The sweet feline brothers featured in this post need good homes! I almost took them home with me. (Local folks: Check out Feline Urgent Rescue.)
Its been awhile since I did a health/TMI update, and I know yall simply CRAVE more medical details from Daisy. (sigh)
In fact, my absence over the past week has been due to my increasingly-large Sissy Hankshaw thumb, which unbelievably, I haven't mentioned in about five years now. Rest assured, my thumb is still attached, although I suppose it's a blessing that I don't have bilateral, huge, swollen thumbs like Sissy's, which might attract undue attention. Its the thumb-joint that is enormous, bulbous, painful and angry. On Saturday, it was nearly the size of a golf ball.
The good news is that such physical ailments do not ALARM me as much as they clearly did in that last post (I'm getting pretty accustomed to this aging stuff), but they remain a giant pain in the ass to deal with. I have taken a break from typing unless it is absolutely necessary. I hope to be back in good form after the current cold front passes. We actually have a frost warning tonight, after a weekend of heat. Strange weather. (I hope it doesn't destroy the beautiful hydrangeas.)
On my way from the market today, I saw a bumper sticker: GLOBAL WARMING? (accompanied with graphic of a rising temperature, obviously meant to signify HELL, of course) HOW ABOUT GLOBAL PRAYER????
Well, I guess that settles it, huh?
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Speaking of fundies, what brought me back here today, even in acute pain? Schadenfreude and scandal-mongering--need you ask? I have an extra-special Doug Phillips update:
A leading advocate of the patriarchal Quiverfull movement groomed a teenage girl as his “personal sex object” and then used the purity culture to shame her into silence, according to a lawsuit filed by his victim.
Douglas Phillips resigned last year from Vision Forum and Vision Forum Ministries over what he described at the time as an extramarital affair.
But the lawsuit, reported by Right Wing Watch, revealed more details about this relationship and the ways that women are treated in the Quiverfull movement – which has been popularized by the prolific Duggar family and their TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting.
Attorneys claim Phillips, a close friend to the Duggar family and an associate of actor Kirk Cameron, “methodically groomed” Lourdes Torres since she was 15 years old and led her to believe they would be married.
NOWATA, Okla. — Attorneys for the adoptive parents of a 4-year-old girl caught up in a custody dispute are seeking $1 million in legal fees from the Cherokee Nation and the girl’s biological father, who is a member of the tribe.
Attorneys representing Matt and Melanie Capobianco have filed paperwork seeking the legal fees incurred while fighting the lengthy custody battle over 4-year-old Veronica.
In September, Dusten Brown handed Veronica over to the Capobiancos after the Oklahoma Supreme Court lifted an emergency stay keeping the girl in Oklahoma.
The Tulsa World reports attorneys for the Capobiancos are seeking $1 million to be split among four law firms. The newspaper reports none of the money would go to the Capobiancos.
Attorneys for Brown and the Cherokee Nation declined to comment on the filing.
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Google has been ordered to block images in a privacy case. This may set a precedent, since as you know, ordinary people do not have the right to make Google do squat... but rich people (specifically Max Mosley) sure do! (Biographical note: Max is the son of Oswald Mosley, whom non-British rock fans mostly recognize as the subject of "Less Than Zero" by Elvis Costello.) According to the New York Times:
LONDON — A French court ruled Wednesday that Google must remove from its Internet search results all images of a former Formula One car racing chief at an orgy. The ruling in the privacy case could have ramifications for the tech giant’s operations across Europe.
Max Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, had filed the lawsuit in September to force Google to automatically filter from its search engine links to images from a British newspaper report in 2008 that included photos and a video of Mr. Mosley participating in a sadomasochistic sex party.
The former Formula One head successfully sued the News of the World in a London court for breach of privacy and was awarded £60,000, or about $96,000, in damages.
On Wednesday, the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris backed Mr. Mosley’s attempts to force Google to block references to the images from appearing in Google’s search results worldwide. The company said it would appeal the decision.
Mr. Mosley argued that French law makes it illegal to take and distribute images of an individual in a private space without that person’s permission. But Google said that would limit freedom of speech, forcing the company to block search results without any person or court overseeing the context in which the images appeared.
