Opera Glasses and Popcorn
Lord of the Flies cover designs – the shortlisted pictures – The Guardian will select the winner of a joint competition with publishers Faber to design a new cover for the schools’ edition of Lord of the Flies
The Devil Within by Naomi Bartholomew aged 14 | Photograph Naomi Bartholomew
The cover designs are pretty stunning for teens, 13 – 16.
******
An Opera Glasses and Popcorn view of Politics and the Assembled Multitude...
Marisacat -
- Real independent observations on current events with a particular fondness for the follies of the Big Box Blahgers.
Deflates bloated egos like a champion fencer in a balloon warehouse.
- Alan Smithee
Marisacat -
"...polish on a mud wallow"
- Meteor Blades [May 24 at Mcat]
Marisacat -
"... doyenne of donkle deconstruction"
- Who is IOZ [January 2 2007]
Marisacat -
"... hardened professionals and their primary strength lies in their being completely unconflicted."
"... the primary difference is that on the level of criticizing other blogs and bloggers, they can actually do some damage."
"... Not what I look for in a liberal blog product."
- peeder - MLW, Daily Rant [3.24.07]
Democracy NOW! / Amy Goodman Electronic Intifada / General Content Press TV / Middle East News Press TV McClatchy Headlines The Real News Reuters / Politics
on one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.
If you click on La Louche the picture or the words, it leads to the Amazon PayPage, a way to ... oh let's say help with the cat can deliveries.
Thanks to all who made the very kind suggestion.
Marisacat 
Well, it’s starting to dribble out ….
LAT –
Hmm. So the guy who gets killed is the incumbent supervising investigator in documents fraud and benefits scams. In an office where – quote – “A high-ranking ICE official and his wife, an intelligence analyst, have been indicted and are on trial in federal court on charges of defrauding the government.”
Oh I’d definitely want Dexter to confirm the print patterns on the gun.
I think we can stow away the typical office shooting ideal , yanah, – One guy shoots other guy behind desk, people seeking concealment or Uhm, COVER while returning fire like one is uhm TRAINED to if not – hello – instinctively so upon gunfire.
Get this little modifier –
And this tid , again via the AP –
Sounds like they just murdered the guy.
I can’t remember the details anymore … but just south of SF, hmm San Mateo I think around there.. a few weeks ago, two “customs agents” I think is how they were described had a shoot out… in front of the home of one. The other lay in wait for him…
Supposedly over the wife of one.
But I would assume most ICE Customs agents are bent, crooked, whatever the word is…
I would assume most ICE Customs agents are bent, crooked, whatever the word is…
Oh Definitely. As the wisewoman said
All of the above for 600. 😉
Something is up with the narrative.
I remember few things from the mil, but finding cover was one of them. I must slept through the whole First, get closer to the guy and try and put your finger behind the trigger that McGyver shit, before seeking cover and drawing down. And I would think their issued sidearms are semiauto with slide triggers, by now anyways. The report that the target “eventually” drew a weapon whiffs of stink.
::
Hmmm….Poking around further while scribling now, there is this piece LA Times Looking at the Tip of the ICEbergwritten just a few days before the shootings….
All sorts of dirt written by this guy, Bonzer Wolf. 😯 Who , while quoting from Ayn Rand AND William O Douglas in his blog profile. (Hell, cover everything there, Bonzer!). Anyways,he was FBI, INS, DHS then retired 2008, has been dishing lots of dirt since on his blog…and a week before, shall we say, the L.A. ballistic inter-office controversy… he was contacted by the LAT. Seems like they had been running with a series on ICE …
….he did a stint at DoS in Diplomatic protective details too.
All sorts of stuff on his blog.
poking thru it … the typical swingin dick cop stuff, gun love and career axe grinding too . Quelle Surprise. Still, worth a sift thru.
ooo thank you for that! New link 😯
I vote for MURDER ……
Ohhhhhh….. Cali’s own, [02/17/11, …an Anniversary of sorts, …not that it is not a daily occurrence] …not that it only happens in CALI, …YET, …the Hypocrisy!:
BLUE ™ & Libewal CALI,…. Just Us Enforcement ….
Anniversary Celebration here.
