For Steve

A palate cleanser...



Update:  Maybe this would describe your attempt to watch the video?  So how about a cat picture instead?

Bobbins and beads

Wonderful Kate Beaton recognized by the Guardian.

 The sorrow of Darrell Issa.

 Forgiveness after the most horrible crimes.

 The GOP war on women:

 

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Fish that's ok to eat.

Voter suppression.

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

The whole world is Fukushima'd.....

Fukishima nuclear disaster update.

Fukushima Medical Care Provider: Hospital president says people will be healthier after radiation exposure from triple meltdowns — “There is no argument allowed”

Post-Fukushima, Japan’s irradiated fish worry B.C. experts
The numbers show that far from dissipating with time, as government officials and scientists in Canada and elsewhere claimed they would, levels of radiation from Fukushima have stayed stubbornly high in fish. In June 2012, the average contaminated fish catch had 65 becquerels of cesium per kilo. That’s much higher than the average of five Bq/kg found in the days after the accident back in March 2011, before cesium from Fukushima had spread widely through the region’s food chain. In some species, radiation levels are actually higher this year than last.

Asahi: Fukushima nuclear disaster is affecting every region of the world – Japanese Professor

Cat Olympics

Guns for sale

Six Dumb Arguments We’re Hearing About the Aurora Shooting

And the two articles referenced: BATTLEGROUND AMERICA and To Keep and Bear Arms

But... isn't owning a gun supposed to stop gun deaths? /snark

An NRA victory

Another massacre brought to you by the NRA and the gun companies to celebrate our freedoms.

This is my body

Women proclaiming their independence.

Listen to Bill Moyers on our obsession with guns

And then take a look at the NRA cult.

And realize that we are being told we must accept the deaths of innocents by crazies like this because the gun companies need to make money.

Freedom.  It tastes like death.

Update:  Bill O'Reilly calls Bill Moyers dumb.  I won't listen to the pompous ego-bloated smug bastard, but I'm sure Moyers could smack O'Reilly into next week with just a few choice words.

Stone soup

Kittens, Mitt!  Not puppies!  Kittens!

Goat man sighted in Utah.

Because without religion... I mean..Christianity..., you can't possibly have morals?

Batman Shooting: Mike Huckabee Blames Shooting on Lack of Religion in Schools

You are what you eat.  Even flavored with Methyl Iodide Pesticide.

Scottish hunt for anthrax killing heroin users.

America and guns: when will they learn? My guess, never?

The continuing War on Women that Republicans think is a winning strategy

Prosecuting failed pregnancies and controlling them wimmen's naughty bits.

The monetary cost of a rape.

Don't make any sudden moves!! A moderate and intelligent Republican!!

Let some of these banksters go to jail.

Embranglements

Following the Silk Road.

 

 Oh noes! Even our power strips are spying on us! Power Pwn: This DARPA-funded power strip will hack your network

Summary: The Power Pwn may look like a power strip, but it's actually a DARPA-funded hacking tool for launching remotely-activated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet attacks. If you see one around the office, make sure to ask if it's supposed to be there.

When did the first people arrive in the Americas?

Monsanto has actually something intelligent to say? Monsanto asks its scientists if global warming is real

There goes the other 50% of voters....Mitt Romney vows to ban pornography by installing a filter on every U.S. PC

 "Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces Archaeological "gold mine" illuminates connection between king and sun god.

They still look horribly uncomfortable: 600-Year-Old Bras Found in Austria

Heading for the cliff.

Apparently we must accept the deaths of innocents

Because protesting them would be denying the gun companies ... I mean denying gun-loving Merikans their freedoms. We are helpless and must accept we are being controlled by terrorist organizations ... I mean corporations who own our elected officials and make money by causing death ... I mean freedom.

Just imagine the rumpus if the killer had been Muslim....

Things to look forward to

As we cook the planet.

Exactly.

Thanks, NRA!

When these inevitable shootings occur, we need to start calling them an NRA event. Or Shootings sponsored by the NRA. Or start talking about how we must just accept the deaths because the NRA wants us to...

Home again!!

Saw Zion and Bryce, Coral Sand Dunes, Pipe Spring National Park, Grand Canyon and Sunset Crater, Wupatki Indian ruins.  Summer storms then puffy white clouds.  Above and below 90F degrees.  Saw wild pronghorn antelope, deer, wild turkeys, mountain sheep, domesticated bison, eagles, chipmunks, desert rats...and loads of tourists from every country.

 I'm so glad to be home

On the road again...

A stove that makes electricity.

Mitt Romney fired this guy.

HOLY CRAP!  Landslide in British Columbia.

Mitt Romney is hiding his taxes because of Stericycle?

Stericycle, a medical waste company that, among other things, disposed of aborted fetuses.

Inside the corpse-harvesting industry

Becoming one with the ocean.

Shackleton and Scott's Antarctic huts are put online by Google

But we're VIPs!

13 reasons why this is the worst Congress ever


Krugman: Who’s Very Important? (short answer: Not the super rich.)

