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Do NOT Piss Off a Marine

Read this.

Any idea whose side our Armed Forces will be standing on if the unimaginable happens in this country?  I used to wonder, but now I take solace in knowing they’ve got OUR backs; not the backs of the 1%, the Corporate Scumbags who think they can continue business as usual.

Have they never seen V for Vendetta?

For Chrissake, have they never read history?

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Your Moment of Zen

Four moons, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. (The fourth is a pinprick dot in the middle of the Enke gap in the rings if you haven’t spotted it.)

(Click to embiggen.)

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What Is #OCCUPYWALLSTREET About?

Scott gets it exactly right:

And why do the powers that be fear it?

I have my own personal take on it and in my mind it comes down to one simple word:

CHEATERS

These fuckwitted clowns at Faux News and elsewhere who are beshitting themselves in fear over the possibility of finding themselves like Marie Antoinette — neck stretched out with Madame Defarge knitting away madly in the front row before the blade falls — are trying and saying anything to discredit the #OWS movement including accusing it of not having a coherent message or of even being anti-success and anti-capitalism.

That is complete and utter bullshit!

If there is any one religion that pretty much every single American shares it’s the religion of success.

We, as a people, adore success stories. We venerate people who have achieved stuff.

Even a venal asshole like Donald Trump gets looked up to by a large swath of America because of his ability to successfully play the role of the Comeback Kid.

We don’t hate success and we don’t hate the billionaire who makes his money through his brilliance and hard labors.

We hate the cheater.

We hate the wall street bankers from Goldman Sachs who sell to their customers a financial product that they know is going to fail with the representation that its gonna make their client money.  And then, if that were not bad {criminal} enough, these same Goldman Sachs bankers turn around and take out insurance AGAINST their client knowing that the client will lose his shirt and when the client goes bust the bank will get paid by the insurer {AIG} for betting against the client.

And when behavior like that destroys the economy these very same bankers in their Too Big to Fail banks go hat in hand to the American people who promptly hand over to them free fucking money which they then take and pay themselves tens of billions of dollars in bonuses — making for the biggest year end bonus in the history of Wall Street.

And then — if that were not obscene enough — these same bailed out, unindicted felons and grifters who produce NOTHING of value for this country are then gifted — GIFTED! — by Treasury Secretary Geithner and Fed Chairman Bernanke the never previously bestowed present of being able to walk up to the Fed Discount Window and borrow taxpayer money at ZERO FUCKING PERCENT INTEREST.

Which they then loan back to the government at 3% interest.

We hate the cheater!

We hate the fact that the Seattle taxi driver who honked his horn the other day down at Westlake Center to show his solidarity for the #OWS protesters camped out there has been forced by the city of Seattle to pay a bigger fine than any of the Wall Street bankers who stole from us and then destroyed our economy.

We hate the cheater!

We hate that corporations are able to use unlimited amounts of money in order to buy and sell politicians of both political parties who then write laws that allow the richest among us and the biggest corporations to pay virtually no taxes but then, when the government needs money because of the cost of its wars {wars that a majority of the population do not support} and the fact that it has cut taxes to the richest, we are told that the poorest among us and the suffering middle class must pony up and pay more in order to make up the difference.

We hate the cheater.

We hate that there are apparently two very different sets of laws for people in this country — a law for the rich and powerful that allows them to do anything and get away with virtually any crime without any consequences attached to their actions. And a law for the rest of us that results in prison time for the most inconsequential of offences.

We hate the cheater!

We hate that there is at present a supreme court justice named Clarence Thomas who, for the period from 2003 to 2007 filed a joint federal tax return with his wife and on that return declared UNDER FUCKING OATH that she had no income during those years.

When the reality was that she was working as a highly placed and highly paid political operative and lobbyist  making almost three quarters of a million dollars in that work.

We hate that.  And yet, as much as we hate that we especially hate that the organization she was working for and being paid by {while at the same time she and her husband the supreme court justice were each committing at least five counts of perjury on a federal document} was an organization that stood to directly benefit from her husband ruling in favor of allowing corporations to make unlimited donations to political causes.

We hate that under the very law that justice Thomas’ wife got paid to lobby for, and for which the Thomas’ evaded taxes and perjured themselves, huge corporations have been given the same rights as human beings in the eyes of the law but those same corporations can neither be drafted into the military nor can they be executed.

We hate the cheater!

