A Message To Obama And The Politicians About The Oil Spill In The Gulf Of Mexico May 27, 2010

You and your people are behaving like blind fools. Instead of doing what’s right for the most important matter, the environment and the climate, you give away our money to banks and rich people, and you diddle and dawdle while the Gulf Coast is destroyed by a company and an industry that the Federal government and the politicians, yourself included, are far too cozy with.

The earth, the environment, the global climate cannot be bargained with, cannot be compromised with, cannot be treated politically. The natural world does not care. It does not bargain. It does not sit down at fancy tables and agree to compromises. You allowed BP to lie for its permits, and now the Louisiana marshes, at the very least, are destroyed. You are allowing Shell to conduct exploratory drilling in one of the harshest environments on earth, one that, should an ‘accident’ happen, Shell and all the government’s men will not be able to fix. You allow ignorant, stupid men like Senator James Inhofe to promulgate lies and deceit in the service of his oil paymasters, and the entire earth suffers.

What is happening on earth now, in large part due to the United States using too many resources too wastefully and failing to provide solid leadership to the world by action and example, is nothing less than a matter of national security, and should be treated as such. The country, indeed the world, needs the modern day equivalent of a Manhattan Project operating under a powerful national security mandate. The Inhofes must be quelled, not compromised with, not listened to, but quelled by whatever means necessary. The oil companies must be dragged under the heel of the government, and the people must be forced into sacrifice and into the process of fighting global warming and fighting the culture that brought us the Deep Horizon catastrophe.

Human civilization depends on it. Our lives depend on it. Failing to meet this challenge, and meet it hard and head-on, guarantees that your grandchildren will, if born at all, be born into a dying world of misery and pain and suffering.

Failure to act, failure to take seriously the ongoing catastrophe of global warming and the continued use of fossil fuels, will make you and the crop of strutting, ego-driven politicians in Washington and the other capitols of the world the object of the last curses of the last dying humans on the planet.

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Technorati Tags: Obama, Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico, Corruption, Politics, Greed, Environment, Global Warming

Top Kill Fails? Junk Shot Next BP Failure? May 27, 2010

9:00 p.m. Thursday

MSNBC a short time ago on the Olbermann show reported that BP had ‘paused’ the top kill procedure for several hours in order to, according to BP, ‘assess’ the situation. They then restarted the procedure, and began talking about doing the junk shot process.

Not being an engineer, The Lion can’t comment on the science and engineering, but putting some pieces together suggests the top kill has failed.

In order to keep the pressure on the oil rising under pressure, BP would have had to keep continuous counter-pressure. Stopping the counter-pressure would seem to be counterproductive, in fact allowing the oil  pressure to push more crude up the pipe into the Gulf of Mexico.

Also, the video shows the drilling mud pouring from the equipment through what appear to be leaks, again a situation that must weaken  the counter-pressure. You can’t pressurize a system that leaks.

If you can’t pressurize the system sufficiently, you can’t keep the oil out of the Gulf.

The Lion suggests that the top kill process has failed, and predicts that the ‘junk shot’ will also fail.

The Lion further suggests that given the size of the flow, the Gulf cannot wait the three months for the relief wells to be drilled, leaving the final desperate move of exploding high-yield explosives at the well in an attempt to shut down the flow. The Lion suspects that before too long the government will detonate a nuclear device at the well, and that may likely be the least damaging option.

Louisiana’s marshes are dead and won’t recover for decades. The nurseries of sea life are dead. The nurseries of bird life are now death traps. In due time people will begin to sicken and many will die.

If a hurricane of any power forms or enters the Gulf, as is likely, the carnage will likely be more massive than we can even imagine now.

BP, already having demonstrated criminal negligence and corruption, should be destroyed and its executives jailed and made destitute. Every penny they own or have hidden should be taken from them, their homes and land taken from them, and they should spend the rest of  their lives cleaning the beaches and working in the marshes of Louisiana. The same should happen to anyone from Halliburton and Transocean who share responsibility for this catastrophe.

The corporate takeover and destruction of America must stop, and it must stop here and now, and the corporate criminals must pay, as must the politicians who take their money and do their bidding.

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Technorati Tags: BP, Oil Spill, Louisiana, Top Kill, Junk Shot, Gulf of Mexico, Transocean, Halliburton, Environment, Politics, Economy

Quick Hits… May 24, 2010

NASCAR aptness…

Considering the amount of advertising plastered on the cars and on the drivers’ uniforms, this Globe photo strikes The Lion as particularly apropos.

