"Black Friday"

Over the years I've had fewer and fewer people to buy gifts for. I've never done the "black Friday" thing. Now this year I'm not even participating in these holidays. I don't care. I've got a bottle of good scotch. And:

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Bloomberg you lose--Cathie Black dismissed

Blow to Bloomberg: Panel votes down mayor's pick for schools chancellor Cathie Black

BY Kerry Burke AND Rachel
MONAHAN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Tuesday, November 23rd 2010, 5:47 PM

In a stunning blow to Mayor Bloomberg, his controversial pick for schools chancellor got a thumbs-down Tuesday from a state advisory panel.

A panel of eight education experts voted against granting a state waiver to media exec Cathie Black, Bloomberg's choice to replace outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein.

"It came after a lengthy discussion. It was a confidential ballot," said panel member Susan Fuhrman.
State Commissioner David Steiner will consider the panel's input when deciding on whether to grant the waiver to Black, who needs the exemption because she has no educational background.

After the panel met for more than two hours, four members voted against Black, two voted for her and two voted that they wouldn't approve her at this time.

A spokeswoman for the city education department and a spokesman for Bloomberg declined to comment.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/11/23/2010-11-23_blow_to_bloomberg_panel_votes_down_mayors_pick_for_schools_chancellor_cathie_bla.html#ixzz169UfHV2A

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/11/23/2010-11-23_blow_to_bloomberg_panel_votes_down_mayors_pick_for_schools_chancellor_cathie_bla.html#ixzz169USq65h

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/11/23/2010-11-23_blow_to_bloomberg_panel_votes_down_mayors_pick_for_schools_chancellor_cathie_bla.html

The Real Threats to the U.S.

http://stpeteforpeace.org/real.threat.html

Mayor Mike Bloomberg

Cosimo Medici was one of the most powerful men in Renaissance Italy. I believe that Bloomberg models himself after him. Medici thought of himself as a man who worked for the common good like Bloomberg believes he does except "Cosimo's career reflects this aristocratic, elitist tendency. His pose as a simple merchant, his pretense of being no greater than any other citizen, deluded no one. He crushed his enemies and exalted his friends and supporters." (http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth213/Medici_patronage.html) This is Michael Bloomberg who thinks he owns NYC and in this vein crushes his enemies and exalts his rich friends.

The History of my Naval Service

I went on board the U.S.S Fort Snelling (LSD-30)  from Great Lakes Engineman's school on my 19th birthday Sept  8,1963. I was in A Division and worked on the four boats, the emergency diesels, the anchor, the steering gear and the two hydraulic cranes as well as the stern gate. In addition I moved on to work in the A/C and refrigeration gang. We took care of the galley refrigerators, the ward room refrigerator, the Captain's A/C and so on. As a fireman I sometimes stood watches in the engine room when underway.

One of my more enduring memories happened the day President Kennedy was assassinated. I was messenger of the watch and had to lower the flag to half mast and walk through the ship's quarters announcing what had happened. In lowering the flag it almost ripped out of my hands it was so windy that day. The OOD that watch was a crusty lieutenant that had served in WWII and had come up through the ranks. We used to call him "tight jaws" because he didn't say much, never showed emotion and was all spit and shine. He stood inside the watch cabin, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring out at the jetty and crying. (I wrote a short story about it later on.)

In 1964 we barely outran a hurricane in the Caribbean, but the weather was so bad no one was permitted on deck. My partner in crime tied a rope to me and I got out an after hatch and took some photos which I can't find.

In 1965, our ship was the first to arrive at the Dominican Republic during that crisis in our continuing role as imperialist. The job I had required round the clock engine repair work. And I think it was the best time of my entire service working the midnight shift for weeks.  Got stories about that time too, but too long to put here. Maybe some day. 

On the Med cruise from 65-66 we anchored outside Genoa and for New Years Eve those of us on liberty got stuck on shore due to a bad storm. I spent the night on the floor of a whore house since I didn't have anymore money.   That was of course the time one of the sailors who was with me looked at a statue of a man named Cristoforo Colombo outside the RR station in Genoa. When I said that his name in English was Christopher Columbus, he said:  "They had one too?"  American education hasn't improved much since then.

In 1966 we were (I think) the command ship for a couple of months in the hunt for the lost 4 atomic bombs off the coast of Spain. I spent a lot of time in the water as boat engineer shuttling back and forth between the beach and other ships. The worst time we had was when we had an NBC camera crew with us and got hit with a freak storm. The boat almost capsized but only the ability of our hotshot coxswain got us to safety. He was only a kid but he could pilot a boat. BTW one of the camera crew was loudly saying prayers and you could hear him above the wind and the crashing waves. BTW they spent 3 months looking for one of the bombs that fell in the water about five miles off the coast.  A fisherman directed them to it when all their technological equipment couldn't.

The best time I had was my final cruise when I became a shellback and on the way back from the equator stayed in Trinidad. We got overnight liberty there and need I say more about that.

Wall Street quietly seeks to undo new financial rules

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The heavy hitters of finance lost big battles earlier this year during the overhaul of financial regulation, but they're working hard to win the war. They're quietly trying to soften, if not kill, some of the more controversial provisions.

Lobbyists for Big Finance are working hardest to neutralize the so-called Volcker Rule, which would force big banks to spin off their lucrative proprietary trading operations, in which they invest their own capital in speculative deals.

The measure_ named after its proponent, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — seeks to prevent big banks from betting against trades they made on behalf of their customers, a popular practice until the financial crisis exploded in 2008. For example, big investment banks such as Goldman Sachs sold customers overvalued mortgage bonds even as they bet secretly that those bonds would default.

