Immolation or Indulgence?

9:43am: Necessity is the mother and all: But...
( Saudi Oil is plentiful and not being bought; 'Lack of Oil' and 'High prices' artificial constructions of speculators. )

3:46pm: Variation on a theme (Send Rove to Jail, plzkthx.)
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2:20pm: Batdance at midnight with over excited crowd
This morning, if you prefer, I left for the general audiences midnight premiere of 'The Dark Knight' The crowd tends to be a little stupid, and normally I don't bother with premieres. My policy on them is I'll go if any of my friends want to make a thing of it, and two of my pals from Davis were too hype on this months ago, so here we were.

My personal take was 4/5, and the oscar buzz for Heath is definitely warranted.

The preview of 'Watchmen' by Zack Snyder was included. I hope that is three hours too.

I recently saw Momento, and I have to admit, I was dissapointed. Chris Nolan has come a long way, or maybe he just works best with unlimited tools.

1:45pm: Shilldom!
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11:40am: CIA Torturers Vulnerable To Arrest Part Two: Guantanamo Torture Legal Advisors ~Also~ vulnerable
( DAMN! )

"Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

DAYUM!

Man, nobody can say we did not try to warn Yoo. Doesn't he work at UC Berkeley's school of Law? I remember protests about him landing back there after his work on torture authorization loopholes for the white house.

On behalf of my friends in the legal profession, let me express my shock. It is a long time since lawyers were also vulnerable to war crimes commissions. Mr Yoo, Feith and Gonzales...you have officially hit a new low.

11:00am: Spying chickens come home to roost: Police edition
( Read more... )

I wish I could believe that the police were horrified because they took a stand on wiretapping and the Patriot Act and are now seeing it bite them in the ass, but the truth is, they were largely clueless about the recent battle over FISA-that is obvious from their response. This is a pretty good example of things it is easier to do with sensible legislation I actually approve of....it is the excessive 'spying on American Citizens and opposition parties' loopholes I worry about. I worry about those tools in Democratic hands. I worry about them in anyone's hands.

*howls in the wilderness*

12:59pm: FISA Fight Forever
( Read more... )

11:41pm: Attachment Style
http://www.helloquizzy.com/results/the-attachment-style-test/?fromCGI=1&var_Anxiety=11&var_Avoidance=52

The Free Agent!

You like to be independent, to play by your own rules. You're not terribly interested in finding a partner and settling down, and it makes you nervous to imagine that someone might depend on you for anything. Were you to find the right partner--someone as independent as you, probably--you'd not be too put out about sharing your adventures with him/her.

I kinda am, and kinda am not like this depiction. I think I was honest with the questions. I was trained from a young age to have 'Game' which I guess is a high degree of romantic objectivity and low reaction to turmoil. Avoidance? I guess that is a manner of describing it negatively.

10:42am: Advanced Patriotism 101: A Patriot is a rebel, not a bootlicker. (Op-ed by Meteor Blades)
( Read more... )

I had been thinking much along the same lines, but Meteor Blades summed up my thoughts succinctly.

I'll add this, also dug up by Daily Kos: Frederick Douglas, 150 years ago.

"What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?"

"The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers," Douglass said, "is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me."

This July Fourth, Douglass declared, "is yours not mine."

Obama has some nice quotes about how things are different now, but my feelings on the matter, like Douglas, will be bittersweet for some time.  I grew up in a impoverished ghetto, in a improverished city from which all businesses abandoned after white flight.  No one took any steps to correct the divestment until I was ready to leave in my adulthood.  My childhood home is still arguably one of the worst places in the world, a nest of inequity and vice the police would not travel to without fourteen squad cars in support, nicknamed 'The Murder Dubs'.  My America...tell me again she is mine right or wrong?

When she is wrong, I will let her know, and strive to make her great.  That is patriotism.

