Onyx Lynx

Joy!  Joy suffusing!
As beams of light through tinted
panes, a song!  Joy!  Joy!

Is nothing sacred?

The baker, Louisville-based Little Brownie Bakers, traced the problem to a breakdown of oils. They say:

No one has gotten sick and the company contends that the cookies, though "not up to our quality standards," are safe to eat.

Well isn't that special. Those oils that are breaking down, unfortunately, are trans fats. The nutritional label notwithstanding, food manufacturers are able to make their foods appear healthier on their packaging by manipulating the portion size.

Via Southern Beale.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria.

But Cara at The Curvature brings it right back to my attention:  5 George Harrison vocals.

(Cara also blogs about transgender issues, rape, abuse, the legal system, and the discourse in the media.  And very well.  But she's on my blogroll onaccountabecause Gratuitous Beatles Blogging.)

You won't believe your eyes...


Blame credit goes to n6tqs.

...around the world.

Scott Horton of Harper's continues to deconstruct the defense of the torture memo:

Let’s be clear about what makes David Margolis tick. He’s not a partisan Republican or a partisan Democrat. He has no real engagement in terms of partisan politics. He represents a culture of craven clientalism in which lawyers are not the champions of the law but instruments in the hands of their employers, dedicated to getting them the results they want. Margolis is prepared to do the bidding of his master, whether his name is Alberto Gonzales or Eric Holder. In the case of the torture memo writers, he also saw a threat to the culture he has promoted at the Justice Department. It would lead, he thought, to internecine warfare within the department between Democrats and Republicans.

...to, um, educate a Chicago public-television presenter on the finer points of background research and point-making:

I’m just some poor, civilian goof who can recognize a plague when it's at his door, who is sick of watching paid teevee journalism die of spine-rot, and who does this in his spare time. And yet even I – with about 30 minutes of clicking a fucking mouse on my wheezing, old laptop – was able to find out all sorts of fascinating stuff about your skeevy guests and their mendacious claims that were, for some reason, utterly beyond the collective ability of the mighty WTTW to ferret out.

People without exposure to literature published later than 1970 (or with religious or moral strictures equivalent) might find the language Drifty uses to be a trifle strong.

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.

Via the San Francisco Chronicle, from the New York Times.

Metsgrrl has written a guide to following the Mets on Twitter; adjust for following your own team if you want to do so.  (I am not a Twit.)

Mikolaj Kopernik, 537 years young.

Fafblog has had a flurry of posts while I wasn't looking.

Annafdd of Live Journal has video of Stephen Fry arguing a position I'm probably opposed to.

Via Avedon, The Real Tea Partiers:

The real Tea Partiers were in the midst of a burgeoning rebellion whose first martyr was a black man.

The real Tea Partiers defied such danger that they performed their act of protest in silence, returned to their homes in silence, and in large part didn't even know each other's names.

The real Tea Partiers weren't merely whining about having come out on the wrong side of an election.

The real Tea Partiers were protesting the imposition of an economic monopoly by an unelected ruler. 

The real Tea Partiers didn't enjoy the protection of their government as they whined petty complaints, in public, in peace.

So here's the deal.  It's Lent.  I'm going to limit my computer use severely (I'm turning into a mole, y'all).  I will probably not be posting as much.  I may try for more essays on serious matters, written offline (and possibly longhand).

Meanwhile, after almost sixteen years, there finally exists a dreamscape for this place.  Too bad it's mostly empty (streets but few buildings).

Also, this morning we had FOG.  Sunday's fog was pretty thick but the other side of the lake was visible.  Today's fog made me nervous about crossing the street.

Enjoy your days.

1. Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow!
2. NY Mets get a visit from a Hall of Fame pitcher.

Cheney strongly defended waterboarding, the enhanced interrogation technique assailed by Obama and what many consider to be torture.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques," he said.

Cheney added that he opposed the current administration's move to do away with it.

Right out in public.  [Emphasis mine]

The murderer of Medgar Evers (who also boasted publicly of his acts) was brought to justice 31 years later.