(sorry, I had intended the second link to be:
BLUE ™ & Libewal CALI,…. Just Us Enforcement …. …)
Oh, this story has everything! Pass the popcorn.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romneys-arizona-co-chair-resigns-in-wake-of-explosive-allegations/2012/02/18/gIQArc32LR_blog.html?hpid=z10
Let’s see…Romney…gay lover…immigration…rising GOP star…irresistable use of the term “hard-line on immigration”…
The Post also can’t stop using the term “surging Santorum”, which makes me think of a sewer line break in the Tenderloin or something.
oh I was just catching up to that (gay lover part) myself!
What a hoot!!
BUT is the border now unprotected???!!!!!
Snicker… I’d read the story, that Babeu was suspected of threatening a love interest with deportation… but not the juicy detail…
McCain used him in that awful commercial about getting the “danged” fence built.
Confession. I wasn’t “late” the other night at work.
I went over to DK after that blip on Pat Shroeder, LOL, poking around for that onetime Shroeder-meat-chowderhead Timmy Lange , found him, LOL, pinching off a loaf on Gingrich, ( you know, always check the bathrooms!) Apparently, Newt is a Liar! Meat-Beat also pointing out that the Dems are as reasonably Republican as anyone else, ( verrrry sloooooow on the upbake, that MB, the operative story is Santo and Romney in MI now)
ANYWAYS 😆 upon checking those bathrooms , they had
( hell, I’ll thow em a link) they had a piece up on
GOP Sherrif Rod Dickbone CongressCandy or whatever
They were, predictably, all full-blown Gaydar Alert : On it!
With some skin, too! Oiled even! LOL. Good Luck to All, I say!
I also saw MB r
Sorry for remnant cut and pasties. Mostly pasties!
When I saw Miss Patty’s name surface I did think of MBlades. And glory days in AZ in the 70s.
[or is that GORY days in AZ? Blood in the streets… etc]
one thing the [UK] Daily Mail is always good for is, piccies!
Ride’em [White and Connected UZ Boyo ™,] Cowboy!!!!!
Catching that dirtball of Slob’s on TW, Robert Gibbs… swearing that Slob is not about to undo SS.
Riiight.
Oh I so want a slimeball white boy from Alabama and a fake pentecostal Northern black jerk deciding my life. And a old secret drunk slack-jawed Irish – Biden – and and and and…
and on and on.
No need to disparage the charms of liquor in this! LOL.
That’s troooo
<;0)
It’s always been about making SS so worthless that nobody minds losing it. If they used a real COLA for the thing, rather than CPI; you know, since medical care is a much higher proportion of spending for SS recipients than the general pop; the monthly payout would be three times what it is now; something people could actually live on. So it’s not dying fast enough; let’s just cut the contribution so it dies faster; call it a payroll tax cut – nobody will know the diff and when the trust fund runs out in 2034 instead of 2040, you know, who cares? Plus it keeps the deficit nice and big (cause SS is in the general budget, and now running bigger deficits), so Slob can continue to try and defend us from a crisis he’s complicit in starting. So read his lips (wait, no, you can’t cause he doesn’t have any), they won’t “undo” it. If it bleeds to death in the gutter, however…
oh they have been slitting the throat of SS almost since it existed… it was all planned to be quite different fom how it is managed. As I understand it, the original plans called for consistent eexpansion of SS.
Slob did lot of firsts including first in 30+ years to cut off the small annual “raise”.
Usually when I get the December notice of whatever the new amt is I toss it on the kitchen table and I open it around March. Bush’s last year I almost keeled over… it was just under 6% – which actually DID make a difference.
And its happening in “Pinal County” *snicker*, I would think it was pronounced “Pee-nal” and not “Pie-nal” or “Pin-all”.
Just checking out the county website, I was drawn to the header of the section called “careers”.
http://pinalcountyaz.gov/WhyPinalCounty/
Pinal Co, where the jokes just grow and grow.
The laugh product is endless….
Wherein, I couldn’t help but thinking, ~Oh honey~,
– never marry a man with a tire on his head.
Well, ya know, another CLUE.
But I love stuff like this. the assumptive exclamatory Even her father! how it rolls off the pie-eyed tongue, lingering only for an instant before the right-hook-Pow! launches the pie-eyed with the limited warranty pitch:
a prominent rabbi of the Riminov line!