Church 500 years behind the times, as usual…

Five hundred years after the Catholic Church ordered Nicolaus Copernicus buried as a heretic in an unmarked grave, the Church finally dug him up and buried him properly.

His heresy? Doing science that suggested that the stupid, dirty old men running the Vatican weren’t the center of the universe after all.

‘Lost’ is finally lost after six years…

The Lion just doesn’t care.

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Technorati Tags: Lost, NASCAR, Catholic Church, Charlotte, Copernicus, Lost Finale, Quickies, Religion, Science, Entertainment, Television, Poland, Vatican, Dirty Old Men

Oh Those Halcyon Days Of Yore Eddication… Your Education… May 23, 2010

Here’s an interesting letter from today’s Globe:

SCOT LEHIGH’S May 14 op-ed “We need it, but who’ll pay for a longer school day?’’ made me wonder: What was his reaction when he was in fifth grade and the bell rang at the end of the day? Was it, “Gee, I wish I could stay here another two hours?’’ Probably he was like most of us. We couldn’t wait for the doors to open.

Many adults tend to romanticize their school days, confusing schooling with learning. Social philosopher Ivan Illich attributed this phenomenon to what he called the “hidden curriculum of schooling.’’ More than any subject matter, more than the content of what is taught, schools teach above all else the necessity of schools. They instill the belief that only in school does real learning take place.

This causes many to have an inflated sense of the benefit and effectiveness of schooling. They think that more school means more learning. The opposite, however, is true. At a certain point, prolonged schooling becomes counterproductive, actually hindering and stifling initiative, creativity, curiosity, and the joy of learning.

How many students today read a book that’s not on a required list? We need less school, not more.

The Lion thinks the writer has it a bit backwards. We need more schooling, but it should be schooling that creates and rewards initiative, creativity, curiosity, and the sheer joy of learning. Education should be messy and sloppy and brimming with the noise of young brains plunging into all kinds of stuff.

That sort of educative atmosphere is not possible when education is focused on passing massive tests like the Massachusetts MCAS. Talk about stifling initiative, creativity, and so on. It’s hard to think of a better way to create dumber students who have absolutely no interest in learning than to subject them to a test-oriented educational regime, a one size fits all mindscrew reminiscent of the Iron Maiden of medieval torture chambers.

We should be promoting schooling that kids eagerly want to go to in the morning and don’t want to leave in the afternoon. Instead we do the opposite, and not for any significant educational reason, but just to make life easier for the bean counters in the various bureaucracies, bean counters who don’t care for the messy matter that results from recognizing that children are exciting and excitable individuals, not statistics to be squeezed like toothpaste into tests and forms that produce nice clean numbers for the learning disabled education bureaucracies in the states and in Washington.

Full disclosure: The Lion is sixty-five years old (sixty five and a half actually) and for the past few years has been struggling to learn classical Greek, formal and informal logic, philosophy, some Latin and Italian, math and geometry and physics, and keep up with politics and social mores and this, that and the other. It’s a struggle, and The Lion is doing it alone, not to pass a test, not to get a reward or a job, but just because the struggle is interesting and fun, because learning is a marvelous thing in itself. The Lion would be the last to claim that he is any good at any of these endeavors, or even particularly successful, but he will claim that heaving his old brain at them has been worth the travail and the frustration. It’s fun. There’s really no other way to describe it (other than challenging and often frustrating to a no-longer-young-and-quick brain). But The Lion seriously doubts he would feel this way if he had spent his entire early education being pounded into an MCAS hole to satisfy a bureaucracy’s need to turn his education into a number that fits neatly into its spreadsheets.

So by all means, let’s have more schooling, let’s have messier schooling, indeed, let’s have smarter schooling.

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Technorati Tags: Education, MCAS, Massachusetts

More Mark Williams Gobs Of Bigot Hate Puke May 20, 2010

TPM has a brief retrospective of Mr. Williams’ delightful soul vomit. Get the full flavor of evil right from the man’s own lips. Or keyboard. Whatever. In a rational world society would send him to a cell in a thorazine factory where he could Tea Party for the rest of his life.

A sample of Mr. Williams’ intelligent commentary:

[R]epeat after me: Islam is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings or even desirable mammals for that matter.

‘Scuse me, I’ve gone to look for America. Not finding it lately, just finding lame sickos like Williams and Beck and Limbaugh and the ignoramuses of the Tea Party and the paranoid anti-American fools comprising the Republican Party.

