Crown of Thorn
May 10, 2010
Saw this in my front yard the other day on one of my rose bushes.
The only thing I can think of is that a gust of wind came up which the fly was not prepared for and blew it into the thorn.
Either that, or the little bugger couldn’t figure out what season it is anymore because of the screwed up climate and just said “Fuck it all” as it went headfirst into oblivion.
Anybody ever seen anything like it before?
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I vote for kamikaze fly. Never have seen that before. Either that, or you have a seriously evil rose bush! Nice photography.
This morning the Energy Committee is meeting to have a little chit chat with the Oil heads
Available on line at cspan and ready to begin in a few minutes. Code Pink is in attendance.
Cspan Link
I can’t take credit for the photo or at least not that one. I couldn’t figure out how to get my camera to focus but I got someone with a fancier lens to snap those for me.
Just tuned in to that hearing. Caught the republican from WY saying that if there is a way to make this process safer it needs to be implemented immediately. I’d think the senator would be well aware that there is definitely a way to make the process safer but the oil companies continue to be given exemptions from the safety guidelines. Funny, I don’t remember this republican senator from Wyoming raising a fuss as these exemptions were granted. But I’m sure that has nothing to do with the other republican from Wyoming who was heavily involved with creating secret energy policies for all his cronies in the oil business when he was VP not all that long ago. Fuckers.
Interesting to hear Jefferson Beauregard Foghorn Leghorn Sessions bitching and moaning about how more regulations are needed. Why isn’t there this and why isn’t there that? Probably because you filibustered it, you dubfuck cracker.
What a collection of turkeys on that committee, Barrasso, Bunning, But ya are Blanche, Murkowski, Sessions, Brownback, McCain. Wonder if McCain will show up to bluster and snort.
Another bad sign of things to come. Big Brother is getting more popular.
US university introduces electronic monitoring of student attendance
Sigh. I have to agree with the professor who wrote this part:
Just more surveillance for the sake of it to let people know Big Brother is always watching. had to chuckle a bit at the end when it asks “Could it happen in the UK?”. I was under the impression that the UK already had more surveillance cameras than just about anywhere in the world.
As usual, McClatchy is providing some of the best coverage of the Oil spill story
Gee, where have we seen this trend before??
U.S. agency let oil industry write offshore drilling rules
and Team <O's tardy response to this obvious problem
Agency that oversees offshore drilling to be split by Obama administration
One would think it might be a good idea to fire a whole lot of those MMS people.
Meanwhile, a douchebag from the MMS, Elmer Danenberger, is whining that his people have been getting too much guff. Senator Landreau looked on with deeply furrowed jowls, feeling his pain. I’d throw a shoe at both of them but it might hurt my puter.
McClathy provides a lot of the best coverage on just about every story these days.
So splitting the MMS in two is going to fix the problem? Somehow a hydra metaphor is coming to mind – I don’t think having two corrupt agencies instead of one is the answer. Like you said, how about firing the jackasses currently in charge and making sure the agency is staffed by people who care about the environment rather than industry lobbyists. But the Titanic/deckchair thing is so much easier for the beltway buffoons.
Landrieu is a two dollar whore. She doesn’t even have enough brains to get the big payoff that she deserves for all her labors.
She reminds me more and more of Susan Collins. What was that term you used a while back ? – dumber than a bag of George Bushes or something like that :)
I’ve seen some bug impalements before, but never quite like that, never through the head.
Since we’ve been talking about Elena Kagan and coddling oil producers, here’s one that puts the two together – Kagan helped shield Saudis from 9/11 lawsuits.
The 9/11 families wanted to sue the Saudis to find out who had financed Al Qaeda.
Somehow I doubt she would have given the same deference to say, Venezuela.
Brother lives on Choctawhatchee Bay in the FL panhandle. He notes a sudden conversion of nearly all his neighbors from oil boosters to environmentalists.