May we not have to wait so long in this case.

Signor Galilei, 436 years young, restless soul and all.

Gung hey fat choy!

I was crossing the street on my way home this evening when I chanced (well, no, they were talking loud enough close enough for me to hear without any effort on my part) to overhear a conversation about Augustus Caesar and his successors (they remembered the existence but not the name of Tiberius; of course they knew of Caligula, but they thought that Nero came directly after, and I could not let that pass).  I mentioned (in reminding them of Claudius) Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius and the TV series, and apparently one of them has been listening to a recording of I, Claudius.  But lately she has OD'ed on Roman intrigue. So she's watching The Tudors.

I mention that to remind the avatars of Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Tacitus that they are still on the case, historically speaking.

That was serious fog this morning.  I mean capital-F, capital-O, capital-G.

Chris Floyd reported a couple of days ago on the Chilcot Inquiry:

The documentary evidence shows that every single purported reason or justification for the war -- the WMD, connections to 9/11, the repressive nature of Saddam's regime -- was false to the core, and known to be false by the leaders who put these explanations forward.

and:

The right honorable minister might consider asking the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the invasion and by the virulent extremists it loosened and empowered: would you want to go back to what existed -- i.e., you -- before 20 March 2003? The right honorable minister might want to ask the more than four million people driven from their homes by the war and the savage sectarian conflicts and "ethnic cleansing" it unleashed and abetted: would you want to go back to what existed before 20 March 2003? The right honorable minister might want to ask the tens of millions of Iraqis who have lost their loved ones: would you want to go back to what existed before 20 March 2003 -- and see if there were any alternatives for a better life other than a massive, unprovoked military invasion, mass death, mass destruction, chaos, collapse, civil war and violent terror from occupiers, mercenaries, sectarians and criminals?

Orcinus is back.

Fred Morrison, who invented the Pluto Platter, which we know as the Frisbee.

1. Pitchers and catchers report in 5 days, and Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas have retired.  (The latter played here for a year and didn't hurt much; got hurt, of course.)
2. The fabulous bugsybanana has compared the Democratic Party as a whole to the Washington Generals, and I think she has a point.  Ow.  (Article she's referencing is here.  Wikipedia article is here.

• Black women pilots, not stopping with Bessie Coleman.  Via The Root.
  

  Among other members are Sheila Chamberlain who was the United States Army’s first African-American female intelligence combat pilot, serving active duty during Grenada/Panama Invasion and Persian Gulf War. Major General (Ret.) Dr. Irene Trowell-Harris was the first African-American woman in the National Guard’s history to become a general officer, and the first woman to have a Tuskegee Airman Chapter and a mentoring Award named in her honor. And Shirley Tyus is the first officer to fly the Boeing 777 for United Airlines on routes from United States to France. She is also, United Airlines’ first African-American female pilot.
  
  As a Military Intelligence pilot, president Beverly Armstrong took a stint in Korea for a military intelligence mission on the Nor. Korean border, where she was recruited by the Air Force International Guard and became the first African-American woman they ever sent to flight training. “I don’t think that we have put a spotlight on the fact that Bessie Coleman made her contribution actually two years before Amelia Earhardt [American History’s note of first female pilot],” says Armstrong. “Bessie Coleman made her contribution almost 100 years ago and we have less than one woman a year to show for it!”

• Skippy on the (political) tea baggers:
  

  most telling of all is [Canadian conservative] mr. kay's realization that, as we in blogtopia (ywctp) have posited elsewhere, the multi-millionaire media managed to ignore the bulk of crazy in nashville, and concentrated on star power, cleaning up the entire proceedings for mass consumption:
  

  perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on sarah palin's saturday night keynote address. it is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.

  well, the left has. we're not sure about the pundit class.
  
  or capt. america, either.

Lower Manhattanite on the earthquake in Haiti.  Read it.  It's long, it's excellent, and in a decent universe would already have a Pulitzer.

