I have a ton of links to share on a bunch of disparate topics, all of which deserve their own proper post but honestly I’m still swamped. It pains me to know that I am depriving you, my loyal readers, of my opinion on everything, because I know how some of you live and breathe for those opinions. So, I’ll give a short blurb with each. Savvy? And as an added bonus game, you can guess who or what led me to each link, and I bet you’ll be surprised. LET IT BEGIN!
Current Events
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Happy Talk like a Pirate Day!
Avast me hearties, it be International Talk like a Pirate Day. My webhost still has me barred from making port in me own hometown, so I be sending this message by carrier parrot. If they don’t end this embargo soon, we’ll chum the waters with their entrails, we will! Arrr!
I have many chores this weekend, not the least of which will be getting these sumbitches from unbanning me before I take my business elsewhere. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to post. Apologies to those of you who were expecting actual content. If you’re looking for something to do, research the Large Hadron Collider and decide whether or not the doomsayers have a case, visit Something Awful and try to start a new internet meme, or maybe donate some money to me toward a Chevy Volt.
One of you lubbers fetch me a grog! Smartly now!
News roundup
Hurricanes galore have been hitting the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico, over and over again. The newest is a Cat-4 hurricane named Ike, and it’s going to ravage all those already-rocked spots that the last two just did (they’re coming so fast and furious I can’t even remember their damn names!). This will probably get Bob talking about the IPCC, but rest assured folks, just because climate change is definitely happening, and lots of scientists predicted it a long time ago, nobody could ever have predicted it and should it turn out that it was anthropogenic, nobody could have predicted that either. Sigh. Just suck it up and weather it. The human race will live through this, undoubtedly, and any massive shift in climate will likely spur evolution in a number of ways through a number of species, even our own.
In a nice bit of justice, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, just won the presidency of Pakistan, after the tin-pot asshat Musharraf (does this mean his ass is a tin pot?) resigned to avoid an impeachment in much the same way as Nixon dodged that particular bullet. There is a modicum of decency left in the world.
In the meantime, John McTimebomb chose Sarah Palin as his veep pick, without evidently first vetting her at all. Their campaign is being rocked by her incessant lying to the point where they’ve decided to curtail her access to the press in much the same way that McCain’s been restricted in his press access and cell phone use, to keep them from going off-message (read: making “gaffes”), and to keep people from possibly discovering what they, and pretty much this generation of Republicans, are all about. Not that media access would really matter, given that right now (and for the past good while) McCain’s down in the polls so all the talking heads are all but bending over backward to fellate the man in an effort to tighten up this race.
On the homefront, I had a debate with someone (at work, no less — shame on me) involving abortion. I of course took the position that pro-life is anti-women, and that nobody who holds the pro-life position is truly pro-life. I say “of course” because I can’t rightly think of any other way to argue this point, given that my views are roughly that a human life is not truly viable as a potential human being until they’re at least two years old (not that I’d ever advocate “aborting” after childbirth, but I definitely don’t personally consider a 1-year-old child any more viable than a three-cell blastocyst). Once they escape the spectre of SIDS, then they’re potentially going to be an adult. And I’m sure this is going to spark some controversy, so feel free to call me a monster in the comments.
Oh, and finally, as any good conservative knows, welfare for the poor is abhorrent, but welfare for the rich who go bankrupt is apparently perfectly justified. Far as I’m concerned, if you want to live by the sword, you should die by the sword. Don’t make it seem like helping those that are less fortunate is robbing them of the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and without missing a beat immediately turn around and give a failing business a golden parachute. If life is supposed to be hard and hard work is the only virtue, then let life be hard equally for those that have power once in a goddamn while.
I’ve got two posts planned, one for the Canadian election that’s coming up (and you can probably guess what I’ve got to say about Harper’s massive ad campaigns and massive last-second spending on military), and another hopefully relatively funny one about Darwin pareidolia, which has been covered recently by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy and The Onion recently.
And they want to drill… to ease costs at the pump to consumers. Sure.
Wow. Chutzpah. Oil Profits Shatter Records and we’re stuck being gouged at the pumps, and the only solution offered by Republicans is to a) give the oil companies more tax breaks, and b) give them rights over more land to drill (despite the fact that the oil won’t be accessible for at least ten years and they aren’t developing over 80% of the land they already hold rights over). By the way, guys, your policies affect Canadians equally detrimentally.
Whatever. Forget I said anything, and go fill up your gas tank! Remember, every time you do, you make this man smile. You want to see him smile, don’t you? Of course you do!
J’accuse!
Seven days after the World Trade Centre attacks, two Democrats who were in the process of trying to prevent the PATRIOT Act from passing, and several media sources, received letters laced with anthrax. 22 people developed anthrax infections; five people died. These anthrax lacings were nearly pure, highly refined dry powder — “weaponized”, in other words. The letters were intended to imply that a foreign Muslim was responsible, with “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great” written on them.