The #OWS movement has been accused of hating the 1%.  But we we don’t hate the 1%.  We hate those people in the 1% who cheated to get there and who cheat to stay there.

We hate the gaming of the system.  The rigging of politics. The buying of politicians and supreme court justices. The undermining of Democracy and the fact that the little guy is always the one being told to bend over and take in the ass.

And we hate that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines fight for this country and risk their lives for it in far off lands and then come home only to be shot in the head by American police officers.

SHOT IN THE HEAD FOR DOING NOTHING MORE THAN WHAT THE CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES THEM THE RIGHT TO DO —

Peacefully assembling as provided for under the First Amendment.

God, do we hate the cheater!

And if things don’t change this nation is gonna burn.

And that’s why the cheaters and the malefactors of great wealth and their paid shills, propagandists and whores are going to so much trouble to try to discredit #OWS.

Because we know they’re cheaters and they’re fucking terrified that they’ll be made to finally pay for what they’ve done to the rest of us.

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Change in the Weather

Months of anticipation have finally come to an end. This is the view from the top floor of our apartment’s parking garage this morning as I was leaving for work. (Thankfully I have a spot in the covered portion.)

I actually made it to work in the same amount of time I normally do; the only difference being that the usual level of crazy was conspicuously absent from the commute.  People on the freeway were actually allowing sufficient space between them and the car ahead to actually stop in an emergency, something I have not seen in this city since our arrival last June.  It was a pleasant relief.

I realized while driving to work however, that one item missing from my winter kit is a windshield scraper.  Since I don’t have the luxury of covered parking at work (unless I want to pay $35 a month), Anderson is sure to be covered by the time I leave this afternoon.  My boss also forgot his, so I guess I’m going to have to improvise…

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The Creeping Crud

Ben and I have both been down with the creeping crud the past few days, and I’m ready for it to be over. What a waste of a perfectly good weekend.

I guess it’s one of those unintended consequences of being partnered to a teacher; he’s exposed to little walking petri dishes day in and day out, much like I was when I worked at the hospital.  (I’ve never been as sick as often as I was when I worked there, despite the copious amount of hand washing and hand sanitizing I engaged in.) I just wish he wasn’t quite so inclined to bring the illness du jour home with him.

(I kid, I know it can’t be helped.)

Ben missed two days of work last week, and I was out on Friday. I think I got off relatively easy this time, as I’m feeling pretty good now that the headache from hell has disappeared and my sinuses are once again functioning relatively normally.  Ben, however, hasn’t been as lucky. He got hit with the full force of the crud and still isn’t feeling anywhere near back to normal.  Send him some good thoughts, okay?

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Worth Reposting

Since that nutcase Harold Camping is again predicting the end of the world, supposedly today.  Last time was a mistake…

Does anyone even believe his bullshit any more?

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Sadness

That’s the only word I have to describe the feeling that completely overwhelmed me yesterday during my afternoon commute.  It came out of nowhere, and by the time I got home I was almost in tears.

I can’t even use the word unhappy to describe it. To me unhappy denotes dissatisfaction. You wanted A but ended up with B. No, this was something different.  There’s a history of depression in my family, so I’m hoping this (thankfully transitory) episode was just a fluke and doesn’t mark the beginning of something more severe.

Frankly, I think my malaise sprang from a combination of many things that simply refused to be ignored any longer: the escalating political stupidity in this country and the ever more outrageous, batshit-crazy shrieking from the right; witnessing the insane police brutality unleashed on the ostensibly peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, and the fact that like those out there protesting, I’m literally back to living paycheck to paycheck (and sometimes not even that), earning what I did six years ago. Don’t get me wrong―I’m thankful to have a job, and at a place I genuinely like on top of it, but at this point I have no health insurance, and no possibility of seeing a doctor for even a routine checkup―much less anything more―until (assuming I do get hired on as a permanent employee at the company I’m contracting with) after the first of the year.  Never mind that I’m now officially overdue for my yearly post-cancer throat exam and that I’m wearing contact lenses that should’ve been replaced a very long time ago.  The car needs the front bushings and a leaking power steering hose replaced (thankfully both covered by my mechanical breakdown insurance, but each requiring a separate $250 deductible), and I still owe a dear friend $200 from some money she lent me last summer. Don’t even get me started on the two medications I’m taking―neither of which have generic equivalents―that cost $50 each for a 30-day supply…

Yeah, I think I have a right to be a little sad.

