Posts from — January 2011

The CBC reports censoring the past: “The 1980s song Money for Nothing by the British rock band Dire Straits has been deemed unacceptable for play on Canadian radio.”

The original studio version, which many think is titled “I want my MTV” because of the background vocal by Sting, does, indeed, use the word “faggot” in an offensive manner, which makes more sense if you see the video that goes with it, as the video is also stereotyping the working class.

I would note that Mark Knopfler still performs the song, and he doesn’t use the “f” word in recent performances. The original is a bit of history that help to boost the music video [and MTV] as a separate genre until it exploded when Michael Jackson hit the scene.

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

== More on the Shemya mission

The memorial service at the University of Arizona was planned as a wake, a celebration of the lives of those that died, and to start the process of healing a community that has been badly shaken by a horrific event. The event was planned by the University, not by anyone else, and it was the decision of the University to push the concept of “Together We Thrive”.

Obviously this is a foreign concept to the wingnut commentariat who leapt to attack the event as political.

What sad, pathetic little lives some people lead. They are so trivial that they have to create their own enemies in their mind. I don’t think they need to be concerned that anyone will organize a memorial service when they cross the bridge, with or without politics.

The ABC latest report: ‘Post-war’ effort needed to rebuild Queensland

Premier Anna Bligh says Queensland is facing a reconstruction effort of post-war proportions as the state battles possibly the worst natural disaster in the country’s history.

The Brisbane River inundated more than 20,000 homes and businesses across the capital when it peaked this morning at 4.46 metres [14.63 feet].

More than 100,000 homes are without power across the city and to the west in Ipswich, where floodwaters are receding rapidly after yesterday’s peak.

But while the water is receding, this morning it claimed the life of a 24-year-old man who was trying to check his father’s house in the south Brisbane suburb of Durack.

His is the 14th person to die in the south-east Queensland floods and first in Brisbane.

There are washed out roads and bridges as well as buildings filled with mud from the floods. Water and sewage treatment plants will be down giving the situation of “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” that is common in flooded areas.

The rains have eased off for the moment, but could return at any time. Dams and reservoirs are at the maximum limit, so they can’t provide any meaningful assistance in flood control for the foreseeable future.

There are still dozens of people listed as missing in the state, so the death toll will probably rise as search and rescue teams gain access to the areas that have been flooded.

Update: Via Kryten in comments earlier: The official Australian Bureau of Meteorology River Conditions map.

[Note: if you see references to CBD, that is “Central Business District”]

Susie Madrak has a post about the rightwing attacks on Sheriff Dupnik that contains this marvelous illustration of the “conservatives” in the US:

…Arizona conservative activist Pamela Gorman, who won national attention over her campaign ad featuring her shooting four different fire arms to “drive the left nuts,” said that Dupnik was only elected to his position because of the county’s Democratic leanings…

In other words, the Sheriff was elected because the majority of the voters in Pima County are Democrats and voted for him, but this is wrong because? Isn’t that the way things are supposed to be, that the majority of voters elect people to office?

By now it should be obvious that “conservatives” in the US believe: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” I doubt they know or care that their view comes from Chapter 2 of The Little Red Book of Mao Zedong.

The rains continue in Australia and the flooding in moving South from Queensland to New South Wales. The ABC reports Seven dead as raging torrent swamps Toowoomba.

Toowoomba is a town near Brisbane on the East Coast of Australia. The ABC provides a map of the flooding.

Most of those who died were in vehicles that were washed off roads and bridges by flash floods in the area. The rains in the highlands on top of the already high river levels created this disaster that shows no real sign of lessening in the near future.

The BBC has profiles of the victims, half of them in their 70s.

The suspect was arraigned in Federal court and remanded to custody, but I only expect one more Federal hearing in Arizona, which will be the change of venue, probably to California. As this case includes the murder of the chief judge of the Federal District Courts in Arizona, I would expect the Arizona judges to recuse themselves, just as the Federal public defenders have already done. He was represented by a public defender from San Diego at the hearing. Even if the judges don’t recuse themselves, I feel certain that the defense attorney will move for a change of venue.

While the state will be preparing for trial, the Feds may decide to move the defendant to a holding facility at the site of their trial. Working with the Feds is never easy for local officials in cases with split jurisdiction.

As time goes on people are learning more about the suspect and it doesn’t look good for the haters.

If you think that his rambling about currency doesn’t make sense, it is because you haven’t been listening to Ron Paul and his gold bug fellow traveler Glenn Beck.

For a few clues about the grammar and mind control weirdness, take a dip in the sewer that is the mind of David Wynn Miller.