(The fact that one of the best writers going today is not doing columns at "influential" dailies and [unnamed hacks] are is the reason I laugh when I hear about the alleged death of newspapers.)

Another reader of Harper's points out soft Intelligent-Design underbelly.

So I'm I think in the shower.  I hear a clock radio start up.  I get out of the bathroom.  The upstairs south side of my parents' house has been grafted to the back of my apartment.  My mother and a baby are in the apartment's bedroom (I have no idea who the baby is).  I turn on the light and explain that [my brother] has to use the bathroom.  Mom reminds me that [my brother] is actually dead.

jurassicpork goes wild:

House Minority Leader John Boehner, speaking through a sign language interpreter as he held his breath, said, "If the President doesn't think that our plan to cover only 6,000,000 out of 47,000,000 uninsured people isn't a good start, then our counter strategy is simply to hold our breath until he notices there's another sheriff in town and that's the GOP."

Rep. Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor did not rule out the possibility that the breath holding strategy would not be followed up by foot-stamping or pants-wetting.

Note: See title of posting first.

In the annals of patronization, some are accused and some merit the accusation; skippy provides prime fodder for investigation.

but now we come to the money quote, the very reason we wrote this piece to begin with. in answering a question about semantics (which basically posited that every political view argues that it is right, and condescension is inherently involved therein), alexander comes up with this gem:

i'm unaware of conservatism's top leaders and main establishment voices arguing that modern liberalism is structurally and systematically distorted and invalid.

now, bear in mind that alexander dismisses glenn beck as a "gadfly," so we assume he'd do the same to the example of rush limbaugh or ann coulter or michelle malkin.

however, we find it disingenuous of alexander to use markos moulitsas as an example in his original column, and then establish the parameter of "conservatism's top leaders and main establishment voices" as the only valid examples to be able to use in the debate.

What I always hear when I'm being condescended at is that possibility x might work very well in closed situations such as academia, but won't fly in real life.

And yet what I hear from conservatives is that their possibility x will work because self-interest, personal responsibility, or the honor system in open situations will insure success in real life.

Um, no.

And we shouldn't have to repeat the lesson every second generation.

Like a broken heart, boredom can actually contribute to death.  (via Making Light)

I think in The Forbidden Tower, someone remarks "The mind writes deeply in the body," and evidence for that statement keeps dribbling out.

Pitchers and Catchers report in 12 days.

Which should remind me to write down knock-knock jokes next time.

Anyway.  Driftglass pinpoints what Andrew Sullivan Will Not See.

Because every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- Andrew " Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory" Sullivan hangs onto his position and paycheck only by tirelessly hawking his own brand of discredited, self-absolving, self-deluding revisionist bullshit ("Bush Betrayed 'Real' Conservatism"). Mr. Sullivan dresses his crackpottery up by nudging the time-line back a little bit, but the object is the same: to exempt himself from the same, harsh judgment he wants to lavish on the Palinites by excusing himself from the much larger and more destructive crime of helping to create the environment in which moral monsters like the Palinites could flourish.

And because Mr. Sullivan builds his critique of the Palinites on fundamentally corrupt ground, his observations of them not only come across as deeply dishonest, but also loudly and unintentionally hilarious.

And then Drifty goes to town.

Warning:  Strong language and Dave Chapelle performing a bigot.

Apparently when sudoku is being particularly intransigent, I become a Monster of Filk, although the only thing I remembered was "On Top of Mount Wicca."  (And only that line.)

The slogan is "The personal is political."

I've heard it for almost 40 years now.

flip flopping joy's bfp, in the context of the death of Gloria Anzualda and her own coping strategies, analyzes the motto's meaning and how it has changed. Brief sample:

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The personal is political as an organizing strategy was NEVER meant to be what it has become today. In a world where “choices” and boot straps dominate our ideology, I’m not surprised that the “personal is political” has become about lipstick wars and “what choices will best support the movement” show downs.