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Technorati Tags: Mark Williams, Racism, Bigotry, Talking Points Memo, Politics

The Rand Paul Boogey May 20, 2010

Last night ophthalmologist Rand Paul of Kentucky, the newly anointed Republican candidate for Kentucky Senator, went on the Rachel Maddow show and demonstrated his new dance steps.

Ms. Maddow had a simple question for him, based on his previous comments and expressed beliefs. She wanted to know if Mr. Paul would allow private businesses to discriminate against people by refusing to serve classes of people the owners didn’t care for, for example, blacks, gays, or Latinos.

Mr. Paul refused to answer the question. Not outright, of course: that would have been too honest and too principled. Nope, this fellow, this doctor who presents himself as a principled and honest man in contrast to the evil politicians of Washington, danced around the question like a bug on a hot skillet for almost twenty minutes. He claimed he favors banning racial discrimination in government institutions and federally funded institutions, but that’s about as far as he’ll go.

He tried talking about anything else, including the second amendment and the first amendment, and he finished up by attacking Maddow for asking the question. His obfuscations and distractions are just amazing to watch. And Maddow persisted, refusing to let him off the hook the way most media people would. She’s a gem.

If you’re not yelling at the video after a couple of minutes you’re not getting the point.

While he loudly proclaims he finds racism vile, he would, if we can take his refusal to answer the central question as indicative of his true views, allow discrimination in any privately held business that serves the public. He would return the country to the era of Jim Crow and segregation, the age of water fountains, bathrooms, and lunch counters for ‘Coloreds’ and ‘Whites’.

Mr. Paul holds other views that appear to be to the far right of the far right, but his views on the matter of race mark him unequivocally as a racist who would enshrine racism in the law and politics of the United States.

And he possesses the most boringly annoying manner of speaking! Fingernails on a chalkboard, anyone? Not that that’s important, but really, his voice just cries out to have a dirty sock stuffed in his mouth.

Mr. Paul’s celebration speech Tuesday night started out with him saying his Tea Party had a message for America. He said he and his ilk were going to take America back.

Given his performance on Maddow last night one can fairly assume he meant take it back from the mulatto in the White House. (Genteel Kentucky Tea Partiers probably don’t say ‘nigger’ out loud.)

So let’s hear it for Rand Paul as he does the get-down racist boogey! Yowsah!

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Technorati Tags: Rand Paul, Kentucky, Politics, Racism, Public Accommodation

Mark Williams Post Revived… May 20, 2010

The Lion wouldn’t want to guess the reason that Mr. Williams blocked his vile Friday post from public view, but he has. Fortunately, it still exists in cyberspace, and here it is, in full, unedited.

 

Savage Islam wants Mosque at Ground Zero – monument to hijackers, 9/11 a “positive” thing

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Click here to get your copy of Mark Williams’ book “Taking Back America One Tea Party at a Time”  in which you will find an entire chapter on the savage 7th century death cult called “Islam” and the threat that it presents to civilized Man

UPDATE:  The Ground Zero monument to the 911 Muslim Hijackers is now scheduled to open on 9.11.11

UPDATE:   They can be housebroken.  That story follows earlier article below

The animals of allah for whom any day is a great day for a massacre are drooling over the positive response that they are getting from New York City officials over a proposal to build a 13 story monument to the 9/11  Muslims who hijacked those 4 airliners.

The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god (repeat: “the terrorists’ monkey-god.”  if you feel that fits a description of Allah then that is your own deep-seated emotional baggage) and a “cultural center”  to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult.   It is a project of American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative,  essentially the same group of apologists (but under 2 different names) for terrorists and the animals who use it as a terrorist ideology.   They cloak their evil with new age gibberish that suggests Islam is just misunderstood.

“The time for a center like this has come because Islam is an American religion,” Daisy Khan, executive director of the Muslim society, told CNN. “We need to take the 9/11 tragedy and turn it into something very positive.”

The longest, most heavily researched and footnoted chapter in my book is about the fruit baskets and nut wads that gravitate to Islam and why it attracts such  mental cases (Daisy for example apparently suffered a severe head injury early in life).

On the other hand, Abdul Rauf is the guy behind both of the organizations and in the wake of 9/11 defended Islam and attacked the entire Western world for “causing” the 9/11 attacks.

“The US and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.   New York-based Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf speaking from his New York mosque, Imam Feisal said the West had to understand the terrorists’ point of view.

Imam Feisal said it was Christians who started mass attacks on civilians.”

