Colonel Baboon, this needs your signature...

NYT today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumer advocate Ralph Nader is calling for the elimination of college athletic scholarships, saying the move is necessary to "de-professionalize" college athletes.

Nader's League of Fans, a group aimed at reforming sports, proposes that the scholarships be replaced with need-based financial aid. He says that would help restore academic integrity to college sports.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the proposal Thursday, ahead of its official release.

Nader, a former presidential candidate (ed. note: his candidacy siphoned off enough votes to allow Bush to steal the election and destroy amerika...remember?), argues that his plan would also help reduce the "win-at-all-costs" mentality in high schools, by reducing the incentive of college scholarships.

----------------------------
yeah, OK, Nader's right, but Huxley showed what happens when you screw up the soma distribution....can't anyone get Nader interested in windmills?

sheik-condom-tin-dated-1931

NYT,today

MANAMA, Bahrain — Bahrain on Friday tore down the protest movement’s defining monument, the pearl at the center of Pearl Square, a symbolic strike that carried a sense of finality. The official news agency described the razing as a facelift.

“We did it to remove a bad memory,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said at a news conference. “The whole thing caused our society to be polarized. We don’t want a monument to a bad memory.”
------------

Fuck sheiks. Fuck 'em. al-Kings, too.

We Consider Birds

Welcome to the third "Give the Fiddler a Dram" podcasts.

Birds have been around long before humans wandered onto the scene. Back then, they were dinosaurs. They survived several planet-wide extinction events, and evolved. Bird imagery occurs universally in all human endeavor throughout all human history. It's like people wanted to be birds...humans wore their feathers (and killed them), slept on their down (and killed them), ate them (and killed them), wanted to eat like them (invented pesticides and killed them), wanted to live in nests (invented suburbs), wanted to fly (invented flying machines that dropped nuclear weapons on other people)...do you detect a pattern? At least people realized birds were earth's original musicians, and tried to emulate them (imperfectly, which explains national anthems and the song "Duke of Earl").

Podcast Nr 3

This Ain't Hollywood

NYT, tonite:

As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.

The emergency flooding of two stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
------------------
I've worked with large amounts of radioactive materials all my adult life. Positron emitters, hard and soft gamma emitters, hard and soft beta emitters, alpha emitters...everything. What's going on in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is a worse case scenario - an MOX-fueled BWR reactor/spent fuel storage facility damaged by a 9.0 earthquake. Over the next few days, it's going to get scary. Two secondary containment structures have been blown out by hydrogen-oxygen explosions, and gamma ray spectroscopy has confirmed the release of I-131 and Cs-137 into the immediate environment. Taken together, this suggests that partial core (fuel) melting has occurred in the damaged reactors. Last ditch core cooling procedures now involve flooding the reactor vessels with seawater spiked with borate salts (pumped in by firetrucks!) and venting radioactive steam to the environment when you hit critical overpressure. Not good.

-I believe you exist...-You're gullible enough...

 

"The topic for today is:  What is reality?"

NYT, today

Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb., was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix.

He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that “were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,” Colton, now 11 years old, recalled.

Colton’s father, Todd, has turned the boy’s experience into a 163-page book, “Heaven Is for Real,” which has become a sleeper paperback hit of the winter, dominating best-seller lists and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Todd Burpo wrote the book with Lynn Vincent, who collaborated with Sarah Palin on “Going Rogue.” Mr. Burpo, the pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, a farming community in southwest Nebraska, said in an interview that he had shouldered some criticism over it.

“People say we just did this to make money, and it’s not the truth,” Mr. Burpo said, referring to anonymous online comments about the book. “We were expecting nothing. We were just hoping the publisher would break even.” (He said he planned to give away much of the royalty income and spend some of it on home improvements.)
----------------

I read a lot of the recommendations for this book on Amazon. Much discussion concerned the "reality" of the story. [ed. note: I haven't read the book]

There is belief, which may be elaborated into faith. Reality does not figure into the process.

