Yesterday, Mother Nature was a jerk:
Today, she redeems herself:
Monthly Archives: April 2005
April (snow) Showers
You’ve GOT to be $%@*#$@ kidding me …:
‘Today: Occasional snow. Steady temperature around 36. Breezy, with a north northwest wind between 22 and 26 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of less than one inch possible.
‘Tonight: Occasional snow. The snow could be heavy at times. Low around 30. Breezy, with a north northwest wind between 18 and 28 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 3 to 5 inches possible.’
News Roundup
Alaska National Oil Company Refuge
The Imperial House of Corporate Representatives passed a bill permitting drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge yesterday. « Let’s just see what this little bill does », shall we?
1. Provides $8.1 billion in tax breaks over 10 years, most of it going to promote coal, nuclear, oil and natural gas energy industries.
2. Makes it easier to build liquefied natural gas import terminals, even if states or local communities oppose the project.
3. Requires refiners to use more corn-based ethanol in gasoline.
4. Protects makers of the gasoline additive MTBE from product liability lawsuits stemming from the chemical’s contamination of drinking water by giving them “safe harbor.”
5. Saddles communities and water districts with billions of dollars in MTBE cleanup costs.
6. Provides $2 billion to help MTBE makers, including major oil companies and refiners, to shift away from MTBE production.
7. Extends daylight-saving time by two months to reduce energy use.
Sing along with me … ‘Corporateland, Corporateland, uber alles …’
Meanwhile, an attempt to require automakers to increase fuel economy to a fleet average of 33 miles per gallon over the next decade, saving some two million barrels of oil a day, was defeated, thereby proving the potency of the bribes and payoff from both the energy and automaker industries.
Wonder if we’ll be hearing clamoring from the moral values crowd over this one?
[Crickets chirping]
Well, There Ya Go
Quote of the Day:
‘I’m a radical. I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them.’
—Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, as reported on MSNBC.com
Heil Benedict!
So, a few days after the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrueck and Buchenwald, and on the anniversary of Waco and Oklahoma City, 117 men in red dresses have decided to elect as Pope a former member of the Hitler Jugend who also helped man Volksturm anti-aircraft batteries at the end of World War II.
But it’s all apparently okay, ‘cause everybody was doing it, they had to, don’tchaknow, and he just had to, and besides he was signed up without his knowledge and then he refused to go to meetings and well, firing Krupp cannon at American Eighth Air Force B-17s in order to protect a BMW plant which used slave labor from Kl Dachau was just apparently a youthful indiscretion and maybe there was some big ol’ nasty Nazi holding a gun to his head, making him aim right. Oh and then there is that rabbi who was trotted out to proclaim that the good Cardinal had worked miracles for Jewish-Catholic relations over the last few decades (Pope Pius XII’s reign wasn’t brought up).
And then this hardline orthodox Catholic ex-Nazi who has since 1981 headed up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known until 1908 as the Holy Office of the Inquisition, chose the name ‘Benedict’ in homage to a Pope who tried to soften the strictures of his predecessor, who had declared war on ‘Modernism.’
Then to top things off, we hear that 24 hours before becoming Pope, he declared war on any ‘isms’ (although Fascism wasn’t mentioned) which state that truth is relative:
‘On Monday, Ratzinger, who was the powerful dean of the College of Cardinals, used his homily at the Mass dedicated to electing the next pope to warn the faithful about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects, ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.’
—San Francisco Chronicle
A question, sir: If there are only absolute truths, were you, Pope Benedict XVI, a Hitler Jugend or not? According to history, you joined the HJ, you took the oath to Hitler. And what’s this Inquisition business?
Unfortunately, I think it’s too late to ask the Pope, now that he’s Pope, if he swore an oath of personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
That would be a faux pas and simply isn’t done. It’s kind of like asking Justice Scalia if he sodomizes his wife.
Oh well. Let’s look on the bright side. Now we can call the Pope a Nazi and it’s neither mere hyperbole nor verboten under that ridiculous Godwin’s Law.
Could be fun.
Light Sighted at End of Tunnel
It’s Frank’s final week of Grad School Hell. Four more days, folks, four more days, then it’s ‘free at last, free at last …’ But I should let him speak for himself. Er, maybe next week.
