Greetings from Bonaire!

Sorry for the silence lately, but these little fellows have been keeping me busy.

Today, I Am the Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth

No, I’m not dying…well, not yet. A series of events have conflued and I am able to take an extended sabbatical from all forms of wage-earning to pursue some things in my personal and artistic life. I anticipate at least a month off, but more likely, I will be off work until the end of the year.

It’s a beautiful opportunity to write, shoot photos, dive and vacation, and release some of the stress that working some 40 years (since sophomore year of college) has built into my body. Mostly, I get to clean up the rat hole I live in and ride my bike to boot.

I’m excited and terrified, at the same moment. This is now on me. I don’t have a boss to complain about – the Bag of Salted Rat Dicks was fired, altho his tenure will outlast mine, but only by dint of some legal wrangling on his part – and while I don’t have a routine, I have to put one into place until I’m comfortable being busy doin’ nothin’, as the old Beach Boys tune put it.

As events have unfolded over the past four months, it seems more and more likely that I picked the perfect opportunity to walk out, because my suspicion is I would eventually have been carried out on my shield.

I paid attention, and the world told me what to do, is the message.

I’ll still be blogging, perhaps even more frequently and at more places. One cannot tell these things in advance. My first adventure awaits in two weeks, and then the looking glass is entered upon my return.

Wish me luck, gang!

Russia Will Only Get Worse. Maybe.

Putin is on the horns of a dilemna. For the first time since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia faces a severe economic crisis – after enjoying years of relative prosperity – and she has a warmongering chief executive. This is a nexus of events that will shape and define Russia for at least the next decade.

Today, it just got worse:

LONDON — An international tribunal in The Hague has awarded the shareholders of the now-defunct Yukos oil company about $50 billion, in ruling on claims that the Russian government illegally seized the company from one of the country’s most powerful oligarchs.

“We are thrilled with this decision, although we know it is not the end of the road,” said Tim Osborne, director of GML, the holding company created by the Yukos founder Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky.

[…] The verdict could increase pressure on Russia at a time when its economy is already under threat after the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on a selection of Russian individuals and companies over its support for separatists in Ukraine.

There could also be implications for Rosneft, the state-controlled Russian oil company that acquired the most important Yukos oil assets in 2007, and for the British oil giant BP, which owns close to 20 percent of Rosneft.

Now, of course, Putin is free to ignore The Hague ruling and it’s business as usual. Except Russia’s credit rating will be at risk. And it gives the West leverage over Putin and Russia at a time when he can afford neither.

You’ll notice that, while Putin pardoned Khodorovsky, there was no attempt made to restore the company to private control.

And Rosneft itself, while reporting higher earnings, has seen its oil production start to slip. There’s not $50 billion in cash reserves, I’m sure.

Politically, what does this mean? It could mean that Putin will turn his gimlet eye towards former Soviet states that produce oil and gas, and invasion and insurrections the kind that we’ve seen in Ukraine.

This would include, presumably, Uzbekistan (which has the 11^th largest natural gas reserves in the world), Turkmenistan (the world’s second largest gas fields), and even Estonia, which while it doesn’t have significant energy reserves per se, does have large shale deposits, which could mean fracking, in which case, Estonia is fracked.

Conversely, if Putin is approached by cooler heads – you know, like the guy in the Oval Office – and delicately offered a way out of the problem, then the Ukraine situation itself might be resolved quietly and more important, quickly.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) How desperate is Vladimir Putin to draw attention away from his failed economy? This desperate.

2) Who would think Norway would be a terror target?

3) Conservatives suck. And are real fucking idiots.

4) Apparently, the mohel took a little too much off the top.

5) Huh huh. He said “assphage”. Huh huh.

6) We ducked a bullet, gang.

7) Oh, this is not going to play well with Climate Denialists…

8) Y’know, I almost feel for the NY state Republican party. Almost.

9) Attention to my readers who have Time Warner Cable: I highly recommend DISH Networks. But stay away from DirecTV. They’re owned by Murdoch too.