Financial lobbyists also are working to soften requirements that Wall Street firms put more "skin in the game" by retaining more mortgage bonds on their books to guard against shoddy lending. They're also trying to undercut the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/16/103833/wall-street-quietly-seeks-to-undo.html

La Bitch (Sarah Palin) may be running for President

“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.” Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21palin-t.html

You didn't get mad when . . .

After The 8 Years Of The Bush/Cheney Disaster, Now You Get Mad?

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick along with many other things... Oh, Hell No!!

Boehner the Douchebag

With Many mea culpas and apologies to the Beatles:

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for the TEA Party loo loos

Thinks he has a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
He's a bit like the TEA party poo ooo

Nowhere Man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man,the world will never be at your command!

ETC.

Dems lose big, Repubs gain and President Obama can start all over

Fuck the Tea Party they suck. Sarah Palin lost more than gained too. The Republicans captured the house and now has almost evened the Senate.  But this could turn out to be a good thing for the Prez. He'll have to rise above, become a statesman instead of a cheerleader and campaigner. He still has the press coverage, the bully pulpit and there are many things he can do by executive power. Sometimes getting flattened is good for the soul. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. . .

Jean Luc Godard's purported anti-semitism

Brody’s most incriminating charge is that of anti-Semitism, not only in connection with Godard’s longtime support of the Palestinian cause but as a matter of generalized prejudice rooted in everything from his childhood absorption of ambient French bigotry to his feud with Claude Lanzmann over the latter’s refusal to use archival footage in the Holocaust documentary Shoah. Brody musters a fair amount of evidence, such as a 1985 remark that invokes the stereotyped slur of Jewish usury: in the history of cinema, Godard said, the ”real producer” is “the image of the Central European Jew” because “[m]aking a film [involves] visibly producing debts.” Brody locates the heart of Godard’s anti-Jewish bias in his conviction—aired most expansively in Histoire(s) du cinéma, his 1998 video series—that true cinema died in the middle Forties as a result of its failure to document the Holocaust, a failure that Godard attributes to money-minded Jewish studio heads. More broadly, Brody paints Godard as an obsessive artist who regards “all of human history as a precursor to or tributary of the history of cinema,” and who blames the Jewish people—starting with Moses, who returned from the Burning Bush with tablets of law rather than icons of revelation—for “the fundamental cultural flaw of society, its preference for text over images, its anti-cinematic prejudice.” Brody finds the apex of Godard’s bigotry in the 2004 collage-drama Notre Musique, which Brody calls “a film of prewar prejudices adorned with postwar resentments—and, like much else in the history of anti-Semitism, with personal frustrations.” As powerful as much of Brody’s argument is, he weakens it by overinterpreting the evidence and (as with the women-and-films motif) pushing it too far—writing about Notre Musique, for example, as if anti-Semitism overwhelmed every other element in its intricate network of images and ideas. But dubious devices mar only a few portions of Everything Is Cinema, and my other complaints are relatively minor, relating to interpretations more than methodologies.

http://www.cineaste.com/articles/everything-is-cinema-the-working-life-of-jeanluc-godard

This election is pretty much the same as all the others

"Midterms Don't Matter"

Do the midterm elections actually matter? The Economist's Will Wilkinson doesn't think so. In spite of all the hysteria and "hyperventilating" commercials, Wilkinson argues that policy tends to stay the same regardless of who's in power. While the ruling party will naturally favor their supporters—that's public-employees unions for Democrats and "rich people and Raytheon" for Republicans—Wilkinson maintains that it's unreasonable to expect any big changes from Congress, or even that special interest groups will give up much power. "Military suppliers, big Wall Street interests, and the economic middle-class may do better or worse, but they always do pretty well," Wilkinson writes. In fact, he says, "this is the great unspeakable fact of American politics: it doesn't matter all that much who wins." At the New York Times, Ross Douthat refuses to say that November won't make a difference at all, but he does concede that Wilkinson offers a "useful corrective to the vast effort currently underway to persuade you that this election … is a world-historical hinge moment."

Read original story in The Economist | Monday, Nov. 1, 2010

What raised suspicions?

What raised the suspicion of the two packages sent from Yemen to Chicago area synagogues? The fact that they were "packages" being sent from an Arab country with known terrorists to an American Jewish house of worship? Or did anyone know what was in each package? Why would such a thing be sent from there to there? It might raise less suspicions if it were the other way the other way around. No?  Unless we had inside information there's no way of knowing or finding out. All I have is logic, my logic, western logic.


It seems like an enormous effort to do what the bomb planners proposed to do even if it meant the target was air cargo shipping. Not a lot of bang for the buck if one or two planes explode. Still the possibility that it would expose known holes in security of cargo transport is an area to be investigated. Shipping would have been disrupted but not entirely damaged. Intelligence services since 9/11/2001 have been focused on passenger planes since that time and the cargo shipments have largely been ignored. So it would mean doubling up now on air cargo. What about ships? Trains? Was it only because air shipments are more convenient for this kind of plan? 

There is much that doesn't seem to add up. None of us should be satisfied that the reasoning behind this hasn't been fully understood. The front pages of newspapers should be demanding answers.  Or maybe we shouldn't and intelligence forces are figuring it out now. My initital thoughts were that this was an operation designed to examine how the machinery of response operated once the packages were discovered and if a bomb went off in the process so much the better. I have yet to be disabused of that.