Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So the UK turned down quasi-unilateral action in Syria with the US. Surprisingly, France is on board.

2) CIA is the largest spy agency in the United States, says Edward Snowden. In a related story, he tells us Alaska is the biggest state, NY the largest city, and Snowden, the largest front-running has-been idiot.

3) At the risk of pissing someone off, PUSSY RIOT!

4) Muslim country determines Al-Jazeera is the enemy. Wait, what???

5)       The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

6) I would do a summary of this article, but I couldn’t finish it.

7) The IRS: “I now pronounce you ‘ball and chain’.”

8) I was proud to see young people stand up for themselves. I hope it makes a difference.

9) Not news, according to the US media. His estranged wife? News.

10) Finally, you know how ice is melting a little faster than anticipated? I bet it’s worse than even we’ve seen so far, and worse

than we can even fear (read the articles through, in order, to understand my point.)

Lest You Think NYC Is Immune to the Derp...

Here’s an excerpt from last night’s Republican primary debate for the candidates seeking to be the next mayor (because, THANK GOD!, Bloomberg has to leave.) [video at the link]

Asked at the start how they'd react to one of their children getting questioned by police, none of the candidates -- whose families are white -- said they'd necessarily have a problem with it.

A federal judge ruled this summer that New York's stop-and-frisk policy was unconstitutional.

"I'd say to him, 'What did you do to provoke it?'" billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis said of his son, John Jr.

Joseph Lhota, the former MTA chairman and Giuliani administration official, said he'd remind his daughter, Kathryn, of the legal history that allowed police to interrogate suspects, and try to determine whether the officers crossed the line.

Doe Fund founder George McDonald stumbled over the question, but gathered his thoughts and said his child didn't live in a high-crime neighborhood. "My son, John, isn't going to get stopped — and that's the whole point."

I do want to point out that McDonald’s answer, while superficially smacking of elitism, is actually on point (the video cuts off the last part of his statement, so it sounds even worse than it reads). McDonald is the founder of the Doe Fund, a charity that gets jobs for the homeless. His answer actually starts along the lines of “My son isn’t going to be stopped because I live in an affluent neighborhood.”

Yea. As I said, it sounded much worse than it reads.

The other two make McDonald’s answer sound practically progressive and in a city where Republicans almost always have to run as moderates to win (Giuliani, believe it or not, ran as a moderate, and Bloomberg switched from Democrat to Republican to run the first time), it’s actually skin-crawly to hear a couple of actual candidates lecture from a position of patriarchical demeanor.

Lhota’s answer gets downright creepy, something the quote I pulled doesn’t do justice to (again, watch the vid.) Here’s what he actually said:

Front-runner Joe Lhota said one of his first moves would be to read his daughter the Supreme Court decision that legalizes the practice.

"I (would) give her Terry v. Ohio which was given by Chief Justice (Earl) Warren in 1968 that gives officers the opportunity, based on certain levels of suspicion, to stop someone," Lhota said. He added that he would become upset only if the officer did not follow procedure.

Hey, um, Joe? I know a judge in Montana with whom you should get acquainted.

The Dream Is Dying

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963

"But one hundred [ed.note: and fifty] years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition."

 

(NB: Dr. King had the full text copyrighted, so I can’t use much more, but in truth, I really don’t have to.)

Syria's Moonlight

One kind of wonders why both China and Russia are making trouble with the world on Syria:

Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich has called on the international community to show "prudence" over the crisis and observe international law.

"Attempts to bypass the Security Council, once again to create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries of the Middle East and North Africa," he said in a statement.

The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said Western powers were rushing to conclusions about who may have used chemical weapons in Syria before UN inspectors had completed their investigation.

Now, given our rather spotty track record when it comes to the possession of weapons of mass destruction, we might pay a little heed to the warnings both China and Russia have given. Prudence is clearly warranted and, besides, I really can’t stand being the police department to the world.

On the flip side, there’s no Scott Ritter or Hans Blik flapping their arms, trying to point out that, no, Syria does not have WMDs, and my mind wanders back to the 1990s, when we had a chance to prevent the death of 750,000 Rwandans at the hands of their own countrymen, and did nothing.