10) Finally, Jello? Maybe?

Instant Karma: Just Add Florida

Man run over by own truck in road rage incident

Compassion In Action

Read this story and tell me where the logical fallacies comes in.

Done? OK, let’s get to work:

Saying that Eric Garner was overweight at 350-400 pounds and battling asthma, many posters on the sites TheeRant and PoliceOne.com said the Staten Island father and husband brought his death last Thursday upon himself. They said his health contributed to his cardiac arrest, and that their interpretation of an eyewitness video of Garner's altercation with police last Thursday was that he resisted arrest.

Police said they suspected Garner of selling untaxed cigarettes when they approached him on a sidewalk. He told them he'd done nothing wrong. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

[…] On PoliceOne.com, one person wrote, "Mayor you killed our effectiveness on the street, when you killed Stop and Frisk. Because of a few bleeding heart liberals and a few ethnic groups who believe they are the only ones being stopped. You shut down the whole system. Because now all those baggy … pants you see walking around are probably locked and loaded."

Another referred to a video tape of Garner's altercation with police that went viral. On the tape, Garner is heard saying eight times "I can't breathe" as police press his head into the sidewalk.

"If you can talk you can breathe! A strong and deadly choke hold would not allow a person to talk," the poster wrote.

Here are the things I want to look at:

a) If he’s 350-400 pounds, then you have to assume a chokehold is a life-threatening event. Period. It’s a fairly safe assumption that the suspect has cardiovascular problems and cutting off his air, even partially could kill him. As a professional police officer, paid and trained to protect the public and to call for medical assistance when necessary, this should be ingrained into your thought process.

b) You can talk if you’re choking. If you are not getting enough air into your lungs, that’s not unlike, in fact, it’s almost exactly like, COPD: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Only not chronic. And the only disease is in the mind of the frikkin’ idiot who put the victim into a chokehold that is specifically outlawed by the NYPD code of conduct. But there are plenty of emphysema and asthma patients who can talk in short bursts as they inhale enough air to support speech. Basically, this victim was dying and in dying, you find a way to exert extraordinary effort to do things that normally are not likely to occur.

What the police officer did in this instance goes beyond shameful all the way to criminal.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) As conservative asswipes start beating the drum to retaliate against Russia for the downing of flight 17 over Ukraine – as seems to be the case – arming rebels and whatnot, I want to merely point out that no one ever declared war on the US for our own part in any number of insurgencies. Except some of the insurgents. The only nation who has much right to declare vendetta here seems to be the Netherlands, and today, we are all Dutch. (p.s. note how the Moscow Times covers a military action committed by their own factions.)

2) The whole world is a ball of confusion.

3) Madiba would have been 95 today.

4) Yea, there’s no global warming: Tropical diseases are hitting the US. Blowholes are popping up in Russia.

5) It’s been so easy to make fun of Florida, so we owe them a kudo for this.

6) Dude, you probably could have bought one at the gift shop

7) I could have answered this question in one sentence: It’s illegal, so who wouldn’t get paranoid, man?

8) Given the recent and tragic lionfish invasion of the Caribbean, this is a pretty important article.

9) Alzheimer’s? I see.

10) Finally, introducing “Cake in a Can”

I Don't Often Link to Pierce

I like to keep that as my private stash, but this, this was too good not to share:

It's not just that TBOTP [ed. note: Tiger Beat On The Potomac also known as Politico.com] invited the Manson Family of American geopolitics to come together for an exercise in ensemble prevarication. It's not just that the account of said exercise is written in the kind of cacophonous cutesy-poo necessary to drown out the screams of the innocent dead, and to distract the assembled crowd from the blood that has dripped from the wallet of the celebrity war-criminal leading the public display. And it's not as though this was a mere interview—a "get" that could help you "win the morning (!)." In that, it might have been marginally excusable. No, this was one of Mike Allen's little grift-o-rama special events—a "Playbook lunch," sponsored by that noted mortgage fraud concern Bank Of America. There's an upcoming TBOTP "event" in L.A. that is sponsored by J.P. Morgan. I know what Mike Allen is, but I am so goddamn tired of haggling about the price. Here's how TBOTP's own account of the event begins.

