It's working. Yesterday (Sunday), Native American adults and youth held hands with the public in a traditional "Round Dance" asking for spiritual help to bring snow to the Lake Tahoe region.
This morning, for the first time in two months, a dusting of snow appeared at lake level with two inches at 8,200 feet. According to meteorologists, the storm door is set to open Wednesday with a possible 6 feet of snow falling above 8,000 feet by Monday. ...
In a similar situation just over 50 years ago, an absence of January snow in the Sierra posed similar planning concerns for the managers of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games' Nordic events, which were to be held at the same location, Sugar Pine Point State Park. The nervous organizers of those original Olympics brought in Great Basin dancers to encourage snowfall, and history has indeed repeated itself.
Wait'll the fundies hear that the blanketasses have more pull with God than they do. Better, what gods did they pull outta the closet to get some action? Heh.
And plug in them damn drums and get to dancin' harder and faster and keep six feet of that shit outta my driveway!
American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over.
The Predator, one of the Air Force’s workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.
The aerial disasters described draw attention not only to the technical limitations of drone warfare, but to larger conceptual flaws inherent in such operations. Launched and landed by aircrews close to battlefields in places like Afghanistan, the drones are controlled during missions by pilots and sensor operators -- often multiple teams over many hours -- from bases in places like Nevada and North Dakota. They are sometimes also monitored by “screeners” from private security contractors at stateside bases like Hurlburt Field in Florida. (A recent McClatchy report revealed that it takes nearly 170 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours.)
In addition, drone warfare seems to be creating a sinister system of embedded economic incentives that may lead to increasing casualty figures on the ground. “In some targeting programs, staffers have review quotas -- that is, they must review a certain number of possible targets per given length of time,” The Atlantic’s Joshua Foust recently wrote of the private contractors involved in the process. “Because they are contractors,” he explains, “their continued employment depends on their ability to satisfy the stated performance metrics. So they have a financial incentive to make life-or-death decisions about possible kill targets just to stay employed. This should be an intolerable situation, but because the system lacks transparency or outside review it is almost impossible to monitor or alter.”
I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return. - Holy Crap!
I would have said "goes batcrap crazy" rather than "pines" but a glimmer of light shone through for just a second. Or maybe it was a hot flash. He's at that age...
Maybe when he gets the line from the Steve Martin song, "memories of what never was becomes the good old days", he'll understand. Probably not.
You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.
[...] It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply — empirically — wrong.
Here follows what the right-wing gets wrong. They don't read us so fuck that. You do - read on.
But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels. [...] Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.
Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.
If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.
Read this. It's a wicked pissah of a defense of Obama and I agree with Andy, er, 99.9%.
Danger lurks for the country again this November. Don't fall for the bullshit, left or right. Don't stay home or vote for some hippie-ass "Peace, Love, and Dope" party that'll never get elected and couldn't do anything if it did.
We're still at war with these right-wing bastards and you better believe they'll turn out, even for Willard, to rid themselves of the Kenyan Muslim socialist. Fuck this one up, you'll be a lot sorrier than if you give Obama his second term.
Click on the graphic to take the quiz. I'll admit I have some experience in having to quickly determine "friend" from "foe". There were two lucky cops and one unfortunate infantryman. Heh ...
Yes, I am taking this Costa Concordia thing personally. For several reasons (I am a seasoned cruiser of over 30 voyages, I have many friends in the cruise ship industry and I am concerned about their safety and the effect this will have on their income and, lastly, I am a shareholder in Carnival Corporation LLP and, however minutely, it reflects on me) I am quite angry with the Captain especially but also the others in the crew who seemed to have abdicated their responsibilities.
This latest:
00:32am
The port authority asks the captain, Francesco Schettino, how many people are left on board. He says 200-300, therefore claiming unrealistically that 4,000 people were evacuated in only 40 minutes. It quickly becomes clear he has already abandoned ship.
...
00:42am
PA asks how many people still need to be evacuated.
Schettino:"I called and they told me there are about 100 people. I am coordinating the operations. But I can't go back on it. We have abandoned the ship."
PA:"Captain, did you really abandon the ship??"
Schettino:"No, no, I am here, I am coordinating the evacuation."
PA:"Captain, this is an order, now I am in charge. Get back on that ship and coordinate the operations. There are already casualties."
Schettino:"How many?"
PA:"You should tell me that! What do you want to do, go home? Now you get back on that ship and tell us what can be done, how many people are still there and what do they need."
Schettino:"OK, OK, I am going."
(The captain will not get back on the ship)
...
Hanging is too good for this guy. You know why he chose to hazard his ship and put 4000 souls in grave danger? This is why:
...
The captain of the luxury cruise ship that capsized after hitting rocks off Italy had sailed perilously close to the coast to "make a bow" to people on a Tuscan island, according to media reports.
Francesco Schettino made the dangerous maneuver so that the Costa Concordia's head waiter could salute his family on land, according to reports.
