By the Rockets’ Red Glare

The Shy Files

Oh, the crazy things that happen when you start to look people in the eye! He had a big smile and looked like a pirate:  Sinewy body, shaved head, a goatee, and hoop earrings. Sexy as hell.  He started asking me a LOT of questions, and of course I gave him my phone number.  Shall we see if he calls?

Sunday Skool: There is a God!

Via LOLFed: ManBirdPig has hit CitiFRAUD Citibank.

(I’m not really this meanspirited, but GAWD, funny pic, non?)

Sunday Skool: Madame Wildhair and the Spark

Cynthia McKinney definitely has the SPARK: Look at what it did to her hair!

I still voted for her.

Daily Kos is the #1 Kontrolled Ops “liberal” website.  If you’ve lurked there you’ve probably noticed that the site is staffed primarily with Israel-Can-Do-No-Wrong-And-If-You-Prove-Us-Wrong-Ur-An-Anti-Semite” types.” Boring and predictable, and although I have an account there I’ve moved on to the Wild West of the internet where people are able to write more freely without having TPTB and Megaphone Minders shut them down for speaking the truth.

While the rest of the world was watching round-the-clock coverage of  Governor Sanford’s wayward peen or Michael Jackson’s demise, former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, 20 other activists and her boatload of humanitarian aid were highjacked by Israel in international waters. Ms. McKinney described it as “an outrageous violation of international law” as the boat was on a humanitarian mission and was not in Israeli waters. On the other hand, the Israeli military said the boat was trying to enter Gaza illegally. As of Sunday morning Ms. McKinney is still in a cell block in Tel Aviv with other women detained for much of the same: Trying to enter Gaza “illegally.” Radical women with humanity on their minds.

One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

- Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

The legality or illegality of the actions on both sides is debatable in a nitpicky kind of way but the splitting of hairs detracts from the point of this admittedly political gesture:  Civil disobedience by definition involves breaking laws when such laws result in an injustice being done. Isn’t the larger crime the Israeli siege against, and the collective punishment of, the Palestinian people?  According to Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs.  The denial of food and medicine to people is a war crime, is it not? What possible benefit can be derived from an increasingly impoverished, unhealthy, densely crowded, and furious Gaza alongside Israel?

Here was the first comment on the post at Kos about Ms. McKinney’s most recent incarceration for trying to bring toys, medicine and building supplies to the beleaguered Gazans:  “She broke Israeli law protesting. She’s in an Israeli jail as a result. So?” Lincoln Deshain had something to say about that:

Maybe some have taken the final stance that she is just a grandstanding troublemaker with a tremendous ego. Now how much of that is truth, or media projection and portrayal? Thats a question only to be answered by those who know her personally, which I don’t. But I have seen her work. The lady is fierce. She doesn’t need to do half of the things she undertakes. She could just as easily have protected her career and sat back like the rest of the Washington wallfowers. (She might still be a congresswoman today if she had.)

It isn’t as if these things she has done, the places her convictions have taken her have placed her in a good light. She’s Madame Wildhair, who ran for as the Green Party candidate. She doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut, and she doesn’t know her place.  She probably went over there to cause trouble, and to seek publicity for some kind of ‘comeback tour’ to save her political career, right? She probably went over there with all those other ambassadors and the convoy of ships full of humanitarian aid just so she could get back on TV and wriggle her way back into our hearts, right? Obviously by giving this any attention, we’re just encouraging her bad actions . . . (snip)

. . . Now she will be released. But this is a far cry from chaining yourself to a tree in hope that a TV camera might show up. And I don’t like to see the kind of Kraft Easy Math i’m seeing here where the rule of law is assumed to be correct, even in an area where we KNOW the opposite is true, with contextual basis stating otherwise, just because you’re a little annoyed by Cynthia McKinney. I think it does her a disservice, and the people she went over there with, and of course the Gazans who we’ve all but forgotten about now that Peace has broken out all over the Middle East.

There’s a collective habit that weak-minded people  fall into: Dismissing the protests of individuals who go against the grain, or challenge the conventional wisdom put forth by the dominant culture. Martin Luther King was once considered a wild eyed radical, was followed by the FBI and disparaged mercilessly by our so called ‘objective press’ after he came out against the Vietnam war–at a time when the Democrats couldn’t even primary in an anti-war candidate.

Going a back a little bit further in history, Henry David Thoreau was visited in jail by Emerson, having been arrested for protesting the Mexican American War by refusing to pay taxes. Emerson, incredulous, asked Thoreau, “Why are you in here?”

