Sky W/ Blimp, Bird & Wires

Taking Pictures In The Park

Singles Doubles

Dog Bites Man, Again

Also too, someone is wrong on the Internet. Somewhat less surprising is that the someone is The Daily Beast's Megan McArdle. Remember her? The "special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast covering business, economics, and public policy." Also kitchen gadgets & other consumer goods.

Megan McArdle doesn’t understand the Kermit Gosnell case

An oddly misinformed Daily Beast piece gets everything about Pennsylvania's abortion debate backward

We can only quibble w/ "oddly."

This, on the I.R.S. "scandal", gets it all as backward & awful as usual.

A related genre is the column explaining how the real victims here are liberls*, [sic since 14 May] the Obama administration and maybe the American public.

I'm going to stick with "the real scandal is a [sic] employees of a government agency using the large powers we have granted them to selectively investigate people based on their political beliefs" and "the real victims are the people who were investigated", though of course, I think this is also terrible for the American people, because we deserve good government.

Citizen's United, that's great government. What other "good government" does she think the American people deserve to get, good & hard?

The asterisk?

*This originally contained a link to a Josh Marshall post, but he disputes my interpretation, so I've removed it.

And here we go, on the stretch & headed home!

The real scandal is that all these complicated tax rules exist. If we would just eliminate the corporate income tax, then people could organize groups, or not, just as they please. And the IRS would not be in the position of deciding what counts as excessive political activity.

But Megan, you will say, isn't this just a list of things that you already cared a lot about, like statistical literacy and getting rid of the corporate income tax? And indeed you're right. But isn't that always the real scandal?

No, really, once we've eliminated the corporate income tax then the job creators will start creating jobs. Just you watch!

And Sweet Blood of Jesus yes Megatron did claim to care a lot about statistical literacy. Gack! We're going up to the roof to heave ourself off it, hoping to be impaled on a neighboring bldg.'s tee vee antenna. Good-bye cruel world.

Show Off

Robert Silverberg's pad indicates he has lost very little money writing. Now he's going to rake in a few more dollars making some of his output available e-book style, which resulted in this:Mostly we envy the library.

The Family That Kills Together Dies Together

Grampaw Cracker kills son, grandson in Texas.

No loss to the gene pool. Maybe they wanted to put him in a "home" & he wasn't going for it. PROTIP: Never live w/ (or near, even, if it can be avoided) your ageing parental units. No good can ever come of it.

Chief Tolliver claims the community where it happened was "affluent."Probably nasty rich people fighting over their ill-gotten gains then. Will no one rid us of the nasty & affluent?

Always Be An England

English Conservatives are having the same problem w/ their 27% even-righter-wing that our Republican friends are having. Though it seems at least one Tory had the intestinal fortitude to be honest & specific about them. "Mad, swivel-eyed loons."

In remarks immediately seized on by Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, the senior Tory said that the party's MPs have to rebel against the leadership because they face pressure from hardline associations.

Farage, who knows the identity of the Tory, tweeted: "If you are a Conservative supporter who believes in Ukip ideas then your party hates you. Come and join us."

The senior Tory made the remarks – in earshot of journalists – after being asked about the decision of 116 Tory MPs to defy the prime minister and vote in favour of an amendment regretting the absence of a EU referendum in the Queen's speech.

The Conservative said: "It's fine. There's really no problem. The MPs just have to do it because the associations tell them to, and the associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons."

The unnamed Tory wasn't pulling anyone's leg; here's some of what the Limey loonies have to say:

"People want, in a sense, to revert back to how we were," she says. "You know: we won the second world war, only we've lost it now, because Germany's taken over… But we had people then, ready to stand up like Churchill and say, 'This is what we're going to do.' A lot of people in this country are saying, 'Where are the leaders? Where are the people prepared to take a stand?' "

As well as the awfulness of modern politicians, immigration, the amount of money Britain pays into the EU, the alleged failings of multiculturalism, the need drastically to cut the UK's foreign aid budget and the dazzling brilliance of the late Margaret Thatcher, Ukip members mention the second world war a lot. But McCaffery's take on 1939-45 is that bit more interesting. Unprompted, she explains her support of the theory that Britain eventually saw off the Germans thanks to the power of prayer. "The soldiers at Dunkirk were able to come back on a calm sea, whereas the German aircraft couldn't take off from their places because the weather was so bad… There were all sorts of changes that happened, and part of it was a result of people praying and asking God for help."

