The Watering Hole, Monday, December 8th, 2014: Keep Watching the Skies

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I’m totally depressed.

My fucking Jets blew it yet again after raising my hopes.

This month is the tenth anniversary of my parents’ deaths, flashbacks started before Thanksgiving.

Our company’s holiday party is tonight, I dread going – I hate the fact that Adam is not here, flashbacks there, too.
.
I hate the “Holidays”.

This country is going crazy and descending into a chaos that could, IMO, result in a violent “civil” war.

I fucking HATE people.

So here’s a nice slideshow of 100 Hubble photos, courtesy of weather.com. At least the human mind brought us the Hubble to show us so many marvels. At this point, I feel that space is the only thing that holds promise and hope for the future. Hopefully some alien species will learn from our human fuck-ups.

Star V838 Monocerotis

Star V838 Monocerotis

This is our daily open thread – don’t mind me, just go ahead and talk about things.

47 thoughts on “The Watering Hole, Monday, December 8th, 2014: Keep Watching the Skies”

  1. Speaking of predictable national failure, here’s an example of what happens when full power of the State is ceded to the corporate world, when Money becomes speech.

    Fossil-fuel lobbyists, bolstered by GOP wins, work to curb environmental rules

    Oil, gas and coal interests that spent millions to help elect Republicans this year are moving to take advantage of expanded GOP power in Washington and state capitals to thwart Obama administration environmental rules.

    Industry lobbyists made their pitch in private meetings last week with dozens of state legislators at a summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an industry-financed conservative state policy group.

    As Cindy Sheehan essentially predicted in May of 2007,

    “[I]f we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt ‘two’ party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland.”

    Has America finally arrived? Have the fascists finally won?

    Glad I’m old enough to presume I’ll be out of here before the bitter consequences of climate change force the onset of the planet’s upcoming and human-caused mass extinction. Meanwhile, I’ll sit back and watch as stupidity and greed — merged — assume full power of the state; and I’ll continue shaking my head in disgust as the biosphere succumbs to the antics of “intelligent” life and reaches its predictable endpoint: “a fascist corporate wasteland.”

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  2. My sixth grader Amber is starting to ask questions about evolution and why humans are the only species that fucks up the habitat it lives in and expects to continue to survive and evolve.
    I have been heartened by her curiosity, and at the same time wondering what kind of a world she and her five year old brother will be living in after I’m gone…

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    • You wrote ‘sixth grader’…time certainly flies! She has great parents as role models and the curiosity – Amber will go far in life!

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  3. Jane, I do not have any sad memories to deal with this time of year and I love the holidays, but I’m right there with you on the I hate people thing. I don’t want to feel that way, but it seems everywhere I look I see greed, hate, and ignorance. I’m just tired of it and have seemingly hit the bottom of my normal reserve of boundless optimism. I plan to spend the holidays drinking some rather stiff eggnog in front of my fire. Want to join me?

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  5. I’m totally depressed.
    My fucking Jets blew it yet again after raising my hopes.
    This month is the tenth anniversary of my parents’ deaths, flashbacks started before Thanksgiving.
    Our company’s holiday party is tonight, I dread going – I hate the fact that Adam is not here, flashbacks there, too.
    I hate the “Holidays”.
    This country is going crazy and descending into a chaos that could, IMO, result in a violent “civil” war.
    I fucking HATE people.

    Geeze, replace ‘Jets’ with ‘Bears’ and move the holiday party to last Saturday, and I’m you.

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    • How about fat naked people being herded towards a pile of cheap crappy TVs by demons prodding them with pitchforks?

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    • I’m sure Tucker wasn’t referring to this event — it’s way too right wing, therefore could never be “Satanic”. Right? Right. —

      From Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression, Volume I Chapter XI

      The deterrent effect of the concentration camps was based on the promise of savage brutality. This promise was fulfilled, to an extent which defies description. Once in the custody of the SS guards, the victim was beaten, tortured, starved, and often murdered through the so-called “extermination through work” program, or through mass execution gas chambers and furnaces of the camps (which were portrayed in the motion picture evidence). The reports of official government investigations furnish additional evidence of conditions within the concentration camps.
      [. . .]
      Flossenburg Concentration Camp can best be described as a factory dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary object of putting to work the mass slave labor, another of its primary objectives was the elimination of human lives by the methods employed in handling the prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations, sadism, housing facilities, inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, freezing, hand hanging, forced suicides, shooting, all played a major role in obtaining their objective. Prisoners were murdered at random; spite killings against Jews were common. Injections of poison and shooting in the neck were everyday occurrences. Epidemics of typhus and spotted fever were permitted to run rampant as a means of eliminating prisoners. Life in this camp meant nothing. Killing became a common thing, so common that a quick death was welcomed by the unfortunate ones.”

      “On Christmas 1944 a number of prisoners were hung at one time. The prisoners were forced to view this hanging. By the side of the gallows was a decorated Christmas tree and as expressed by one prisoner ‘it was a terrible sight, that combination of prisoners hanging in the air and the glistening Christmas tree’.”

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  7. I’m with you, Jane, aside from the Vikings new QB coming along nicely and having his second game in a row with a rating over 115. I am overcoming my antipathy towards the NFL by the simple expedient of refusing to read comments on ANY football story.

    My mother died on Thanksgiving and her mom died the following Christmas Eve. This part of the year is a time of mourning for me. By the time Christmas finally passes I have been scraped down to raw nerves by all the strangers insisting that I should be “merry”. Mr. Worf sums up my thoughts quite well.

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    • Thanks, I had to laugh when I saw the video title. That was a fun episode.

      I used to love the holidays, but even before my parents died, they (the holidays, not my parents) were already getting just too hectic and stressful, although the actual day of the holiday turned out well. Now, the teeth-clenching and nerve-scraping start in continuously before Thanksgiving, which I consider to be the beginning of the final slide into hell. As you say, “Merry” is no longer in my emotional repertoire.

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  10. I’ll pay attention to pro sports again — when (a) each and all players are paid $10.10 per hour up to 40 hrs per week, time-and-a-half after that, double time on Sundays and Holidays, and (b) when the owners are forced to purchase their stadium or arena at full price, and, too, must pay annual income taxes at standard rates. Until then, nope.

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  11. 19 years have passed since my eldest brother died on Christmas Eve.
    He’ll be forever 45. His two toys are now men with families of their own!

    We’re a close-knit family and that helps during the holiday dinners as we bring forth memories of the two brothers and Mom that are no longer physically present yet remain in our conversations.
    (actually not a day goes by I don’t think of my Mom)

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  19. Here we go.

    Extinction Rate Rivals That of Dinosaurs, 2014 Likely Hottest Year Ever

    Recent studies show that current animal extinction rates from anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) now rival the extinction that annihilated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

    “If that rate continues unchanged, the earth’s sixth mass extinction is a certainty,” said Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

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  21. The below documents are evidence the grand jury considered that was released by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch.

    Portions highlighted in yellow are notes that St. Louis Public Radio reporters have made to help understand these documents or passages we’ve marked for later reference. We have not redacted these documents — other than the notes, they are as provided.

    UPDATED DEC. 8 with new evidence released.

    Evidence released by McCulloch

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