Thoreau, equally incredulous, replied, “Why are you out there?”

You don’t need to like Cynthia McKinney or her tactics. You don’t need to agree with her.  All I ask is that you SEE her:  Madame Wildhair has the Spark.  She has IT.  Maybe it’s something you never had, or something you had once upon a time and lost.  Maybe you still have it, that spark of liberty that will make you do and say outrageous things in the face of the overwhelming odds against you, because some things are just right, and some things are just wrong, and no unjust law is going to prevent you from taking a stand.

Those who do not hear the music think the dancers mad.

- African Proverb

And that my dears is your sermon for today. I return you to your round-the-clock coverage of Sarah Palin’s incoherent resignation. Oh, and Michael Jackson:  ZOMG Did He Fake His Death?

According to international humanitarian law children are to be afforded special protection during international armed conflicts. This includes military occupation such as exists in the Palestinian territories under Israel. Legal protection is provided by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Israel signed the CRC in 1991.

Irritato

Mara Carfagna is an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary resume, but nobody seems to care. Never mind how she moved from a career in modeling to a law degree to a career in television to politics (elected) to a ministerial appointment in Italy.  The western media only cares about one thing: ZOMG MARA BOOBIEZ 911!!!1!!1!

Ex-topless model is first lady stand-in

When Silvio Berlusconi chose the Equal Opportunity Minister AND the Education Minister  as stand-ins for his estranged wife at an official function the Western media went apeshit about Berlusconi’s “model escort.” Notice the Education Minister is only mentioned in passing: Since she isn’t/wasn’t a model, nobody is supposed to give a shit about Berlusconi’s second guest.  Only Ms. Carfagna matters, because she is the Woman With a Past.

Berlusconi’s decision to invite these two political women to a state event is now added to his growing list of “sleazy scandals.” Moral of the story:  Once a sex symbol, you can never ever ever ever be respected or taken seriously. Oh, and some people are just prudes who need to grow up and gain some perspective, because obviously Mara Carfagna has moved on.  Isn’t it time we did? I wouldn’t blame Mara for living up to her name:  It means “bitter” in Hebrew.

Happy 4th!

The Formula

Finally, the article everyone is talking about is online!  Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:  The Great American Bubble Machine:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money . . .

. . .  What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain . . . They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

Villians or heroes? Depends on whose side you are on. Best not to choose sides.

Way to mix your metaphors, Mr. Taibbi! Did you just pull a Friedman? That’s all right sweetie; moving right along:  It’s the classis pump-and-dump, folks.  Much of the activity on the NYSE is Goldman selling its own stock to itself, pumping up the prices and then selling at a profit. Didn’t you know?  Time to get out of their sandbox, chumps, because they’re schoolyard bullies out for your lunch money. And here’s a little bit of forshadowing. Interesting!

The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

I think cap-and-trade is going to fail, not just because earlier attempts have failed in Europe and the UK but because everyone already knows it’s a scam.  Consequently the Banksters are forcing governments to mandate  it.  The bubble-makers will rely on governmental force to ensure its profits.

Here’s the problem with that:  Whenever the Powers That Be set up another privilege entrenching control system (it’s all they know how to do), people end up putting more energy into bypassing the system than they put into playing along.  See: Former Soviet Union. Cap and Trade will fail, and everything will fall apart after that.  Since Americans don’t have the same social and governmental support systems that the Russians had when they went through their collapse we stand to suffer severely.  Mark my words: The failure of cap and trade to inflate the economy will act as a temporal marker in our nation’s collapse. It will not be the cause of the collapse because our demise was a foregone conclusion before any of us were even born:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

-Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence

Taibbi says Goldman Sachs has been following the formula since the Roaring 20’s, but the pump-and-dump is just a mini formula that’s part of (and part of the fight against) a much larger and older scam, one that hails to the days of Old Europe when the Rothschilds used fractional banking methods to  debt-enslave and co-opt one aristocracy after another after another. This is an ancient war of sovereignty between Royalty and its Financiers, playing out like a Shakespearean drama where our role is  that of the crowd: Serfs and barnyard animals stupidly chewing our cuds, acting in concert as a cheering section or pitchfork waving rabble. Don’t be so proud of that pitchfork: Either way we’re taking your cues from our owners. The only escape is to exit the stage. 

