Thursday, November 3, 2011

I’m taking a blog break and will be back with your morning coffee and stories on Tuesday Nov. 8

094Time for me to walk on down the road…

my latest path will take me through the hinterlands of America where I’ll be associating with a lot of 99 %ers!!!

Peace out!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

They said it – Quotes ripped from stories in the headlines today

Students in Shanghai, a booming Chinese city, shocked the world last year when they beat every other country on international exams. After reading the article one commentator (Celtic Curmudgeon) said;

Welcome to the third world, America. By the time the teahadists and GOP get done with dismantling the U.S. educational system, we'll all be living in single-wides watching NASCAR, and wondering what happened.”

Image: Samantha Zucker

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On Oct. 22, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — she was brought back to Harlem. The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute. Zucker summed the experience up;

“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”

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What do you think? Do animals really know right from wrong?

My pug Millie certainly knows when she’s done something wrong. Like Tank (the dog on the left) she cowers and looks at you with her big pleading eyes…

which usually works!

This is an interesting article on the subject and well worth your time to read. Enjoy, it might give you some insights into your pet.

“In a famous YouTube video, Tank the dog sure does look guilty when his owner comes home to find trash scattered everywhere, and the trash can lid incriminatingly stuck on Tank's head. But does the dog really know he misbehaved, or is he just trying to look submissive because his owner is yelling at him?

In another new video from the BBC "Frozen Planet" series, Adelie penguins are seen gathering stones to build their nests. One penguin stealthily steals a stone from his neighbor's nest every time the neighbor goes a-gathering. Does the penguin thief know its covert actions are wrong?”     Read the rest here.

Warlock and witches enlisted in drug wars, City lights could point the way for aliens, and Trump accuses Jon Stewart of being racist

Image: Luis Tomas Marthen Torres, a warlock, performs a ritual of protection on Julisa del Carmen in the town of Catemaco, Veracruz, Mexico.

  Good Morning Humboldt County!

It’s another day in paradise and I’ve got the coffee on. C’mon in and join me for a cup. I’ve selected a trio of stories that’ll get your gray matter going today:

Warlocks, witches enlisted in Mexico drug wars

CATEMACO, Mexico — In the dimly lighted back room of a modest house in this tourist city now largely devoid of tourists, Luis Tomás Marthen Torres, a warlock with 50 years of experience, closes his eyes and chants as he briskly rubs a stark white egg over the arms, chest and neck of a worried customer.

The ritual is old and common here in Mexico’s dominant hub for masters of the occult — where wizardry is passed from generation to generation — but like so many things in Mexico, the requests for help have changed.“People ask us for assistance because they’re scared of threats, of extortion. They’re full of negative energy,” says Mr. Marthen Torres. Visitors to this middle-class town of around 67,000 people, which attributes its mysticism to the region’s ancient Olmec roots, had for decades sought wizards to cast love spells and cure physical ailments.

    City lights could point to E.T.

Astronomers suggest that artificial illumination creates a signature that could point to the existence of civilizations on other worlds — and they say we should get started on a survey of the edges of our own solar system, just in case.The suggestion comes from Harvard's Abraham Loeb and Princeton's Edwin Turner, in a research paper submitted to the journal Astrobiology. A version of the paper appears on the arXiv.org preprint server and sparked a write-up today on Technology Review's Physics arXiv Blog.

Trump accuses Jon Stewart of 'racist rant'

Let's face it, Donald Trump feuding with someone is hardly shocking.

But that doesn't stop the Republican supporter from pointing the finger at somebody when duty calls. So who's the entrepreneur yellin' at now?

Jon Stewart is facing the real estate mogul's wrath after making what Trump calls a "racist rant" about Herman Cain on "The Daily Show."

The comedian commented on the Republican presidential candidate's confusing reply to reports that he faced sexual harassment charges during the 1990s, joking that it was like responding to the question, "Have you ever kidnapped a baby?" with the response, "No. Well, other than the Lindbergh baby."

Time to walk on down the road…

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The Backlash: Propaganda Posters of the 1% …

 

posters via Visual News

Humboldt County Story: dog stays with deceased owner for 8 days

Roxy is a true friend of the Millsap family…

This is a bittersweet story that tells of the untimely death of Humboldt County resident, Corkey Millsap, and how his loyal boxer stayed at his side after the fatal accident for eight days.

When daughter Delana and others found Corkey, who had gone over a 200 ft. cliff in a car off of Hwy. 299, Roxy the boxer was next to the car. She had survived the fatal plunge.

Dangerous baby shampoo & wash, more weather disasters ahead, and if you want to live longer – get happy!

Image: Johnson's Baby Shampoo is pictured on display in a Hong Kong store.

             Good Morning Humboldt County!

It’s a chilly morning and I have a pot of streaming hot coffee on, so c’mon in and grab a cup. I have a few stories to start your day. You might call them the “Good, Bad, and the Ugly!”

Activists call for boycott of Johnson & Johnson over chemicals in baby shampoo

Two chemicals considered harmful to babies remain in Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo sold in the U.S. and some other countries, even though the company already makes versions without them, according to an international coalition of health and environmental groups. Now the coalition is urging consumers to boycott Johnson & Johnson baby products until the company agrees to remove the chemicals from its baby products sold around the world.

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest health care company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals — dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that releImage: A Buddhist monk wades through floodwater on a streat near Sanam Luang square near Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand.ases formaldehyde — from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products.

More weather disasters ahead, climate experts report

Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.

Want to live longer? Get happy, study says

If you’re happy and you know it, maybe you really should clap your hands. That’s because being happy might make you live longer. In a study published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from University College, London found that happy people reduced their risk of premature death by as much 35 percent.