Syria as a strategic issue is a conundrum. Yes, they are a threat to Israel, particularly through their Lebanese surrogates, but it’s not like Israel hasn’t had bigger threats that they’ve faced down by themselves, with us standing behind them.

That Assad would use (assuming he has) chemical weapons against his own people means the likelihood of using them against Israel is even greater and while Israel has long expected this kind of attack, she’s never been tested the way she’d be tested by short-range missiles tipped with bioweaponry. By treaty, we’d be forced to retaliate, and by extension, so would NATO.

Sort of makes a case for Russia joining NATO but they seem content with offering some low-level assistance to that organization and nothing else.  

One would hope for a better solution to be found in Syria, and that Kerry’s speechifying and Obama’s public pondering are merely a little sabre-rattling. Another war is the last thing this nation needs, and as tired as we all are right now, a major mistake is just a button-push away.

Short-Fingered Vulgarian Reach Much Longer Than Thought

Apparently, Donald Trump’s fortunes have sunk to new lows. Rather than scam tens of millions from institutional investors and banks who lined up to fund his Atlantic City casinos…and let’s face facts: if you can’t make it in the casino industry, you’re a failure. It’s like failing in the illegal drug trade, it’s unpossible…and then file bankruptcy, Trump has been forced to resort to selling to us peons.

You know, things like his ill-fated airline, and his noxious cologne, and his line of “premium” chocolates.

I’m told they make terrific emetics, but I digress…

It seems that Trump was not content with the nickel-and-dime grifting he was engaged in and has allegedly decided to go with the long con, if you believe New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

New York's attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony "Trump University" that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

Trump shot back that the Democrat's lawsuit is false and politically motivated.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says many of the 5,000 students who paid up to $35,000 thought they would at least meet Trump but instead all they got was their picture taken in front of a life-size picture of "The Apprentice" TV star.

"Trump University engaged in deception at every stage of consumers' advancement through costly programs and caused real financial harm," Schneiderman said. "Trump University, with Donald Trump's knowledge and participation, relied on Trump's name recognition and celebrity status to take advantage of consumers who believed in the Trump brand."

A bit of prima facie evidence that there may be more to this charge than – oh, hell, who am I kidding? We all know it’s true! – but one sign that Trump is worried is the reaction he had, both in real life and on the web and on Twitter.

“98% approval rating” – another tactic of the fraudulent, so maybe Trump ought to back away from it, is to make up shit wholesale – is probably based on surveys by people who completed the “University” and hadn’t realized yet how badly they had been ripped off: e.g. the really dumb and ignorant, otherwise known as Teabaggers.

I presume the next step for Trump is to roll drunks for their wallets, and mug kids for their milk money.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Does anyone know where I can obtain a gift subscription to Go Fuck Yourself Quarterly? Asking for a friend.

2) Batfleck? Really? Did no one pay attention to the box office numbers for Daredevil?

3) I’m conflicted over the revelations surrounding Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. On the one hand, I support her right to live her life as she chooses, no matter how icky I may personally view her choices. On the other hand, given the serious nature of the revelations she made as Bradley, this distracts from a very serious, very important story, and diminishes the media’s already miniscule coverage.

4) It seems like the entire western United States caught fire while I was gone. What have you people been doing?!?!?!?!

5) The problem with drawing lines in the sand is that sometimes, people step over them.

6) In other Syria-related news, it looks like Israel is either being pro-active or opportunistic. You decide.

7) I’m worried about where this is all headed in the Middle East.

8) The NASDAQ was shut down for three hours yesterday, apparently due to a glitch in the system software running the trading computers. “Ghosts in the Machine,” indeed…

9) Begun, the Derp Wars have.

10) Oh, Florida, you never fail to amuse.

So, I Had a Dream

As you may recall – you few, you happy few who actually follow my shitty little blog – I took a vacation last week.

I’ve been having a tough time at work with many transitions in process, changes and alterations, radical and minor. I’ll be moving from my current digs shortly, my old supervisor retired, my new one is… well, let’s just say that he reminds me of a heaping bag of salted rat dicks, and leave it at that.

Believe it or not, those are the minor changes.

Anyway, my first night on vacation, I dreamed I was in a vast building filled with storage units. You know the place: you stick your Grandma’s furniture in them when she has to stay in a long-term facility.

