Bad Mothering and Other Stuff

From today's Saturday Diary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

I came to motherhood in woeful denial. My image of the job dated from my own childhood, which (and here I date myself) looked much like an episode of "Madmen": mothers complaining about housework over coffee, cake and the odd cigarette while their children played unattended in the yard.

As far as I knew, my duties for the first stage of motherhood -- giving birth -- consisted of:

1) showing up

2) wearing a little makeup afterward when my husband came to visit.

The rest of it is pretty good.

Hard IFR this morning. I may not get to fly a weekend trip this summer at this rate.

57 banks have failed so far this year. 25 failed in 2007 and three in 2006.

NSA and the Mormon Church

The National Security Agency is siting a huge new facility outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. Putting the facility allows the NSA to do two things: Toady up to a politically powerful Senator (Orrin Hatch) and tap into the linguistic skills of Mormons who have completed their overseas missionary tours.

NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center.

As I have said before, put nothing into an e-mail (or, for that matter, say on the telephone or put into a fax) that you would not mind seeing printed on a billboard alongside a highway in your home town. Those bastards are trolling through the telecom and internet traffic of everyone.

(H/T)

Caturday

George snoozing. There are lots of comfortable places for him to nap on, but because there was a sunbeam there, he was sleeping on that hard surface.


Hey, that's a single-room-occupancy unit, there!


Gracie and Jake are not usually that close to each other and I had never before seen them in the same condo box. They're not friends, more like observing an armistice.

RIP, Uncle Walter

Walter Cronkite, newsman and CBS anchorman, has died at age 92. He was the model of what an anchorman should be. The ones who followed him, on all of the networks, all strove to be as good as Walter Cronkite and never quite made it. Hell, they never came close.

When Apollo 11 began its flight to the Moon, maybe 40 seconds after it took off, the director at CBS cut to the camera that was on Cronkite. He wasn't sitting at his desk looking at a monitor; he was at the window, bending over so he could look up and see the rocket flying, with the camera catching a view of his ass. It was a very telling moment that captured his excitement at what he was seeing.





Fair winds and following seas, Uncle Walter.

Full-Bore, Batshit Republican Racism

No, I'm not talking about Pat Buchanan's meltdown last night. I am referring to the speech on the floor of the House of Representatives by a noted Thuglican, Congressman Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, whose argument against abortion was to ask what would have happened if two notable Americans' mothers had aborted them.

The two Americans this jackass chose to highlight as candidates for abortion, if it had been legal when their mothers were pregnant, were President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

If you think it was a coincidence, just sheer-assed luck, that Tiahrt selected two prominent African-Americans as his hypotheticals for "what if they were aborted", then maybe you'll also believe that Dick Cheney is a true patriot, that George W. Bush was the smartest president since Thomas Jefferson, that there is prime Florida swampland waterfront property for sale and such a deal I have for you!

Socialism for Losers, Capitalism for Winners

That is basically the story of a group of financial pirates operating as "Goldman Sachs". When they are in trouble, they run to their friend in the Treasury Department for a bailout, but when they do better, they get to keep the cash.

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Paul Krugman points out that Goldman Sachs really are a bunch of pirates whose main objective is to loot the US economy and play the rest of us for suckers. You may recall that when Goldman Sachs got into trouble, the Secretary of the Treasury was a Goldman Sachs alumnus and while he was perfectly willing to Lehman Brothers fail, he did his utmost to keep Goldman Sachs going, even if it cost us (the taxpayers) many, many billions of dollars to do so.

Matt Tabbibi has a story that alleges that Goldman Sachs's entire business model is centered on creating investment bubbles, profiting from the sale of the bubble investments and then profiting from cleaning up the wreckage.

When it comes to damaging the American (and the planetary) economy, al Qaeda are rank amateurs compared to the pirates of Goldman Sachs.

Fat chance they'll be stopped anytime soon, though.

Apollo 11 Audio

Time-indexed to the current time and day from the mission 40 years ago. 11 minutes into the flight, as I type this.

Update: Audio and animation.

Yesterday

Shuttle Endeavour, Mission STS-127, launched en route to the ISS.



Good luck, guys.

Bruce Willis Owns a Skyscraper?

Sears Tower is history. As of Thursday, the iconic Chicago, Illinois, skyscraper is now named Willis Tower.

