It’s better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps… ...Teddy Kennedy
Please bear with us while we attack this shovel ready infrastructure project The ratbastards at our webhost having caused the loss of 5 years of posts and site customization, we are starting over. It’s both a stunning loss and a fresh start. Our members will have to re-register. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope you can find a way to see it as a fresh start, too.
So onward and upward, eh? Welcome to 2.0 — Allons-y!
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6, 999, 999,999……….7 billion!
Holy Crap, that’s a lot of people. And no, despite the preponderance of evidence, they’re not all ahead of you in line at the supermarket while the muzak serves up versions of oldies close enough to the original to make you line-boogie and bad enough to make you terrified someone you know will see you.
Not that most of us spend as much time thinking about this very big number as we do about the fact that next week will contain 11.11.11 – a date that’s the same on both sides of the Atlantic. woohoo. partay. yaawwnnn.
But what the hell, you’re here eh? So why not give it a minute or two. 7 billion people. Evened out around the world – and of course nothing ever is – that would be less than a tenth of a square mile per person, or nearly a Chicago city block. That may sound roomy enough, but that block has to accommodate your housing, recreation, land to grow all the food you eat, roads, business, and whatever else you’re up to these days.
And as we said, it actually never is evened out. Some places are really crowded (Manila has 4800+ in that same city block) while others do well to scratch up 2 caribou and a Palin.
The food is never really evened out, either. While many of us are ridiculously overfed, others are starving. Literally. Here and abroad. And it’s more likely to get worse than better in the near future.
What can you do? Not a lot for the really big picture, frankly. But you can do something. Give what you can to local food banks and international food security charities. Keep an eye out for that friend/neighbor who is out of work and may be hurting more than you know. Vote to throw/keep the I Got Mine so Screw You crowd out of office. And have some spaghetti marinara for dinner. It’s Meatless Monday and in a world where so many get by on so little, it’s unseemly to take 2400 gallons of water and 7 lbs of grains and turn them into one pound of beef that’s no good for your heart anyway.
In Oakland, California, an Iraq War veteran participating in Occupy Oakland was struck by a tear gas canister, fracturing his skull. As other protesters tried to come to his aid, more tear gas was fired at them. This is video from Current TV of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment.
Will America once again react to peaceful protest by killing its children?
It used to be every circus had a clown car – a funny looking little car that held a seemingly impossible number of full sized clowns, big shoes and all. And here it is – an homage to the classics from the GOP Clown College Class of 2012. Just when you thought that primary car had given up all the clowns it could possibly hold:
Quran burning pastor Terry Jones, last seen protesting Sharia law outside the White House and accidentally setting off his gun during a trip to Michigan, is getting ready to light up the presidential race.
Read more at TPM.
If you have a TV or radio machine, you’ve heard it’s here, but what is it? I wondered, too, and rode the Google through the intertubes to find the answer:
It’s higher bank fees, winning three slams in a year, calling in sick, and teetering on the brink. It’s social, it’s frugal, it’s green. It’s cold and it’s hot. This NPR article about Herman Cain says it’s being angry at elected officials, though I’m frankly having an easier time finding the “normal” than the “new” in that.
It’s high gas prices, it’s paranormal, it’s an Illinois town humming with electric cars. As my personal favorite, it’s trees on balconies creating vertical woodlands in cities.
It’s building an open air mall, enclosing it, then opening it again. It’s extreme couponing, cheap Kindles, and not as bad as we thought. It’s congressional dysfunction, interactive learning, working in coffee shops. It’s violent, chronically overworked, and threatened by superbugs. It’s surviving cancer and brain injuries.
If it’s all a little overwhelming, take heart. Apparently, it’s on the way out, making way for the new reality and the old values.
When these little creatures survived a recent New Zealand oil spill, they needed sweaters to keep them from picking off the substance from their feathers.
See more photos of birds in knitwear!
October 25 is Sourest Day, the desperately needed counterbalance to Sweetest Day. I’m so happy about the free rein to be grumpy, I may not be able to take advantage of it!
Today is United Nations Day. Nearly a quarter of the United Nations regular and peacekeeping budgets comes from the United States. In 2011, that came to about $2.4 billion – a small price to pay for keeping the planet functioning. Sort of. The UN has been called, with some justification, a toothless tiger with little real power to effect change. But if Republicans got over their exaggerated American exceptionalism obsession, stopped undermining US participation and finally bought in on working with other nations (yes, they do exist, Agnes, and their citizens can even walk on 2 legs) that would be different. After all, as Eleanor Roosevelt said “The United Nations functions just as well as the member nations make it function, and no better or worse.”
Oh, and it’s also National Bologna Day.
Other officers suggest it was as simple as …“I’m not sure how people think that we should have been able to tell these people apart; they didn’t look any different, they didn’t speak any different, dress any different, their signs said the same thing; they were trouble—we read about them, and they spoke of causing trouble in our city… Poisoning things, having sex on the streets, … It was all bad, and we could hear it coming down the pike, and smell it, too.” Other officers agree…“They went under different names, but we kept our eyes on all of them. I think they were pretending that they were different at times, but that was just a ploy, because when they got on the street, they all behaved the same way. Your regular patrolman was not going to be able to tell these people apart, and they didn’t seem to care what we thought, anyway; even if they weren’t trouble, they wanted to look the part.”
That was Grant Park, Chicago in 1968
Last night in a flash of deja vu, 130 people were arrested in Grant Park. So much has changed in 40+ years, but one thing remains the same: You can push Americans pretty damn far before we’ll stir our asses out of our Barcaloungers, but don’t make the mistake of thinking we’ll never fight back. I look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters and I don’t understand any more than they do or anyone else does what, exactly, they want to happen next. But just the fact that they see the clear need for major change is cause for hope.
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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. ...Seneca the Younger 4 b.c.- 65 a.d.
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