 

5:12pm: CIA Torturers May Be Vulnerable To Arrest Under 'Universal Jurisdiction' War Crimes Authority
Fascinating.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/01/cia-vet-next-president-ma_n_110248.html

12:47pm: Ultimate Win: Craig and Vitter sponsor a Federal Marriage Protection Act
You can't make this up.  And they waited until Gay Pride weekend, how nice.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/27/craig-vitter-sponsor-bill_n_109624.html

I laughed until I was a Tomato....only the fact that this is a proposed Constutional Amendment sobered me.  It is highly likely to fail, it's only point is in awakening the sleeping religious right.  I expect a Flag Burning proposal and a Pledge of Allegiance proposal to follow.

I think these guys are talking a really wide stance on these matters.  Let's really tap these issues.

1:33pm: Myanmar Revisited: 45% of populace starving, Junta not too crazy about coverage either
 http://world.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=136413

All the nations in the world want to help, no strings attached. They want to give you food, and distribute food to your dying people. How do you screw this up? By being selfish, ignorant and letting spies set the policy, that's how.

12:19pm: Replenishing National Stores With Excess Profits Tax on Oil War Profiteers
Definition Three of War Profiteering: Commodity

War usually leads to a shortage in the supply of commodities, which results in higher prices and higher revenues. For example, increased oil prices have enabled the oil companies to increase their profit in recent years, so oil companies are profiteering from war.

Solutions/Anti Profiteering Measures:

Making unreasonable profits from war is widely considered unethical and is deeply unpopular, so attempts to prohibit excessive war profiteering, such as the imposition of an excess profits tax, receive much political support in wartime. Defining 'excessive' accurately is difficult, however, and such legislation frequently allows some instances of profiteering to go unchecked while reducing the income of others' war-related business to loss-making levels.

---------------
Given the above contested Wikipedia definitions (which I'm sure the wrangling of will prove at least a decade in court to target Exxon and Speculators specifically) why don't we take it off their noses?

The Oil Companies have gotten fat, and their move out of the United States makes their intentions obvious.  I honestly don't see why we don't nail them but good while the law, right and momentum is on our side.  Might it cause a fluctuation in Oil Markets?  Certainly.  If we leeched off their 280% increase in sales since the start of the Iraq War, could we subsidy gas cost and rebuild the military with US excess profits tax alone?  Sure.  How much tax are we talking about?  Well, 5 Billion dollars represents 12 hours of Exxon's daily profits.

I see no reason we could not pay for the entirety of the Iraq War and all associated costs, and even pay for some US Attorneys to nail Halliburton (KBH, whatever) to the wall for their overcharges, which would give us another half trillion dollars.

This would need to be done NOW, to prevent Obama's presidency from sucking air for two years trying to make up for all the excesses of the Bush Administrations (alleged) criminal collusion with war profiteering.

10:05am: Big Read Book List Meme (borrowed with pride from Faerchylde)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (7 books)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Had a dictionary sitting right next to me, just in case.)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (golden compass, subtle knife and amber spyglass actually 3 novels)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (read Scarlett, too.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (7 books)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (see # 33 - this list is kind of flawed)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

9:51am: Armchair Politrix Part Deux: Dump Lieberman
It was real, Joe, and I'm all for some moderates who talk sense (in fact, I would argue I am closer aligned with Republican Constitutional Conservatives than Democrats these days-see FISA Wiretap Captitulation and my leaving to the Green Party). But as for spilling more blood in a useless push into Iran to satisfy your neocon paymasters? No. Just...no. Which part of 3 Billion dollars a day sinking into the sands of Iraq are you not understanding? Which part of the head of Afghanistan Ops, the General of Generals, saying 'We are completely under-supplied thanks to the Iraq conflict.' did you not understand?

( Dump Joe Lieberman from Democratic Committees Petition )

Shh. Don't talk. Just walk away with the dignity befitting a person whose calls Gore formerly took.