An evil shadow falls over lower Manhattan

Follow the fight to stop the shrine to savages at this link

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Satan’s Spawn

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UPDATE:  May 17

Miss Muslim USA, stripper Rima Fakih

Meet the new  Miss Muslim USA Rima Fakih.  In the photo above she is a participant in a stripping contest held by a Detroit T & A radio show.  Last night she won the nod for Miss. USA when Miss. Oklahoma dared answer a question from a judge about illegal aliens with a response that suggested immigration law be enforced while safeguards against racial profiling are also enforced.   At that point pageant political correctness went into full gear and Fakih was declared the winner.

Note to the freaks and mental cases who dominate Islam:  See what you’re missing when you peal off the burka there fellas?  Maybe you wouldn’t have to spend so much effort Michael Jacksoning the little boys in your terror camps if you took a look at the chicks for a change.

In the meantime I have a wonderful idea along the same lines as that mosque at Ground Zero thing…  a nice, shiny new U.S. Military Base on the smoldering ruins of Mecca.  Works for me!  Comments are enabled below.

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Tags: 7th century death cult, 9 11 11, 911 hijackers, American Society for Muslim Advancement, Cordoba Initiative, feisal abdul rauf, ground zero mosque, mark williams, mark williams commentary islam, one tea party at a time, savage islam

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Technorati Tags: Mark Williams, Savage Islam, Tea Party, Miss Muslim USA, Satan’s Spawn, 7th Century Death Cult

Director Of Tea Party Express Strikes Again At His ‘Animals Of Allah’ May 19, 2010

A couple of things you should know about Mark Williams.

He’s a radio talk show personality.

He’s the Director of the Tea Party Express, and a leader within the Tea Party.

All you need to know about Mark Williams can be found in his Friday blog entry in which he calls Muslims ‘animals of allah’ and refers to Allah as the ‘terrorists’ monkey-god’.

All you need to know about the Tea Party’s willing and cheerful acceptance of Mr. Williams’ hatred, violence, and bigotry can be found in an earlier post from The Lion.

The Lion intended to comment today on Mr. Williams’ Friday blog post, but frankly the post speaks for itself.

If you read it and agree with him, then you are as sick and hate-filled and violent as Mr. Williams.

If you disagree with him you will feel at the very least a bit of nausea in the pit of your stomach that America could breed such a sick mind, indeed, that America can countenance a political party that lauds the disgusting depths from which Mr. Williams springs.

If you do read his post, pay particular heed to the picture of the three year old boy, and the caption beneath the picture. It suggests that Mr. Williams can reasonably be supposed to belong to the savage subset of humans who, on defeating an enemy, would grab children and infants by their feet, swing them around, and smash their heads against the nearest tree or rock.

Considering his choice of photograph of Miss Muslim USA and his comments following the photograph, one might reasonably expect that once Mr. Williams had finished bashing the heads of children he would further satisfy his hatred and blood-lust by raping and murdering Muslim women. He does make it obvious that he’s not interested in treating Muslims as if they were human, and it is a staple of warfare that dehumanizing the people you regard as your enemy makes it much easier to kill them and to commit atrocities against them.

Mr. Williams’ motivating complaint in his Friday blog is the construction of a mosque in New York City, apparently too close to the World Trade Center site for his liking. His basic motivation is perhaps more evident in his opening paragraph, in which he pushes sales of his book to the people, most likely Tea Partiers, who appreciate his hatred and his violence, and who are too ignorant to grasp his ignorance, and who are either inclined to follow him down his dark road of violent bigotry, or are too stupid to figure out just where he and the rest of the Tea Party leadership want to go in the hell they would like to unleash.

It would not be unfair to ask how much innocent Muslim blood must be shed for each sale of Mr. Williams’ book. After all, after reading his post, one can only imagine his joy at the American brutalization of two Muslim nations and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, including women and children by the thousands.

After all, they’re just the animals of allah living under a monkey god. That kind of talk should sell a few books for Mr. Williams.

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Technorati Tags: Mark Williams, Animals of Allah, Muslim Monkey God, Tea Party, Tea Party Express, Miss Muslim USA, New York Mosque, Politics, Racism, Bigotry, Islam

Americans Got No Imagination, According To Our Best And Brightest May 17, 2010

In today’s Common Dreams there’s an article from the Boston Globe about the Department of Homeland Security seeking to take land from a Vermont farmer in order to beef up, to the tune of eight million dollars, a crappy little Canadian border crossing station.

But that’s not the important bit in the piece. This is the really important bit:

Allison Stanger, director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College, said the government is right to shore up aging, little-used border crossings.