As I wander about the place, in the back of my mind I know there’s a symbology involved: this is not a literal dream.

A voice, perhaps the facility manager, speaks up and intones “Before you lay the broken dreams and failures of thousands of people.”

But really, that’s not what storage units are. Storage units represent hopes for better days. Sure, they are projects you had to put aside for whatever reason, like a big house that you lost in a divorce or because you lost your job. But if you truly failed, you’d have sold the stuff and been done with it.

With that thought, I realized I was not in a building, but in my own soul, my own mind. Inside this unit lay my theatrical props, in that other one, my photography and videography tools. Behind me lay many relationships and friendships, but you’ll note, I didn’t sell those off either. There’s always hope for some form of reconciliation.

Right now, I have to endure a test of my strength of character. I was never particularly good at those unless they were vital. Perhaps all I need to do at the end of this hallway is make a left and find another storage unit to stuff this experience away in. I’d sell it, if it had any value to anyone else.

I’ve got a pocketful of keys and a building full of doors.

Sounds like fun!

I'm Back

I'm also swamped with work for a day or two, so blogging will be really light. Also, too, ill from either a mosquito bite or work. You decide.

Te Aworo

Out for a well-earned and well-deserved vacation from the calamity that is life in New York City. See you in a week or so!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) It looks like Pakistan has decided the rest of the world was getting too much attention.

2) Smokey Bear turns 69 today, which makes him one year older than the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

3) Bryan Fischer's head to explode in 3….2….1….

4) First, they convicted Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel Goldman Sachs trader for a billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Now they've written a strongly worded note to Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. When will the brutes at the SEC stop beating up banksters????

5) For you science geeks out there…you know who you are…this weekend marks the Perseid meteor shower. It ought to be a golden dandy, since the moon will be practically new.

6) My hometown is a tough place to live and work, but the premise of this article, that you now have to be successful to live here, is bollocks. It doesn't hurt, to be sure, but if you're willing to fight for it, you can make a go of it here. It's like the song says, ♪ If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere ♫

7) Speaking of my hometown, I can't believe I'm going to miss this!

8) Anthony Weiner keeps shoving more body parts into his mouth. After successfully swallowing both feet, he seems to be shoving all three legs in there. And yet, he keeps trying. And failing. I have a theory, which is mine. Well, this theory that I have--that is to say, which is mine-- ...is mine. And the theory, which is mine, and belongs to me, is that Weiner is running as part of his couples therapy.

Stay with me for a moment on this. He entered the race for mayor knowing full well he had landmines and grenades laying about all over the place. And he's behaving bizarrely enough to warrant scrutiny by any passing cop. The boy ain't normal, is what I'm saying. But what if he underwent therapy to save his marriage to Huma Abedin, and in the course of that therapy, it came out that he still had the campaign bug, and big enough to really distract him from focusing on repairing his marriage?

Now a good therapist would have counseled him away from that kind of notion, no matter what modality their training took them. Sometimes, tho, particularly in B-Mod, you let the patient run a little out on the leash, like small dog sniffing a big dog's butt. He'll probably get smacked and high tail it back and then you'll be able to substitute in trying to be successful at something smaller, like his marriage.

So you, the therapist, leave him be to make his own mistakes, to yell publicly at his staff, to hand out cookies while smearing his opponents. He'll be back, and you can make another house payment.

9) Alex Rodriguez returns to the Bronx tonight for his first game back since the Commissioner suspended him for, well, forever. I would imagine there will be riot police standing by.  

10) Finally, dolphins beach all the time, altho not in such great numbers. So why not sharks, too? Indeed, the entire marine ecosystem seems to shifting north (or south, depending on your hemisphere) as manmade global warming devours our colder climates.

The Adult In The Room

The interesting dynamic that is the relationship between Obama and Putin has a new twist, and it’s one we should welcome:

On Wednesday evening, when U.S. President Obama cancelled his upcoming visit to Moscow, the Russian reaction was perhaps most clear in the way that Vesti, the state’s main propaganda TV channel, conveyed it on the channel’s website. Buried about half way down on the page, underneath a story about Russian tourists in Turkey, Vesti announced: “The invitation for Obama stands.” Beside that was the somewhat diversionary headline: “Barack Obama will travel to St. Petersburg for the G20 summit.” The actual news — that Obama had decided not to meet with his Russian counterpart before, after or during the G20 summit in St. Petersburg next month — was clearly not something the official spin doctors wanted to advertise.

