Paul sings Nessun Dorma high quality video/sound

We have American Idol. They have Paul Potts. I envy them.

The Only Spending Allowed

is spending on his frickin' war, or gimmies for oil companies and tax cuts for plutocrats.

The rest of you can eat cake.

And pay.

The Congressman ... and The Senator

My Congressional district used to be represented by a Republican named Snowbarger. He was virulently opposed to Bill Clinton. During the impeachment proceedings, I wrote to him telling hm to cut it out -- that lying about sex was a normal thing to do, and neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor.

He sent back a three page missive. The first thing it did was admit that over 66 per cent of his constituents who had written to him agreed with my position. He then proceeded to tell me and the other 66 percent of his activist and vocal constituents that he was going to pursue his vendetta. Mistake.

At the next election, he was replaced by Democrat Dennis Moore, who has made more gains in majority each time he stands for re-election. Congressman Moore goes out of his way to address constituent concerns, even sending Congressional studies on topic of interest!

Well.

I have a Senator named Sam Brownback. I wrote on the Medicare issue awhile back, saying that Congress should legislate to permit negotiation for lower drug prices.

Shades of Congressman Snowbarger, today Senator Brownback sent a missive telling me why he was not going to vote for any such thing. Why, did I know just how terrible for investors this idea was?? Oh woe!! You know my heart just *bleeds* for investors.

All I can say, Sam Brownback, is watch what happens when you get too frickin' arrogant. You could *easily* join Congressman Snowbarger as a has-been.

Just sayin' ....

Bastards

Now here is a headline to conjure with:

Court Rules in Favor of Enemy Combatant

Talk about being convicted on the word of George Bush alone!

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master's degree at Bradley University.

He moves in the *day before* 9/11 -- and *someone* decides he is an "Enemy Combatant". I really don't care what kind of contorted bullshit the government used to create that term. It is obscene, and it is an excuse to drop individuals down the oubliette with as much justice as French prisoners got from Louis.

Now look at the Government's argument:

The Bush administration's attorneys had urged the federal appeals panel to dismiss al-Marri's case, arguing that the act stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear cases of detainees who are declared enemy combatants. They contended that Congress and the Supreme Court have given the president the authority to fight terrorism and prevent additional attacks on the nation.

"Given him the authority" -- you know, I don't think that anyone except a Bush attorney would think that throwing out the Constitution is encompassed in any "authority" that congress might grant. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that all those elected officials took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not destroy it in pursuit of illusory "safety".

Only George Bush and his trained Dementors would try such a thing. Why is he still in office? Why?

[crosspost @ Mockingbird's Medley]

Gonzales

My goodness, does Senator Schumer have it wrong:

Democrats say it's only right for senators to go on record, since five Republicans have called outright for Gonzales' dismissal and many more of the president's party have said in public comments that they have lost confidence in him.

"If all senators who have actually lost confidence in Attorney General Gonzales voted their conscience, this vote would be unanimous," said Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., who authored the resolution with Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. "We will soon see where people's loyalties lie."

No, the vote on the resolution will have nothing at all to do with where loyalties lie, and less to do with "going on record" in any meaningful sense. The vote will have even less to do with the adequacy of government and the performance of duties by the Attorney General. For a change Tony Snow is actually right -- it's all about politics, and that will make the vote a travesty. The vote will be nothing but a dog and pony show, proving absolutely about Gonzales's adequacy or about Bush's intransigence.

You'd think by now that Senators Schumer and Feinstein would know better, but noooo. This particular vote especially shows why I consider the current antics grounds for calling a pox on both their houses.

Wierd Death

A 17 year old track star died from using too much muscle rub -- or so the New York Medical examiner concluded.

Arielle Newman, a cross-country runner at Notre Dame Academy on Staten Island, died after her body absorbed high levels of methyl salicylate, an anti-inflammatory found in sports creams such as Bengay and Icy Hot, the New York City medical examiner said Friday.

The cherry on top, however, is in the last two paragraphs of the story:

Her mother, Alice Newman, said she still couldn't believe her daughter's death was caused by a sports cream.

"I am scrupulous about my children's health," she told the Advance. "I did not think an over-the-counter product could be unsafe."