Unlike other “happiness” studies that rely on a participant’s long-term recall of emotional states, the researchers used a technique called Ecological Momentary Assessment, which gives a quick picture of what a person is feeling in real time. In this study, the nearly 4,000 participants, ages 52 to 79, were asked to rate their feelings of happiness or anxiety on a sliding scale four times over the course of one day, beginning when they woke up in the morning. The scientists then followed them for five years, recording the number of deaths during that time.

Time to walk on down the road…

Monday, October 31, 2011

It’s Kinda Scary: Zombies worth over $5 billion to economy

Image: Zombies

Zombies may be the walking undead, but their contribution to Main Street’s economy is very much alive. In modern times, the zombie genre has evolved from a cult following to a highly popular theme. 24/7 Wall St. estimates that today’s zombie genre economy is worth billions of dollars.

Think way beyond zombie movie ticket sales. Think about DVD sales, video games, comic books, novels, Halloween costumes, zombie walks, merchandise, conventions and even zombie art. Add to that all of the websites, homemade movies, Facebook sites, YouTube sites and other forms of “digital” zombies, not to mention music. And if you think the financial tab has been high so far, by the end of 2012 the tab is going to be far larger.

They said it: quotes ripped from today’s news…

What were Steve Jobs final words? His sister said, they were: Oh wow.. Oh wow.. Oh wow..”

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A recording of transmissions between a JetBlue pilot and Bradley International Airport near Hartford, Conn., captured the pilot's frustration at being stuck on the runway during a snowstorm for more than seven hours on Saturday:

"We can't seem to get any help from our own company. I apologize for this, but is there any way you can get a tug and a towbar out here to us and get us towed somewhere to a gate or something? I don't care -- take us anywhere."

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 Image: Michael Ciron is rescued from an 8-foot hole in front of his Oceanside, N.Y. home.An 80-year-old man who went to retrieve the morning papers on his lawn sank into an 8-foot hole on New York's Long Island.  Michael Ciron joked that throughout the ordeal,

"I held on to the papers."

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Tony La Russa retired as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals on Monday, three days after winning a dramatic, seven-game World Series against the Texas Rangers.

"I think this just feels like it's time to end it," the 67-year-old La Russa said at a news conference at Busch Stadium.

Happy Halloween: Beware of costumed pugs prowling the night!

   Good Moring Humboldt County!

 Welcome to my special Pug Halloween post. Grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair, I’ve got some entertaining little monsters to start your day:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time to walk on down the road…

Sunday, October 30, 2011

As It Stands: Next Stop Africa: American Imperialism on the March

UPDATE BELOW – Monday 10/31 americon                                                                
“The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.”    

--John T. Flynn, conservative American writer, 1944

                                                     By Dave Stancliff/For The Times-Standard
   I once thought only Communists used the word imperialism when referring to American politics. As a Vietnam veteran against the war when I came home in 1971, I was in solidarity with those protesting against it.
  Still, some slogans like “Imperialistic Pigs” or “Imperialistic Puppets” vaguely troubled me. I didn’t like that word for some reason. It made me uneasy.

  Of course I really didn’t understand it’s full meaning and admittedly didn’t go out of my way to find it out. Instead, I  went with a knee-jerk reaction and put the word in my Commie file. After all, back in those days Commies used the word in scathing verbal attacks against America.
   In fact imperialism is defined as extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.
   It’s been a long and painful road since the Soviets were our mortal enemy. Along the way America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of national security. Ours. We extended our military presence in the world to 126 countries under the guise of protecting democracy.
   President Obama announced the majority of our troops will be out of Iraq by January 2012, but what about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan?
   More alarming, Obama and his corral of Chicken Hawks recently announced the invasion of a new frontier. They sent 157 Green Berets to Uganda as military advisors in what is being described as the first phase of a military operation that will spread to other nearby African states.

  The Pentagon’s questionable reasoning for this mission is based upon lies designed to hide our capitalistic goals – there’s oil in Libya – and other African states have natural resources we can plunder.
   We’re going in – wearing White Hats and all – to save Uganda from some roving gang of thugs that’s supposedly terrifying all the good people in southern Africa. An earlier generation of Chicken Hawks in Washington said the same thing about Vietnam.

  The warmongers are ready to rip Africa apart, like the vultures they are, in order to keep the industrial complex rolling. Africa screams…but no one hears. The ghosts of thousands of American troops who have died in dirty little imperialistic wars/actions since Vietnam must be restless.
   As long as we have influential Chicken Hawks lobbying for wars and military actions, they’ll continue. Military ambitions will run rampant as long as obscene profits - made on the back of the American taxpayer - can be made. All under the guise of democracy and national security.
   Capitalism became patriotism as politicians persuaded the public that America needed a worldwide military presence. The lies flowed with the cash. Business as usual.
  Our government has created a system of proxy rule, by way of client states and dependent regimes. Few dare call it imperialism. Indeed, the most militant defenders of the policy greatly resent the term. They call it leftist propaganda.
  My sentiments are the same as Mark Twain’s were back on Oct. 15th, 1900, when he wrote the following for the New York Herald:

   I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
    Here we are over 100 years later, still putting our talons into other countries. That’s very discouraging. As much as I love America, I’m ashamed that we act like a superpower with no soul.
   As It Stands, I watch Americans protesting the economy daily now, and I find myself hoping that this growing movement of outrage will add demands to pull our troops out of every country we now occupy.

EDITOR’s NOTE:

I seldom comment on emails I get in response to my columns, but felt compelled to thank all the people who filled up my mail room (in the last 24 hours) with feedback on this column! Wow! It appears I struck a nerve. The thing that really surprises me is it was ALL positive feedback. That’s almost scary this Halloween!!!  

It's Time to Pay Up Donnie!

It's looks like there will be some prime real estate going on the market soon in New York City. Convicted rapist and former president ...