After a year spent honing their anti-American rhetoric — on issues ranging from the adoption of Russian children to missile defense in Europe and the civil war in Syria — the Kremlin message makers were suddenly eager to claim that President Vladimir Putin didn’t really mean for things to go this far. “Sure, Putin uses this rhetoric, but it’s not so much anti-American as anti-Euro-Atlantic,” says Evgeny Minchenko, a Kremlin-connected political strategist. “And keep in mind that he has tried to stop short of a head-on collision.”

So, shorter Kremlin: Holy fuck, he’s not that idiot Bushy BooshBoosh!

Indeed, he is not. And he’s not going to kowtow to the likes of a tin-plated moron who trades offices like a Southern governor.

Putin has played the US since at least 9-11, using our War on Terror as cover for all kinds of sins in Georgia and Chechnya, and let’s not forget the 130 Russians who died in a terorrist standoff in a Moscow theatre.

Yes, this is the guy Edward Snowden wants protecting him, but won’t give up secrets to. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Keep in mind that, as Bush pursued a unilateral American foreign policy with healthy servings of imperial aggression, without engagement or advisement from what could have been its strongest ally in fighting terrorists, Putin took both offense and advantage of Bush’s narrowed focus to become an active player in the Arab and Muslim world, particularly as the development of the Russian natural gas industry saw Russia become a major player in the energy field that previously had been dominated by the OPEC nations.

Putin began to develop ties to Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea, partly to further their own energy markets but also to assist them, it seems, in keeping America occupied. Our response?

To place a ballistic missile system in 2007 along the Polish border, nominally to protect against, errrr, Iranian and North Korean missiles.

This provocative move came a few short years after Bush removed us, again, unilaterally, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties in 2002.

While I cannot and will not defend Putin’s responses to any of these actions, in hindsight his motivation becomes clear: he saw a new Cold War starting up. I’m not sure that was an unjustified position to take.

So here comes Obama, tasked with both maintaining the façade of those missiles being vital to American security, while having to defuse Russian imperial ambition and coax (or bully) them on board with regards to Syria and Iran, and possibly North Korea.

Is ignoring a summit opportunity the way to go? Keep in mind that both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will still be meeting with their Russian counterparts as part of the G-20 Summit and that both Obama and Putin will have opportunities to communicate, possibly even privately, while in St. Petersburg. So it ain’t over yet. The message is sent. Let’s see how Russia responds. As indicated by the Time Magazine article, the signs are hopeful.

When Is A Human A Factory?

When you’re a poor black woman who died 50 years ago:

Henrietta Lacks was only 31 when she died of cervical cancer in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital. Not long before her death, doctors removed some of her tumor cells. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in a lab, a feat no human cells had achieved before.

Soon the cells, called HeLa cells, were being shipped from Baltimore around the world. In the 62 years since — twice as long as Ms. Lacks’s own life — her cells have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies, many of which have yielded profound insights into cell biology, vaccines, in vitro fertilization and cancer.

But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, black and uneducated, never consented to her cells’ being studied. For 62 years, her family has been left out of the decision-making about that research. Now, over the past four months, the National Institutes of Health has come to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used.

[…]The agreement, which does not provide the family with the right to potential earnings from future research on Ms. Lacks’s genome, was prompted by two projects to sequence the genome of HeLa cells, the second of which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

What benefit does the Lacks family gain from this? Privacy. After all, sequencing the genome would reveal nearly the entire family’s genetic history, and expose her descendants to identification when they obtain genetic tests for whatever reason.

For instance, Lacks died of cervical cancer clearly contracted from the HP virus. Not that anyone should be ashamed of this, but it’s not something that should be publicized unless the heirs agree to.

But think about this: HeLa cells were vital to the development of the polio vaccine (admittedly, not exactly a profit enterprise originally), in vitro fertilization, cloning and mapping the human genome, among other important – and profitable – medical advances. I think the Lacks’ family is entitled to some reparations for that, don’t you?

WaPo Drifts Down the Amazon

Well, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com, has purchased the Washington Post:

The Washington Post Co. agreed Monday to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to The Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will get a new, still undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without the newspaper.