Matt Taibbi is right: Many at Goldman Sachs are crooks. However, much of the money they’re stealing from us is purportedly “going toward a good cause,” and that’s why they can sleep at night: They’re fighting an enemy most of you have never heard of.  Goldman Sachs is goosing a failed paradigm, the main tool of the Main Enemy, because the alternative is capitulation to our enemy: Our creditors, the Men Behind the Curtain. It’s time for a recap of the Rothschild Fractional Reserve Banking Formula:

a. Establish a debt based banking monopoly.

b. Flood a targeted economy with credit, “monetizing” it until the economy can no longer afford to make the minimum payments on the loans;

c. Start making demands of the victim country, and punish it by calling loans or triggering hyperinflation and/or engineered “socialist revolutions” (paid agents provacateur) if/when the government balks. This can include both legal and illegal counterfeiting. See: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man;

d. If that does not achieve the necessary capitulations, abruptly shut the credit window, call loans en masse and play Repo Man;

e. Buy what remains at fire sale prices; and finally

f. Play Big Mack Daddy, wave a lot of money around, and dictate the terms of recovery to a desperate, angry mob.

So what is this “monetizing” thing, anyway?  The details are boring but here’s the upshot: Inflation.  It means watering down the value of a debt-based currency, which makes it easier to pay off debt. It’s been done many times to the U.S. dollar since it’s inception, but we’re nearing the point where it can no longer work.  That doesn’t prevent Goldman Sachs from trying.

Hear any bells ringing?  Sorry folks: It’s a death knell.

Goldman Sachs employees are NOT “the men behind the curtain.” They’re just technicians, doing their part in the aeon’s-long banksters war.  They are pirates and hero-villains, while the real men behind the curtain are aristocratic devils so rich you’ve never heard of them.

A significant cabal within Goldman Sachs is fighting the Rothshchild bankers using the banksters’ own tools:  One speculative bubble and Ponzi scheme after another after another to keep the game of musical chairs going and fight off the Rothschild Repo Man.  Meanwhile the Repo Man (probably a Chinese Man named Li) is biding his time, mulling over whether or not to bother with Step B and just move ahead to Steps C and D and get it over with . . . Or maybe not, since to do so would destroy his own country and possibly the rest of the world.  The Goldman Banksters have made sure of this.  In the Mafia it is called “doing business,” Chicago School:

Whose side do you want to be on? Who cares? They’re hungry wolves fighting over a herd of  sheep, and you’re the sheep!  They feed off YOU!   A sheep’s only hope is to escape the wolves’ clutches, hide in the wilderness and hope they eat each other before they can hunt you down for their next meal.  The best “green shoots” can be found in the economic wilderness outside of statist clutches anyway.  Think about THAT as you enter the Fourth of July weekend: Who is Sovereign? What makes a Free (Wo)Man?  And for you Obama lovers out there, it should be pretty clear by now which way he’s leaning:

It’s all just a matter of style: Team Red and Team Blue only play exhibition games.

Bar Nekkid Lady

Quoting from the Sports Illustrated Q&A: Bar Refaeli’s favorite thing to do on a rainy day: “stay in bed and watch movies.“

This video of model Bar Refaeli was ostensibly used to promote an art exhibit? Huh. Was it a porn exhibit? I mean, she’s just exhibiting her body.  Hasn’t “Naked Woman on a Bed” been done before?  And did they really have to use that clip from”Music To Cut Yourself To?”

I fast forwarded through it, just in case Ms. Refaelli did something interesting, but no.  Just a nekkid woman on a bed, hell I can see that every day by looking in a mirror but knock yerselves out I guess.  Here’s my question for the Hive Mind, though:  Does this digital overshare make you more interested in Bar Refaeli’s body (ahem) of work?  Will it make her (more) famous, at least in a “no publicity is bad publicity” kind of way?  More generally, does digital oversharing make a person more or LESS interesting, overall?

Or are you just thinking “wait, what did you just say?” because all you can do is stare, and who cares?

We Temporally Marked His Words

Biden said “Mark My Words.”  Well OK then.

It’s been six month since Barack Obama took his oath of office.  His test, his “generated crisis,” is due to transpire any moment now.  If like me you’re following the web bot project at Half Past Human, what do you think is going to happen?  I’m using what I’ve learned from the project to suss out the possibilities:

- We know the neocons are itching to bomb Iran, but the web bots don’t have us going to (or narrowly avoiding) war until wintertime;

- We know the U.S. dollar will eventually be rejected as the world’s reserve currency, but the web bots show this happening next year.