Me? I’ve been in a hell of my own … Hell, AKA Oklahoma. Good lord, there’s a lotta porn palaces and Jesus bilboards in Missouri (or as I refer to it, Misery).
It was a good trip, but there’s really no place like home.
(By the way, I knew I was back in Michigan when I entered a gas station in Coldwater and was almost knocked off my pins by some woman who pushed the door into my face, then gave me a dirty look and didn’t apologize. Yup! Back with the warm, wonderful people of Michigan!)
Deathbed Dollars
While we’re all a bit tired of poor Terri Schiavo (let her rest in peace), I say we keep screaming about this one and hang it squarely on the Fascist FunDumbMentalists’ heads … like a flaming rubber tire. They are, after all, not shy about using a vegetable for their political purposes, as we’ll see in a moment.
But it’s important to note first that Chief Florida Fascist Jeb Bush’s own DCF produced report after report that found « no evidence of vegetable abuse »:
‘In the four years after Michael Schiavo won the right to remove his wife’s feeding tube, the state’s social welfare agency investigated 89 complaints of abuse but never found that he or anybody else harmed Terri Schiavo, records released late Friday show. The state Department of Children and Families repeatedly concluded that Michael Schiavo ensured his wife’s physical and medical needs were met, provided proper therapy for her and had no control over her money. They also found no evidence that he beat or strangled her, as his detractors have repeatedly charged. The 45 pages of confidential abuse reports made public by court order show that despite the litany of complaints, investigators never found that Terri Schiavo had been abused. That raises what Michael Schiavo’s attorney said is a key question: Why, during her last weeks of life, did DCF twice try to intervene in the seven-year dispute between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her parents?
’”The answer is obvious,” said attorney Hamden Baskin III. “From the get-go, this was nothing but a political intervention. There was and continues to be no reason for them to have been involved.”
—Washington Post [Emphasis added]
Of course it was a political intervention. In fact, « it’s simply a case of using someone’s deathbed to beg for dollars »:
‘During the weeks preceding Terri Schiavo’s death, a number of radical right wing Christian fundamentalist groups stepped up to take full advantage of what the Traditional Values Coalition’s (TVC) Rev. Lou Sheldon characterized as a “blessing…to the conservative Christian movement in America.” Established organizations like the TVC, relative newcomers like RightMarch.com, and newly formed coalitions, like Voice for Terri, had their Web sites sizzling with news of the case and extensive fundraising appeals. Prior to Terri’s death on Thursday, March 31, her parents had apparently agreed to sell the names and e-mail addresses of donors to and supporters of their daughter’s case to Response Unlimited, a right wing direct mail house. However, within 20 hours of David Kirkpatrick’s March 29 New York Times piece exposing the arrangement, Response Unlimited withdrew Schindler’s list from its catalogue. Before removing the list from its web site, the Waynesboro, Virginia-based Response Unlimited (website) headed by Philip Zodhiates, was asking $150/month for 6,000 names and $500/month for 4,000 e-mail addresses of people who responded last month to an e-mail plea from Terri Schiavo’s father, the Times reported. Advertising the list’s availability and fundraising potential on its website the firm said: “These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler’s legal battle to keep Terri’s estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri.” The selling point was that the people on the list “are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia and are pro-life in every sense of the word!”
’… In a few months, when the Terri Schiavo case has drifted into the ether inhabited by such cultural cataclysms as the Elian Gonzalez case, those who sent money or a supportive message to the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation will discover that they’ve made Schindler’s list. Their e-mail boxes and snail-mail boxes will be stuffed by a host of appeals from organizations pushing everything from the privatization of Social Security to school vouchers to an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the constitution.’
—Media Transparency
Truly a sordid, disgusting and black time in the Empire.
Sad thing is, it’s only the beginning.
Back From Blue State Hell
Yes, dear friends, I’m still alive and haven’t dropped off the end of the earth. But you could see the end from where I was: Oklahoma.
Okiehoma. Oh my. Parent’s 50th anniversary was the occasion and I drove the Jeep because I still had books and sundry items in Duncan to pick up.