The Post Co. will retain the building in Washington, as well as the online presence of subsidiary websites such as Slate.com and Foreign Policy magazine.

The newspaper business has had a rough time of it, adjusting to the online news presence of so many blogs, websites, and news outlets. Even the vaunted NY Times has had to eat crow and a billion dollars on what should have been a profitable endeavor, the purchase of the Boston Globe.

The Post made its own stupid decisions, most notably buying Newsweek magazine for a premium – which ironically was also sold over the weekend by IAC to IBT -- and a raft of television stations, none of which bolstered its flagging paper and only distracted resources and attention.

Bezos is generally acknowledged as a CEO’s CEO, one of the top two or three in the world. He also skews a little liberal (he’s a big supporter of Senator Patty Murray of Washington) which bodes well as a bulwark against the corporatocracy of Rupert Murdoch and other conservatives who own the “liberal” media. He’ll be keeping the paper privately owned, which means that he won’t be responsible to shareholders for quarterly earnings and may be able to build a media empire on this foundation.

If anyone can, it would be the guy who started the world’s largest bookstore.

Hm. Am I mistaken?

I thought guns made for a polite society?

 

Responsible gun ownership in action.

Exploitative Television

Normally, I look forward to this time of year. It’s Shark Week. If you don’t know or don’t care for it, Shark Week has some interesting programming about sharks, which is sadly interspersed with more and more exploitative programming.

They don’t just exploit sharks, they exploit you and me as well. Playing on our fears, reinforcing the worst about sharks, and drumming up crises where none existed before, all in the name of programming. They are the FOX News of popular science, and they suck about as badly.

Take last night, for instance. There was a “documentary” called “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives,” which supposes that a extinct (by several million years) dinoshark called Megalodon still lives off the coast of South Africa. Done up in documentary style, along the lines of the equally egregious “Mermaids” on the sister network Animal Planet, Discovery essentially creates a fictional narrative and gussies it up with phony incidents and dubious experts in an attempt to attract viewers and…for what?

I watched a bit of it last night, and the more I watched, the angrier I got. Rather than talk about the megalodon as an abstract, rather than discuss its niche in the paleontological archives of history, or how it evolved into the modern day (and far less dangerous) shark, Discovery decided to go for grabbing you by the short hairs and twisting.

They ought to be ashamed. Discovery has long been a haven for science, featuring programming like “Mythbusters,” and yes, even Shark Week, which while it has long since become about scaring people out of the water again, and contributing to the wholesale slaughter of sharks, used to be about giving us knowledge and information about these mysterious and therefore terrifying creatures.

Sharks are beautiful animals and they have a place in the food chain that helps balance our ecology. Without sharks, our reefs would eventually die off. Sharks cull fish, keep population explosions in check, and otherwise help balance an environment that is rugged while beautiful. Nature is brutal, and the shark is about as perfectly descriptive of nature as any other apex predator, including man.

The difference is, we can do something about our brutalities. Sharks have a harder time. A lot of the behavior we interpret – anthropomorphise, to be frank – is just a shark’s way of exploring his environment. Sharks are highly intelligent creatures, with a brain-body mass comparable to humans, and that measure has long been a gauge of intelligence.

So why is Discovery Channel acting like an idiot?

If you are truly interested in sharks and their place in nature, watch SharkFest on NatGeo Wild. You won’t have to feel icky about yourself afterwards.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

It’s easy to get disheartened with the state of the nation today. We seem to be sliding back to a time when the country was superficially in a decent state, but had deep divisions and even deeper oppressions of the underclasses and minorities. Whether you were black or Hispanic, gay or a woman, you suffered enormously at the hands of the white male dominated culture.

And it seems that we’re headed back in that direction. I’m here to remind you, we ain’t.

If anything, we’re looking at the last gasps of a patriarchy that will devolve more and more quickly. But evolution, which is what we’re undergoing currently, is an incremental process.

Look to the youngest adults in our society: there lies your future. There is where we can invest, both the good and the bad, our hope.

Gay marriage didn’t come around because people of my generation changed our minds. It came about because young people started speaking up to their parents about their gay friends, and started interacting comfortably with gay men and lesbians.

