Babette

Yesterday, me 'n Mrs. G went to a breakfast 80th birthday party for our friend Babette Haueisen at Smokey's Kitchen. Kind of an unusual idea, I think, but we had a ball. Here's the birthday girl:


The glare from the candles seems to have over-exposed the photo a little. Actually, the sun was out for the first time this week. Our town is in a 6000' altitude basin surrounded by mountains. The basin was beautifully clear with storm clouds visible over the mountains all around us. I figured Babette had some pull somewhere to get the sun to come out for her party! She's like that.

We've known Babette since Mrs. G worked at Soda Springs ski area thirty years ago where Babette was the director of the ski school. That's up on Donner Summit, just west of Donner Pass, the nation's highest inhabited snowfall area, averaging 33 feet of snow per year, and sometimes the commute was a real bitch. Mrs. G would ride to work with Babette sometimes and learned how to drive in the snow - "Stay in the untracked part of the road. You can haul ass!". No shrinking violet, that ol' gal.

Here's a display at the party. Click it bigger and take a look at it:



The miracle is that she survived such early equipment as beartrap bindings and lace-up boots!

I knew Babette was a top-notch ski instructor and former racer, but I had no idea! For research for this post I googled her up. I was a little amazed. Mrs. G knows her a lot better than I do and when I mentioned that Babette was more than a little famous, she gave me a "Just get off the turnip truck, didja Clem?" look. From a TahoeTopia post entitled Tahoe’s Top 25 Skiers in History:

BABBETTE HAUEISEN 1931: A former ski racer who won the Roche Cup at Aspen, the Silver Belt* at Sugar Bowl, and the Harriman Cup in Sun Valley, all in 1955, the precocious Haueisen dominated Tahoe events during the 1950s against the likes of Olympians Andrea Mead Lawrence, Sally Hudson, Jill Kinmont and Gretchen Fraser. An injury forced her off the U.S. Olympic Team in 1956.

She learned to teach at the instructor's college in St. Christophe, Austria, a first for any American. "Miss B" taught full time well into her 70s. In 1995, she was selected by Skiing magazine as one of the top 100 instructors in North America.

*See her drink champagne out of the trophy! Read the article too. Skiing in those days was a lot harder than it is now.

Since the winter Olympics is coming up in a coupla weeks, this is all pretty timely. Here's 1960 Olympic torch bearer Babette handing off the torch to former Olympian Johnny Moseley for 2010. SacBee photo.



At breakfast we were sitting with another old friend of Mrs. G's from Soda Springs days. I mentioned to her that Babette had told me that at 80 years she was starting to slow down a little. Her reply was, "Yeah, she's slowing down to where the rest of us are!". All I could do was nod at that and hope I have half the energy at 80 that Babette does.

Just as kind of an aside, Babette is originally from Milwaukee. She attended Harley-Davidson's 100th Birthday Bash in 2003. Her brother rode in the parade at age 88. He just turned 95. Runs in the family I guess. Hey, ya don't quit ridin' (or skiing) because ya get old, ya get old because ya quit doin' it.

As we were leaving the party, Babette gave me a big hug and informed me that I will be taking her for a motorcycle ride this year! Yes, ma'am...

Originally I was gonna do this post about a birthday party for an old friend, but it turned into something else along the way.

Babette made her life out of following her heart and doing something she loved. She is still going strong and should be an inspiration to us all.

Happy Birthday, hon. Many happy returns. I'll come to yer parties as long as I'm able to...

Truth In Advertising

The Rude Pundit on SCOTUS' abominable decision on corporate money:

That's right. In addition to sucking people dry over the internet to make their own ads and instead of PACs doing their big-ass donors' bidding, politicians can count on corporations to throw millions upon millions of dollars into commercials supporting a specific candidate. First they took our bowl games. Now they'll get our members of Congress. Money is speech, motherfuckers. We always knew it could talk. Hey, maybe if they're willing to pass a couple of disclosure laws, members of Congress can all be honest about whose whores they are.

Some of 'em have more corporate logos than a NASCAR racer. And then:

The Rude Pundit? Other than the fine, fine readers who sustain him with their contributions, you know who brings him to you:

I'll take a smart honest fuckin' drunk over whore pols any day!

Sanity?