9:23am: All respect due to Sichuan Province: NONETHELESS.
( BOYCOTT BEIJING 2008 PETITION )

I cannot have that Darfur catastrophe connected to me. Sorry U.S. Olympic team, I will not be watching at all. No Olympic coats, no Olympic commercials, no Olympic beer purchases, nothing.

10:52am: GRIM Day for Progressives Yesterday (also hot)
The Solstice brings what it brings.

This year, we got Scott Mclellan trying to speak on what little he knew that could be potentially revelatory in the Valerie Plame Scandal, which was kind of good in a two-years-too-late kind of way.

However-that testimony was halted so the Democrats could cravenly capitulate on the Hoyer FISA bill, which granted full retroactive immunity to the Telecoms who have been conducting warrantless wiretapping on US citizens since the Oval Offices first requested the service in January 2001. Yeah...that's....a few months before 9/11, maybe you noticed.

To be trailed by a full granting of all the war funds needed to continue till the end of 2009, with no provisions or requirements WHATSOEVER, and even more money than the President asked for. What's that Timmy? A Green should not be concerned about the Democratic leadership? Aw, that's civil Timmy, but I worry when any group currently holding the power to conduct unlimited hearings, begin Impeachment procedures, deny war funding as the 2006 Democratic voters reinstallment obviously mandated them to do and holding the presumptive next president bends over in the name of political triangulation or to 'look tough on terror'.

Even being a Green is a pale comfort, as my membership is largely an investment in a future where that fringe party will not be a toothless wonder. There is nothing to do but make lemonade, Timmy.

4:17pm: Why do I love these...(enneagram meme, stolen with shame from FullDamage)

Your result for The Quick & Painless ENNEAGRAM Test...

3 - the Achiever

Thanks for taking the test !

Take The Quick & Painless ENNEAGRAM Test at HelloQuizzy

12:07pm: Brits cure Metastacized Melanomic Cancer with cloned White Cell flood
How sweet is this! British researchers cured the most ( virulent suffused variety of cancer from all over a subject's body by cloning his remaining white blood cells and flooding his body with them. ) Cancer was completely gone in two months, and no sign of it after two years!

I am of course waiting for the downside...Vampire

Edit: I assumed the researchers were british because I heard erroneously that Cloning was used to grow the new select T-cells, and they don't have a ban on cloning for medical research unlike some theocracies I could mention. HOWEVER: the method used was nutrient medium culture growth-that's right baby, American! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

10:08pm: New Certs versus 3 Month Background checks BATTLE!!!!!!!
*sound of birds chirping in the distance, dust settling*

Check back in half a year.

Move along, no action here...

*coughs*

...yeah....*clears throat*

Edit 6/20/08

Found a company I could live with, got my .45 APC Sig Sauer, 10 days of waiting period for Brady's Law and I should be in business. Not as good as the gummint jobs I applied for but hey; I have some time to kill.

12:48pm: Kucinich Files Bush and Cheney (last month) Articles of Impeachment.
35 Articles, in fact.

( 35 Articles for Impeachment, Sponsored by Kucinich and Wexler )

It doesn't matter that this will never pass the current majorities and resistance from the Red-leaning Democrats and the Pelosi 'Slow Crawl To Election' Dems. This is courage we can read about and be sure that at least some public figures can quantify what a betrayal of the oaths of office looks like.

12:01pm: Myanmar death totals after weeks of innattention
( 77K dead, 55K missing (dead), 28K injured )

( Read more... )

7:55pm: War Inc opens in SF and Berkeley on June 13 in Test Release
Sweet, sweet sweet! Who wants to go? I'm seeing this in Berkeley!

( Info! )

A war film that won't suck....made without a dime of advertising dollars or idiotic committee input, as a work of love by John Cusack? I'm in! Does anyone know if this rocked Cannes to dust?

10:10pm: Test (Super Stupor)


My 2nd Favorite Supers-In-The-Real-World series.

12:45pm: Iraq Study Group Goals from a Progressive, Pattern-Analysis view
( From the Center for American Progress. )