Similarly, immigration reform isn’t coming about because a boatload of immigrants washed up on our shores and changed everyone’s minds. It’s coming because this is what we perceive as the right thing to do, as our kids accept their Hispanic and other immigrant friends.

Marijuana legalization is next: not because hippies woke up and realized the needle on this issue hadn’t moved in generations, but because kids these day see marijuana as a part of their experience. It’s illegal, but not hidden; it’s illegal in plain sight.

Gun control is not far behind, altho there will be more resistance here because the gun rights lobby is just fucking nuts. These folks have grown up with Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary and Trayvon Martin and literally hundreds of other mass shootings in schools and malls and movie theatres. They get it: guns have no, zero, place in polite society. I stress “society,” because no one is suggesting that you can’t keep a gun at home for protection. But hell, even Tombstone, Arizona required you leave your gun with the sheriff when you were in town.

These are all small steps on the road to an enlightened society, and I may – probably will not – see even these steps all completed in my lifetime (and I plan to live a very long time) but they are coming, and beyond that lies a road of even greater riches of both the body and soul for all of us.

We are mere data bits in a stream of information that will overwhelm and flood ignorance. Take heart in this.

Why Poverty Happens to Good People

Lesson to learn -- it’s usually not their fault. Case in point:

Donald Cardin became a firefighter at age 20 in Central Falls, R.I., a town just north of Providence that filed for bankruptcy in 2011. He was making $60,000 a year as a fire chief before retiring at age 42 in 2007 to take care of his wife Lana, diagnosed with thymic carcinoma, a rare cancer with extremely low survival rates.

The couple relied on Cardin’s health insurance, which required no copay, to cover Lana’s $8,000-a-month treatment. Cardin worked a part-time contracting job to make up the difference between his $34,000-a-year pension and his former salary.

But that all changed in 2011 when Cardin, and his fellow firefighters and policemen, were called to a meeting at the local high school, where state-appointed receiver Robert Flanders warned them that the city would not have enough money to survive if pensions were not cut. Weeks later the city would file for bankruptcy.

“After a lifetime of service, with the stroke of a pen, Judge Flanders changes the rest of our lives and doesn’t care,” said Cardin.

So here’s a man who put in a lifetime’s work based partly on the promise that, in exchange for risking his life now, the city would help take care of him in his retirement. Nevermind that he retired at an age young enough to go find another job with a living wage and have a completely new career – which is not an easy proposition living in a small New England town, by the way, and that’s before considering his wife’s medical needs – that was the contract implied at hiring. Then, shortly after retiring, half his pension and half his medical insurance was taken away, leaving him making $17,000 AND paying $48,000 in medical bills, annually.

In a town of 19,000 people, it’s likely many if not most knew Chief Cardin, and other retirees who saw their lives brutalized by unfeeling bean counters, but you’ll notice in reading the article and doing further investigation, the subject of raising taxes never once comes up.

Until they emerged from bankruptcy in record time. They did this by shifting the bankruptcy burden off the town and onto the middle class pensioners, and increasing property taxes 25% over five years. Had it been discussed before the bankruptcy, perhaps those pensions could have been saved or at least, given a shave, not a beheading.

Manning Up

Attention, Edward Snowden: This is how you do it and maintain the higher ground.

FT. MEADE, Md. — Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted Tuesday of violating the Espionage Act and faces up to 136 years in prison, but his acquittal on the even more serious charge of aiding the enemy was hailed as a victory for the press and the Internet against the government's crackdown on leaks of classified information.

Manning's leak of more than 700,000 State Department cables, terrorism detainee assessments, combat logs and videos was the largest breach of classified secrets in U.S. history. Among the information was a now-infamous 2007 video of an Apache combat helicopter attack in Iraq in which U.S. soldiers fired on civilians and killed 12, including two Reuters journalists.

Manning becomes one of only two people ever convicted under the Espionage Act for making classified data available to the public; the other, Samuel L. Morison, a government security analyst convicted in 1985, was pardoned by President Clinton on his final day in office.

I would expect President Obama to do something similar on his way out the door, and Manning will not have to rely on the kindness of totalitarian dictators to eke out a survival existence, the constant threat of either retaliation by the US government or continuous monitoring by his “host” ever looming in the background.