Two different village idiots:

There is talk of "the British way of life". As Downes sees it, "A lot of people of our generation – the grey pound, sort of thing – really feel, why has our culture become unimportant?" There is also unease about same-sex marriage. "The problem is, you're going to put churches in a position where it won't be long before someone will go to the European court and say they're being discriminated against," he says. "So it opens up a whole hornet's nest."

The two also talk, at some length, about the EU – once again with the seemingly obligatory references to Hitler and Churchill. "My father fought in the second world war, as millions of people from this country did," Downes says. "We fought to free Europe from tyranny. And we're now in a position where we're almost being… controlled by a communist regime, in my view, where the EU controls everything."

"It may not necessarily be communist, but it's authoritarian," Le Gresley offers. "It's no longer non-democratic: it's anti-democratic."

[...]

Keith Gibbs, 65, joined in 2012. He's an ex-policeman and another disciple of Margaret Thatcher. "She looked after the armed forces and the police, and I'm all for that," he tells me, nursing a lunchtime pint in a pub garden in nearby Rayleigh. "I mean, we're becoming a third world country really, the way we're going."

How? "Our military's going down and down, and you're going to get to a stage where we won't be able to defend ourselves."

And while the old folk miss the good old days, the younger ones spew the usual glibertarian crap:

His basic politics, he explains, is "libertarian". He goes on: "If you're asking me rather than the party, I think all taxation is immoral… I genuinely believe that if there's a real need for people to give money, then people will give it if they're not forced to."

This takes me aback. He really thinks that an entirely voluntary system could fund, say, schools, hospitals, the police and the roads? "If people needed roads and there wasn't this comfort blanket of the state providing everything, they'd be built." What about the NHS? "I'm probably straying too far off policy now. But people would donate to make sure people were fit and healthy."

Ah, the English-speaking peoples.

We Are A Shitty Person*

Now we won't have ol' Dick Trickle to make fun of any more.

LINCOLN COUNTY, N.C. —

The NASCAR community was shocked and saddened to hear about the loss of a man they call a true legend.

Richard "Dick" Trickle, who some claim is the "winningest" driver of all time, was found dead shortly after noon Thursday at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Boger City.

It's a place of significance for Trickle's family. His granddaughter was buried there after she was killed in a car accident in 2001.

Deputies say they received a 911 call from the NASCAR driver, but by the time they arrived they found him dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Shot himself at a cemetery. The cemetery in BoogerBoger City. One less trip for the hearse, to compensate for all the crap he pumped into the atmosphere during his racing career?

---

*This really is news to us, but after making fun of the late NASCAR driver for his name & for offing himself at the boneyard we realize we're actually worse than we imagined ourself. At least we resisted noting the irony of his granddaughter dying in an auto accident.

Asian Factory Collapse Of The Day

Today Cambodia gets the nod.

Earlier, a trade union member at the factory had said six people had died in the collapse, which happened at around 7 a.m. (2400 GMT on Wednesday)

The shoe factory, owned by Wing Star Shoes Co Ltd, a Taiwan company, employed around 7,000 people but only around 100 worked in the single-storey warehouse, according to staff.

Work at the plant had stopped and Reuters witnesses saw employees leaving the main factory on Thursday.

A Reuters reporter saw footwear bearing the name "Asics" scattered around the damaged warehouse, where a bulldozer was clearing away rubble.

[...]

Asics relies on sports shoes for about two-thirds of its sales, which amounted to 57.33 billion yen ($559.73 million) company-wide in the year to March 31, 2013.

Strikes over pay and poor working conditions are common in Cambodia which, like Bangladesh, is home to numerous factories producing clothing cheaply for Western retailers.