Oh, sorry, it's named for some Brit insurance company.

Good luck getting that name to stick. There are people in New York City who still refer to the Avenue of the Americas by its old name: Sixth Avenue.

40 Years Ago This Day

Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. and Michael Collins began the first of six voyages to the Moon.



The last Apollo Moon mission returned over 36 years ago. If you were watching the Apollo flights back then, the st. Valentine's Day Massacre and the early Depression-era bankrobbers were as far back in time, then, as the Apollo voyages are today.

Of all the things that for which Richard Nixon and his party should be damned to Hell, the cancellation of the Apollo program and the axing of the production of Saturn rockets in favor of the more "cost-effective" Space Shuttle should be very high on the list.

Mu-Wha-Ha-HA!

Oh, I cannot begin to tell you how this news from John Cole's blog has just made my frakking day:

The nation’s largest public pension fund has filed suit in California state court in connection with $1 billion in losses that it says were caused by “wildly inaccurate” credit ratings from the three leading ratings agencies.

The suit from the California Public Employees Retirement System, or Calpers, a public fund known for its shareholder activism, is the latest sign of renewed scrutiny over the role that credit ratings agencies played in providing positive reports about risky securities issued during the subprime boom that have lost nearly all of their value.

The lawsuit, filed late last week in California Superior Court in San Francisco, is focused on a form of debt called structured investment vehicles, highly complex packages of securities made up of a variety of assets, including subprime mortgages. Calpers bought $1.3 billion of them in 2006; they collapsed in 2007 and 2008.

Calpers maintains that in giving these packages of securities the agencies’ highest credit rating, the three top ratings agencies — Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch — “made negligent misrepresentation” to the pension fund, which provides retirement benefits to 1.6 million public employees in California.

And it just gets better and better:

Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are ~!$1 billion.

But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.

The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CALPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.

They don’t want them to merely suffer — they want to destroy their unique position as an Oligopoly, to remove them from having a special status under the SEC rules.

Oh, motherfuckin' yeah! I am going to have to lay in a large supply of popcorn in order to watch this one.

While tumbrels and a guillotine would be satisfying, no doubt, Death by Litigation can be very entertaining. Depositions, discovery, interrogatories and CALPERS is going to take their asses to trial.

It should be oodles of fun over the next several years.

Legalize RPGs Now!

Last night I was on my way home. At one point, the road changes from two lanes going in that direction to one. A SUV roared up beside me on the left and damn near took my front end off when the putz driving it swerved into my lane. I blew my horn in protest/warning and the asswipe gave me the "Welcome to Boston Half-Peace Sign".

What made my day was that the jerkoff driving the SUV had this pasted to the rear end of the SUV:That was when I found myself wishing for a RPG-7.

Could the Senators on the Judiciary Committee Be Any More Self-Absorbed or Arrogantly Stupid?

I am so glad that I have not been following the confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor. Jon Stewart shows why:

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I can't imagine watching this crap on C-Span or even on the evening news. Many thanks to the Daily Show for their work on this.

The Absolutely Safest City in the U.S. of A. is Akron, Ohio

Because the Akron cops have the time to raid the card games of a bunch of senior citizens. No domestic violence, no killings, no robberies,no burglaries, nobody selling crack, they have cleaned up all of the serious violent crime, so they have the time to go raid the seniors at a Slovakian club.

One would hope that the jury would have the sense to come back in five minutes with a verdict of "you gotta be kidding, you took us away from our daily routine for this shit?" and acquit.

(H/T)

These Things Are the Best!

Almonds with Wasabi and Soy Sauce.

If I didn't exercise a lot of willpower, I could blow through a can a day.

You Just Know That These Guys Are Part of George Bush's Sarah Palin's Base

The 6% of Americans who believe that the Moon landings were faked.

I Don't Mind If You Steal Reprint My Posts

But at least give me the courtesy of crediting me for the material.

(And if you are going to swipe my stuff without crediting me, you'd think that you'd at least change the frakking title of the blog post.)

You know who you are.

Welfare for Wingnuts

Texas Tech has rescued Alberto Gonzales from the ranks of the unemployed to teach one course. According to Think Progress, TT is paying Gonzo $100,000 for the hard work of teaching one seminar course.