- A drastic water-related (weather?) event is supposed to cause a diaspora, but the event wouldn’t be human-generated . . . Would it?

- We know the derivatives crisis is gonna blow, with the web bots predicting some kind of derivatives-based crisis event peaking in – surprise! - two weeks.

- We know California’s state government is about to go belly up. Any day now.

So, going strictly by temporal markers, I’m thinking the generated crisis is going to be based, even if obliquely, on the financial mess hitting a peak stress point.  Mark MY words: If it’s a terrorist incident or rioting (they’re calling this the Summer of Hell or the Summer of Rage for a reason) it will be a false flag distraction which will enable the Powers That Be to suspend business operations and/or declare martial law.

Whatever happens, the trading floor at the NYSE could morph into a vomitorium by midsummer. For those of us smart enough to get out of the stock markets there’s little we can do besides pack our bug-out bags (if we live by the ocean) and make some popcorn for the show.

Digital Dickweeds and Cranky Cunatalinas

Image found at Girl in Short Shorts

Inflamed CNBC host calls bloggers ‘digital dickweeds’

That’s according to CNBC host Dennis Kneale, who’s declared the recession over, and who went postal on critical financial bloggers Tuesday.

A livid Kneale described bloggers he alleges have dubbed him “irritating,” “unwatchable,” “Beaker,” “super dipshit” and “clueless” and purportedly compare his show to a Saturday Night Live skit.

Zero Hedge has the background and the context. I’m sure that right after his on-air bitchwhine Mr. Kneale announced that Good Times Are Just Ahead, so get back into your pen, sheep!  Then he pissed on everyone’s legs and told us it was raining.

Matching Martini Madness: Frozen Limoncello Espresso

Frozen Limoncello Espresso Martini

Starbucks Coffee Liqueur (or Kahlua)
Limoncello (or Lemon Vodka)
Espresso, brewed

Mix and Freeze

Choose the Choos

The Hedonistic Pleasureseeker has never been a fan of Jimmy Choo shoes, but she might be willing to make an exception for the new H&M line!

Queen Karl and the Cushy Pudendas

Karl Lagerfeld at the premiere of Totally Spies in Paris

Since we’ve been on the topic of Karl lately, I can’t resist posting this photo.  Can you just imagine what is going through this narcissistic bagina-hating genius’ head right now?  The folks at DListed can imagine such things, but they’re pretty foul over there, so before you go clicking you’ve been warned!

I think someone should have handed these fine ladies a few Cuchinis before they left their dressing room.

HPS Goes Tipper* on BET’s Ass

Image found at Classical Values

My long term readers know I’ve been to a few major music awards ceremonies. I could have gone to this year’s Black Entertainment Awards Ceremony, if I had begged for it since Andrew always works it, but he would have asked “Why? It’s so lame and boring!”  And he would have been right. Via Jezebel:

For the finale, Lil Wayne sang that he wishes he could “fuck every girl in the world” while onstage with pre-teens.

Dude. Um, dude? Weezy, you be (robo)tripping AGAIN?  Way to do a tribute to Michael Jackson:  By rapping “I like a long haired thick red bone Open up her legs then filet Mignon that pussy . . . “ in front of a bevy of tweenagers, one of them who is reportedly your DAUGHTER.  Not exactly an appropriate sendoff for a man who had been accused of inappropriate relationships with children.

My sex game is stupid
My head is the dumbest

No shit, Weezy. Fucking fuckers, the producers should have seen this would be a problem during the rehearsals. Why don’t people THINK?

*Tipper Gore was part of a Congressional wives’ club agitating against violence and sex on TV shows and then in the mid-1980s came Tipper Gore’s famous campaign, abetted by her husband, against explicit rock and rap music.

Kittyprint Tuesday: Not Exactly a Fungi to Be With

. . . especially since so many phallus shaped mushrooms smell like rotting meat!  At least this one looks like it has a kittyprint pattern.  Hmmmmmmmmmm . . . Reminds me of an old lover from way back when.

Herpetologist Robert Drewes will forever be remembered for his two-inch Phallus.

In the upcoming issue of the journal Mycologia, scientists describe a new species of stinkhorn fungus from Africa, which they christened Phallus drewesii in honor of their expedition leader.

“I am utterly delighted,” Drewes told the San Jose Mercury News, “The funny thing is that it is the second smallest known mushroom in this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp.” [Scientific American]