If I could write like that, I could put away my shitty little blog and become world-famous, and have women dripping off me like rainwater in a monsoon.

If You Had Told Me This Appeared on The Federalist Website....

…I would have laughed in your face. But it did:

Why abandon K-Street, and acknowledge, then reject, the Big Business perception of the GOP? They’ve had the Republican Party’s back for some time, right? In the past, the largest companies favored one party over the other because they understood a pro-capitalist, low-regulation government benefits them.

However, in recent years, especially since the 2007-2008 recession, many have turned to viewing government as a revenue source, a competition crusher, an error-eraser, and a partner in padding their bottom line. Their interest in cheap labor, bailouts, and selectively-favorable legislation has led to a flood of dollars into the Democrat Party, or into political action committees (PACs) that attempt to move Republican congressional votes away from their bases’ expectations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s push for amnesty. Meanwhile, a mix of bad deals and worse legislation left taxpayers and shareholders on the hook for trillions, millions lost their homes and jobs, and the senators and corporate heads responsible are laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank.

Christ, you’d almost have thought that I, a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, a Marxist of the Adam Smith school, wrote that and not Brandon Finnigan.

And it’s true. This corporatocracy that the United States has become, where corporate bribes have made it nearly impossible for the average citizen to exercise his freedom without being drowned out in a chorus of “Me too” from the corporations, a place distinctly unfriendly to human beings.

Take the last big bipartisan initiative: the TARP program and it’s immediate antecedents. Everybody jumped on board because “too big to fail.” And now, they’ve gotten even bigger and we’ve become even more diminished and the next big bubble is here, Right now. In front of our eyes. You want to know the glaring warning sign?

Corporate mergers.

Mergermania has forecast nearly every single economic downturn since, well, downturns began in America and certainly every one since the 1800s.You can trace the curves almost perfectly. After all, these are the business leaders who have their fingers on the pulse – and thumb on the scale – of the American economy.

In this instance, mergers aren’t happening because there’s a lot of spare money on the table (there is, but it’s not the primary reason). They are happening because Big Business knows that the tax haven that they’ve banked on for decades, even centuries – America – is about to go all pitchforks and tumbrels, and start soaking the rich.

And the rich aren’t Americans. They are Dollaricans. They will flee this nation in a heartbeat if we raise taxes even a fraction of a percent and this is evident from the wave of mergers overtaking the nation.

Of course, liberals and their progressive progeny have been all over Corporate America since long before Occupy Wall Street, long before the G8 Summit protests, long before the NAFTA. So welcome to the party, Finnigan! Pity you waited until it was too late.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) She singlehandedly stopped more killings in this spree by picking up the phone and calling the cops, not by firing a weapon. Tell me again how guns in the home make you safer?

2) Israel fires 1100 rockets into Gaza. The Palestinians and Lebanese fire 550 back. So how does the media cover this?

3) The IRS scandal rears its ugly head yet again. No, this is not a story from last winter. Congress ordered the IRS to investigate this new attempt at dodging taxes. Congress got the investigation it ordered. Congress was unhappy it was targeting their supporters because, guess what? The guy who they put in charge of the investigation knew where the crimes were being committed and so did his job!

4) The Polar Vortex is coming. No, this is not a story from last winter, either. Still don’t believe in global warming, Teabaggers?

5) Say, how do you think conservatives will feel about this story?

6) Not that Obama is going to care, mind you. He’s finally starting to chop wood.

7) Justice 1 Teabaggers 0

8) “Greetings, Professor Falken. Shall we play a game?”

9) OK, so we’ve had PEDs in baseball, football, weightlifting, even cycling…but walking?

10) Finally, another side effect of global warming? Kidney stones.

Meet the Next Florida

New York City

A new report released by research and news organization Climate Central predicts that by the year 2100 our usual 82 degree average summer weather will reach an average of around 91 degrees—the equivalent to an average July day spent in Lehigh Acres, Florida.