Elsewhere, the full-bore racism of the younger Wingnuts has been on full display and the older Wingnuts are advocating murdering a child, but there is nothing remarkable in that. So move along.

Happy Bastille Day!

220 years ago.

The Relentless Optimism of Paul Krugman

It is a good idea not to watch this clip if you are borderline suicidal, for Krugman's pessimism was on full display on last night's Colbert Report: "Things are getting bad less quickly." He believes that the Obama Administration and the Congress have done enough to stave off a second Great Depression but not enough to turn the economy around (and we all know whose fault that is: the GOP's, specifically the three GOP senators who made gutting the stimulus bill their price for supporting it).

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Paul Krugman
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Apollo Plus 40 Years

A look back by a reporter who covered the Gemini and Apollo flights.

As the centuries go by, most of the horrors of the 20th Century will fade from the memories of all but historians. Arthur Schlesinger is right in saying that the 20th Century will be remembered for the flights to the Moon.

The Arrogant Stupidity of Dick Cheney

Congressional demands for an investigation grew on Monday over new disclosures that a secret CIA program to capture or kill al-Qaida leaders was concealed from Congress for eight years, perhaps at the behest of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

I'll bet this: There is no "perhaps" about it. If the program was concealed from Congress, that was done on Cheney's orders. That is illegal. There is an old axiom in politics that time and time again is proven to be true: They don't hang you for what you did. They hang you for attempting to cover it up.

I see little difference between killing a person with a bullet fired from a sniper's rifle or a silenced pistol and killing that person with a Hellfire missile. If anything, shooting is far more preferable. For one thing, if you kill a bad guy with a slug from a 7.62mm rifle, you are also not blowing up his house and killing a bunch of women and children. You can also gain some level of deniability, for if you use a Russian sniper rifle or a Makarov, the shooter could be from anywhere, but only one nation in South Asia uses Hellfire missiles fired from Predator drones.

There are laws about how secret operations are to be conducted and who has oversight. If those laws were broken, the guilty should swing. And for this, he might.

If You Think You Can Do Without Having a Soul

Then the CIA is hiring.

So if your concept of an ideal employer includes working for a family-friendly company that offers flexible working schedules while it subverts democracies around the world, flagrantly ignores our own laws, considers the Constitution to be "just another goddamn piece of paper" and then whines like a little child when it gets caught, then the CIA may have a job for you!

You have to apply at CIA dot gov (and no, I am not providing a link).

Устала. Очень Устала.

Don't expect much from me today.

There's no real point about blogging about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. The Democrats are going to praise her to the skies, in part, to try and strip away the Latino vote from the GOP by portraying the GOP opposition as based in racism (which, to some degree, it is). The Rethugs are going act as though they know nothing about the rule of law (which they don't, so that's not much of a stretch) and try to throw out some bloody meat to the batshit racists in their base. At the end of the process, unless she has a public meltdown, Sonia Sotomayor will be a justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone on both sides of the aisle in the Senate knows this.

It is just political theater and I feel no need to watch it play out.

I could also lay on the snark about how it seems that Democrats "quit" or "cut and run" while Republicans "advance in a different direction" or "have other priorities", to wit:

• Bill Clinton was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War.
• Dick Cheney had "other priorities" and used a series of deferments to avoid military service.
  
• So did John Ashcroft.
  
• George W. Bush used family connections to get safe slots in the National Guard.
• So did Dan Quayle.
• Bill Clinton "cut and ran" from Somalia.
• Richard Nixon sent over 25,000 men to their deaths so that he could orchestrate an ultimately futile diplomatic shower curtain to cover withdrawing from the Vietnam War.
  
• Elliot Spitzer resigned from being the governor of New York in disgrace.
• Sarah Palin resigned from being the governor of Alaska "because she has other priorities" than doing the job to which she was elected.

But I don't feel up to it.

Wiretap/War Crime Nation

This is what we know so far, based on stories over the last two days:

• The Bush Administration was wiretapping every American's communications.
  
• They got very little in the way of useful information by doing so.
• The rationale for the wiretapping came from the same Bush Administration officials who were justifying the use of torture.
  
• They were only able to keep the program going by deliberately lying about its effectiveness.
• Dick Cheney was running the program and directed that the CIA both lie about the program and not tell Congress about it.
• Thousands of prisoners were slaughtered by the order of an Afghan warlord who was being paid by the CIA, they were buried and re-buried in mass graves, and the Bush Administration actively worked to cover up those murders.