If that weren’t enough, I’m still not feelin’ it as far as Denver is concerned.  That doesn’t worry me that much, because as I remember I went through something similar when I first moved to San Francisco, and it took me well over a year before I started to think of it as home, but it’s still there, tap-tap-tapping at my subconscious.

The same goes for our apartment.  It’s very nice (even with its strange design quirks), but as I explained to Ben the other day, it still just feels like someplace we’re staying; it’s not yet home.  I guess that comes from the fact that I was in my last place three years, and the place before that, a little over seven, and I’m used to being settled.

I also miss my family back in Phoenix.

All I can say is it’s very different to uproot yourself and start a new life when you’re 50 versus when you’re 25.  Very different. At least I take solace in knowing that both my mom and dad did just that when they were even older than I am now, so I know it’s not impossible.

Oh, and one more thing:  Last night, after trying iCloud and deciding it was a waste of time and effort for anything other than Find My Mac and Find My iPhone, I disconnected and the lost all my calendars.  For some fucking reason, when you decide to disconnect from the cloud using your Mac, you’re offered the choice of staying connected or losing all the calendar data synced to your Mac. Seriously.  (“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”) Thankfully, after quite a bit of swearing and being unable to restore them from Time Machine, I was able to manually sync my calendars back from my iPhone.  I sometimes think there are Apple designers who have a severe case of Microsoft envy.

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Now That's Scary!

And proves beyond a doubt that everything on his planet could be blotted out in the wink of an eye…and we’d never even see it coming.

From Dvice:

In August of 1883, an astronomer in Mexico named José Bonilla spotted hundreds of fuzzy objects passing in front of the sun that nobody could explain. A new analysis of these observations suggests that what Bonilla saw was anywhere from a billion to a trillion tons of comet passing as close as a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth.

At the time, Bonilla had no idea what he was looking at. All he knew was that over a period of about two days, he counted about 450 objects surrounded by fuzziness passing between his telescope and the sun. Contemporary astronomers didn’t see anything, and when Bonilla published a paper in an astronomical journal a few years later, the journal editor suggested that Bonilla must have accidentally been counting birds or bugs or something like that.

As it turns out, it may not have been bugs. It may have been the remnants of an immense comet that narrowly missed completely destroying our entire civilization that nobody else saw because it was so freakin’ close to us. Based on Bonilla’s account of the size and number of the objects and the length of time that they were visible, modern astronomers have been able to estimate what the original size of the comet probably was, and just how close all of its fragments came to Earth. The numbers are shocking: each of the 450 fragments probably ranged in size from 150 feet to a solid mile across, and the upper limit on the size of the original comet (before it broke up) is something like nine trillion tons.

Let’s just put a few trillion tons of fragmented comet in perspective, shall we? We’re talking about an object with a mass that’s equivalent to at least eight Halley’s comets. And if you’re wondering what would happen if a couple-hundred-foot wide comet fragments made it through Earth’s atmosphere, we’re pretty sure it happened over Sibera back in 1908, resulting in an explosion approximately equal to the detonation of a moderately-sized thermonuclear weapon. Nobody was around to experience the blast, but a few trees did get knocked over. And by a few, I mean 80 million.

Now, keep in mind that those 450 objects that Bonilla counted over two days only come from a few hours of observations, and extrapolating his objects per hour out over two days, we get over 3,000 cometary fragments. So take that type of fun little thermonuclear-equivalent destructive experience, and imagine it happening thousands of times all over the Earth in a period of a day or two. Yeah, we’re talking the equivalent of global thermonuclear war, except way, way worse. Odds of humanity (or much in the way of any other plants or animals) surviving the bombardment and the climate change that would follow is not good, not good at all.

The really scary part is just how close this comet came to hitting the Earth: since only Bonilla saw the fragments and no other astronomers did, that means that it had to be close to us. Very close. Very, seriously, it’s not even funny close. The minimum distance that the fragments passed was calculated to be about 400 miles from the Earth’s surface, which is nothing. That’s only 150 miles or so above the International Space Station. If the comet had been in a slightly different orbit, or had broken up at a slightly different time, as of about a hundred years ago, our entire civilization might have ceased to exist.

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I Was Really Expecting…

…Denver to be more wet and cloudy than it’s been. But I guess the same commandment that’s in place in Phoenix also extends to Denver as well: Thou shalt have no days where the sky is completely overcast from sunrise to sunset. It is forbidden!

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