What is supposed to be my damn cspan3 channel has preempted as usual to show some committee meeting of the Yakima city council, which seems to hold eight or ten meetings a day.
This Transocean guy is slimeball and a half. Keeps trying to eat up all the time with a big show of his concern for everyone’s welfare. Lying sack.
Keep tuning in and then getting disgusted as nobody is saying much of anything. Just another bunch of rich white guys trying to cover their asses again.
As this BP debacle continues I keep thinking of the Unreasonable Woman Diane Wilson. Got to see her give a talk a few years ago and she was very good and not the type to take shit from anybody (maybe Alex Morton should team up with her!).
Anyway I’d been wondering if she’s been heard from since the oil spill and I found this interview. Might be worth a listen.
btw, meant to refer you to this short video of Morton. Comes at it in a much more personal way, including the death of her husband.
Excellent article worth reading in its entirety by Michael Hudson – The People v. the Bankers .
He discusses how the budget shortfalls and debt crises Greece and so many other countries are facing are a result of not taxing wealth and explains that the oligarchs are demanding payback by forcing austerity on labor. The bankers want their pound of flesh and they are using every means at their disposal to get it. Some snippets:
!
You think it’s easy to transform Europe to third world status? Turns out it is. Of course the US public is thoroughly convinced it’s all a matter of wages being too generous. Houses, labor, forests are all worth what the financial interests decide they are worth today. No other opinion is worth considering. Tomorrow, when they own them,the value may be assessed slightly differently.
I thought this little post gave a good insight into the mindset of many of these financial types. It’s just some guy discussing one of his trader acquaintances. The part I put in bold sounds very familiar ;)
Good post from Yves Smith on what may have caused the huge stock market downturn last week – An Analysis of the Thursday Meltdown.
Structural weakness and failure and no one minding the craps table. Sounds about right.
Here are the sum total of words of wisdom on the same subject from Mary dumbshit Schapiro of the SEC
Schapiro says the markets failed many investors on May 6th.
I think she may be a second cousin removed from the other airhead of the day, Mary Landrieu.
Got cyanide?
Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 looks at how we’ve done with the ballyhooed biodiversity targets launched with the usual fanfare from European bureaucrats and others.
Eleven goals with twenty-one sub-targets. The assessment for each starts out the same.
From Achim Steiner’s introductory remarks:
Fail, fail, and more fail. I’m sure the CBD meeting in November will fix it all, especially with Japan at the helm.
Sigh. Don’t have too much hope for the near future of life on this planet as the latest great die-off continues. The only bright side I see is that life is persistent and human beings won’t be able to kill it all. While it doesn’t concentrate on destruction by humans, this post put things nicely.
Somehow, that doesn’t exactly make one break into song. In the realm of cold comfort, just a few degrees above absolute Debbie Downer.
Vitter Fed audit amendment reject by Senate today
Skating away, skating away on the thin ice of the same old day (apologies to Jethro Tull)
So it’ll just be a one-time audit. Great. That should give the Fed ample time to re-cook their books for the time period in question and then they can start the whole process over again in secrecy once the audit is over.
Maybe this is better than nothing, but not by much.
Ok, that is really weird. When I linked to that story the title said what I’d typed up there, that the amendment had been rejected. Now it says this for the title, the complete opposite.
Senate OKs Fed audit as part of bank overhaul
It was a switcheroo. I wish I’d blockquoted the former article, because it was completely different.
I was wondering about that when I read it. When I checked it only mentioned the Vitter amendment being killed near the end. I’ve noticed that this happens a lot with breaking stories on larger content providers like Yahoo, Reuters, the AP, etc. Sometimes it seems like a legitimate update (although it would be nice if they at least noted the content has been changed) and other times it looks like a scrub job because the original report got a little to close to the actual truth.
Chris Floyd has another excellent article up, this time concerning an LA Times story discussing how the CIA’s drone program is targeting unknown people using something called “pattern of life” analysis.