So it becomes clear, now. A Republican president commits all manner of war crimes and violations of the Constitution and the Democrats are complicit, now, in covering it all up. A Democratic president gets a blowjob from a female intern, lies about it, and the Republicans try to drive him out of office.

Republicans have a thirst for power that is so strong that they will stop at nothing, nothing, in order to slake it.

Attorney General Eric Holder is making rumblings that he may appoint a prosecutor to investigate the use of torture by the Bush Administration.

I will believe it when I see it. Democrats are scared of their own shadows.

Caturday Preloaded

I hope this works; I'm going to have scarce computer time from tomorrow afternoon until Saturday evening, so I am preloading this one on Wednesday.


I took Gracie into the vet's today to have her rear end shaved shaved. She is not happy with me right now, she is sulking in one of the cat condos.


Here is Rocky, Gracie's younger brother, or so we think. He is so different from any other cat in that line that it is possible that the mother stole him.



That's Bella, sleeping on a day bed. She loves people, she loves attention. One of her favorite things is to be combed, which is good, since she is a long-haired cat.


The only thing she doesn't like is having her claws clipped. She is polydactyl on her front paws, so it is more involved for her. It almost looks as though she has thumbs.

Paucity

I'll be away from the Intertubes for a few days.

So please, surf the blogroll. And their blogrolls.

Republicans Are Willful Idiots

Republicans announced Thursday that they plan to call a white firefighter to testify against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearings that open Monday.

I have seen nothing to indicate that the 2nd Circuits decision in the Ricci case was not correct in accordance with the then-existing Supreme Court precedent. Lower courts are bound to decide cases based on the guidance of the Supreme Court. If the Supremes later reverse themselves, they are entitled to do that, but no lower court is entitled to decide a case if their decision would contradict what the Supreme Court has previously held.

For Republicans to claim otherwise is nothing more than cynical political grandstanding.

That Sub Is So Fraked

Last march, the USS Hartford, a Los Angeles class submarine, collided with the USS New Orleans in the Straits of Hormuz.

According to a report in today's the New London Day, the Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, CT now has repair contracts for that boat amounting to $37.4 million. The work will not be completed until after the first of next year. I don't know for certain, but it sure sounds to me as though they have to replace the entire sail of the boat.

This is not a good year to be on another ship and need repair work. Between the Hartford's collision and the USS Port Royal's grounding in February, the navy's repair budget has probably taken a beating. Unless it is a mission-critical repair, I'll bet that other ships are being told to eiher fix it themselves or suck it up.

(The Day's public access expires within 24 hours, so there is no point in linking to them.)

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.

Buried deep in an article about the CIA's lying and deceiving Congress for the last eight years was this little tidbit:

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

The Gang of Eight has not been effective at doing anything, so far as I can see. When they are "read into" a program that is highly questionable if not outright illegal, they don't do anything to stop it. They might as well expand it to the "Gang of Nine" with the ninth member being the statute of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.

Beyond that, as for all those Republicans and their allied Hindenbergs who were demanding that Nancy Pelosi should step down for accusing the CIA of lying to Congress, Hell will probably freeze over before they apologize to her.

For Your Reading Pleasure.

This floating around an e-mail chain. I don't know who wrote it; purportedly it was written by a farmer who used to fly fighters for the Junior Birdmen.

I went out to plant corn for a bit to finish a field before tomorrow morning and witnessed the Great Battle.

A golden eagle - big bastard, about six foot wingspan - flew right in front of the tractor. It was being chased by three crows that were continually dive bombing it and pecking at it. The crows do this because the eagles rob their nests when they find them.

At any rate, the eagle banked hard right in one evasive maneuver, then landed in the field about 100 feet from the tractor. This eagle stood about 3 feet tall. The crows all landed too and took up positions around the eagle at 120 degrees apart, but kept their distance at about 20 feet from the big bird. The eagle would take a couple steps towards one of the crows and they'd hop backwards and forward to keep their distance. Then the reinforcements showed up!

