Pottymouth Alert: Unexpurgated Carlinisms Galore.

The world is a complicated place. Usually it makes no sense to speak of a single cause for any big phenomenon. Nevertheless, the Foole was no fool, and and when I first saw the HBO show this video clip is from, I just said “Yep.” This is from seven years ago, and these were truths one seldom heard mentioned in any mainstream venue. The public has started to notice lately, though. If George Carlin were alive now, he’d probably have done this speech in Zuccotti Park.

Slightly dated (2007) topical video at no extra charge. The other Black Friday vids were all a bit boring.

Thirty years ago and more, Tonio K. had a revelation of the future. It goes a little something like this…

Michael Moore gives great interview to Keith Olbermann on KO’s show, now on Current TV which is NOT AVAILABLE HERE DAMMIT. But you can have all the Fox propaganda you want.
Quoth Moore:

“These people who stole the pension funds of the American public, who stole their money, who stole the future of our kids and grandkids, they think, they’re kleptomaniacs, and they think they’re going to get away with it, they have taken our democracy and formed it into a kleptocracy, and if we don’t stand up, if we don’t have our voices heard, believe me, they’re not done yet.”

How, Olbermann asks, do protesters and citizens “make the system bend to their will?”
Moore:

I think there needs to be a many-pronged approach. Civil disobedience on Wall Street is one approach, people doing things locally in their communities is another approach, people who are being foreclosed upon need to know that they can’t find the original mortgage, the bank can’t find it, I can tell you that right now, ’cause they split it up, and they bundled it and put it into derivatives, and nobody really owns your mortgage, so you should never leave your house, you should resist this as long as you non-violently can. I think, Keith, here’s the thing, there is so much rebellion that is percolating right now, just under the surface…”

As to the legal murder of Troy Davis, Moore is basically boycotting Georgia and sending proceeds from his books sold there to the Innocence Project and get-out-the-vote drives.

American hero, he is. If you don’t like him, you’re listening to the enslavers.

Let’s assume an ant. He or she is an ant of very average size, a quarter inch long. Let’s assume this is a sort of ant that lives in a house on a plot of land, like one of us. Like me, this ant lives in an average rectangular house about nine times hir own length. A matchbox house. This house sits on what would be half an acre for an ant, a square about two dozen times hir length. That’s about six inches on a side. That’s how much land our very average ant owns. This ant’s doing okay. Many ants have less.
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Sumac Seeds

This has been bugging me for a while, and I finally remembered to look it up… is it Ailanthus or Sumac?

Sumac

Ailanthus

Ailanthus Seeds

Staghorn sumac is a native plant and quite useful. Ailanthus, also called Tree of Heaven, is a nasty invader which is very good at crowding out natives. The invader seems more common than the native now, and they look much alike. In my yard, I have the ailanthus but no sumac.

Staghorn sumac and ailanthus not only have several similar physical characteristics, they tend to grow in similar places. It’s very important to be able to tell the trash (ailanthus) from the treasure (staghorn sumac) when deciding which plants to destroy. While ailanthus and staghorn sumac have many similarities, if you look closely there are also differences.

Anyway: check out the linked page above. If you see sumac, let it be. Ailanthus? Cut it to the ground, and don’t be surprised when it comes right back.

Other invasive plants include Japanese honeysuckle, which I confess I like, privet which I dislike greatly, and the notorious kudzu (which I’ve read is edible.)

By the way, I’m not going for fancy formatting with the pictures here. The HTML has a bit of a mind of its own, and you should have seen some of the messy arrangements I had to tinker with to get this far.

What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

And that is how babies are made.

So President Obama has let John Boehner tell him when he, the President, can give a jobs speech.

You know what? I think I’ll just post this poem again.

Barack Origami

The right-wingers reap his amends;
for them, how he folds! How he bends!
That flexible swami,
Barack Origami!
He gives paper cuts to his friends.

It’s easy to see where it ends;
The billionaires’ club, he defends.
That flaccid salami,
Barack Origami!
He only stands up to his friends.

On wars but not people, he spends;
This paper-doll man who pretends
To love us like mommy:
Barack Origami!
He only says no to his friends.

Progressives he gladly offends;
The Right, why, he courts their back ends!
It’s that one-man army
Barack Origami!
He only shoots straight at his friends.

Some say that he overextends
The olive branch he always sends
To those who’ve gone balmy,
Barack Origami!
And then takes a cane to his friends.

Security’s end, it portends
Is surrender the move he intends?
He sure ain’t no commie,
Barack Origami!
But he’ll take the farm from his friends.

The right-wingers reap his amends;
for them, how he folds! How he bends!
That flexible swami,
Barack Origami!
He gives paper cuts to his friends.

There’s been little talk here at ScruHoo about the News Corp. phone hacking scandal, but we should shine a light on it. In brief, let me quote Carl Bernstein from Newsweek:

“The facts of the case are astonishing in their scope. Thousands of private phone messages hacked, presumably by people affiliated with the Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper, with the violated parties ranging from Prince William and actor Hugh Grant to murder victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The arrest of Andy Coulson, former press chief to Prime Minister David Cameron, for his role in the scandal during his tenure as the paper’s editor. The arrest (for the second time) of Clive Goodman, the paper’s former royals editor. The shocking July 7 announcement that the paper would cease publication three days later, putting hundreds of employees out of work. Murdoch’s bid to acquire full control of cable-news company BSkyB placed in jeopardy. Allegations of bribery, wiretapping, and other forms of lawbreaking—not to mention the charge that emails were deleted by the millions in order to thwart Scotland Yard’s investigation.”

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“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips

NOTE: Comments are off for this post. I don’t know why, and I can’t seem to turn them on. Halp! EDIT: Fixed, thanks to Tom Sullivan.

One of the most difficult yet rewarding books I have ever encountered is Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. It took me about a year and a half to read it… on my second try. There’s no simple way to describe what it’s about; in a nutshell, a computer scientist uses a bag of literary tricks to show us hidden connections between the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s work, the fugues and canons of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the startling logic of Maurits Escher’s wondrous prints, but his real topic is what he calls “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”. GEB is about how complex systems behave: how swarming ants might behave as if they were neurons, for example; how one system of information might encode another; how a clever person might turn a system’s own complexity into an engine of self-destruction…

Yes, there’s a point here about politics. Read More→