Here’s Floyd’s piece – The Poetry of Death: Patterns of State Terror.
Here’s the original LA Times story.
Gossip and experimental computer programs driving policy. Sounds a lot like a certain street in Manhattan, and I ain’t talking 110th St.
This is the appeal of certain sf. The Terminator series, say. Only a metaphor for what has already happened. Only in real life we didn’t even put up any resistance.
Astronomers discover a giant hole in space.
Neat-O.
Can we please send the wingnuts into that keyhole on a shiny new rocketship? I know it isn’t nice or right to pollute the atmosphere, but it might really help this planet. ;-p
Oil industry spent big on Senate panel members
Be sure to check out how much Miss Mary Landrieu the petrolslut has sucked into her coffers.
The futility of the current government is overwhelming
Planet Earth the light show. Oil on water with food coloring projected on a screen was the backdrop to the psychedelic 60’s. Now we have the blood of dead Jurassic inhabitants swirling around in the Gulf, much to the same visual effect if you are Major Tom in space
photos here
I think there are fractals in there. Nauseating.
If I were the headline writer for that website I would definitely not be calling those photos “beautiful”. What the fuck?
Interesting development into how new species form – New Insights Into Genomics of Speciation.
Big Bank Takeover: How Too-Big-To-Fail’s Army of Lobbyists Has Captured Washington
This 28 page pdf report outlines all the details behind the revolving door. See the rest of the intro section for a summary of the findings. Will this change the practice? Probably not.
Probably won’t change anything but it is nice to have all the names of the lobbyists listed. I wish somebody would bring up Chris Dodd’s and his former staffers’ ties to the banking industry the next time the corporate media tries to make it look like Dodd is a champion for reform.
I got a kick out of this bit:
Seems to back up what that woman said in the article about Rubin just wanting to be “cuddled”.
On a somewhat related note, reading that reminded me about a radio ad I heard recently touting the consumer protection benefits provided by……wait for it……fucking FINRA! That’s right, the same FINRA which was created at the insistence of Bernie Madoff among others, the same FINRA which is staffed by industry insiders and which handed out non-binding “guidelines” and “suggestions” to the financial industry rather than actually regulating it and then looked the other way as the banksters robbed us all blind. Evidently their PR people are working overtime (probably with indirect taxpayer dollars provided by bailed out banks) to polish up their image and fool the rubes. IIRC the ad was aired during a Red Sox game and I doubt the average Sox fan knows who the fuck FINRA is much less if the ad is actually telling the truth or not, which is probably exactly why FINRA chose a baseball game to air their spots.
What the hell is going on in Arizona? Now the governor has signed a bill banning ethnic studies.
Um, Latinos have been oppressed by white people for centuries now dumbass and trying to brush the facts under the rug isn’t going to make it all better.
My thinking on this has changed a lot since I was in college. At the time I didn’t think much of all the mostly white students protesting for more diversity. The percentage of minority students in the college I went to was much higher than the percentage of minorities in the state the college was in – IIRC there were about 11% minority students in a state with much less than 1% minority population at the time. I couldn’t figure out why the city kids didn’t just go to college where they came from if they wanted more minorities around because from my standpoint I was being introduced to all kinds of people I’d never been around before having grown up in a small rural town with no minorities at all. I couldn’t see why the college should be required to teach so many ethnic studies or women’s studies classes – I thought black history or Asian history should just be taught as part of any world history class.
But in the ensuing couple of decades it’s become abundantly clear why this is necessary. Taught as part of more eurocentric courses, the study of white guys overwhelms the rest and the history of other ethnic groups gets short shrift and taken out of context. With the resurgence of crazy crackers in the country it’s clear to me now that there are many who would rather the uncomfortable truth never be taught at all.
Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown GlenBeckistan. These are the people who think the first amendment is there to protect the right to praise mom, the flag, and apple pie, nothing else.