What universe is that woman living in? She has never heard of people overdosing on aspirin? Over the counter does not mean "impossible to abuse". Heck, people can die of excessive water intake. It is sorry and sad that her daughter died from using a topical preparation. It is less impossible to believe when the young lady had a mother who thinks that availability equals safety.

Shit

The police in Missouri have found a body believed to be that of Kelsey Smith.

Today when I went to the thrift shop her picture was posted on the entry door. She was local.

Like all the young women who are stalked as prey, she did nothing to invite, attract, or encourage this atrocity ... except exist and be female.

We never expect this kind of thing in Kansas, in Missouri, even though the police estimate that there are about seven serial killers operating in the Metro area at any given time. It absolutely infuriates me that anyone can be so callously terminated at the whim of some psychotic son of a bitch.

I hope they catch him and end his worthless life.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I spent most of the last few days working on art projects. Yes, that is hard to believe. Still, it's what passes for activities in the Scorpion Hut.

This means I have been doing news blackout. Between reading, artwork, and taking enough naps to keep functioning, my days have been full.

I was sorry to see, in my few web visits, that Steve Gilliard passed on. I came very late to his writing, and I will miss him. I can't imagine how much those who really knew him and loved him are doing.

Agriculture Department Doesn't Care if You Die

The USDA wants to ban a cattleman from testing all his cows for Mad Cow Disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

In other words, they do not want to ensure the safety of the food supply. Period.

Expensive? How expensive is it going to be to treat a population with rotted brains?

Farenheit 451, Live, 6 Blocks Away

Did he ask the small towns of the Gulf if they would pay to have books shipped?

Did he ask the large towns of Mississippi and Louisiana? How about Florida?

Did he ask the local libraries that use old books to raise money? How about the churches? The VA hospital?

Whether he did, or whether he didn't matters not. He burned them, as many as he could manage before the Fire Department stopped him. Since his antics have made the national news, maybe he's got his money's worth in free advertising.

He is also making manifest some old bogeymen.

[crossposted @ Mockingbird's Medley]

The Good Old Days and a Sense of Shame

Toshikatsu Matsuoka is not the first Japanese office holder in recent years to follow the old tradition and kill himself when he became embroiled in a scandal.

Even people who only vaguely know about Japan have heard of sepuku, which was the ritual disembowelling that Samurai did on command of their leaders. Honorable Suicide. Death to atone for bad behavior. The kamikaze of WWII were famous as well. It is no recent thing to make an airplane a weapon. The Divine Wind -- people who freely gave their lives to achieve an end; and thus kamikaze entered our language as well.

In the United States, there is no shame so great that a political figure will seek death. We have weasels instead. Perhaps there would be less corruption if there were more shame. It's something to think about.

Oops! They Did It Again!

WalMart has made another fashion faux pas.

The kind of error that they are making has two important prongs. The first is that the buyers (or concept creators) are conflating "upscale" and "trendy". There are clothes that are upscale. There are clothes that are trendy. Those two sets only overlap in a small area. The second mistake is that WalMart misidentifies the activities for which its customer base buys clothing.

WalMart needs club clothing in its stores like a hole in the head.
Your average "upscale" individual doesn't spend a lot of time lurking in clubs.
Your average WalMart shopper does not lurk in clubs, either.

And it is beyond imagining that Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, women who actually do inhabit clubs, would suddenly be possessed with the need to go see if WalMart has club wear.

Wal Mart shoppers want things to wear during leisure and work activities. Your WalMart shopper likely goes to ball games, amusement parks, movies, bowling alleys; barbecues and picnics; swim outings and camping. These are "regular American" pastimes. I say this with no mockery at all. These activities are fun, and they are things that cut across class and race. But clubs? Trendy time eaters? There is a very brief window when any normal person might become very heavily into dancing, drinking, and trolling for companionship.

It's best not to base a business model on luring people in that narrow demographic into your store. It will not keep WalMart afloat, that's for sure.

Light and Erratic Posting

Ah yes -- this weekend is a big one for conventions, and I'm attending one. So far it's been fun. The Neilsen Haydens of Making Light will be around, as well as many writers and artists.

Science Fiction conventions are way too entertaining.

School for the American Taliban

Here you go!

A student from Liberty University was arrested for making bombs. Of course, in line with the quality of his university they were *crappy* bombs, but he did give it the college try.