The blood is on your hands, clothing-wearing western person!

Catch-22

In the form of F.B.I. Form 302:

FBI agents always interview in pairs. One agent asks the questions, while the other writes up what is called a “form 302 report” based on his notes. The 302 report, which the interviewee does not normally see, becomes the official record of the exchange; any interviewee who contests its accuracy risks prosecution for lying to a federal official, a felony. And here is the key problem that throws the accuracy of all such statements and reports into doubt: FBI agents almost never electronically record their interrogations; to do so would be against written policy.

In 2006 the FBI defended its no-electronic-recording policy in an internal memorandum, which The New York Times later made public. The memo in part attempts to defend the policy as logistically necessary, but given that virtually every cellphone today has sound recording capabilities, any “inconvenience” or “non-availability” excuse for not recording seems laughably weak. The more honest — and more terrifying — justification for non-recording given in the memo reads as follows: “. . . perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness and misleading a defendant as to the quality of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit.” Translated from bureaucratese: When viewed in the light of day, recorded witness statements could appear to a reasonable jury of laypersons to have been coercively or misleadingly obtained.

But the FBI leaves out the even more potent criticism of its practice — that such interview tactics seem virtually geared toward establishing as fact what the FBI wanted to hear from the witness. Frightened and confused interviewees, who, if they deny they said what any 302 report claims they uttered, can then be indicted for making false statements. The FBI is thus able to put words into a witness or suspect’s mouth and coerce him to adopt the FBI’s version as his own. The FBI thus establishes the official version of what a witness said, and the pressure on the witness to adhere to the 302 version is enormous. Any deviation, after all, raises the question: “Were you lying during your FBI interview, or are you lying now?”

Unlike the federal government, many states understand that unrecorded testimony must be viewed with skepticism in a fair judicial process. In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court requires that a custodial interview be electronically recorded whenever possible. For unrecorded testimony to be admitted at trial, a judge must instruct the jury to be wary of police claims as to what the interviewee did and did not say.

The lesson: As long as the FBI relies solely on its agents’ uncorroborated reports of such interviews, it is difficult to credit the bureau’s version of what was and was not said. Presumably, much more is going to emerge concerning what Phillipos really told his interrogators, and nobody should arrive at any conclusions until all of the evidence, from both sides, has been made public. The FBI is not entitled to any presumption of credibility in these situations.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal and civil liberties lawyer, is author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Know your rights, so you won't be dumb enough to try using them.

Toad

Turns out Ginger Baker is quite the asshole, & a film to prove so will be out soon. We weren't going to bother, partly because Baker sounds as if he could be serious competition

the evidence is there in the interviews with him, in which scorn is poured on more or less everyone

& partly because the fucking Guardian's fucking videos can't fucking be fucking embedded, so fuck them, but we chanced upon a list of awful interviews & while most of them involved Limeys interviewing Yanks (so cultural differences are to be expected) or Limeys & other Limeys (And who the hell cares about that? Not even Limeys themselves, we'll confidently state.) but the one all-American item (of six) was this (embeddable) classic.Baker Bonus:

But the single question I'd most like to have asked Ginger Baker – and which should have been asked in the film – is a variant on Simon's: Why are you such an unpleasant man? What possible benefit does it bring you? After all, you don't watch Beware of Mr Baker and think: he might be a tosser, but at least he's happy. In fact, he just seems filled with anger and bitterness.

Don't forget the rage. And the pain.

What Kind Of Tree Would You Be?

Why aren't the two on the left dead yet? And if they are still breathing, why aren't they being tortured? And why were Cronkite & Chancellor allowed to live so long? What is the matter w/ the people of these United Snakes? What keeps them from recognizing their enemies on sight? Is it an allegedly liberal media that wants to weaken America?

This picture would take 1,000 words to say "uh-uh, no," but it's a picture.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES

Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor
after being awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey Freedom Prize
for their roles in Mideast peace talks in 1977.

Alex Pareene specifies why Babs' head should be on a pike.