"If there’s a weak link in the chain, that’s precisely what our enemies would target for getting things into the country,” she said. "It seems far-fetched to think that something like this could happen in beautiful Vermont. But before it happened, what American would have thought that someone would fly a plane into a building?”

According to Ms. Stanger, Americans are too damn stupid to have looked at the World Trade Center towers, sticking up like two very sore thumbs way above the New York City skyline, and fail to consider that a) an airplane might collide with them or b) that an airplane might be flown into them.

The Lion would venture that most people who looked at those buildings had one or both of those thoughts, and if you had the first one you didn’t have to be too imaginative to come up with the second.

According to Ms. Stanger Americans have no imagination, none at all, despite having access to the vast wealth of news and information that flows around the world twenty-four hours a day and despite having seen some really brutal acts by various terrorist and military groups virtually every week.

So what else could Americans not imagine?

How about floating submerged mines or heavy explosives down to some of the giant dams in the western states?

How about loading a legitimate cargo ship under a flag of convenience with high explosives and sailing it into the piers of the Golden Gate bridge?

How about loading a U-Haul truck with explosives and blowing it up in front of a Federal building? Oh, wait, that’s been done, by an American citizen, all white and crew-cut, in Oklahoma City.

How about sending a team of suicidal Islamic warriors into an attack on underprotected nuclear plants, or pathetically unguarded chemical plants in densely populated areas of the country?

How about spending years developing a plan to infiltrate and take over a liquid natural gas tanker and blowing it up in a major American port? That’s probably already under way.

How about getting some of those now publicly available DNA mixing kits, a competent set of fanatic scientists, and turning loose some suicidal pathogen-infected jihadis in the coffee shops and restaurants of New York City and Chicago and Los Angeles? That should be doable these days.

How about doing a bunch of small things, like weakening water delivery mains around the country to cause blowouts like Boston had a few days ago? Do a lot of small things that add up to huge economic damage, and make them seem like simple infrastructure failures.

How about having fifty operatives in fifty cities drop about a dozen packets in each city, packets containing white powder, some of which is anthrax or something that reads as anthrax in standard tests? Put them in restaurants and supermarkets. That should cause some upset and some economic damage.

How about kidnapping Ms. Stanger and putting her in a creative thinking class for six months or so? She’s obviously not bright enough to hold a position of responsibility that requires the use of some imagination.

She’s not the only one, of course. The United States has had entire governments that didn’t have enough imagination to figure out that there are bright, imaginative, deadly people in the world who can apparently out-think and out-imagine American bureaucrats.

Such people flew airplanes into the World Trade Center because the idiots in charge in Washington just couldn’t imagine such a thing and saw no need to beef up security here in the United States. Especially when they thought it was so much more dramatic and political to attack third world countries to gain votes for re-election.

They didn’t have the slightest idea of what that would unleash. Talk about a lack of imagination! 

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Technorati Tags: Allison Stanger, Vermont, Border Crossings, Canadian Border, Border Control, Department of Homeland Security, Border Protection, Politics, Economics, Terrorism, Vermont Farm, Morses Line, Franklin Vermont, Rohatyn Center for International Affairs

Lizards Are Dying, Ho-Hum; Humans Next, Yawn; Maine Lacks Lizards May 14, 2010

In the journal Science biologists predict that in seventy years, in 2080, some forty percent of lizard populations will have died and twenty percent of lizard species will have gone extinct.

In Mexico, some ten percent of places where lizards flourished in 1975  no longer have any lizards.

Global warming, the scientists say, interferes with the lizards’ ability to breed, thus killing them off. Now. Today. Not in seventy years.

Oh, well. Hardly a concern of us dominant humans. After all, we run the planet. We’re the boss, the top dog, the alpha male, the king of the mountain. What’s a few lizards matter, eh?

Fewer lizards, more bugs.

More bugs, fewer crops.

More bugs, more disease.

More bugs, fewer humans.

Fewer lizards, fewer humans.

But really, it won’t matter much. After all, we’re in the process of killing everything else that makes life possible on the planet, including human life.

So screw the lizards. They’re only good for making handbags and shoes anyway.

Right?

Just for the record, The Lion notes that the new platform document of the Maine Republican Party, a document created by Tea Partiers, contains the following policy statement:

Defeat Cap and Trade, investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth, and prosecute any illegal collusion.

Apparently there are no lizards in Maine, other than the reptiles in charge of the Republican Party.

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Technorati Tags: Lizards, Environment, Global Warming, Extinction