What a hoot.
But, I’ll cheerfully admit, like any other offer, I read the NY Post for
“All The News That’s Fit To Print” – oh that’s right, that’s the Times~ish outfit, who broke this story today on their FP.
I know! In the New York Times! Known for its Sports coverage!
Practically the goddam source on Ashkenazi Hockey!
Now wading in to current events and International Affairs!
Snicker.. playing in Germany as he is so broadminded.
Course no mention of the ties and links between historically right winger Germans (strangely, esp in Bavaria) and Israelis.
Geesh Get over yourselves. I think he missed the epochal crossroads. We are post x-roads.
The wedding pic in the first story is a hoot.
WhoEVER got the idea; HUGE SQUAT CYLINDER!
COVERED IN FUR! Oh FFS. LOL.
😳 Welllllll. LOL prolly NOT a wedding pic.
Not theirs anyways.
Why I Call Myself a Socialist:
the whole piece is really something … I think you’ll find it interesting.
My only issue with this, really, is that there is no reason that anyone should have to choose between being a “mere” laborer and creativity.
The problem isn’t manual labor. (Playing a violin, after all, is also manual work.) The problem is that 40 hours a week, or anything more than that, in toxic environs for shit wages and no bennies, is murderous. I’d say that about all the desk jockey jobs I’ve had, too. Not just the ones in warehouse/factory settings.
Whatever happened to proposing a shortened “full time” schedule. Oh, right. We threw that out the window about ten minutes into Clinton I’s first term. Overemployment or Unemployment are your choices, you stupid proles. Now shut up and vote and forget having any sort of life not connected to collecting whatever shit wage we feel like letting you have.
[rage]
Creativity is not a fucking designer good to be doled out to a fortunate few. Not in a humane world, anyway. I don’t like to see the Socialists echoing this Capitalist pretense, however unwittingly/unconsciously.
I love you honey.
diane, I regret to report that I was stone cold sober when I wrote it. :p
If you were my neighbor, I would offer you a brew (apologizing for the fact that it isn’t one of the better brews) and a big hug.
I’m so sorry to hear about the carpal tunnel. A while back, I had what I initially thought was carpal tunnel (it was actually ulnar nerve damage (that numbness occurs in the little and ring fingers and that side of the hand)), was afraid to go on disability, as I knew in Sly Con Valley it would pretty much make me near unemployable, so paid for it (out the ass), …still fucking numb ……….
Lastly, in my wee opinion, you nailed it again, for millions in the UZ, with this:
Arnold pretty much gutted Workers’ Comp…. and now employers look upon being ill as being the end of the line… or so I hear. And it wasn’t ever good unless you had a REALLY decent employer, doctor who actually cared (how rare is that?) and so on..
ugh
SO many people at my last firm had CT, and the Firm for some reason was accepting of that, I think because it was so cut and dried. Factory medical care basically. Assembly line surgery, pretty much… Time off for surgery, a few weeks to heal and people came back with pretty angry looking red surgical scars but swore up and down (they all did) that the pain and the problem was gone.
I thought it was all vaguely barbaric…
yup, Barbaric is the word. Oh, and for fucks sake the hand doctor (forgot the technical term) had about fifty people at a time in that office, one to two hour wait, after thousands out of my pocket it feels pretty much the same, likely because out of fear and economic situation, I ‘waited’ way too long ….
It’s always struck me, how at the very end of his term, the Big Dawg signed off on some sort of ergonomics bill (if I’m not mistaken?), …which the Shrubster immediately undid upon inauguration (I think it was even prior to Sharon and Berlusconis’ ‘Crownings’),….not a fuckin whisper from Billy the Dawg, or the Dem’s, that I recollect.
Shrub moved ergonomics out of HHS, Rover managed it from the WW. Which means it stopped existing… not that Bill or his strange wife cared.
I’ve been thinking there are millions and millions of kids who will end up with major hand surgery by the time they’re twenty, …. with a few exceptions:
Computer Free Silicon Valley School, That Doesn’t Compute
(original source ($Firewall$ and/or Cookies required!!! ™ ))
(sorry, corrected: original source link)
Yes but then rich chartered schools which is what I think the Waldorf schools basically are, that adopt what might be called a quixotic system is then USED to deny poor children materials they need. Like access to oomputers.