The letters were sent to Ft. Detrick, Maryland, a US Army research facility, where they were ostensibly found to contain trace amounts of bentonite, a chemical used in Iraqi biogenic weapons research. This is then used as smoking-gun evidence (in the form of a deadly mold spore, I suppose) to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the attacks, and ultimately, to conflate the 9/11 attacks with terrorism in general.
The catch is, they didn’t contain bentonite, this information was given to ABC News and they reported it as though it had come from “four well placed” but naturally unnamed sources. In 2007, ABC finally admitted that these samples did not contain any bentonite at all.
The FBI has been investigating these attacks, despite everyone else having since forgotten all about them and their role in the instigation of the Iraq war; at one point, suspecting heavily Stephen Hatfill then subsequently exonerating him in March 2008 and settling a lawsuit he had filed for $5.8 million. Fast forward to present day, the Justice Department was apparently prepared to accuse one Dr. Bruce E. Ivins of committing these attacks. One Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, top anthrax researcher at Ft. Detrick, who in 2003 received a Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for having assisted in creating a vaccine against anthrax. One Dr. Bruce E. Ivins who turned up dead on July 29th, 2008, of an apparent suicide by overdose on Tylenol with Codeine. I say apparent, because for all we know, he may have been killed to keep him quiet, and of course you must realize he is innocent of these attacks until proven guilty. This doctor however is very likely one of ABC’s “well placed sources”, though that’s mere speculation at this point, because ABC is playing this close to their chests. I daresay it’s because of complicity in what amounts to a treasonous false flag attack on America in order to drum up support for the Iraq war.
Read more at Glenn Greenwald’s blog: Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News.
This is where the “j’accuse” part comes in. I accuse the Bush Administration of not only complicity, but of direct responsibility for these anthrax attacks in an effort to create reasons to go to war. This isn’t the only false flag operation carried out by the Bush administration, in my eyes, either. See the trumped up 2008 Strait of Hormuz incident where ostensibly Iranian speedboats attempted to provoke an American destroyer into firing upon them, then cross-reference Dick Cheney’s casus belli brainstorming session regarding putting US soldiers in Iranian gear on Iranian speedboats and having them shoot at American ships. (Thankfully cooler heads prevailed on this one, and the Americans didn’t fire on the speedboats despite comically threatening radio messages like “I am coming at you, you will explode in [static] minutes”.)
I’ve never been a “9/11 Truth” squad member, having always believed that the administration had failed in a shockingly spectacular fashion on 9/11 but not being directly responsible for it. I’m starting to rethink that position. Considering what else we now know was lies, I wouldn’t be surprised if new evidence directly linked the Usual Suspects to 9/11 itself.
I hope to see every member of that administration one day frogmarched out of The Hague.
Conservative hate radio influenced UU Church shooter
Unbelievable. Simply unfathomable. Eight people were shot, one dying immediately and another dying later in hospital, when a man with a grudge against, well, liberalism itself, decided to unload several shotgun blasts into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a children’s production of Annie. The rest of the injured are in serious or critical condition presently.
While liberalism is normally accused of creating radicals (an image it got, rightly or wrongly, due to opposition to the Vietnam War), we have today people setting fire to and bombing abortion clinics, destroying government buildings in revenge for the Waco Massacre, and now some jackass who was mad about “gays and liberals” supposedly taking jobs (THEYTOOKOURJOBS!) and preventing him from getting one himself decided to take matters into his own hands and went on a bloody rampage.
This time around, though, the media actually seems to be getting the fact that this guy was a radical conservative, whose Required Reading list included such philosophical giants as Bill-O The Clown, Michael Savage (born Michael Alan Weiner — I honestly can’t blame him for his pseudonym), and Sean Hannity. The problem being, nobody’s going to call for these idiots to be banned from the airwaves for creating radicals — that particular tactic is generally only employed by conservatives, for starters.
He specifically picked the Unitarian Universalist church (which, by the way, if I had even a smattering of religious tendencies in my body, I’d happily convert to) because, though it finds its roots in Protestantism, it has a non-dogmatic approach to spirituality, and it is open to all walks of life, including (and prominently advertised on the sign outside its doors) homosexuals. Don’t forget, gays “tookhisjoerbs”. Of course he has to go shoot up a church full of good people because it’s tolerant of homosexuality. That makes perfect sense, in such a xenophobic mind twisted by the conservative pundits’ Two Minutes Hate. And because of the lies these pundits spewed, two people are dead, and six more are hanging by a thread.
