RealityBucket

Cutting Through the Katrina Krapola. For all I loved New Orleans when I visited there, for a whole day in 1988, I just love “pulsating pustule on the bayou.”

Chertoff on final Real ID rules: “Reconfiguring our society.”

You mean like they reconfigured society in Ukraine during the first half of last century? Or more like reconfiguring society during the New Deal Great Society Cultural Revolution? Just wondering.

Mayor Mumbles Menino decries clinics in retailers.

I’m going through accumulated links I never turned into posts, or don’t remember turning into posts and didn’t removed from the stash, so some short takes, down to links presented with anchor text and no comment, will be appearing here and at other blogs as I go through them. Where will depend on the topic and whether I feel like switching accounts if it could go more than one way.

Here’s a now aged but fascinating article: Magma may be melting Greenland ice. Imagine that! It might explain why the Antarctic is gaining ice while Greenland is not.

Seeing the news of the uncontacted Amazon tribe, and the fact that there are both more of them than I might have imagined had I even considered the possibility of it being non-zero, and that lack of contact is carefully maintained, that gave me pause.

In short: Why?

Why hide from them the current nature of the world and level of civilization, and presumed benefits thereof? Why treat them, if effect, as remote zoo animals, or subhumans not worthy of joining the rest of us?

Arguments could be made the other way, and I might even buy them. It just struck me as a conceited “we know what’s best for your little minds and your little lives” attitude. And if that’s what we’re doing, making an intentional overflight feels like taunting.

Perhaps they’re quite happy, content not knowing better. Perhaps we’d all be. Perhaps some of what bothers me is a commonality with the atavistic death cult pastoralism of the environmentalist fringe. Perhaps many of us imagine a simple life as superior, shades of the desire for the comet to hit and free us from modernity explored in Lucifer’s Hammer.

Most of all, I am fascinated that these people even exist. The pristine primatives, not the modern freaks who want us all to go backward… with them at the top of the hierarchy they would impose.

Food for thought.

Looking Forward to President Obama is a fantastic post over at CultureFeast. I especially like the way he pulled Def Leppard into it.

I solved the mystery of my anemic blogging today: it’s just too damned depressing. My first thought when reading an article about renters facing eviction because the owners of the properties they rented were being foreclosed on was, “and somewhere there’s a blogger blaming them for renting.”

I was so much happier before I knew that there were actually people who think that way.

I loved The West Wing, despite the leanings of the President, who was, after all, sensible above all. I even enjoyed the final season - heck, maybe enjoyed it more than most of the run - and the Santos character.

However, I am not at all surprised with the poll findings cited at Cato, giving Vinick a landslide, even a lot of liberal support, by being a libertarian leaning republican. It would have been a brave and exciting thing to do, having him win. I’d have watched more seasons of that. But then, I’d have kept watching either way. I’d have just been more intrigued to see how they’d depict an administration from the wrong side of the aisle.

This is not the first mention I’ve seen of the eerie similarities between fiction and probable reality. Deb may even have been the first to mention it to me. It is the first I’ve seen that it was intentional, paving Obama’s way through a fictional minority candidate. That makes the similarities no accident, down to guessing, perhaps, that McCain could be the Republican nominee, abeit making the fictional version more appealing.

Anyway, see the link. It’s fascinating. That was basically all I’d intended to post, as I don’t have time to write at any length. Shocking I was able to generate a post of this length.

Was this woman on some morning show yesterday. I was sitting in a waiting room waiting to give someone a urine sample so that I could prove in advance of employment that I have not violated one of the many Politicians’ Full Employment Acts of the last half-century, and they introduced this lady who’s lost 100+ pounds so that they could all bow down before her awesome ability to starve herself.

So over an aural backdrop of brave tragic music, they had a recording of her stiltingly and scriptedly telling her tale of woe. Her mother? Fat! And an inadequate cook! And this daughter always swore that she’d never wind up like her mother, who partook of the bypass-gastric. So when the scales tripped a magic number she joined a gym, and now has a marginally socially acceptable body AND got the joy of showing the nation exactly how much she hates her mother.

I did not ooh or aw or sigh at the appropriate points. *This* is the pinnacle of morality? *This* is what we are to idolize?

Not me. Not in this lifetime or the next or the one after that.

But I think Steve Verdon’s got this one pretty much dead right.

On top of all that, I generally like to point out the irony of the same folk who want people to stay in Mexico making it prohibitively expensive for them to do so by fucking up the entire world market for grain so they can feel better about their SUVs. It adds a nice touch to the whole issue, I think.