That si really what I see here, to be frank.
Since I don’t have kids/grandkids, and am not up on what is going on in the public schools enough to comment about that being used to generally deny needed access to computers in non-wealthy schools (though I am aware enough to know that paperless, instantaneously ‘revisable/deletable/prohibitable’ kindle type books, and a thorough loosening, if not decimation of handwriting are being pushed nationally for students who are not from wealthy families), I won’t debate your thought, and I totally agree that all students should have free access to computers.
The thing that I agree with about the article, is that a total emphasis on computers and related gadgetry, all day long, to the exclusion of all else, does: inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
That seems to be, from what I’ve seen, what is being pushed for the masses, and taken over a huge segment of remaining, barely (if that) livable wage employment, eight plus, numbing hours a day at computer. They’ll soon have bots to do all of the now menial paying service jobs, and increasingly non-unionized physical labor.
oh I agree it is all getting increasingly robotic, no question. The public school system now is a set up for failure. Has been for a long time… I think it goes back a ways, to the 60s, the growth of the “adminstrative” slots in education, even before the growth of the outside entities that take all the money and then the monies slotted for “special ed” which has little if any plans to teach anyone.
Masses of children with forced ADD ADHD dx, in some instances medication forced on parents for their children and so on.
I think the whole thing si a hell hole.
The problem is that 40 hours a week, or anything more than that, in toxic environs for shit wages and no bennies, is murderous.
Bingo. In the later 90s I was still working when the law firm I was at went from 35 hours a week to 37.5 … it can be argued it is ”only” a half hour a day, but it made a big difference. Forget moving from 37.5 to 40… Or losting an hour lunch to a half hour lunch etc., and all the other “changes” that are going on…
32 worked very well for me, while it lasted.
But of course it couldn’t last.
I mean, you can’t have people both earning a real wage AND being awake/alert enough on their three days off to become engaged in real life. Well all know how wrong that would be.
When I’m idle now I’m either broke or being eaten alive with stress and fear. When I’m working 40 hrs in Templand I’m frantically throwing money at everyone in sight, and I’m fucking exhausted. (I also just managed to acquire a nasty case of carpal tunnel at the current job, which means reduced time here AND a drawn-out tango with Workers Comp. I want physical therapy and I think the cheap Temp fuckers should pay. Obviously they don’t agree, of course. Let the games begin. 👿 )
I found working 40 hours but just 4 days a week very doable… It does reduce stress, less commuting, less rise and [try to] shine, etc… an extra day to get things done… I think more places should look at that…
ugh carpal tunnel Does the dr think there is enough that can be done thru PT that you can avoid the surgery..???
I doubt surgery would be necessary if I could just get in there NOW, instead of dicking around with the State and the Agency. It’s taken THREE MONTHS just to get to the point where they’ve issued the initial denial, and now I have to appeal the denial. 🙄
The HMO only offers therapy during the hours I work, and there’s no paid time to attend therapy, so I want to go off-system, somewhere that I could get in on weekends or evenings. Just a few sessions would probably help, though I haven’t been able to see an MD yet, just the “Urgent Care” nurse.
You’d think I was asking these cheap assholes at Temp-Mart for a yacht and a closet full of mink coats. Fuck ’em. I’ll appeal until the world really does come to an end or until the State commands me to knock it off. They piss me off that fucking much.
A four-day work week w/10 hours per could be tolerable, depending on the line of work and locale. I bet at the current job, and in my advanced years :p it wouldn’t be so hot, though.
Did they at least give you the simple forearm wrist hand brace? I found that helped a lot in general… esp if it fits right… tho I never was dx with CT… just tired wrist…
Ah, yeah. The brace helped the first couple of weeks, but now the condition is deteriorating again.
It’s more paralysis than pain. Just really disconcerting. The first week, I picked up a water pitcher and didn’t have enough nerve sensation to know that I was really gripping it. Dropped it on the floor, water everywhere. Gah. At least the pitcher was plastic.
I did that schedule for a few years, loved it.