I can’t wait to see how O’Reilly and Hannity (I don’t often get much exposure to Savage, being that he’s radio, moreso than television) try to spin this. Well, no, actually, I don’t. Anything they say short of apologizing profusely for categorically spreading fear and hate will likely make me vomit in my mouth, and you know as well as I do that they’re going to express their “heartfelt sympathies” for the victims of the tragedy, ignore completely their part in creating this monster, then turn back to their Two Minutes Hate of the day.
Today’s “Fuck You” round-up!
Fuck you, Robert Mugabe. If you have to put your opposition in prison and threaten everyone in your country with violence in order to win an election, then there’s no point in having a fucking election at all. Just call yourself a dictator and be done with it. Asshat.
Fuck you, Republicans who were eager to question John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, producing smear after execrable smear of his record, but are now more than happy to bitch about General Wes Clark questioning whether McCain’s graduating in the bottom 1% of his class (no, seriously! 894th out of 899!) then proceeding to get shot down in your fighter jet (after having crashed four other planes, by the way) qualifies you for being president.
And a big old, bold-faced, FUCK YOU to Future Ex-President Bush for finally seeing the light with regard to using diplomacy with one of the members of his supposed “Axis of Evil“, not one month after giving a speech before the Knesset (text) in which he called Barack Obama’s policy of diplomacy a “delusion” and akin to Nazi appeasement (and this in front of the legislative assembly of Jerusalem! Subtle, real subtle!). Yes, diplomacy is the right way of dealing with the assholes that occasionally occupy world stage positions, and force only comes as a last resort, so Bush should be applauded for managing an actual diplomatic win (maybe the first of his presidency!), but the hypocriticality of the whole situation just makes my blood boil.
It also bothers me that if Bush manages to get his war on Iran begun before he leaves office, then his ditto-heads will have another talking point — that Bush dealt with the Axis of Evil. Forget the fact that North Korea now has the bomb, and under Bush’s watch. Forget the fact that Iraq is a quagmire. Forget that he’ll be dumping THREE wars on Obama’s lap. (I refuse to even entertain the idea of a McCain presidency. And you can’t make me.) Edit: Oh yeah. And forget that the REAL war he’s supposed to be engaging in, the “War on Terror”, has a real organization involved, Al Qaeda, which is headed by Bin Laden, who is in Pakistan, and the Bush administration is FUCKING PREVENTING A SPECIAL FORCES PLAN TO GO KILL HIM!
So to you douchebags, I say, FUCK YOU.
Heh. That’s a good one. I’m going to use that image again in the future, I’m sure.
George Carlin, RIP
Be aware that below the fold, there’s a ton of videos embedded directly from Youtube. I expect anyone who plans on reading this post, devote at least an hour so you can watch every one of them. You are not paying George Carlin’s memory any honour otherwise.
The media has been rife these past few days with tributes to a personal hero of mine. One would think that’s a good thing — it’s vindicating to have a personal hero lauded in the media, right? So why is it I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth, every single time someone on television or in the papers gushes about what an avant-garde, counterculture, brilliant comedian he was?
It probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t consider him a comedian. He was a truth-teller. And that’s why I, alongside the rest of the world, mourn his death.
It was bound to happen eventually.
Hostopia Inc., the place I worked in Toronto immediately prior to my moving back to the Maritimes, has just been bought by a company based in Minnessota called Deluxe Corp., for $124 million. I’m guessing that the financial company was looking to “diversify their portfolio”, as it were, and branch into website hosting.
I knew something was up when the bigwigs at Hostopia started floating the possibility of going public but never actually doing it — sounded suspiciously like they were trying to attract a buyer. Well, they have their buyer, and I’m honestly glad I didn’t give more of my life to them than I did, knowing now that I had been working to enrich the coffers of people who already have more money than by rights they could ever need. (I suppose the same could be said of all companies, but when I got offered eight grand more a year by a much smaller company to do essentially the same job, I knew exactly what I was dealing with.)
The people who worked there, at my peer level, are the only parts of the company I miss, frankly. Here’s hoping some of you read this now and then.
Better late than never.
Senator Hillary Clinton has officially suspended her campaign and endorsed Barack Obama. While she was, right up until mere days before Obama clinched the nomination, claiming she’d take the nomination fight right through til Denver, she has realized that unfortunately the steam has run out for her campaign.
Don’t get me wrong. Obviously I’m supporting Obama, as you could tell from my previous posts, but I sincerely believe that either one of them would have made a fine Democratic president, and a breath of fresh air to the whole world in comparison with what the Republicans evidently have to offer policy-wise. (And it’s because of the effect of the American government on the world stage that I’m at all interested, to be quite honest. Yes, I’m a Canadian, but I’m a citizen of this planet, and what America does has far reaching repercussions.) So, honestly, I’m happy that Clinton has suspended her campaign and thrown her weight behind the grassroots juggernaut that the Obama campaign has turned out to be, even if it means a good person who ran a good campaign has lost what could be her best chance at the most powerful position in, likely, the world.