Oh the things you see on the road. Missouri: One endless stretch of Jesus billboards punctuated every few miles by Adult Superstore porno palaces ensconced in old Route 66-type gas stations, connected by an interstate full of frightening-looking people driving cars with Bush-Cheney ‘04 bumper stickers and support the troops magnetic ribbons. Illinois, Indiana and Oklahoma aren’t much better than that; Oklahoma doesn’t have porn palaces, Indiana seems to be lacking in the scriptural billboard department and Illinois now has a gigantic 20-foot -tall steel cross by I-70 (see pic below). Since I passed through it in the dark early in the morning, I’m not sure what southern Michigan has to offer and I’m not sure I want to know.
All-in-all, it was a good trip, even if I had to confront (for 2,300 miles roundtrip) just how Fascist FunDumbMentalist has become the Imperial Heartland.
Back to regular posting soon, dear ones; thanks for hanging in there with me! More later …
Return of the Birds
Well, the weather’s been fabulous (if a bit chilly) the past few days. I think we’ve seen the last of the snow. I could be proven wrong, but I doubt it. It’s very pleasant here in the spring — in the Bay Area, the only birds you see much of are pigeons and seagulls, so it’s great to have the return of the aviary here. They make a lot of noise in the morning, battling over turf and building nests and engaging in all of those other bird activities. It’s nice.
Finish Line Approaching Fast
We went through the first instance of the term-end ritual of professor evaluations this morning in my Preserving Information class, filling in circles on Scantron forms with stubby pencils to register our feelings about the course. That is the real signal that the finish line is fast approaching. Up till now it had all been rumor and speculation and calendar-watching. But tomorrow it will be just two weeks until my final final exam as a Michigan student.
I’ve been increasingly longing for it all to be over, which when I really think about it is somewhat strange, since when the structure of school is gone it’s going to be hard to adjust. But I’ve felt overtaxed and stressed in a way this term that I haven’t felt any of the other terms. Part of it may be that I’m not completely gaga about my coursework this term; I’m learning quite a lot, as always, but I have moments of heavy indifference about it all, as I’m sure most of my SI colleagues do sometimes. Part of it may be that the pile-on of coursework demands at the end seems more brutal and relentless this term. Part of it may also be the knowledge that it’s almost over, which is surreal — grad school has so completely dominated my life for the past two years that it’s kind of like getting out of boot camp. And part of it may be just lack of sleep — I stumbled around campus like a zombie all day yesterday and came close to keeling over two or three times.
I recall avidly following an SI student’s blog the spring before I moved here, hoping to glean bits of insight about how to deal with what was coming. She dropped off the face of the earth in the last few months of her time at SI, not blogging more than two or three entries for months on end, and I wondered what had happened to her.
This is what happened to her.
Wishy-Washy Weather
More unpredictable Michigan weather, though I have the impression that this is about the end of it for a few months. Yesterday it got up to 77 degrees and was warm and even muggy. Today it was overcast, chilly, and not much over 60. Of course I overdressed yesterday and underdressed today. But it’s supposed to be clear and sunny the rest of the week.
Overheard in Ann Arbor
There’s a blog called «Overheard in New York ». If Ann Arbor had a similar blog, it would be somewhat more boring. Or maybe somewhat more pedantic.
Intellectual Lecturer Type: “Maurizio’s introduction to Marx Beyond Marx is the only thing I’ve read that tries to bring together all of those threads.” [Cafe Ambrosia]
In Which I Get My Gay Card Stamped
I discovered the « Scissor Sisters » last night. Got their album via iTunes today and burned it onto a CD for my road trip next week. Ooooo that Jake Shears!!!! Oooooo lala!
I’m feeling tres gay. [Except, of course, that real-er and hip-er gay boys discovered them way a year ago and have now moved on. But I never claimed to be hip. Just gay. Sue me.]
Duly Noted
According to World Health Organization figures, on the same day that Terri Schiavo died and so-called Christians mourned her so-called ‘murder,’ 6,000 other human beings died from vaccine-preventable diseases including diphtheria, measles, polio, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, Hib and yellow fever, because they and the countries they live in are too poor to afford the vaccines.