Whiskey Fire

Wednesday Pics on Cacapon

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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Don' Throw Me inna That Al-Qaeda Patch

It appears that the last big thing Bin Laden did before he got shot was to release a video where he warned Americans about how Goldman Sachs controls the SEC.

Appearing thin and with a very black beard, bin Laden says major corporations -- the "undeclared kings" of America -- ignite wars on purpose for profit and wield the power over elected officials.

"And it seems that the path to stop the hegemony of capitalism is to carry out a real radical change that will help you liberate -- not to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein -- but to liberate the White House so that Barack Hussein will be liberated and with him, everyone else from the hegemony of these corporations.," he says in the approximately six-minute address. "Peace be upon those who head the advice."

This strikes me as savvy. Bait the wingnuts!

Bin Laden wanted to destroy America, remember.

(Sorry, begging, but) It's All Fun and Games...

... until somebody loses a gym.

I lost my gym to a flood! That's just weird...

What a mess. Below is a picture of one of our shopping centers the day after the rain. You can almost see the roofs of some cars!

We live high atop Liberal Mountain, of course, so we didn't get flooded. But our power didn't come on again until earlier this evening -- almost two minutes after we got our new generator started. 

Anyway, MollyI&I can't bitch. Well, we can and do, but we shouldn't. There are lots of people in our little corner of the world who have lost their homes and their jobs, and we still have both. I go to our Y to work out and to go swimming with my kids. Other people go there to work and put food on their families.

Ah fuck. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm trying to guilt you into sending some money to help some of our local flood victims. I gave out the Red Cross link a few days ago, and that's cool. But  speaking frankly, there are folks involved in local efforts like the ones described here who just need crap like canned goods, contractor garbage bags, shovels, wheelbarrows, gasoline, baby wipes, formula, socks, shoes, underpants... can you imagine if you had to run out of your house or apartment in a hurry and had no clean underpants?

It's really bad here. If you like Whiskey Fire and you at all can, please hit the Tip Jar link on the left sidebar. If you can't, it's cool. These are hard times for everyone, and you don't need a flood to go underwater nowadays.

But if you can, put "flood" somewhere in the donation message. I'll email you to say I got it. And I'll contact you again to tell you how MollyI&I spent your dough. I'll also say so here.

So please. This is my place, where my family dwells. And it's been hit hard. Thanks much, even just for thoughts.

Anyway, we're back, now. "Normal blogging" to resume etc.

 

Cacapon Mountain Hike

Sunday was a good day for hiking up Cacapon Mountain. So I did.

Scenery:

Critters: (The Tawny Emperor picture didn't come out sharp, but that's the only one I've ever gotten, so here it is. And theirs didn't come out so great, either.)

Toadstools:

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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ALL I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT 9/11, THE DAY, COMMEMORATED

Fuck.

Among the Deepening Shades

So Paul Krugman volunteered for duty as the Two-Minutes'-Hate pinata, without which a 9/11 10-Year-Commemoration would have just seemed incomplete.

Glenn Reynolds wins some sort of prize, here, saying of Krugman as regards to Obama, "Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay.... You’ll see more and worse from Krugman and his ilk as the left nationally undergoes the kind of crackup it’s already experiencing in Wisconsin. They thought Barack Obama was going to bring back the glory days of liberal hegemony in politics."

Right.

Gosh, it is almost as if Reynolds is cheering on some sort of preposterous cartoon storyline about how the Right is good and Knows Everything and how the Left are jerks who Hate America.

He's also linking idiot Althouse commenters, who believe that it is the fault of "Krugman and his ilk" that only loons think the Iraq was dumb, and that "The double dip" was "caused mostly by the One listening to Krugman and his ilk."

Which is some darn good gibberish.

Yes, Glenn Reynolds is that stupid, but the wider point is that he is well paid to be that stupid, and to give aid and comfort to our nation's idiots, well represented by Althouse's comments section, which is worse than Al Qaeda, on the douchebag scale, anyhow.