Let’s not forget one of her most recent Big Scoops, an exclusive interview with murderous Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. How did she score that one? It probably helps that she was friends with Assad. Walters vacationed to Syria in 2008, and thought Assad and his wife, Asma, were “very charming and intelligent.” After the 2011 interview — while Assad’s military was killing demonstrators across the country — Walters wrote letters recommending the Assad aide who set up the interview for plum American media internships. (With Walters’ help, the aide was accepted to Columbia.)

Lovely couple. They're both so charming & intelligent.

Photos.

Down On The Street W/ The Street Art Patrol

Previously.

Scab Of A Nation, Driven Insane

Juxtaposed in the reader:

Nice, huh?

If You Haven't Done Anything Wrong You Have Nothing To Worry About, Tea Party Tax Cheaters

If all the worthless assholes, Democratic* & Republican, would shut their fucking cake-holes about what an outrage & horror this IRS-looks-at-the-Tea-Party bullshit is for just a moment & pull their heads from their asses, a few of them might realize it's perfectly sensible to investigate people & organizations whose sole excuse for being was alleged to be displeasure at paying taxes, indeed a revulsion at the very concept of taxes (except poll taxes of course).

It it really such a stretch of the imagination that outfits pretending that the Tea in Tea Party stood for "Taxed Enough Already" might not be interested in following the finer points of the tax code & could very well be cheating on their taxes? (By the way, what happened to amorphous Republican plans to "close tax loopholes?" Can't close 'em if you don't know what they are.) And why should the government subsidize admittedly anti-democratic & hate-filled organizations that want to overthrow the duly-elected gov't."take our country back?"

Then once the elected clowns shut the hell up maybe the lame-ass media could stop paying attention to the whiny would-be victims. Not a single damn loudmouthed right wing jerk has shut up, stopped typing, been removed from the air or denied Internet access by the government or by anyone else. Nor have any of them made any effort to differentiate between paranoid persecution fantasies & the dull reality where no one gives a shit about them or their personal psychiatric & financial problems.

Irony will come when no one will believe them even as they're crammed onto Amtrak trains & sent to "the east""F.E.M.A. camps" for some education, because they'll have been crying "chilling effect" & "black helicopters" for so long no one will believe them. Or care.

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*We most specifically mean one Max Baucus of Montana, a deserving recipient of the Hypocrite of a Given Time Period award (A lovely metal trophy, jacketed in copper & launched directly at the recipient.) if this is true. And whenever mentioning the Senator, we like to note that "Baucus corruption" returns about 470,000 results. Will no one rid us of this Senator? (Yes, he's retiring this yr. but former Senator Baucus will surely take the opportunity to replenish the coffers, George Bush style. Expect more & better corruption now that he's free of the Senate.)

Worth Some Words

Hey Trotskyites, it's Victor Navasky!Our favorite today.

Nobody Knows ...

If it isn't one thing, it's another ... & naturally this would happen on a Monday.

All of the (several) reasonable people in Southern California are appalled by the local tee vee stations that offer "news" dragging out the "STORMWATCH" graphics whenever more than half an inch or so of precip. is promised. This a.m., no sooner had we awakened in a puddle of our own perspiration & turned on the telly then we were confronted w/ a new one: "HEATWATCH" (because the mercury may hit triple [Fahrenheit] digits in some areas)!

Enough is enough we decided, we simply can not live any fucking longer in a hot sweaty world populated w/ cretinous drones. So we closed all the windows tightly & went to turn on the gas, BUT NO GAS! (We now sincerely hope that one of these fucks manages to blow up at least the apt. where they're messing w/ the gas, if not the whole damn bldg.) Talk about a last straw, our last nerve has been plucked. Whose fucking non-existence is it, anyway?

Then, adding insult to a pain in the ass, they fucking go around offering to light your pilot as if you're some fucking moron cave-dweller who hasn't mastered flame yet. We are so tired of you fucks. Just because you're an idiot doesn't mean all of us are imbeciles.

Spring Cleaning

We blame the anti-smoking anti-depressant pills for this burst of energy.

Believe it or shove it, it's an improvement.