Despite mounting tensions around the strategic oil transit point at the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. ships have in recent weeks rescued the crews of two Iranian ships — one from pirates and the other stranded when it broke down. But Iran doesn’t seem to be in a mood to respond in kind. U.S. military officials told CNN that the day after the crew of the Iranian fishing boat was rescued from a weeks-long pirate takeover, Iranian motorboats harassed two U.S. ships near the Strait. The boats raised alarms by rapidly approaching both the USS New Orleans and U.S. Coast Guard cutter Adak, but no shots were fired in either incident and the Iranian boats broke away. Watch the Iranian boats near the New Orleans here:
The Iranian boats fled at high speed when 800 heavily armed Marines jumped into the water and began chasing them.
I mighta made part of that up...
Seriously, folks, this looks like a day on the lake. I'm sure the orders to the Iranian sailors went something like, "OK, boys, we're messin' with the world press today with a show of force so here's whatcher gonna do - run them things as fast as they'll go right at two of the least heavily armed ships in the American fleet and don't forget to shear off before you wreck or they shoot at you. Just scare the shit outta their pussy warmonger politicians back home. Don't worry about that battalion of Marines lookin' over their sights at you, they're not scared and have good fire discipline anyway. Have fun."
The American kids were probably thinking something like, "Wow, nice boats! I betcha we could pick up girls back home at Lake Suckamadickee with one of those!"
Sailors and Marines aboard USS New Orleans (LPD 18) stand by to repel boarders, wait for command of "Stand by for a ram!"
Harassment, my ass. All the Iranians did was flip us the bird. Big deal. They'da never got close enough to blow up and do any damage. Cole taught us about that.
Ya wanta see harassment? Here's the original New Orleans after the Japanese "harassed" her off Guadalcanal in 1942:
The Iranians are just wavin' their weenies at the neocons. The neocons'll talk big but they won't wave their weenies back. Nothing to wave.
The founder of a movement to increase racial diversity within the Republican Party told a crowd of tea party supporters on Sunday that they weren’t racists because “the Democratic Party is the party of the KKK.” ...
Claver added: “They want to say your are the racist. No. No. If anybody is a racist, it’s [Texas Congresswoman] Shiela Jackson Lee! If anybody is a racist, it’s [Democratic Congressman] John Conyers! If anybody is a racist, it’s [South Carolina Congressman] James Clyburn! If anybody is a racist, it’s Jesse ‘castration’ Jackson! If anybody is a racist, it’s Al ‘shakedown’ Sharpton! They’re the racists! We’re their friends!”
Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Jan. 15, 2012.
By all means go watch it.
Shorter: Dem dam Dems done fucked over us darkies wit all dat civil rights an' shit.
Rep. Kip Smith, the Georgian Republican sponsor of Georgia House Bill 464, which would “require random drug testing” for citizens on public assistance, found himself drunker than Lindsey Lohan (only ugly and with no talent) and apparently was arrested friday morning on a DUI.
Perhaps someday soon Canada, the land of the laughing beaver, may acquire another symbol of its great culture, a grinning stoner. The current minority party has adopted the position that marijuana should be legalized.
...
Hopefully, that type of thinking will drift southward, like this cold air we've been having lately.
This pic gives more perspective on how close to shore they were. The cruise line is also throwing the Captain under the bus at this point. As I've said in comments on my previous posts, I've been through this area many times and it is impossible not to spot the ship channel, even at night. Civitaveccia (2 hours from Rome) is one of the biggest commercial ports in Europe and the traffic in and out goes on 24/7. Leaving the port, it looks like you're entering a highway, always a line of cruise ships, freighters, and tankers out in the shipping lane. If I were on a cruise ship and saw them approaching this close to land, I would have been running for my life jacket long before they had a chance to hit anything.
And a note, this is not the port of Civitaveccia, this is the port on the island of Giglio, not deep enough to accommodate this class of cruise ship. Assuming, according to some reports, there was an electrical casualty before they ran aground, heading for this port for repairs was out of the question for the same reasons the course he set was. Fortunately for the people on Giglio, he didn't run it aground in the harbor.
Can a presidential candidate erase his campaign? And how fast can that happen?
Literally within minutes of the news breaking Sunday night that Jon M. Huntsman Jr. had decided to abandon his White House bid and endorse Mitt Romney, his campaign went into overdrive to begin wiping the record clean.
The record, of course, included months of sometimes tough criticism by Mr. Huntsman that the campaign can’t erase. Just six days ago, Mr. Huntsman assailed Mr. Romney for saying he enjoyed “firing people.”
...
Yeah, he's trying to 'unsay' everything he said for the last few months and convince us how great the Mittster is. Fat chance.
Heh. One All-U-Can-Eat Burrito Nite could cure that! But then there'd be nothing left of him except a puddle of frothy mixture. Win-win! Unless he was sitting on your couch at the time...
Authorities said that [Captain] Francesco Schettino, 52, who has worked for the owners of the cruise liner for 11 years, was being investigated for manslaughter and abandoning his ship. Prosecutor Francesco Velusio was quoted as saying that the vessel "was mistakenly close" to the island on a route ordered by Schettino through well-mapped sea lanes.
...
Seems he left the ship while there were still passengers and crew aboard. Bastard.
From what I've seen and heard so far, the Captain did everything wrong (including postponing the lifeboat drill until the next morning). What I'd like to know now is why the first officer did not relieve him as soon as he made the course change.