But that’s not what the concept ever meant or what it was intended to interrogate (personal choices). In fact, as an ideology, it explicitly refused to interrogate women’s choices–as it argued the choices women make are all choices of survival. Some may be privileged choices that are made by women who are further away from the burn of survival than other women are–but they are still choices of survival.

[crossposted to Dreamwidth]

Via Daisy's Dead Air: Jenny Sanford has written a book.  Daisy Deadhead's reaction:

But this is the logical end-result of the Republican-approved family, in which the wife dutifully takes the husband's lead and obeys his orders. What other power does she have, except simpering and martyrdom and inducing the hubby's guilt to get what she wants? Us loud gals here in the south who dare to ask men questions, are the "bad" girls, against which women like Sanford are judged. WE demand answers of men, so in contrast, they do not. See? They are the nice girls.

And we see what being nice gets you, hm?

But wait! There's more!

Andrew Young (no, the campaign aide) has also written a book in which no one comes off well.  (There's a stack of haloes in Heaven marked "Returned for fit."  Trust that.)

One thing I like about the speed of our modern era: we used to have to wait YEARS to get these fabulous scandal-mongering books about presidential campaigns. Now, the campaign workers are racing to their laptops to type them out before the concession speeches have even been given...

Scott Horton on the Department of Defense caught in its own lies by Seton Hall University law faculty and students.

The more the DOD speaks, the less sense its story makes. There is a great deal more in the Seton Hall report, and I urge readers—and reporters—to download the whole thing.

Accidental Hedonist makes something of the same point I made about food last year.

Link originally from cofax7 on someone's Network page at Dreamwidth.

I left a comment at skippy's, but I still want to thank anyone I added in the last year; you've been terrific to read and great folks to know!  And thanks to the readers and the lurkers.  I hope I have either entertained you or made you think.

May you be blessed.

Please remove all beverages and food from the area and swallow anything in your mouth.  Twice.  Clear your nasal passages.  Your keyboard and screen will thank you.

Thank you.

An Englishman in New York.

In honor of fannish foreigners; why they haven't killed us, we'll never know...

Warning:  There is sexism.  British humor sexism, but sexism.

An excerpt:

Finally, I am out of the Death Zone and into the Zone Of Perpetual Terror. I've been drenched, burned, ridiculed, deafened and ran-over twice, but it's all worth it, because I now get to spend nine hours in constant fear of losing my job. In England, provided you're not in the service industry, it's ludicrously hard to get sacked. Americans, however, have this thing called At-Will Employment, which basically means that an employer can fire you if he's uncomfortable with the size of your eyebrows.

[Beginning of dream, with credits, lost.]

A friend and I are at a house, working on something (we are clutching stuff, but what the stuff is is gone) and talking (subject gone) for a while.  I discovered that the ceiling is leaking onto a bed (there is a circumstance in which that has actually happened, but this isn't the place).  The friend, sounding like my mom (paging Dr. Freud!  Dr. Freud to the red courtesy phone!), complained about my inability to get anything done and eventually directed me up a flight of stairs with ratty carpeting (instead of the folding ladder, which exists but isn't used in the dream) to a secret (and open) door at a half stair part of the way up.  Instead of mostly empty space just under the roof, there is a storage warehouse.  Really.  Except for the part over the bed, which didn't exist.  There were shouts from downstairs; that turned out to be either my sister and brother-in-law or two other friends (maybe they morphed a lot).  The female of the pair announced her pregnancy, with synonyms, and then we all had to leave.  Somehow, we got on a train and agreed not to go all the way to Penn Station, and I saw abandoned stations and sidings, and then I woke up.

Huh.

Via Mills River Progressive:  Special training to deal with "unruly people."

Job hunting, magickal thinking, and conservative shibboleths.

Thanks to Republic of T.

Wednesday is Blogroll Amnesty Day!




Because...

Also, I need to replace a few blogs and probably consolidate a couple of lists because Things Have Changed.  And I may need to expose the recipe for Gizzards to the outside world.

Watch skippy for details.