He intended to use them on any protesters at Jerry Falwell's funeral.

The most infamous of those protesters were supposed to be the congregants of Westboro Baptist Church (shame upon the Baptists for not suing these nutcases for blackening the otherwise-innocuous name of Baptists everywhere).

Ironic. Right now I'm listening to South Pacific and "You Have to be Carefully Taught" just came on. I'm afraid my distaste for Westboro and Liberty U people is a lot more recent than being "carefully taught" at "6 or 7 or 8". And if the groups are at war, it sort of strikes me as a Kilkenney Cats solution.

Scary

Last night I had a rather scary few hours. I have been reading many books in the last few weeks as a prelude to judging them. I read fairly fast, but due to the amount of time I spend online I no longer read 3 to 5 books a day -- I am down to one or fewer. Yes, I now take several days to finish a book. Such a slacker!

In any case, last night I was reviewing the ones I need to judge, when I suddenly realized that I could not remember anything about the one I had most recently completed except for its title and author. No clue to the plot. Not one character name. No themes. No nothing.

I am terrified of getting Alzheimer's. It is altogether possible that I will live more than another 30 years, and I would hate to lose my mind even 25 years into that span. One of my relatives had either Alzheimer's or some other form of senile dementia. I know when it happened, too -- when the television in my parents' house broke down and the elderly relative lost the mental stimulation (!) it provided, the mind went into a permanent sunset.

Now let the snarky one say what he will. I check up on the latest research with some frequency. Just Google "beta amyloid" for everything you ever wanted to avoid. If you Google "turmeric beta amyloid" you will understand why I eat curry regularly, as any person with a possibility of Alzheimer's should be doing. I also have lots of mental challenge games and I try to play some of them daily. Simple? Yeah, right.

The terror of suddenly being "lost" while driving on some of the more cookie cutter roads around here -- the losing of words, quotes, phrases -- losing a *entire book* just two days after completing it! I read it. I liked it. Today I looked it up on Amazon and got the information about it back, but it's been scary times, thinking over the possibilities.

The book I forgot had Alzheimer's as a theme. I am hoping that is why I suppressed it so thoroughly. I'm freaked out enough that tomorrow I'm headed to an herb store to get turmeric in capsules so I can take the amount that was used in some recent studies. I guess eating curry isn't enough. I do take my own advice, whether it's simple or complex.

[crossposted @ Mockingbird's Medley]

Fun with Science

This week in the news, there was a story about new species found on the Antarctic shelf. The photo album with the piece was incredible.

My particular favorite was the photo at the top of this link. I saw it and immediately thought "glass trilobite". It's beautiful.

OK, so my idea of beautiful can be a bit eccentric.

Best Thing This Week

The Freeway Blogger has a brilliant new strategy.

To rip down the opinion is to also rip down the flag.

This will definitely give some folks something to think about -- and of course, others will go wah wah wah, just as they always do when thwarted.

Freedom of Speech Again

Shock jocks are biting the dust in record numbers this week. Opie and Anthony were suspended from their meal ticket at XM Radio for their schtick on rape with Condoleezza Rice as the object of merriment. Meanwhile, two New York shock jocks, Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay, lost their jobs at CBS for a racist mock of Chinese.

Clearly the lines are firming up -- there is freedom of speech, but no reason to expect freedom to be paid for a public platform for racist and sexist puke. And I will place long odds against Imus getting a job on satellite if Opie and Anthony's perch there is already precarious.

Good deal.

Hot Topic

On Sunday Kevin Drum did a post on the Heinlein Centennial, which will be July 6 through 8 in Kansas City.

Of course the post has a lot of comments. They range from the idiotic (Why isn't it another date? Well, since Heinlein was born July 7 of 1907, another date would not be a Centennial, now would it?) to the very explicit.

One of the comments I liked the most pointed out that his three major cult novels appealed to three very different cults. The person commenting did not see a philosophical thread that connected Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Stranger in a Strange Land, but they are actually not inconsistent with one another. Indeed, Moon is a Harsh Mistress holds permutations and echoes of the other two.

Every now and then, as someone who has read all his work, I have a Heinlein moment, when something he has written becomes obvious to the rest of the world. One of the most recent was when Stephen Hawking took his zero-g flight. The inevitable thought was that Hawking would live "Waldo" if he were allowed to do so, because living in zero-g would be a great boon to him and his caregivers.