The Manning verdict seems pretty fair: found innocent of aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States, but convicted of stealing and releasing classified information. We may agree with the spirit of what he did (or not), and we may welcome the exposure his information has gotten, but the law is the law. At least Manning, this frail looking Marine, stood up and took responsibility for what he did.

Which is why I’m persuaded to believe that Obama will end up pardoning him. It’s the right thing to do.

Your STFU List for Today

I’m tired, I’m pissed off, the Bag of Salted Rat Dicks I work for is trying to cause trouble for me, and I’m on deadline, so posting is a bit of an exercise is getting ahead of the curve.

Anyway, I realized this morning there is an entire list of people who need to shut up and go away. Dig a hole, climb in and sew it closed behind you. Get dropped in the middle of a tundra naked and alone. Close the door, and bolt it shut.

1) Anthony Weiner – JUST! SHUT! UP! You’re toast. Your candidacy is dead in the water. You’ve humiliated your wife again (altho she must have had plenty of warning which speaks really bad about her, as well.) I wanted to believe your comeback. Hell, I was ready to vote for you, along with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers, and elect you mayor. I wanted the reformation to be real. You may have had Bill Clinton officiate at your wedding, but you ain’t the Big Dog, the greatest President since FDR. You just ain’t.

2) In a similar vein, Eliot Spitzer – Dude, I will vote for you, but you have to get out of commenting on the mayor’s race unless you plan to switch races. By your own admission, you aren’t a saint and you made mistakes. If you expect us to forgive and forget, you have to lead by example.

3) Sarah Palin – Go away. Your fifteen minutes were over five years ago, except in your own slow spiraling descent into the black hole of obscurity that is your fate (that obeys the laws of physics, by the way: time does slow down near a black hole.) And you lied. The McCain campaign let you shoot your mouth off enough times that you shot McCain in the foot.

4) Mitt Rom…Romney? RomBot? Romalomadingdong? Whatever… -- OK, so you know how there’s videotape of you quoting you at length? Go lend a shoulder to your would-be queen wife, Ann. She’s been crying since last November.

5) Brooke Goldstein – Never heard of her before? Don’t worry, neither have I. Neither has anyone else. And with any luck, you don’t need to worry about this wanna-be Ann Coulter. She needs to dye her hair blonde and grow a set first.

6) Maureen Dowd – Huma Abedin is too, errr, mewling, to leave Weiner? Really? HILLARY’S Chief of Staff?

7) Sydney Leathers – Girlfriend, the NY Post is NOT your friend. Your time is up, you lost the story a week ago and with a body like this, you won’t even get the inevitable Playboy offer. Sorry, hon. You’re done.

8) George Will – Because African American single moms lent money to Detroit at usurious rates, and are sitting at home on the couch, clipping bond coupons, I bet. ARGH! SHUT UP!

9) Rand Paul – Not in my town, Brillo-top.

Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes

Well, well, well…this is a refreshing change of heart:

ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRCRAFT — Pope Francis reached out to gays on Monday, saying he wouldn’t judge priests for their sexual orientation in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference as he returned from his first foreign trip.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis asked.

What? No “Burn in Hell!”? No “God hates fags!”?

Whatever is religion coming to?

God, is what.

Yes, there are plenty of things from yesterday’s Papal press conference(!) that we can criticize, such as the “investigation” into a monsignor on his staff on pedophilia charges, but this position, seemingly unqualified and unconditional, leaps off the page.

People of all colors, creeds and orientations struggle to find meaning in life. Even atheists have been known to try and answer what is essentially a spiritual dilemma: What’s the point?

For me, for this Christian, the Pope strikes the right tone about religion. It’s a voyage of self-discovery. It’s about finding a place for one’s higher power in one’s life, because let’s face facts, there are times you need one, and wish you had one. Maybe it doesn’t answer your questions or solve your problems, but a god or goddess or enlightened plane or what have you help you get ready to get through and then past a crisis.

Many of my friends, scientists and realists, are atheist (or at least agnostic) and I respect them for that, but a lack of a system of faith is, well, still a system of faith, since none of us can ever really know the answer to the ultimate questions we all have.

Even Francis has tacitly endorsed atheism. It’s not about holding a book or hands folded in prayer, it’s about how we all behave towards one another.

On that point, I believe we can all find common ground.