Now there are reports that he has some sort of ties to “American Renaissance”, a wonderful group of people that are tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Department of Homeland Security.

Sheriff Dupnik is, of course, being taken to task for decrying hate speech, and will probably face a candidate from the Tea Party in his next election, if the rightwing efforts to chase him out of office earlier don’t work. If the people of Pima County allow it to happen, they deserve what they will get – a whacko with a badge.

The murder of Judge John M. Roll and the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords automatically fall under Federal jurisdiction, the US Marshals Service and the Capitol Police respectively, which is why the President sent the head of the FBI to coordinate. The other murders and assaults are under Arizona’s jurisdiction. This will complicate information releases as the Federal and Arizona rules of criminal procedure are different, so they will be restricted to releasing only details that may be provided under the rules of both systems. The Federal system is more restrictive than most states, so the frustration will be evident on the part of Arizona officials and local media.

The weapon was a Glock autoloading pistol. While these weapons are routinely referred to as “automatics”, they fire one round per trigger pull. On military weapons this is classified as “semi-automatic”, as opposed to “fully automatic” in which the weapon continues to fire as long as the trigger is depressed and there is ammunition available. It had a 30 round over-sized magazine, doubling the normal capacity of the weapon.

The suspect has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and is not talking to investigators. This will be important in any plea of insanity, as it indicates that he is in control of his faculties and realizes what he has done is wrong.

I have noted that in the discussion of the hack job on Huckleberry Finn that few have observed that this is just another attempt to rewrite American history concerning the antebellum South.

Samuel Clemens specialized in writing in the vernacular, the everyday speech of the people, not in formal English. The novel is a snapshot of a time and place written down by one of America’s greatest storytellers. Clemens grew up in that period and provides a window to it that a history book cannot. Through the story we learn about regular people, not leaders or politicians.

The “N” word was always a low-class word that wasn’t used in “polite society”, which means that is was the common word in use. If someone wants to eliminate the word, at least do Mr. Clemens the courtesy of the calling the result something else and not Huckleberry Finn. That worked when The Seven Samurai became The Magnificence Seven.

The Sheriff of Pima County, Arizona is Clarence W. Dupnik. Sheriff Dupnik sees what is really there and doesn’t like it. A half dozen people were murdered in his jurisdiction, including the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Arizona and a Congressional staffer, and a dozen people were wounded, including the local Congresswoman.

At a press conference the Sheriff laid it out: there are unbalanced people everywhere and the current political rhetoric in the media is pushing some of them over the edge to violence.

You can’t have a continuing stream of hate speech of the type noted by DCap Ny and others without feeding the paranoia of people who are losing their grip on the real world. When candidates for public office and media figures keeping talking about the government as “the problem” and bullets to “correct things” that ballots can’t, you are going to have violence.

The Tea Party, the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck. Rush Limbaugh, etc. ad nauseam have been using the language of violence to “energize the base” for years, and no one, especially not Sheriff Dupnik, is surprised by the result.

I would note that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a conservative Blue Dog Democrat recruited to run for Congress by Rahm Emanuel.

Digby watches television so I don’t have to and saw the following discussion among three of the denizens of the Village: Wolf Blitzer, Paul Begala, and Mary Matalin.

Wolf Blitzer: “In an interview the other day with the New York Times, the president said about his press secretary Robert Gibbs, Paul let me read it to you:

He said “We’ve been on this ride together since I won my Senate primary in 2004 … He’s had a six-year stretch now where basically he’s been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay.”

Blitzer noted that the modest pay was $172,200 per annum without considering the perquisites. The responses show that none of them has any math skills, nor any judgment as to the difficulty of a position.

Paul Begala: “And, as Mary points out, if it’s a hourly wage, then Gibbs is probably making about fifty cents an hour.”

Mary Matalin: “For those kinds of jobs, and those hours, it is minimum wage. That’s how hard those jobs are.”

Actually the current Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and assuming an hourly wage for all of the available hours in a year, Mr. Gibbs is making $19.66 per hour. US Senators only make slightly more than Mr. Gibbs, $174,000, and the Vice President only makes $200,000.

The totality of the job is to talk to the press. There are thousands of kindergarten teachers in this country who are qualified to do what he does, and they work for a lot less money.

С Рождеством Христовым to my Orthodox friends who are still waiting to see how the calendar reform works out.

Table for One

Nom nom nom…

[Editor: This is Tip, who eschews dishes to avoid the crowd at the feeding station. She is only semi-feral, which causes problems within the Family.]

Friday Ark is in Europe