"Mother" Is Only Half A Word

If you know what we mean.

Your Children & The National Debt

The national debt is the last thing your mutant spawn will be thinking of as they dogpaddle about hoping they're getting enough nutritious plankton. They'll beg for the quick release of a meteor strike.

Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

"When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts," he said. "Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

"We have always been at war w/ every other tribe."

The news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached 400ppm has been seized on by experts because that level brings the world close to the point where it becomes inevitable that it will experience a catastrophic rise in temperatures. Scientists have warned for decades of the danger of allowing industrial outputs of carbon dioxide to rise unchecked.

The prospect of Earth returning to these climatic conditions is causing major alarm. As temperatures rise, deserts will spread and life-sustaining weather patterns such as the North Indian monsoon could be disrupted. Agriculture could fail on a continent-wide basis and hundreds of millions of people would be rendered homeless, triggering widespread conflict.

There are likely to be severe physical consequences for the planet. Rising temperatures will shrink polar ice caps – the Arctic's is now at its lowest since records began – and so reduce the amount of solar heat they reflect back into space. Similarly, thawing of the permafrost lands of Alaska, Canada and Russia could release even more greenhouse gases, including methane, and further intensify global warming.

If not meteors or comets, atomic oblivion will do. It's inevitable, really.

"You ain't bringin' no cows & donkeys in here. Now git or else!"

What better way to tell a few million starving neighbors to get off what's left of one's lawn than a nuke or two?

Much as we hate to say our cynicism was completely justified it was completely justified, wasn't it?

Thumbs Up

We think this is something to eat.

So why'd someone come out & shout "No photos?" Makes us suspicious. Not that we were planning to eat any of whatever the hell it is.

Police Terror Of The Future

The sky, very similar to the background.

Via L.A. Observed:

KCRW producer Matt Holzman embedded with cops in the LAPD Air Support unit to see what it's like in the helicopters that patrol Los Angeles skies.

If he could drive home, whether to NPR guy hep urban pad or suburbia, it is not "embedding." A day or two hanging at the helipad & a couple of fly-alongs while the ossifers mostly ignore you &/or try to be on their best behavior is not like racing to Baghdad in a truck full of hopped-up jarheadsgyrenes, you hyperbolic drone.

Now then. Are we as blind/stupid as ever, or have the SoundCloud clowns given us a player w/o a volume control? (It's the accumulation of these little things that drives some to anti-social acts, you know.)ADDED AGGRAVATION: If the fucking thing isn't playing here (IT DIDN"T FOR US, & THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE MEAN BY "ACCUMULATION OF LITTLE THINGS," BY THE FUCKING WAY.) click through to listen, & leave a nasty note for SoundCloud about cross-platform something usability blah.

And mere secs. later: We must admit they (whoever they may be) are geniuses, because now the damn thing plays, & we, having added a now-useless paragraph (& this one) are about to boil over w/ rage.

Take Two

We were reading a thing about re-recordings of "the classics" & were reminded of a prime example of the phenomenon, an example we once owned. Sadly, the guy typing the item remembered as well & typed it up,

When Sinatra left Capitol Records in 1960 to found his own label, Reprise Records—with the explicit goal of giving artists more control over their recordings—he made a series of albums that included re-recorded versions of his Capitol hits. The financial incentive was huge: Sinatra was still riding high, and since he owned Reprise he stood to make far more money from sales of the re-recorded records than the originals. (Even so, he had to sell the company to Warner Bros. a few years later.) [Ha ha! — Editor Bouffant] Similarly, Ponak pointed out, when Chuck Berry left Chess Records for Mercury, the first thing he did was record a greatest-hits collection, presumably at a much more favorable royalty rate, without making it clear that the hits had been re-recorded.

so we've no particular reason to quote or link to it. It's not as if any human activity's been authentic for some time anyway.

Should probably be clear it was the Chuck Berry Mercury diskL.P. we once had, not Sinatra remakes.

Dirt

Piled high & deep.

Debris

Making America a bigger shithole, one planter at a time.

You fucking pigs.