In many ways Heinlein was a visionary. He was, nevertheless, a creature of his age, for all the things he did that were unusual.

Web Evolution

[mode=rant]
Over at Mockingbird's Medley, Mimus asked the question "Blogads or YouTube...?"

It's pretty easy for me to ignore Blogads -- they just sit there. The main harm they do is to curtail the speech of the blogger who accepts a corporate nickel -- and I think that readers can make their own decisions about what that does to someone's point of view.

What drives me really crazy is something that big web sites do all the time now. They put up a headline promising a recipe, and if you click on it, you are presented with a video box with the inevitable arrow. I hate those mthrfckrs! If I had wanted a damned video, I 'd have gone to YouTube.

I read much faster than anyone can perform anything and I resent the daylights out of time-wasting videos. I also resent links that take you to videos without giving a video icon by the headline.

If these morons do it enough, I will move on to another home page and they can begin to kiss revenue good-bye with my foot helping them along.
[/rant]

Little Stuff

I spent some time thinking about politics, and there are only a couple of leetle things that keep me from being wholeheartedly libertarian.

The first, and likely foremost of those is this: if libertarians would abolish the personhood of corporations and require personal, individual responsibility for corporate acts, perhaps I'd be more of a libertarian.

You see, escaping from consequences by hiding behind a corporate shield is anathema to me. Corporations kill people with impunity. There's no death sentence for them, even when they act with malice.

There are enough little flaws in a libertarian system that I could write a book. Augh! Mimus! See what you've done?

[crosspost @ The Medley]

Bush Hates Troops

"The White House also said Bush would veto any bill drafted by House Democratic leaders that would fund the Iraq war only into the summer months. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said such short-term funding would be very disruptive and “have a huge impact” on contracts to repair and replace equipment."

Predators

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has a story on union-busting in China. She quotes a JohannHari article that goes into detail about the exploitation of Chinese workers and the support that US business has given the Chinese government in its exploitation.

Yes, since businesses cannot actually keep slaves here, many are willing to collude with governments that do the next best thing.

WalMart sells a lot of things made in China. I avoid them. When people buy cheap Chinese goods, they are colluding with the abuse of Chinese workers *and* making sure that their own job market will not come back from the dead. And yes, manufacturing in the US is pretty dead.

I have another policy that I uphold. If I get a call from any organization that is using a foreign call center, I disconnect immediately. Call centers used to be in the midwest, but India is cheaper. Foreign call centers make their employees take an Anglo work name like "Mark" or "Dave" when they call. That may be considered "convenient" since clients are not likely to pronounce Goparaju, Prasadram or Ptumporn Supakitvilakakarn comfortably. On the other hand, one cannot help but think that it's transparently fraudulent as well.

My take is that I will not support Kansas jobs that have been outsourced to Bangalore -- period.

But...

will she land on the Rose Garden?

Speechless

Air traffic controllers were in a room full of carbon monoxide. They were not allowed to leave. They felt their mental processes were impaired.

I believe that. Someone with a functioning mental set might have started vomiting when not allowed to leave. That is unusually convincing to supervisors. Someone on break might have hit the fire alarm. That, too, is a reasonable thing to do under the circumstances.

But to just let a supervisor do something criminal -- that I don't understand at all -- either the doing or the accepting.

Entitlement

Did I read this correctly?

Is Don Imus really contending in a lawsuit that since he always got away with his crap before, that it is his *right* to be paid to spew racist and sexist malice?

That's a new low, even for a White Boy.

Good

Barack Obama is being given Secret Service protection this week. I am glad that someone is being realistic.

I have heard many people remark that he would be a good president if he survives to hold office. The way people say this makes one understand just how many people fear that racists are plotting evil based on the color of someone's skin. It's an ugly reality.

Me, I'd like to see him survive, so I am glad he will have guards.

Back from the Dead

The medical news in Newsweek this week is breathtaking.

Read the entire story. If the possibilities don't just blow you away, you need to get a sense of wonder.

Medley

I give Mimus the Good Stuff.

Why Not Tell the Whole Truth?

Bush Vetoes Appropriation of Billions for Iraq.

Wah wah wah. He did not like the terms.

He wants billions with no oversight at all.

Gravy train time is over.