Heh, sanity went out the window a decade ago:

Hardball is almost unbearable today with Matthews babbling incoherently as usual and viciously attacking Grayson and the netroots, Chuck Todd competing with Little Luke for sheer vapidity and Ron Brownstein half heartedly trying to explain why everything they are both saying is factually incorrect and analytically absurd. If this is the level of conversation in the Capitol right now, I think we can kiss sanity good-bye.

...

The politicians and press have lost any grip they had on sanity a long time ago. Watching them govern the United States, and the reportage of said governance, has become the equivalent of watching professional wrestling.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

An old favorite of mine.

From Dutch TV. Emmylou on the Rodney Crowell song - Ricky Skaggs to the fore having recently replaced Rodney in The Hot Band

Emmylou Harris ~ Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

Show me a sign...*

Click to embiggen

Me 'n Mrs. G went to our friend Babbette's 80th birthday party this morning at a local eatery. That might seem a little strange, but it worked well and there's certainly nothing wrong with birthday cake at 10 AM! More on that later after I reposition yet another drivewayful of snow for about the sixth time this week.

We've wanted a picture of that sign for years and today we had a camera with us! That joint is sometimes SRO (Must be delightful on a broken leg. Heh.) after the last run of the day.

*Apologies to Lowell George and Linda Ronstadt.

Slow roasted ...

Via Skippy, from Earthtimes.org:

...

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

...

People can deny all they want but, until they understand that it just ain't all about the polar bears, it's gonna get worse.

Christ ...

When I was a kid, I loved basketball but one day, when trying out for the JV team, the coach told me "son, you're too short and too white." It's why I excelled at ice hockey but I digress. Imagine, if you will, a basketball league made up strictly of ... wait or it ... white men. Mortgage the house, Margaret, we're investin'!

Quote of the Day

Me, at the Facebook thing:

"Welcome to the Exxon John F. Kennedy International Airport, your gateway to the Corporate States of America. Flight 001 from Amsterdam will be continuing on to Xe Ronald Reagan airport in Washington D.C. Be sure to visit the Goldman-Sachs White House and the Bank of America Capitol to see our purchased employees at work for the American people. Thank you for flying Corporate Airlines."

If they weren't so incompetent ...

The Scott Brown election in MA could be a "teachable moment", but I don't give the Dems that much credit:

Scott Brown was a gift to the wayward Obama administration. Or at least that's the way Rahm Emanuel should look at Tuesday’s results. Watching Democrats lose the so-called 60th vote, itself a manifestation of the collective failure of purpose and nerve among modern Democrats, to a former male model who attracted disillusioned Obama voters who still want change, gives the White House and congressional leadership a chance to reboot the agenda and use 2010 as a sprint towards November.

...

The only way Obama is going to make lemonade out of lemons is to sack up, make some personnel changes, and remember there's something out there called "the base". That would be us. "Independent" and "Centrist" votes won't mean a damn thing if the people who worked to get him elected give up on him. He hasn't given us much to cheer about over the past year.

Dred Scott 2010

SCOTUS just gave away such democracy as we still have. Maybe we should just make it official and change the name from "The United States Of America" to "Corporate America" and get it over with.

The way I see it, this decision is built on two terribly flawed previous SCOTUS decisions:

1. Corporations have the same rights as individuals.
2. Money is free speech.

I'm not a lawyer, never played one on TV, never even stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but those both seem like utter bullshit on the face of them. Both are absolutely unfair to individual people and tilt toward the money, as if there were a dearth of it in politics.

There are lead-ups to Olbermann's Special Comment here and here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"Drop yer cock and grab yer socks!"

In keeping with our theme today, this is effin' perfect!

Thanks to Slate.

Torture and Murder at Gitmo: A Risky Political Opportunity If Obama Is Willing to Take It

He's gonna put the Repugs, conservatives, neocons, teabaggers, birthers, deathers, tenthers, racists, the religious right, staff and management of ClusterF**Noise, and general all 'round no good batcrap crazy wingnut fringies in Gitmo and give 'em what's comin' to 'em? Fuckin' A, Barry!

Sadly, no.

The Rude Pundit has said it before, and he'll keep saying it: the Obama administration's failure to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration will lead to its downfall. You wanna establish moral authority to "change the tone" in Washington? Then adhere to some goddamned moral code. The laws of the land are a good place to start. As so many members of yer progressive punditry are saying, Barack Obama has to make Bush and the Republicans own the crises we are now in. And one way to do that is to reveal the extent that the United States under Bush tortured innocent people. It's ugly, and it's awful, but, hell, most violent crimes are.