Oh Well Then

The Economist describes a case of scientific misconduct on the part of Duke University medical researchers who made unsupportable claims about predicting optimal chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients.

This, of course, is indisputable evidence that climate change is a hoax.

Just passing thal along...

A Nice Day For Golf

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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To Pounce upon Command

MollyI & I live in a place that's just gotten walloped by a natural disaster. We're OK; we live high atop Liberal Mountain, and so are secure from flooding. Our power company, however, in its wisdom, built our substation in a flood plain, so we are out of power, as we always are after bad weather. This time the rumor is that the substation actually exploded, so hopefully whenever the damn thing is rebuilt, it will be rebuilt on a fucking hill. But I don't think our house will have power until the end of next week. Which sucks fetid Trent Lott balls, but there are people far worse off than us -- we still have a house! Help folks out here.

The ban on normal-person travel was lifted in our environs at 2 this PM. We split right about then, heading to my brother's house in Bayside, NYC, where I'm currently using his Internets to say "fuck."

We were planning to see family in NYC this weekend anyhow. My cousin D, a public school phys ed teacher on Long Island, was hit out of nowhere with a cancer diagnosis earlier this summer. He is, I report with relief, doing as well as you might expect, namely shitty, yet breathing. He won't be working this year, because he can't, but he has a family and kids. His colleagues donated sick days to keep his family OK for a year. His friends are holding a fundraiser for him tomorrow at a bar on Long Island. Hopefully the proceeds will keep his wife and children provided for until he is back on his feet. If you have anything to contribute towards his situation, hit up the Donate button on my left sidebar, and I will send it on.

As I was driving south today, with all my kids, I was of course grouchy. I can't go to work, my kids can't go to school, the boys' soccer league may be done for the season because the field may never dry out because it's next to the river, I can't take a shower and I stink, etc.

And then I tune to 1010 WINS as I approach the city to hear traffic reports, and I'm reminded that the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 is approaching.

My mom was, among other things, a mental health social worker. During 9/11 itself she was fulfilling a lifelong dream of visiting Manchu Pichu. But for every anniversary afterwards she volunteered for the Red Cross and accompanied victims' families to the remembrance services. I have one cousin who was working in the towers as they hit; she escaped. I have another cousin who would have died in 9/11 as a firefighter if he had not swapped shifts with a friend for that day. I think he's survived, mostly.

Floods, cancer, 9/11. My family's still pretty OK, though. Happy to be American! And fucking proud as hell to work for the American government, or in the American system. Teachers, perfessers, firefighters, cops, Marines, soldiers, IT guys, lawyers, bankers, architects, chefs, moms, dads... America has been great to our sprawling Irish/etc. crowd, and in return we have served America as best we could with whatever gifts we had.

Well, America may keep faith, for all that is done and said.

But I fucking doubt it.

MAS. James Taranto, no shit:

Dionne has his own ideological reasons for promoting complacency about the threat of Islamist terrorism. He disapproves of the "vaguely defined 'war on terrorism' " because he regards it as a "detour" from what's really important: "American strength always depends first on our strength at home--on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements."

That is, on an ever-expanding welfare and regulatory state, paid for by high taxes (Dionne complains that "we asked for great sacrifice over the past decade from the very small portion of our population who wear the country's uniform," a liberal dog whistle for tax hikes) and scrimping on defense. To justify the latter, it is necessary to minimize the threat.

Liberals are crazed totalitarians who want to endlessly cite 9/11 in order to scrutinize credit default swaps and threaten the free housing market, or else acknowledge climate change, while conservatives want to defend small-government freedom by pointlessly pumping taxpayer money into the defense budget, launching stupid wars, installing an unaccountable national surveillance regime, and gutting habeas corpus. Oh and fuck the gays! And also too, torture. FUCKING TORTURE.

As above:

But I fucking doubt it.

Weather Talk

On the one hand:

On the other:

P.S. There were a couple of responses to Thers' Megan McArdle climate change post I'd like to highlight: one from fish and one from DKW.

Update: More video, and mystery moth identified.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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