Freelance writer Mark Schrope is cruising the Gulf of Mexico on board the Pelican, trying to understand this oil slick. He’s blogging it at The Great Beyond: Oil spill science: Where’s the oil?. See also “the jellyfish graveyard,” linked at the above.
Humans deliberately fucking with the environment has us all on the brink of catastrophe. So what’s the solution? Deliberately fuck with it some more.
No no no no wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!!!!!!
The complexity of the global weather systems and how they interact is far from being understood, definitely not to the point where you could throw up some clouds and expect just the right parts of the world to start cooling down. Maybe if human beings had colonized a few other planets and wanted to experiment on a lifeless uninhabited one to see if it could be made habitable this would be OK. But seeing as this is the only planet we’ve got and we already know that human activity is making it warmer, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to just stop the activities we know to be damaging?
The answer to Fermi’s question about advanced extraterrestrials
<Where is everybody?
is maybe becoming clearer. They don’t make it.
That has always been one of the possible solutions to the paradox. The way things are going it would at least explain why aliens, if they exist, will never hear of us.
This is what we do. Take the problem of obesity. I’m sorry, but there are a couple simple answers and they involve stopping doing what you’re doing. Eat a little bit of everything, mostly plants, and then stop eating. Go out in the yard and pull some weeds. Walk those few blocks to the store instead of driving.
But oh no. That wouldn’t support two hundred feet of diet books in every bookstore, quack plans and operations and magic potions, a whole billion dollar industry built on the fact that people just won’t take the proven, effective door number one.
Been thinking a lot about different economic systems over the last few years, particularly about alternative forms of currency to replace the ones we have that are based on faith alone or on shiny metals, which again is just a faith that these are worth something. The one thing that makes everything tick is energy in one form or another – you can’t eat paper money or silver or gold – so my idea was an economic system based on how much energy is required for human beings to live and the currency would be based on the calorie.
So I was particularly intrigued by this new scifi book which may be of interest to fans of scifi with an environmental twist – The Windup Girl.
It posits a not too distant future where the economy is based on calories. Saw it at the bookstore yesterday and couldn’t resist picking it up. However the future it presents is a very dystopian one where the big corporations continue to exploit whatever economic system is in place. Only read the first few pages so far but I’m thinking I may need to rework some of my ideas about the calorie based economy.
Pam Martens with more on the stock crash from last week. She smells a rat – The May 6 Stock Crash Revisited .
That part in bold seems to contradict this part from the Yves Smith article on the same subject linked to above:
Martens is saying the huge drop allowed the HFT guys free reign but the Smith piece says the HFT guys disappeared after the drop – the vast majority of the huge trading volume that day came before the drop. Of course it’s highly possible that I’m missing something here. Looks like martens is going to continue her thoughts on this in another article. Stay tuned…
More of your taxpayer dollars at work.
Battlefield executions in Afghanistan and Obama’s black detention sites.
Ha! Michael Lewis has some advice for God’s Work.
Haha! Plus, he really cuts Warren Buffett and the hagiography surrounding him down to size. Buffett may not be as bad as the rest of them but he’s no saint either. Even with him it’s still all about the money.
And on a related note, Yves Smith takes apart a Goldman apologist.
More on Buffett. I’ve come to believe he is no different. A squid is a squid is a squid.
Regarding his $5 billion Goldie Sux investment
Those derivatives may be “financial weapons of mass destruction” to use Buffett’s own words but he isn’t averse to making a profit off them either, even if it’s only indirectly. Buying up beat up stocks when they are low has always been his modus operandi and he took advantage and got Goldman by the short hairs when they were down. But he’s shown that he’s still a predator just like the rest of them and as Lewis mentioned, I’m sure Buffett would have no qualms about fucking Goldman eight ways to Sunday if they don’t cough up his cash.
When there’s nothing left to steal from the rest of us, the squid start eating each other and right now that’s about all they’ve got left. That’s how this crisis started and it continues unabated. The banksters will collude with each other when necessary but will still swallow each other as soon as they get the chance.
