Ugly and Swearing

California's top court overturns gay marriage ban

By LISA LEFF
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In a monumental victory for the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation's biggest state to tie the knot.

Domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage, the justices ruled 4-3 in striking down the ban.

Outside the courthouse, gay marriage supporters cried and cheered as the news spread.

--Associated Press

"It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy — to pressure countries like Iran and Syria."
--Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

The idea that oil companies are somehow 'to blame' for record oil prices and rising fuel costs is seductive but absurd. For all their power and profits, the international oil companies are in fact in trouble. They may still be swimming in cash, but no longer in oil. Despite vast investment in exploration and production, these days they generally fail to replace the oil they produce each year with fresh discoveries, or even to maintain current levels of output. Shell's oil production has been falling for six years, BP's seems to have peaked 2005, and this week even the mighty Exxon was forced to admit its output dropped 10% in the first quarter of the year.

None of this should come as a surprise since all the evidence now suggests the world is rapidly approaching "peak oil", the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline for fundamental geological reasons. Annual discovery of oil has been falling for over forty years, and now for every barrel we find we consume three. Oil production is already shrinking in 60 of the world's 98 oil producing countries – including Britain, where output peaked in 1999 and has already plunged by more than half. When an individual country peaks it only matters for that country – Britain became a net importer of oil in 2006 – but when global supply starts to shrink the effects could be ruinous for everybody.

--http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/03/do0311.xml

In June 2006, oil traded in futures markets at some $60 a barrel and the Senate investigation estimated that some $25 of that was due to pure financial speculation. One analyst estimated in August 2005 that US oil inventory levels suggested WTI crude prices should be around $25 a barrel, and not $60.

That would mean today that at least $50 to $60 or more of today’s $115 a barrel price is due to pure hedge fund and financial institution speculation. However, given the unchanged equilibrium in global oil supply and demand over recent months amid the explosive rise in oil futures prices traded on Nymex and ICE exchanges in New York and London it is more likely that as much as 60% of the today oil price is pure speculation. No one knows officially except the tiny handful of energy trading banks in New York and London and they certainly aren’t talking.

--http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878

Press Release Source: Mervyn's LLC

Mervyns Mother's Day Sweepstakes Offers to Pay Mom's Bills
Tuesday April 29, 1:58 pm ET

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mervyns, a family-friendly department store, announces the We’ll Pay Your Bills sweepstakes to give moms something they can really use this Mother’s Day – financial relief!

Mervyns will offer a chance to win one of the following prizes, which have a total value of more than $30,000:

* Grand prize: Three winners will receive free mortgage or rent for one month
* First prize: Ten winners will receive free utilities for one month
* Second prize: More than one-hundred-fifty winners will receive a $100 gasoline gift card

“Moms have one of the most important jobs in the world, and it usually doesn’t come with a paycheck,” said Susan Mesec, Mervyns senior vice president of marketing. “So to recognize their efforts, Mervyns created the We’ll Pay Your Bills sweepstakes to make this Mother’s Day memorable and ultimately help lighten the financial load for nearly 200 families.”

The promotion is valid April 27 - May 11, 2008. Entry forms will be in Mervyns stores. No purchase is necessary to enter. Winners will be selected on or about May 23, 2008 in a random drawing from eligible entries.

To clarify, you're not affected by the DTV transition if you have one of the following:

* A TV with a digital tuner
* A digital-to-analog converter box
* A cable or satellite TV subscription that's not connected straight to your TV set

The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.
--Thomas Jefferson

Devo - Gut Feeling / Slap Your Mammy

Something about the way you taste
Makes me want to clear my throat
There's a message to your movements
That really gets my goat
I looked for sniffy linings
But you're rotten to the core
I've had just about all I can take
You know I can't take it no more
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling, feeling
Centered 'round long time ago
On your ability to torment
Then you took your tongs of love
And stripped away my garment
I looked for sniffy linings
But you're rotten to the core
I've had just about all I can take
You know I can't take it no more
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling, feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut WAAAAHOOHOOHOO!!!
WAAAOOOOWWW!!!
Slap your mammy down
Slap your pappy down again
(Oh move it up and down now)
(Oh move it all around now)

But he said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.

"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record," Aftergood said.

"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.

--http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/pl_afp/usvietnamintelligence512

Disowned by the Ownership Society

Naomi Klein

Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.

So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.

As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.

Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.

Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.

Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.

The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?

