Inspired by zxbe’s excellent collection of macro water drops, I found this downy gem out on the water yesterday.
Elephant Butte Lake, New Mexico. An exceptionally quiet afternoon, accompanied only by scores of western grebes.
Today’s weather calls for winds up to 30 mph, the feathers will soon be plastered to the rocks.
The Zoo has obtained an advance copy of President Obama’s upcoming 2011 State of the Union Speech from an anonymous source. After vetting the copy using the same thorough vetting processes employed by renowned Fox News, we found it to be an authentic original draft of Obama’s intended remarks penned by his own hand on cocktail napkins from The Founding Father’s Bar and Grill.
STATE OF THE UNION, JANUARY 25, 2011
My Fellow Americans, Members of Congress, Members of the Press Corps and The Supremes Supreme Court Justices,
It is my obligation and duty under the Constitution of the United States to tell you all the State of the Union. And, as I stand here today, I can honestly tell you, the Union is fucked. We’re broke. We can’t pay our bills. And the only tax package Congress will pass is one that puts us further in the shithole.
Ten years ago, our country was in the black. We not only had a balanced budget, but we were actually paying down the National Debt. Now, I’m not usually one to talk smack about anybody, but President Bush blew it big-time. The first thing he did was to cut taxes for his wealthy buddies and put this country in the red. Then he attacked two countries, and paid for those wars with money he borrowed from Red China. Red China!
So, here we are, the Greatest Free Country in the World, and we owe our asses to the biggest Communist Country in the World. Like I said, we’re fucked.
And don’t get me started about education. Ten years of No Child Left Behind has cranked out the stupidest voting population ever. I mean, how else can you explain putting Republicans in charge of the Nation’s purse strings when it was the Republican Party who bankrupted this country in the first place? Now they want to take Jefferson out of American History and put a Calvinist Preacher in. They want to replace our science curriculum with a faith-based science education, so that when our kids ask ‘what makes this work’ or ‘what causes that’, the answer will always be “God.” Well God isn’t going to save our asses when we run out of oil and don’t have the technology in place for alternative energy sources. God isn’t going to clean up the pollution we create that’s slowly cooking our asses. We have to. But we don’t have the will to. We’re fucked.
And finally, I have to talk about the rise in violent rhetoric these past couple of years. You can’t put gun-sights on the districts of your opponents and not expect that some deranged nutbag isn’t going to act on your suggestion. You can’t talk about “Second Amendment Solutions,” about resorting to the Bullet Box instead of the Ballot Box, without knowing that there are crazy people out there, crazy people with access to assault rifles and 30-round clips of ammo, crazy people who, if they don’t get their way, would just as soon shoot everyone in sight. But you-all voted to end the ban on assault rifles, end the ban on these mega clips of ammo, then you go and talk this crazy-assed shit about targeting your opponents. Then you get all defensive and fake-horrified if someone actually does what you instigated. We’re fucked because we’ve got no system in place to keep crazy people from getting their hands on killer assault rifles. Now let me tell you something. I can give a good speech and talk about toning it down, and about coming together and have a Kum Bye Ya moment. But sooner or later some nutbag is going to seek revenge, and it’ll be YOUR house with the “Surveyor’s Marks” on it. Maybe then you’ll realize: you’re fucked.
But that brings me to another point. We’ve just seen the first politically motivated killings in quite some time. A nine-year old girl got shot in the back, because she happened to be at the wrong place. No parent should have to go through what her parents are going through. A federal judge, gunned down. A member of the House of Representatives critically wounded with a bullet through her brain. Six people dead and over a dozen wounded by someone who thought that government was the enemy. And he’s not the only one who thinks that way. That’s been the message from one side of the aisle since Reagan.
I talked to my kids about it. And Joe talked to his kids about it. And we came to the only reasonable conclusion we could: We’re not going to take a bullet for this country. We’re not going to see our kids take a bullet, either. And we’re not going to ask the good men and women in the Secret Service to take a bullet for us either. This country is just too damned fucked for it to be worth it.
Now I’ve spoken with the incoming Republican Majority in the House and they’ve assured me that unless they get their way, they’re going to shut this country down. And they can do it. They’re in charge of passing the budget, and the only budget they’re going to pass will gut the federal government, gut your social security and destroy the economy of the nation so that their rich cronies can take trillions of dollars out of this country and put it into their off-shore trust accounts. And they can do it. Absolutely, without a doubt, they will destroy this country in order to get their way. We’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
But there is something Joe and I can do. We can quit. In fact, that’s the only way to keep the Republicans from shutting down this whole country in the next few weeks. So, effective immediately, both Joe and I submit our resignations. By operation of law, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House is now your President. Now you’re really fucked!