Morgan Stanley under investigation for shady CDO deals.
Check out the hubris of these assholes:
Perhaps Blankfein didn’t get the sarcasm and took Michael Lewis’ advice from the link in the last comment above about blaming everybody else, since later in the article there’s this:
Meanwhile, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Company each turned a profit in every single day of trading during the first quarter of this year. And we aren’t talking about nickels and dimes.
Citigroup evidently announces the details on an annual basis so no word on exactly how much they raked in per day.
Ratfuckers, all.
Ratfuckers and vampsquid all, indeed. Last week Zedge reported on JP Morgan’s latest probes,
Civil And Criminal Probes Launched Against JP Morgan For Silver Market Manipulation
All of these banksters are in on the take at one level or another, and will “manage” their legal problems the way they manage PR problems, throwing lies and money, other people’s money, at it all until it all goes away, moving right along to the next opportunity to maximize their bonuses.
The whole fucking country, if not the entire world, is captured and swindled by these thieves.
I’m kind of with the “nature is in despair” interpretation. Lemming it.
Latest from McClatchy on the Big Petrosquid spills
Criminal charges likely from Gulf oil spill, legal experts say
BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer
Today they will see how well the “tophat” works. Guardedly optimistic, eh.
Chu should be insisting Obama turn this into a Manhattan style mega Project, throwing the best minds and technicians from around the world into an emergency think tank to solve this problem. Get BP the fuck out of there, except for their money. The tedious measured, mostly hands off, so very Obama approach is absolutely the wrong way to go at this. Lead you motherfucking President, lead and do it right!
Salazar can go fuck himself. He’s the one that granted BP the waivers to bypass the environmental standards and if he’s looking for ways to find ways to prevent future catastrophes the only place he needs to look is in the goddamned mirror.
I was reading that first one earlier and was wondering how they could charge BP with much since they didn’t flat out violate any standards because they were given the waivers. Looks like they can get them on somewhat lesser charges:
If Barry had any interest in leading he’d show Salazar the door right now and put someone in there who isn’t so cozy with the industry lobbyists and actually gives a shit about the regulations that already exist. Of course if he was interested in leading he would have sacked Timmeh a long time ago too so I won’t hold my breath on this one either.
I remember as we all lamented as <O selected all these people for his advisers and cabinet. There were very few of them for whom we could cheer. Looking at the results of their work a year plus later, I don’t think we were offbase in our lament.
Summers, Geithner the Elvin, Rahmbo, Holder, Salazar, Sebelius, etc… maybe now even Napolitano and Chu, who both seemed more promising initially.
You get what you pay for, I guess. The big corporations have taken our money and paid for these people and they are dancing with them that paid them most.
Roubini has reverted to charging fees for most analysis available on his site, but ZH has a post up based on a recent interview he did with (barf) Cavuto of Faux.
Roubini says economy unsustainable
On the possible riots – just wait til Barry and friends get through with “reforming” social security.
Yikes. Things have not calmed down in Thailand.
A dissident general was shot in the head during an interview with a NYT reporter.
Here’s a good link to stories and other media on Thailand from the Guardian: Thailand I keep this bookmarked and check now and then for updates.
Now that there is a major martyr, it is going to get nasty again.
One you’ve been a politician for a while it’s evidently difficult to stop whoring yourself out. Despite having amassed a sizable personal fortune, Shillary Clinton still has not paid off her campaign debts. But rather than opening up her wallet to pay all the vendors she’s been stiffing over the last two years, she’s going to raffle off Bubba.
Which brings to mind the words of Nietzsche posted a couple days ago –
He was talking about you, Bubba.
Haha, your love for the Clintons is showing, c-man. ;-D
John Nichols has a very good and evenhanded assessment of Bernie’s ‘Audit the Fed’ amendment here.
I posted a new open thread for us to fill