Esp with a not too long commute (which I had, short hop, 20 minute city bus ride) It can be very do-able…
#F20 National Occupy Day In Support of Prisoners: Statement from Formerly Incarcerated People
There is no longer any idea in this country that it is possible, that is all I am saying possible, the possibility of discharging a debt to society and re-intregrating.
That really is over.
I think we are fully moving to as much exclusion and separation as we have ever had in the country… the demarcation lines won’t ncessarily be as easy to read as slave vs free or who may use a water fountain, toilet, train car etc.,… but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.
Gerston who admittedly writes in
Readers Digestoops Politico I mean, but I don’t mind him on legal matters, has a piece up on the assault coming on the Voting Rights Act… building. They’ll make a fight of the reauthorisation that is coming… and whil it is told as conservatives doing it, as always they have willing partners… across the spectrum.agreed, better to keep people powerless, to have them broken up into competing blocs, with a large black hole of being shunned to dump them into in case they don’t get the message.
There is no longer any idea in this country that it is possible, that is all I am saying possible, the possibility of discharging a debt to society and re-intregrating.
Fish rots from the head down. Tail up.
From those cute little fins on the side, too.
Point being; all rot now, this USA! Where War Criminals walk, Kleptocrats create dynasties , a Catholic Rape Cult and its Cultist still afforded any credence whatsoever..where Judges jail children in private prisons they own, where police frame, beat and thrill kill citizens with acquittal being the norm, none of this being the rare exception to the rule…..Where elections are purchased and insured on a daily basis, and where regular people spend far too LITTLE time considering the ethical possibility of doing in some of the well known foregoing miscreants let alone destroying their criminal resources or resisting their wares on offer. Might have set a different tone.
Instead we’ve seen a country of stupid spineless people chest-pound for War and beg for the prison industrial complex that has now come upon their heads. We’ve seen these same imbecility run off halfway houses and transitional living, filled with mostly, in more cases than not, people just like themselves, save the temerity of having crossed if ever so slightly outside the serpentine lines of the “law”.
We’ll never know of course, and picking a point on villiany’s timeline is a mug’s game, but I do think it mattered an awful lot that Nixon didn’t go to jail. And I wonder what would have happened if Kissenger was taken down by a posse. Imagine if Michael Milken got a sentence like Bernie Madoff back then, or in the alternative, any in the long, episodic line Criminal Cops or Bankster wrist slap-ees were simply offed during transfer by an Ain’t-taking-this-Shit crowd.
We have a decidedly hour-glass shape of criminal “justice” in this country. Oh they say all is contained, and of decent measure.
But how odd just looking at it as sands of time, restitution and punishment only flow downward in direction. We let pimps and thugs take the blindfolded lady , scrapped everything along the way, her horizontal scale was the first to go.,
‘a[wo]men’ siiiiiiiiiigggghhhhh, …gaaaaaspppp, …but why …….
Yes I remember Milken literally on cooking shows after his incrceration… one of his ways “back in”, appearing on daytime shows…. early am shows and then in local markets too… with his low cal this or that recipes. And the family gave money big time to hospitals, got their name on wings and what-have-yous…
Complete rebranding. Loads of cute stories, as he whipped egg whites, about toupees… etc.
Thassssssssssssssssss America!!
hmmm, I hope Glenn Greenwald has seen this, and will make short work of it:
Northern Wisconsin Chippewa tribes might use treaties to halt or slow proposed mine
The Republicans are trying really hard to ram this mine through before the recalls …
4 Signs the American Spring May Be Coming to Chicago
and it couldn’t happen any time too soon ……
Oh this is very troubling. Found this code out on the web, see, some kinda plot to take over the International Space Station. Anyways, its out of this clandestine site in England ,
the ‘cross/ then down” encryption and everything.
B B C
R E A
I E N
N R
G
HEY! WE”RE ON TO YA UP THERE, CANADIAN BASTARDS! 😆 😉
They are sending Canadian Geese Death Rays to earth from Space! All commercial air flights be aware!! You too can skid into the Hudson.
New
LINK
………………… 😯
I’m getting a “comments closed” on the new link and can’t post.
oh let me check.. sorry…
should be corrected, leaving a comment on the new thread to test…
gah…