| Ralph Nader's Grand Alliance |
[Oct. 4th, 2011|12:30 am] |
As our collective American experience has become increasingly psychotic and the various layers of shadow government put the finishing touches on the US's transformation into a Bizarro World inversion of anything good and noble we might have once stood for, down in the trenches of the Internet, shit just gets stranger and stranger. Case in point, this recent interview with Ralph Nader in, of all wildly weird places, The American Conservative, and about of all things, his political bromance with Ron Paul. He says in part:
“Libertarians like Ron Paul are on our side on civil liberties. They’re on our side against the military-industrial complex. They’re on our side against Wall Street. They’re on our side for investor rights. That’s a foundational convergence, it’s not just itty-bitty stuff.” Really -- what the fuck is this shit!? Well, what the fuck this is, in part, is illustration of how you can start on the right, or start on the left, and go so far around to the extremes of your political point of origin that you, metaphorically speaking, punch through the the energy barrier surrounding the Milky Way Galaxy and find yourself sharing fundamental points of view with folks from the opposite side of the political spectrum who, years early, you might have shanked for some pure, white hot STFU. Can't be bothered to read, or simply can't believe your eyes, witness the Nader/Paul bromance in this compilation of clips. In a word, woah.
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| The American Dream (in cartoon form) |
[Sep. 8th, 2011|09:40 am] |
Since the election bullshit machines are spinning up to vertigo inducing speeds, I am sure that you, my discriminating and select LJ Friendzors, are turning your mental energies more to those things governmental, and in that questing spirit of gnosis I offer you this John Stagliano produced infotainment. In all seriousness, as fun as this cartoon can be in parts, the core concepts it is trying to convey are important, and frankly can be disturbing if you have never been exposed to them before. So, here is The American Dream:
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| First Words |
[Aug. 24th, 2011|11:28 pm] |
Yes, so yesterday during our tiny quake, while the glass walls in my place of employ were shaking in fits, the first thing that my brain caused to come out of my mouth, and cheerfully spoken was:
"If there's a blinding flash, don't look at it!"
That's all I got, people. :D |
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| The 13th Floor In A Hotel |
[Aug. 17th, 2011|01:18 am] |
I'm sure some of you, the select specimens of biped who are my dear LJ friends, watch The Daily Show regularly and so have already seen this clip, but for those of you like myself who have largely abandoned the telly for the InterWebz, you might have missed this funny and pointed piece of commentary, er...I mean comedy, from Jon Stewart on the hamfisted and bizarre lengths the mainstream media, the rightish flavor in particular, have gone in attempting to disappear Ron Paul down the Memory Hole. Either way, if you think Ron Paul is a crazy crank, or that he is a miracle cure for everything that ails the country including planters warts, seeing Jon Stewart hilariously perp walk a shameless gallery of sock-puppet-for-hire media whores is absolutely worth four minutes of your life.
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| Financial Terrorism |
[Aug. 11th, 2011|06:05 pm] |
Say it along with me, the truth will set you free, and accepting reality is the first step toward recovery:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I am a peasant.
If any of you, my dear Internet friends, have been following the the recent news of the day, keeping abreast of items of interest like the debt ceiling deal, the downgrade of America's credit by the rating agency S&P, the slow motion economic collapse of Europe's banking system, and the last few days of wild, water slide ride stock market swings, maybe you might find yourself in an intellectually expansive frame of mind, one where you might be wondering just what the fuck is going on. While this article is hardly a comprehensive source for answers to that question, it does provide some of the necessary framework so you can understand just how fucked we are and, in a broad sense, who has us bent over the dining room table and is doing the fucking:
Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion.
The article is long, detailed, and depressing, but on the upside it will leave you steaming mad and ready to grab torch and pitchfork. If you take the time to look this over, one thing I hope you come away with is the realization that, not only does Santa Claus not exist, but neither are you one lucky lottery ticket, or one garage born tech venture away from joining the elevated ranks of the genuinely wealthy. Like in the diet commercials, these results are not typical, your experience may vary. |
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| Mulberry Madness: It's On Like Donkey Kong |
[Jun. 13th, 2011|08:37 am] |
Here at the tiny house with the big lot I rent, the start of summer means the start of mulberry madness. I have been at this spot for ten or so years, and every year around this time I look forward to the wild mulberry trees setting fruit and the short couple of months when I get delicious and free food. Yea, this shit really does grow on trees. My trees are sort of wild and sort of not as while I actively manage them, I don't plant them. They come up where they want to through no effort on my part and I deal with the random placement. I like to think of my yard as being freescaped. Over the years I have allowed to happen several fine trees of all sorts which I have tended to and diligently mowed around much to the confusion and angst of my next door neighbor who, ironically, is the block tree crank and personally responsible for multiple acts of city assisted arborcide. His lot has no, none, zero, zilch, nada trees on it. He took his last two sad, sick specimens out this spring because they were menacing his deck and driveway -- the guy's a loon. You can actually see the treeless dead zone he lives in from space, OK, space meaning Google maps sat image.