Of course, New York isn't the only city with a rising thermometer; Los Angeles and Miami temperatures could both see a jump of seven degrees, while northeastern Pennsylvania could see an increase as large as 11 degrees.

The report examines projected daytime summer temperatures for 1,001 cities across the United States, and matches them to other cities who already experience those projected temperatures today. Frighteningly, some city projections are too hot to match, and had to be linked to other parts of the world.

"In some cases, summers will warm so dramatically that their best comparison is to cities in the Middle East. Take Las Vegas, for example. Summer highs there are projected to average a scorching 111°F, which is what summer temperatures are like today in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And at an average 114°F°, living in Phoenix will feel like summering in sweltering Kuwait City," the study states.

I suppose if there’s a bit of good news in there, it’s that Arizonans and Floridians and other redneck numbnuts will finally be forced to reckon with global warming. Only it will boil down to them wearing dishdashas and kaffiyahs, rather than doing something to stop it.

To be sure, NYC is an industrious city and we’re well on the road to preparation. Many office buildings already have air conditioning, many companies already have infrastructure in place to deal with telecommuting and keeping people and cars off the streets and of course, there’s the comprehensive public transit system.

The folks I feel for are the suburban commuters who will have to deal with Floridian temperatures while sitting in their cars in traffic. Anyone who’s sat on the LIE for an hour waiting for an accident to clear can only begin to imagine what that’s going to feel like.

Also, there’s no guarantee that anyone on Long Island or Miami will be able to drive anywhere, unless they own a submersible car. There’s that thought too…

Pretty Embarassing

If you hadn’t heard, World Cup host nation Brazil had its dreams shattered last evening.

Perhaps “shattered” is too nice a term. Germany paved the pitch and turned it into a one-way autobahn.

No country is more closely associated with soccer than Brazil. None have won more World Cup titles than Brazil’s five. None have so feverishly demanded style with victory. None could be more stricken by such total and bewildering defeat.

“We ask for forgiveness,” Scolari said.

Forgiveness will be hard to come by. The last time Brazil lost a game in the knockout round of the World Cup on home turf was in 1950 when Uruguay beat them 2-1. Those players still hear about it, some 55 years later.

This time around, the host nation endured huge protests as people felt rightly that wasting billions of dollars on stadia that would be used for only a handful of games and then basically abandoned to teams that might play for a few thousand people. Literally (Yes the Olympics are coming, but…) I can't imagine there won't be backlash on a enormous scale.

It’s hard to equate this experience to the average American, without either understating its importance or swerving into full blown hyperbole, but imagine if the original United States Dream Team in basketball – Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan et al. – lost to the Argentinian team that Olympics by a score of 80-12.

And then double that humiliation.

Hey, Remember How VW Wanted to Open More Factories in the United States?

And remember how they supported unions, the (informed) workers supported unions, and hell, most of America wanted to see those plants opening up here because, jobs? And it was only a small handful of conservative morons who were all Socialism!!!!!, which of course neglects the fact that the same “socialism” was expanding production into America?

Yea. About that…

That’s not to say that these two Chinese factories wouldn’t have been built anyway – China is still a huge nation and can easily support more factories – but it is to say that many manufacturers have found it cheaper to build in America for export to China, and so maybe that plan was scrapped?

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Our chickens are coming home to roost. It’s too late to prevent what is inevitable and too silly to start wringing hands over it. But, as inevitable as another terror attack against American interests is, more inevitable is the “No one could have forseen” antics of the far right.

2) Well, I suppose it’s a step up from “I am not  crook.”

3) Shorter Mayor Alan Long: “We don’t hate those people. Some of our best friends are those people. We just don’t want to see them.”

4) Not only is global warming real, and manmade, but NASA will now bother to prove it to the right wing, once and for all. Expect funding to be pulled in 3…2…1….

5) We had a strangely beautiful but really violent storm in the city last night.

6) Speaking of rain, and the city, tomorrow is the annual Twilight Zone marathon. Some episodes to make sure you catch.

