Yearly Archives: 2007

NADA

The Thought-police

LAPD to build data on Muslim areas – Los Angeles Times By Richard Winton, Jean-Paul Renaud and Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers, November 9, 2007

Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing, who heads the bureau, defended the undertaking as a way to help Muslim communities avoid the influence of those who would radicalize Islamic residents and advocate “violent, ideologically-based extremism.”

“We are seeking to identify at-risk communities,” Downing said in an interview Thursday evening. “We are looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated. . . . We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities.”

It was quite distressing to hear Downing on NPR calmly explain how important it is to turn in anyone you think might be inclined — inclined — towards persuasion to violence. Thought-policing is good for the Homeland! mjh

PS: Please, comrade, tell the neighborhood Thought Enforcer that this writer is as peaceful as a lamb. Praise be to The Decider!

Uncategorized

Shoppers Strike

Stores opened today at 4am or earlier. Yesterday’s paper had more ads than any Sunday. Commercials on TV show everyone glowing with anticipation, ready to charge into the stores at the earliest opportunity, to fill their carts with bargains.

Don’t buy it. Literally: Don’t buy it. Stay home today. It’s not that I wish to shut down the economy. I wish to shut down the treatment of potential customers as sheep or Pavlov’s dogs. I wish for people to consider that maybe they don’t need all this crap and, if they do, maybe they should buy it when they want to, not when the marketers want them to.

Capitalism is just like patriotism: The louder and more insistent it is, the more we need to stop and wonder what we’re being driven to do. mjh

Uncategorized

Imagine

[From mi amiga:]

Just think, if November 22 had been Thanksgiving in 1963, JFK would have been at Camp David (or Hyannis Port) instead of Dallas.

Imagine,

cko

www.walkingraven.com

loco

The Despicable Man of the Year

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I have my choice for the person I — a would-be pacifist — would most like to punch in the face: The Despicable Man of the Year.

Everything about this man infuriates me. His cluelessness. His selfishness. His power to defy nature; his willingness to defy all sense and decency. Despicable.

The Associated Press: Huge Water Park Planned for Ariz. Desert, By CHRIS KAHN

MESA, Ariz. (AP) — By tapping rivers and sucking water from deep underground, developers have covered Arizona with carpets of Bermuda grass and dotted the parched landscape with swimming pools, golf courses and lakeshore homes.

Now another ambitious project is in the works: A massive new water park that would offer surf-sized waves, snorkeling, scuba diving and kayaking — all in a bone-dry region that gets just 8 inches of rain a year.

“It’s about delivering a sport that’s not typically available in an urban environment,” said Richard Mladick, a Mesa real-estate developer who persuaded business leaders in suburban Mesa to support the proposal called the Waveyard. [mjh: Rhymes with graveyard. It’s about money and an utter indifference to anything else.]

Artists’ drawings of the park show surfers gliding through waves that crash onto a sandy beach and kayakers navigating the whitecaps of a wide, roiling river. Families watch the action from beneath picnic umbrellas. If constructed, the park would use as much as 100 million gallons of groundwater a year.

Mladick, 39, said he wanted to create the kind of lush environment he remembers from growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., and surfing in Morocco, Indonesia, Hawaii and Brazil.

“I couldn’t imagine raising my kids in an environment where they wouldn’t have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about the same sports that I grew up being passionate about,” he said. [mjh: Use your imagination a little more: Move to Hawaii!]

Over twenty years ago, The Beach Waterpark came to Albuquerque. I wrote a letter to the editor about the foolishness of *wanting* — let alone building — a waterpark in the desert. At the time, I heard “Albuquerque sits on a huge underground aquifer that will last for centuries.” Yes, this was the consensus, a view very convenient to development. Not ten years passed before we started to wake up. But even when we slowly get a clue, we refuse to look back at our ignorance as an indication of how much remains. We’ll run out of water, air and earth long before we deplete our ignorance. mjh

PS: Contrast MalDick (sic) to the parents of Malkolm Boothroyd, who are spending a year birding while using as little of fossil fuels as they can. Here is a family that is having a great adventure together in the most positive way. If MalDick got into birding, he’d build the world’s largest aviary and fly everywhere stealing birds from nature. Despicable dimwit.

PPS: Following the bankruptcy of the Beach, a new waterpark is being built in Albuquerque, while the old Beach remains a memorial to our foolishness.

NADA

Right is Wrong

I read yet another conservative columnist griping about how the left is “invested” in failure in Iraq. Funny, how conservative veiw the world solely in financial terms. Conservatives claim liberals want failure in Iraq. Wrong.

Conservatives — staunch advocates for personal responsibility — refuse to own up to their own responsibility for liberal mistrust and disbelief. Conservatives are unwilling to recognize that there is good reason for liberals to doubt the “good news” (gospel) out of Iraq.

First, we all know this adminstration has mislead the world on Iraq. Take “mislead” in both the sense of incompetence and lying. If conservatives want to chalk it all up to incompetence, that’s their choice. Having been repeatedly and thoroughly mislead by an administration that is full of marketers, spinners and ideologues, why would anyone believe anything this administration ever says?

Second, this administration and its supporters include many who angrily deny global warming and evolution. They deny science and their own experience and, in the process, heap scorn on others. Why would anyone trust anything they say?

If there is good news out of Iraq, that is truly good news. But that does not offset the lies and mistakes that precede and follow that news. mjh

PS: As the Right repeats this claim, they villainize the Left. (“See how awful liberals really are?”) They also provide a scapegoat for failure. (“We might have won if not for the liberals, the media, etc.”) Personal responsibility? Yeah, Right.