You'll have to go see the next paragraph for yourself. It made my typing finger blush. Here's what it was able to c&p for you:

{...} "Enough, you sick fuck." At some point, it just becomes too ugly to bear.

When it comes to torturing brown people from somewhere filled with rocks and/or sand, it seems like Americans have a capacity to not give a shit. Yeah, bring on the kneecapping and electrodes on nipples. But maybe there is a line. Scott Horton's new report about the potential murder and cover-up of three detainees - Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, who was 17 when he was sold to the United States - would seem to be the limits. Three men, none charged with any crime, two of whom were on a list to be released, may have tortured and murdered by the CIA at a secret site at Gitmo nicknamed "Camp No," where, one imagines, the detainees weren't served chicken and rice while being allowed to read the Koran.

To be crassly political where lives are at stake, Obama has nothing to lose at this point by using the Gitmo murder cover-up as a way to keep the memory of the Bush administrations failures alive. It will galvanize the Democratic base, who want Republican blood spilled, and it will change the story in the press. Dahlia Lithwick asks in Slate, "Why aren't we talking about new accusations of murder at Gitmo?" And the answer is that the administration has locked itself into this bullshit notion of working across the aisle. Instead, the White House should be thinking about how to sell the public on the good of putting Dick Cheney on trial. Fuck, use Republican reasoning for impeaching Bill Clinton for a less-than-violent crime: he broke the law. Sadly, though, by getting George W. Bush involved in the Haiti recovery effort, it almost seems like Obama pities the man when he should be despised and exiled.

The Rude Pundit's father was a tragically hopeless Mets fan in the 1960s and 1970s. He said that he always bet against the team because, if they won, he'd be thrilled. And if they lost, at least he won the bet. At the end of the day, even if it does nothing to change the seeming tidal shift in public opinion on Obama, at least a few murderers and their enablers may go to prison. At least we can say that laws matter.

I guess we've got a theme today: advice for Obama. It's coming in a tsunami. It's been building little by little as he gave away the store to the banks, caved on health care to give the Repugs and their health cartel masters nearly everything they wanted and the bill looks like it may not pass anyway (and probably shouldn't as it stands), but since the MA flusterpluck it's crashing on the shore and may proceed inland in depth, scope, and time. I hope he hears it. And acts on it.

Matters of law aside, my fervent wish to exact vengeance - pure unadulterated lust for revenge - on Cheney and his bitch Bush who got us into all this remains unabated.

Headline of the Day

Edwards admits paternity, Bush Sr. may be next

Why Obama should play to populism

Here are the last two paragraphs of an excellent 'must read' in the Financial Times:

So what on earth is going wrong? Where Mr Obama has fallen short is in the exercise of the talent that those of us who have watched him a long time assumed he had mastery: taking control of the American narrative. The switch from punchy candidate to remote administrator began, exactly a year ago, when he declined to give the crowd lines on which to cheer themselves hoarse. It was as though he was saying “I know you want to holler but you should see my in-tray.” As the year has gone on, this refusal to descend to the tomfoolery of public polemics has become more marked. But it has left a vacuum of passion into which the hard right has roared with infectiously histrionic rage.

Mr Obama’s distaste for getting down and dirty with the demagogues is a fatal misunderstanding of American politics, which seldom moves in the rarefied air of legislative achievement. It feeds instead on sound and fury; it is Mr Obama’s job to make it signify something. If he so chooses, financial regulatory reform is the perfect theatre for him to reclaim the populism he needs if his presidency is to survive in any form worth having. Take it to the bad guys, Barack. Remind the country where it was when Republicans were still in the White House. Otherwise, your government will expire from its own noble fastidiousness.

Shorter: Fuck those Repug and Wall Street bastards. President Obama, wade in with yer fists swingin' like ya got a pair. Yer gonna take some lumps, but ya gotta bring some to get some. If you don't, this country is gonna be right back in the shitter we've barely begun to climb out of.

We gave ya a shot. You better take it pretty goddam soon.

President Obama, Remember Who Your Friends Are

Truthout, with a tip o' the Brain to Democratic Underground.

Your friends are not the suits on Wall Street, the same ones who fooled Timothy Geithner for years. Your friends are not the timid centrists, who Rahm Emanuel coddles. Your friends are not the giants of the mortgage industry, who fought you tooth and nail to keep the foreclosure crisis out of the courts. Your friend is not George W. Bush, whose crimes you continue to conceal.