But, back to mulberries. Even after having to severely prune back one of my prized black mulberry trees over the winter (it had blown over the previous year and the only thing keeping it out of the driveway of my other, not as awful neighbor was a big effing rope), this has been a good year for berries. I have enough fruit that to get at more of it, I have taken to laying down a big blue tarp and shaking the berries out of the branches that are too high to get to by hand. And man, have I got a shit load of berries. Not wanting to be a waster, I have been disposing of berries by pouring frosty cold pitchers of my improved process (seedless) mulberry daiquiris into ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) pastor_saturn and she has returned the favor by baking me a slap-your-mama good mulberry pie. I figure I can leverage another pie or so out of her with the application of more pitchers of daiquiris. ;D
The pie thing was kind of cool in an old timey, sexual division of labor way. I went outside to do the sweaty, dirty, mosquito ridden job of gathering and cleaning the mulberries, and then I got to had off them off for pie making to the capable, womanly hands of Teh Susan. It was a nice bit of teamwork. Harvesting the berries and turning them into pie was not only too much work for one person, but I don't have mad pie skillz, nor would Susan be caught dead spending a couple hours outside sweating, inhaling gnats, and feeding the skeetes to gather in ten-pints of berries.
I keep imagining next year I should try to scam RT (Russia Today television) into them sending out one of their derpy big-trouble-for-moose-and-squirrel accented reporters to come cover the summer Gaithersburg Mulberry Festival, which as you and I know dear friends, takes place only in my yard and in the space between my ears. |
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| Your Random Insane Pokémon Moment Of The Day |
[Mar. 31st, 2011|02:52 pm] |
With Fukushima turning, inexorably it seems, into the location of the next S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, it is hard to not feel a little guilty these days in still taking pleasure in the silly contributions that Japan has added to the rich mulch of Internet culture.
Well, I say fuck that shit, here's some goddamn, motherfucking Pokémon insanity!
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| Remorse |
[Mar. 25th, 2011|01:27 am] |
williambanzai7 is a photo collage and graphic design artist who contributes to the exceptionally interesting Zero Hedge financial website. Remorse is from his latest set of images.
Pretty neat stuff, and you can find his Zazzle.com store here. |
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| Chernobyl: A Liquidator's Tale |
[Mar. 24th, 2011|01:30 am] |
Liquidators -- the name coined for the 600,000 to one million workers pressed into service decontaminating the ghost city of Pripiyat during the Chernobyl disaster. Natalia Manzurova is one of the surviving Liquidators and she tells a powerful story of her experiences in an interview at AOL.news.
What message do you have for Japan?
Run away as quickly as possible. Don't wait. Save yourself and don't rely on the government because the government lies. They don't want you to know the truth because the nuclear industry is so powerful.
The interview is short, but it leaves a mark... |
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| I Watched C-beams Glitter In The Dark Near The Tannhauser Gate. |
[Mar. 23rd, 2011|03:14 pm] |
Every day since the reactor disaster in Fukushima got rolling, I foolishly start my morning wondering if today will be the day I hear that the criminal fools running TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) finally got a grip on the situation and that things are getting better and not worse. Today was not that day. Kyodo News is now reporting neutron beams have been detected radiating out from the Daiichi nuclear complex. Neutron beams, really?
Not the beam source!
Neutron beam observed 13 times at crippled Fukushima nuke plant
TOKYO, March 23, Kyodo
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday it has observed a neutron beam, a kind of radioactive ray, 13 times on the premises of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was crippled by the massive March 11 quake-tsunami disaster.
TEPCO, the operator of the nuclear plant, said the neutron beam measured about 1.5 kilometers southwest of the plant's No. 1 and 2 reactors over three days from March 13 and is equivalent to 0.01 to 0.02 microsieverts per hour and that this is not a dangerous level.
The utility firm said it will measure uranium and plutonium, which could emit a neutron beam, as well.
In the 1999 criticality accident at a nuclear fuel processing plant run by JCO Co. in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, uranium broke apart continually in nuclear fission, causing a massive amount of neutron beams.
In the latest case at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, such a criticality accident has yet to happen.
But the measured neutron beam may be evidence that uranium and plutonium leaked from the plant's nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuels have discharged a small amount of neutron beams through nuclear fission.
To be real, 0.01-0.02 microsieverts is a minuscule amount of radiation, but since the article does not say otherwise, and given the happy spin about the reactor disaster from both the Japanese and our domestic media, I am going to reach for the brass ring and assume the 0.01-0.02 microsieverts reading was taken at the 1.5 kilometer distance referenced in the article. Since radiation is beholden to the inverse-square law where, "The radiation passing through any unit area is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the point source," meaning the further away from the source, the lower the level of radiation, assuming the readings were made at a 1.5 kilometer distance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is not something you would want hitting you square in the chest within spitting distance.
Of course, I am not a nuclear physicist, nor do I play one on TV, so your mileage may vary. |
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