This is our Open Thread. Feel free to write on this or any other topic that comes to mind.
This man is eating dinner. Not bothering to pick through the dumpster and carry home (which he likely does not have) what he finds, he eats out every evening behind a trendy Italian restaurant. Once I saw him lurching along, holding his stomach and groaning. Vary wary, he never spoke, and cast darting glances around as he made his way across town from bin to bin. At some point he realized that I might be the one who was leaving the plate of food tied up in a plastic shopping bag on top of the pile inside, giving me a long look and a grimace. His only contact with others appeared to be the alcoholics who would wait for him near the grocery store and give him a few dollars to buy a jumbo for them. I don’t know if he is a military veteran or not, but it is highly likely, as there is a VA hospital in town. After an early cold spell around Thanksgiving he disappeared.
People who have fallen through the cracks in our society, brought home with shocking violence as of late, become a burden with potential for greater catastrophe the longer we pretend to ignore them.
This is our Daily Open Thread. Your comments on this topic or any others are welcome.
By Tracy Knauss
There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence…
~“Social Justice and the Emerging New Age” address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)
(Emphasis added)
On a hike last week to visit an area of ancient desert habitation with a small group of people, I had an opportunity to get a picture of the art, techniques and habits of comunication.
The leader of our excursion promptly took off ahead with the parting comment of “I don’t know where I’m going”… only to reappear later upon some hilltop waiting for us to catch up. Whereupon he would say “I think there are some more petroglyphs over there” as he waved his arm in a general east to west direction and say: “….but I don’t know where I’m going”. Often to appear somewhere off to the north or south.
Another member of our party, the owner of a small resort, would remain at these hilltop locations to send and receive cell phone calls, making reservations and conducting business. With obvious only partial success, as he would find another hilltop along the way and try again to complete the dropped calls.
The two women in the group wandered along together, talking animatedly and waving their arms from time to time in no decipherable pattern.
Myself, I sat down upon the rocks and gave thought to what the original inhabitants might have been saying through their graphics on the rocks.
Communication has become a major part of our modern society, the telecom industries represent a huge part of the economy, and the consumer culture stresses a need to be constantly updated on the latest, the greatest and the must have.
There are inevitable breakdowns. We ended up trudging along late that afternoon into a stiff cold head wind with spits of snow because no one checked the weather ahead of time, we got somewhat lost, and eventually went home hungry because our destination for dinner that evening is closed on Mondays.
I managed to figure out that there had been an earthquake that collapsed the caves and rock shelters once upon a time. There were no petroglyphs upon the newer fractured faces of rock, the inhabitants had simply left. A dropped call one could say.
This is today’s Daily Open Thread… any thoughts or observations you wish to communicate, here we are!
Chapter Seven of Thom Hartmann’s book, Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country, is called “Cool Our Fever.”
This week, Thom discusses two things: Stripping oil of it’s strategic value, and ways to clean up our atmosphere before we boil.
The United States has about 3% of the world’s oil, but we consume 24% of the oil produced around the world.
[O]il accounts for roughly 95 percent of the energy used for transportation in the United States (and our military is the world’s single largest consumer of oil), and that’s what makes it strategic. If we want to strip oil of its strategic value, so it can’t
be used as a weapon against us and we can use our remaining oil supplies for rational things like producing plastics and medicines, we need to shift our transportation sector away from oil and do so quickly.
If we change the way we power our transportation, then we won’t need such a huge, oil-guzzling military to invade countries like Iraq, who are sitting on “our oil.” That would be one huge problem solved.
But how can we do it?
In 1999 progressives in Germany passed the 100,000 Roof Program (Stromeinspeisungsgesetz), which mandated that banks had to provide low-interest 10-year loans to homeowners sufficient for them to put solar panels on their houses. They then passed the Renewable Energies Law (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) and in 2004 integrated the 100,000 Roofs Program into it. The Renewable Energies Law mandated that for the next 10 years the power company had to buy back power from those homeowners at a level substantially above the going rate so the homeowners’ income from the solar panel would equal their loan payment on the panel and would also represent the actual cost to the power company to generate that amount of power had it built a new nuclear reactor.
Germany was trying to find a way to avoid building two new nuclear power plants, and they succeeded wildly. In eight year’s time, the 100,000 Roof Program was generating 8,500 MW of power to the grid — about eight nuclear plants worth. Enough power to make it easy to power transportation! Continue reading
Photo by Zooey
A sandhill crane at sunset. Bosque del Apache NWR
Here is my youthful solution to the chessboard problem from yesterday. My rule was 1 inch wide:
This is our Open Thread. Please feel free to add your thoughts on this, or any other topic that comes to mind.
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