What about the argument that we must keep taxes on the rich low lest we remove their incentive to create wealth? The answer is that we have a lot of historical evidence, going all the way back to the 1920s, on the effects of tax increases on the rich, and none of it supports the view that the kinds of tax-rate changes for the rich currently on the table — President Obama’s proposal for a modest rise, Mr. Romney’s call for further cuts — would have any major effect on incentives. Remember when all the usual suspects claimed that the economy would crash when Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993? 

Furthermore, if you’re really concerned about the incentive effects of public policy, you should be focused not on the rich but on workers making $20,000 to $30,000 a year, who are often penalized for any gain in income because they end up losing means-tested benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. I’ll have more to say about that in another column. By the way, in 2010, the average annual wage of manicurists — “nails ladies,” in Romney-donor speak — was $21,760. 

So, are the very rich V.I.P.? No, they aren’t — at least no more so than other working Americans. And the “common person” will be hurt, not helped, if we end up with government of the 0.01 percent, by the 0.01 percent, for the 0.01 percent.

It's industrial strength sugar

We could be driving our cars with it... A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

Almost Friday Cat Blogging

And Fifi finds out what happens when you call a poor person lazy....

Stuff. Because it's still hot at 11 o'clock at night.

The facts about the Great Pacific Plastic Garbage Gyre.

Your chair is trying to kill you.

Florida... *cough*.. *cough*

An evil plot to create more stupid voters who vote against their own interests.

A Lego bridge in Germany.

Star Trek?!  NO.... ALIENS!!

Contraception saves 250,000 lives each year: study

Odds of record U.S. heat being a random event: 1 in 1.6 million and U.S. Sees Hottest 12 Months And Hottest Half Year On Record and so Climate scientists are finally coming forth and making the connection between human activity and the wild weather.


Woman photographs her own abortion to educate women and fight the ugly fear-mongering anti-choice protesters use.

Rush Limbaugh's phony empire.


Bees are smarter than supercomputers.

Monsanto gets an F.

Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth

Women's Suffrage

After Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, the lyrics are different.  Delightfully so.

Back to the past

Sounded a bit silly...

Southern values revived

How a brutal strain of conservative American aristocrats have come to rule America

Until I saw this:

NRA board member Nugent:  America might be better had South won the Civil War 


 My husband always says we lost the Civil War....


Update 7/8:  Marceelina found a link:  Racism Against White People by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

In that environment, the idea of race had to be really important--indeed the future of your country hinged on it. With that said, what I like about this article is it, again, points out the stupidity of using race as a broad classification to reveal abstract, and ill-defined, characteristics. Moreover, it shows that the idea of race in American life has never been a rock, but clay fashioned as the racists of every generation need it to be.

Here's a question for future study--Is there any relation between the mass casualties in the Civil War and this idea of ethnicity and "race" among white people? 

Art to Mars to ruined library

Master forger comes clean about tricks that fooled art world for four decades

Mars crater image beamed back by Nasa rover Opportunity

Nasa scientists say crater, formed by an impact billions of years ago, is the largest yet encountered

Dads Reveal How Having Daughters Has Changed Their View Of Women

Sales of plug-in cars

Finding beauty in neglect.

Will we ever be able to learn from our experiences?

Or will we have to repeat them over and over and over....

After the storm.

Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Chernobyl

Internet virus

Libor's dirty laundry:

Yet, on these shores, the reaction has been mainly a shrug. Perhaps we’re suffering from bank-scandal fatigue, having lived through Bank of America’s various travails, and the Goldman Sachs revelations, and, most recently, the big JPMorgan Chase trading loss. Or maybe Libor is just hard to gets one’s head around. But the Brits have this one right. They may not understand the intricacies of Libor any better than we do, but they sense, powerfully, that banks have once again made a mockery of the role that society entrusts to them. “Why has the scandal created outrage in Britain? Because it truly is outrageous,” said Karen Petrou, the managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics. “They weren’t supposed to be fixing that rate — no matter what the reason.” She continued: “If I give you my money, I need to be able to trust you with it. If you can only be trusted via regulation, then you might as well be a utility. And if banks can’t be trusted to manage their trading desks, then we need to rethink our whole model of banking.” Petrou is not an advocate of returning to the days of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated investment banking and commercial banking. But with the Libor scandal, she said, she could certainly understand the growing calls for it. Barclays, of course, is hardly the only big bank that manipulated Libor for fun and profit. It is simply the first to admit its wrongdoing and settle with the government. The word is that just about every big bank is under investigation for playing games with Libor, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and other American-based financial giants. Which means there is going to be a lot more opportunities for Americans to become outraged over this scandal. And, maybe, to finally summon the will to change banking once and for all.

I will loooove you and loooove you...

This is our planet

The only one we have.

May we truly believe in what is engraved on the Statue of Liberty

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, 1883

Happy 4th of OMG!!....

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

Traffic in Frenetic HCMC, Vietnam from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

This would make me dig up my back yard

Front yard, the neighbor's yard, the street....About 50,000 silver and bronze coins uncovered by men who spent decades exploring one field

OMG!!

Grenades!

Wild leopard attacks!!

Colorado burns!

The bomb in Obama's health care explodes!!

Ancient mammals as big as cars!

But none of this matters because we are cooking ourselves right off the planet.



Sorry about that.