Your friends are the progressives across this country, who, when you asked for their faith and inspired them with beautiful words, placed you on their shoulders and carried you to a historic victory.

The progressive movement needs results - we're too smart to be placated and spun. We're too cynical - and too determined - to compromise. And, soon, we'll be too jaded to believe that Democrats are anything but limp windsocks, pointing whichever way the wind blows.

The right wing thrives on vitriol, hate and divisiveness. When the bile they spew goes unchallenged, their disease infects the people around them. They will not lie down, Mr. President. You are going to have to put them down - with true progressive action, not the frail rhetoric of appeasement.

No one has ever proclaimed a die-hard commitment to centrism. No one has ever held a rally to support bipartisanship. Those are Washington DC catchphrases that mean nothing, serving only as a fog for professional politicians huddling together inside the beltway, too timid and too immersed in campaign logic to stand for anything.

There's more, and well said.

Grinding Jesus

Stuff, NZed

Biblical citations on weapon sights used by New Zealand troops in Afghanistan are "inappropriate" and will be removed, the Defence Force says.

The Defence Force learnt of the citations when The Press contacted it yesterday.

That one deserves repeating for emphasis:

The Defence Force learnt of the citations when The Press contacted it yesterday.

Real fuckin' observant ain'tcha, Kiwis? And I thought Marines were dumb...

I kid. To be fair, the letters are small and our DoD rocket scientists didn't see them either. Or maybe they did. There's a lotta fundies in the Pentagon that probably like that shit. Holy war, you know.

The Defence Force would talk with the US-based manufacturer and supplier to ensure future orders did not have the inscriptions, he said, and it would remove the letters from existing gunsights. (my em)

Do it the other way 'round: grind off the citations and then use the Dremel on Trijicon. Just 'til all you can see of it is the cord stickin' outta their ass oughta do it.

DoD, you can't say you don't know about this shit any more. Do what the Kiwis are doing: Grind & Ream.

Quote of the Day

Krugman:

...

But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

I think it's the absence of leadership that bothers me the most. Single-payer, public health care should have been a slam-dunk and signed into law before the August break last year. In the absence of leadership from the White House, we have Harry Reid playing that role and you see where that's gotten us.

But it's our fault ...

How many times ...

Have I said the American people have the attention span of 3 year olds? Maru:

...

Jeebus Christ on a unicycle. Yeah, let’s send the President a message! Vote in the same fucking morons that got us into this mess! Oooh, we didn’t like Croakley’s campaign style – Brown’s was so much more shiny! He’s GOT to be the better candidate!

Good jorb, twats.

...

Sometimes I wonder about our supposedly "blue" neighbors ...

Blame the Left ...

Why not? We were the people who were promised everything to get our vote in November '08. Not that we got anything; but we had the nerve to add ourselves into the political equation. Greenwald:

...

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by "the Left," let alone "the furthest left elements" of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left "ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months." The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion -- only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry. Nor was it "the Left" -- but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis -- who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets. [all ems in orig]

...

And just something to think about; in Europe, most American Democrats would be considered staunch conservatives.

In this political climate (with the constant influx of corporate cash into the system), the "left" will continue to get nothing. Max Headroom was right; we're living in a 21st Century dystopia.

Researchers discover method to objectively identify PTSD

YubaNet

Researchers at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis VA Medical Center have identified a biological marker in the brains of those exhibiting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

A group of 74 United States veterans were involved in the study, which for the first time objectively diagnoses PTSD using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive measurement of magnetic fields in the brain. It's something conventional brain scans such as an X-ray, CT, or MRI have failed to do.

With more than 90 percent accuracy, researchers were able to differentiate PTSD patients from healthy control subjects (250 people with clean mental health) using the MEG. All behavior and cognition in the brain involves networks of nerves continuously interacting – these interactions occur on a millisecond by millisecond basis. The MEG has 248 sensors that record the interactions in the brain on a millisecond by millisecond basis, much faster than current methods of evaluation such as the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which takes seconds to record.

This work, specifically on detecting post-traumatic stress disorder, follows success in detecting other brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, using MEG, as reported in September 2007.

This is pretty good news. Being biological as opposed to strictly mental is like being mechanical - it is physical and can be fixed. Just how remains to be seen, but it's a start.