7) It’s really cool to see an old professor quoted in the NY Times, and that he’s still doing what he loves to do: urban geology.

8) Incidents like this do not give me much comfort for a future.

9) You need to take it further, Mr President.

10) Finally, what does it mean to be a real American? This, not.

Assume Fire Truck Dead

Blogging will be light today and probably tomorrow because of an accident I had yesterday with a fire truck.

I was on my bike. The truck – more of a pick up truck than an actual fire truck – hit me. The truck is broken. I’m fine, apart from a bruise on my ass.

I’m left contemplating the wonders of the universe that allowed me to walk away unscathed while two machines (my bike is broken too) need repairs.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The US had a chance yesterday to sell soccer to a crowd that was not only paying attention but had a vested interest in the game being played. That weak-ass shit was the best they could muster? Admittedly, Germany dominated so well that I expected them to declare they had annexed the Sudetenland, but come on! A game like that could have focused attention away from the really ugly and really ridiculous stories coming out of Brazil.

2) This weekend marks the 100^th anniversary of the Shot Heard Round the World. No, not that one. No, not that one either. No…*sigh*…OK, yea, there have been too many of them to keep track of…

3) How do we know that homosexuality is mainstream? Corporations are unafraid to sponsor gay pride parades. Not sure this is a good thing.

4) This was a ham-handed decision by the Supreme Court, but not as ham-handed as this one.

5) Arizona will become the first state to feel the real economic wrath of global warming.

6) NYC is about to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows. It’s about time. PS there’s a reason the Irish Times has such strong interest in this.

7) I guess they were hungry an hour later, too?

8) Your heartstrings moment of the week.

9) Oh, poo!

10) Finally, this story features Nikita Kruschev, Vladimir Putin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And no, it’s not a buddy comedy. Well, maybe not.

Man, I Am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Screwed...

Premature death linked to TV watching.

Update

A few days ago, I mentioned the story of Aereo.

 

SCOTUS has chimed in. Capitalism loses one.

How Republicans Operate

The IRS “scandal” gives us an object lesson in the modus operandi of conservatives.

1)  Grossly underfund an agency.

2) Task that agency to investigate an entirely new kind of possible fraud.

3) Whine when that agency performs its task to perfection – even tho an appointee from a President from your own party was in charge! She would know that the first people to abuse the status would be the very people who appointed her. Why else would she have been appointed?

4) Stamp your feet and yell that the agency can’t provide all the information you requested. Mostly because, you know, underfunded!

Like a Circle In a Spiral

So Barry Diller’s latest venture, Aereo, has hit a major legal snag:

A two-year-long legal battle between the country's biggest broadcasters and a startup called Aereo is about to culminate at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court's decision, expected sometime this summer, could have far-reaching implications for television and technology companies -- and ultimately on how people watch TV programs.

That's because Aereo brings up crucial questions about copyright law and threatens to disrupt lucrative business models.

The case basically pits former Paramount Pictures (now part of CBS) and USA Television (now part of NBC Universal) head Diller versus…well, his entire stock portfolio, I’m sure: CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX (where Diller also worked), which means CBS Corporate, Universal/Comcast and Disney. And FOX, too.

Ironic that these cable providers would also be involved in this suit, as the concept of cable’s beginnings is essentially the model behind Aereo’s service: capture broadcast signals and re-transmit them to viewers (in Aereo’s case, using small over-the-air antennae on the roofs of subscribers, then streaming those signals to the Internet for viewing on phones and tablets, and also allowing a DVR-like option to view at a later time).

It seems duplicative, except that Aereo charges $8 a month for 38 channels. To contrast, Time Warner’s basic 20 channel plan in NYC starts at $20 a month. And that’s before rental fees and other “charges”, and won’t allow you to stream your selection over the Internet through their website or app.

Diller has been a strong voice for breaking up media conglomeration and warning about how the consolidation of media outlets can only be a bad thing for the nation.

So he’s putting his money where his mouth is. I only hope his lawyers got enough of the leftovers.