I happened to spot the eagle's mate hurtling down out of the sky at what appeared to be approximately Mach 1.5. Just before impact the eagle on the ground took flight, and the three crows which were watching the grounded eagle, also took flight thinking they were going to get in some more pecking on the big bird. The first crow being targeted by the diving eagle never stood a snowball's chance in hell. There was a mid-air explosion of black feathers and that crow was done! The diving eagle then banked hard left in what had to be a 9G climbing turn, using the energy it had accumulated in the dive, and hit crow #2 less than two seconds later. Another crow dead!

The grounded eagle, which was now airborne and had an altitude advantage on the remaining crow, which was streaking eastward in full burner, made a short dive then banked hard right when the escaping crow tried to evade the hit. It didn't work - crow #3 bit the dust at about 20 feet altitude.

This aerial battle was better than any airshow I've been to, including the warbirds show at Oshkosh! The two eagles ripped the crows apart and ate them on the ground, and as I got closer and closer working my way across the field, I passed within 20 feet of one of them as it ate its catch. It stopped and looked at me as I went by and you could see in the look of that bird that it knew who's Boss Of The Sky. What a beautiful bird! Not only did they kill their enemies, they ate them.

Humor Break

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Other than not torturing people, this makes Barack Obama different from George Bush and Dick Cheney how, exactly? Obama can string together a coherent paragraph, that's the real difference?

Between that and hiring a Monsanto thug who is hostile to government inspection of slaughterhouses as the FDA guy in charge of food safety, I'm not seeing a hell of a lot of difference between the two administrations anymore.

(H/T)

Back to the Future

In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs that is tied to its Chrome Web browser.

The idea, as I understand it, is that Google expects people to shift more and more to netbooks and to run their applications (and store their files) on the Internet. The netbooks become, in essence, "dumb terminals" which have to access the Internet in order to perform the desired functions.

Which is just the way that office computing was done 30 years ago when companies had huge UNIX-based VAX servers from Digital Equipment Corp. You logged on at a terminal that was a keyboard and a CRT.

I, for one, am not comfortable with the idea of my stuff residing on a server that is under someone else's control. At least in the old days of the VAX or IBM mainframes, there was someone that I could to talk to (or threaten) if something went wrong. Here, if I were to use the "cloud computing" idea and my data got munged, who has the backup? Who do I talk to?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Microsoft. But this idea of having my stuff dispersed to Babbage knows where just doesn't wash for me.

"Cutting and Running" or "Deserting One's Post" Is Not a Bad Thing,If You Are a Republican.

Sarah Palin's bombshell that she is resigning as Alaska governor actually has boosted her a bit among Republicans, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, though it also has dented her standing among Democrats and independents.

Politicians are elected for defined terms. There are a handful of accepted reasons for leaving before the term up: Death, ill health, taking another post (usually by election), massive scandal or felony conviction. "Being bored" or being ground down by ethics complaints because one is a sleazeball who likes to skate on the edge.

So what would a President Palin do if her ethics were questioned? Have a personal melt-down and quit? Would she get bored because Congress kept sending her legislation? Bailin' Palin can't handle the stresses of being the governor of a fairly empty state, how in Hades could she handle the stresses of being the president of a nuclear power and of one of the larger nations on the planet?

The plain fact of the matter, though, is that neither party has enough supporters to win the presidency without the support of both independent voters and crossover support from some of the other party. That is not going to happen with Palin. If the GOP is in the wilderness, now, Palin will drive them right into the Empty Quarter.

Sarah Palin is to the GOP what Jim Jones was to his cult in Jonestown.

Robert Strange McNamara

Died in his sleep at age 93.

Over 58,000 American men did not have the luxury of dying in their sleep in their old age, thanks in no small measure to Mr. McNamara's decisions as Secretary of Defense for both JFK and LBJ.

And that is all I have to say.

Bing..... Clunk!

I have three different blogs and one which is an appendix to this blog. I've a statistics counter running on all of them. Out of curiosity, I checked the "search engine" stats.

Google has, depending on the blog, between 85% and 100% of the searches used to get to the various blogs. AOL Search has shown up 6-14% on the blogs that have registered it.

One searcher came via Bing, as did one using Yahoo (the search engine Microsoft tried to buy).

I don't look back far; other than page loads and visitors, the detailed stats are only kept for the last 500 page loads. But based on that result, I have to wonder if anybody is paying attention to the ads that Microsoft has spent millions of dollars to produce and run.