There are facts (imperfectly perceived), which may be elaborated into truth (incompletely realized). Disbelief is the basis of this process.

Many people confuse these pathways, unintentionally or intentionally. It may be argued that this confusion has lead to countless deaths since homo sapiens emerged as a species. The 20th century wasn't a walk in the park. Things aren't looking so good a decade into the 21st.

Watch Out: This is an Allen Ginsberg-style "Eyeball Kick"!

The Associated Press
Friday, March 4, 2011; 10:06 AM

PHOENIX -- Blair River, the 575-pound spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill, an Arizona restaurant that serves shamelessly high-calorie burgers and fries, died Tuesday at the age of 29, following a bout of the flu.

Restaurant founder Jon Basso tells The Arizona Republic that River was more than the larger-than-life caricature he portrayed in promoting the restaurant in Chandler, which includes huge hamburgers, milkshakes and fries cooked in lard on its menu.

Basso says River was a creative genius who had been planning to take part in the shooting of a promotional spot called, "Heart Attack Grill: The Musical."

The 6-foot-8 River was an Arizona [high school] state heavyweight wrestling champion in 1999. River garnered celebrity as the grill's "Gentle Giant" when he became the face and advertising star of the medically themed restaurant -- famous for its triple-bypass burgers, flatliner lard fries and server "nurses" donning uniforms fit for adult films.

[Owner Jon] Basso is very open about the controversial position he puts himself in by marketing unhealthy food "worth dying for," as the restaurant slogan goes.

"I hired him to promote my food. We are absolutely guilty of glorifying obesity. That's what I do for a living: I make a mockery of heart-related issues in order to sell hamburgers," says Basso.

But nothing will change in the Heart Attack Grill's approach now that River has died, Basso says.

Before owning the grill, Basso owned a Jenny Craig franchise and a fitness center, and says that despite pouring "his heart and soul into the diet and exercise industry," he didn't feel like he was reaching anyone. "I'm making more inroads now into people's consciousness by working the other side," he says.
-------------------

I doubt Mr Basso has a heart or soul. Yeah, this story is funny in a black humored way. Yeah, it deals with what statisticians describe as outliers; a 600 pound pitchman, toxic "all American" food-porn, an event that will be lucky to last one news cycle...but consider this before you ignore this story and ignore my rant: this is a reductio-ad-absurbdum of everything expressed in contemporary American economic and popular culture, basically "eating" all you can or want, as opposed to need.

To celebrate (is there a Russian or Yiddish expression for "celebrate with contempt"?), this event and all its participants, from Mr River to the Associated Press, and sadly, myself, I am going to post what is generally considered the most offensive underground comix panel ever published; a "Captain Pissgums" episode by S. Clay Wilson. You are what you eat.

please click here first

Will Bare-Knuckles Capitalism Turn Urban America into a Shithole?

Here are excerpts from NYT stories published a couple of days apart...

---------------
VERNON, Calif. — Vernon is a bleak, 5.2-square-mile sprawl of warehouses, factories, toxic chemical plants and meat processors that looks like the backdrop for “Eraserhead,” the David Lynch movie set in an industrial wasteland. It has a population of 95 — and 1,800 businesses, drawn by low taxes, lax regulations and cheap municipal power.

Willets Point, in Queens, is a 61-acre expanse of junkyards and auto-repair shops so squalid that local business owners compare it to Iraq. City officials estimate that Willets Point is home to 255 businesses, which employ about 1,700 people, some in sheds made of tin or cinder blocks. On a recent afternoon, as garbage cans burned, Mexican norteño music wailed from boom boxes on the hoods of cars. Large pools of swirling dirty water overwhelmed unpaved roads. Locals complained that the police handed out tickets for parking cars on the sidewalk, even though there were no sidewalks. “I don’t want to leave,” Mr. Nicolescue said, “but I have nowhere to go. This may look like the third world, but it is my world.”