--The Nation

     The following note is not an apology of suicide — it is the simple and sober description of a spiritual situation.
     The more lucid and overwhelming one’s belief in Providence, the greater the temptation to get it over with, this business of life, but the greater too one’s fear of the terrible sin implicit in self-destruction. Let us first consider the temptation. As more thoroughly discussed elsewhere in this commentary, a serious conception of any form of afterlife inevitably and necessarily presupposes some degree of belief in Providence; and, conversely, deep Christian faith presupposes some belief in some sort of spiritual survival. The vision of that survival need not be a rational one, i.e., need not present the precise features of personal fancies or the general atmosphere of a subtropical Oriental park. In fact, a good Zemblan Christian is taught that true faith is not there to supply pictures or maps, but that it should quietly content itself with a warm haze of pleasurable anticipation. To take a homely example: little Christopher's family is about to migrate to a distant colony where his father has been assigned to a lifetime post. Little Christopher, a frail lad of nine or ten, relies completely (so completely, in fact, as to blot out the very awareness of this reliance) on his elders' arranging all the details of departure, passage and arrival. He cannot imagine, nor does he try to imagine, the particular aspects of the new place awaiting him but he is dimly and comfortably convinced that it will be even better than his homestead, with the big oak, and the mountain, and his pony, and the park, and the stable, and Grimm, the old groom, who has a way of fondling him whenever nobody is around.
     Something of this simple trust we too should have. With this divine mist of utter dependence permeating one’s being, no wonder one is tempted, no wonder one weighs on one’s palm with a dreamy smile the compact firearm in its case of suede leather hardly bigger than a castlegate key or a boy’s seamed purse, no wonder one peers over the parapet into an inviting abyss.
     I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one’s body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman’s promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently — not fall, not jump — but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off — farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth’s green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body’s obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one’s eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one’s liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one’s temporary personality.
     When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all eternity?
     So what can stop one from effecting the transition? What can help us to resist the intolerable temptation? What can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in God?
     We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
--from Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

"If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation — at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen — sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of manmade emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. Conversely, healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon.

"The stakes are so dire that if we don't start turning this around in the next 10 years, the extinction crisis and the climate crisis will begin to spiral out of control," said Roman Paul Czebiniak, a forest expert with Greenpeace International. "It's a very big deal."

--Associated Press, the rest of it

Why the fuck is it so complicated just to exist these days?

Because plastic is dumb. Everybody freaking out about the stock bullshit lately, bitching "I LOST ALL THIS EQUITY!!!" and I think "you didn't have it 5 years ago, however did you survive then?" I mean, I don't even like having a cell phone, the day I get myself around a good system of public transportation I sell the car and buy a Jeep to use only when absolutely necessary because the kids need more cat ear medicine, and hopefully I'll be living in a place where the roads aren't so much "roads" as they are "long stretches of inhumanity where nobody goes" because I'll reside in a land where only those who want MORE from life (more books, frequent sex, and better whisky) can, will, and do get by. Jesus piss.

FYI: this here Ulver tribute is really god damn good. Lots of atmospheric stuff on the second disc, and what is nice about this tribute is that it is more interpretive than most cover songs, which for a group like Ulver, should be expected. It's no longer available on that website (bandwidth reasons), so it is being uploaded right now. At the very least that way I can download to my home computer tonight. :)

This free album is way better than the free Radiohead, although I can think of a lot of things much better than said album. Case in point, the peanut butter and jelly sammitch I ate about an hour ago. Not that In Rainbows is bad, it certainly isn't, but to all the major league critics lauding it as something amazingly fresh, awesome, and new, come on! There's absolutely nothing about it that hasn't already been done before, and better, oftentimes by the same fucking group no less. Even Pitchfuck gave it a 9.3, I didn't think they gave ratings higher than 7.0 to anything shy of curing various forms of cancer while lowering worldwide gas prices via glockenspiel. I've listened to it about 40 times now, and it is perfectly good music, but there is absolutely nothing revolutionary about it. I guess Radiohead has become one of those "everyone loves them because everyone loves them" bands. What do I know about diamonds?

"If somebody has their wealth in dollars and they are going to buy consumer goods with dollars like a typical American, then the decline of the dollar, the only effect it has is it makes imported goods more expensive," says the dickface in charge of everyone's wallets.

--You Tube video of Berfuckne getting owned but too stupid to realize it

There is something quite alarming on the recently released “Blue Magic” music video.

The song, by the wildly successful rap artist and businessman Jay-Z, is on an album of songs accompanying/inspired by the Ridley Scott movie “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.

But it wasn’t sex, drugs, violence or explicit language that shocked my conscience.

It was the Euros.

The Jay-Z video flashed large stacks of €500 Euros.

When I start seeing rap stars flashing euros instead of U.S. dollars, I know our economy is in trouble.

--http://www.chaskaherald.com/node/3010

Gisele Bundchen wants to remain the world's richest model and is insisting that she be paid in almost any currency but the U.S. dollar.

Like billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Bill Gross, the Brazilian supermodel, who Forbes magazine says earns more than anyone in her industry, is at the top of a growing list of rich people who have concluded that the currency can only depreciate because Americans led by President George W. Bush are living beyond their means.

--http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCs.keWwNdiY