Analysts said the ruling against Google could lead to greater restrictions on what was accessible through search results and could prompt more people to demand that the United States technology company remove references to their private activities.
“At this point in time, the pendulum is swinging toward individuals’ privacy and away from freedom of speech,” said Carsten Casper, a privacy and security analyst at the consulting firm Gartner in Berlin.
...
As part of the settlement ordered by the French court on Wednesday, Google will have to filter out nine images of Mr. Mosley from its worldwide search results. The company must pay him 1 euro in compensation and it will be fined 1,000 euros every time that an image is found through its search engine, starting at the beginning of next year.
“It’s a fair decision,” said Clara Zerbib, a lawyer at the law firm Reed Smith in Paris who represented Mr. Mosley in the lawsuit. “This case isn’t about censoring information, but about complying with French law.”
...
The lawsuits relate to a 2008 report in The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which was later closed because of its ties to a phone hacking scandal. The article described Mr. Mosley’s activities as a “sick Nazi orgy.” The allegations were particularly damaging, as Mr. Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, a pre-World War II-era British fascist, and Mr. Mosley had sought to distance himself from his father’s activities.
By pursuing legal action in France and Germany, Mr. Mosley was taking advantage of more stringent data privacy legislation in those countries compared with either the United States or Britain, according to privacy analysts. In France, for example, it is a criminal offense to record someone else without his or her consent in a private space.
Google is facing a number of privacy lawsuits in Europe.
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How would the world's coastlines look if all the ice melted?
Charleston, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach would also be gone, meaning that the South Carolina coast would start somewhere around Columbia, by my reckoning.
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I am opposed to assisted suicide. I thought I might have said this before on this blog... but then again, when I do a search, find that I have hedged and have not stated my opposition outright, so here it is: No.
I think we people with a disability are feared. We are the one and only minority that can be joined via illness or accident. Our atypical bodies also symbolically represent the limits of medical science. Please do not talk to me about joint decision making strategies between physician and patients. Do not talk to me about informed consent. Do not talk to me about patient centered care. These buzz words are cultural ideals we aspire to reach. I am not suggesting we do away with these concepts. They should be valued. But my reality, my experiences when I try to access health care is radically different. [UK-Guardian writer Stella] Young quotes Marilyn Golden, a long time opponent of assisted suicide who perceptively observed: "we are asking the wrong questions when it comes to assisted death: We have to ask, do people with disabilities have true choice and self determination, in terms of living outside of nursing homes? In terms of housing that is truly affordable and accessible? In terms of the kind of services that really allow them to lead meaningful lives? In many cases, no."
These are the sort of questions we should be discussing. Why do people, all people, want to die? What drives a person to think death is preferable to living? Pain is not the primary variable. People choose to die because they fear losing their independence and autonomy. And here the link between end of life issues and disability is glaringly obvious to me. When I see a person with a disability I think of all the things a person can do. The same can be said for any person approaching the end of life. I think what can this person do? How can their life even with death impending be enhanced? This is not typically how others with no exposure to disability or end of life issues think. Instead we isolate the disabled and elderly--a historic pattern we have yet to break.
Kibler’s approach to political activism doesn’t rely on subtlety and consensus-building. He prefers open and direct confrontation, and his energy is inexhaustible. I recently spoke with him about his latest project, an effort to stop the Greenville County Council from imposing a one percent sale tax for the purpose of road maintenance.
“I’ve had so dad gum much fun doing this,” he tells me, “it ought to be against the law.”
Would that it were so.
Read it and weep.
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MORE:
::Today on our radio show, the redoubtable Occupy the Microphone, we discussed the case of George Stinney, a 14-year-old who was executed by the state of South Carolina in 1944. Currently, there is a renewed effort to clear his name and get his conviction overturned.
:: And finally, here is your CUTE QUOTIENT CONTENT for this month... and possibly for the whole year. I have bookmarked this, and I go to it when I need to feel calm, centered and happy. TOO CUTE FOR WORDS: Baby Goats and Friends. SQUEEEEEEEE! Gonna die. Gonna. Just. Die. (And they upload more all the time, from everywhere.)
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Due to Daylight Savings Time, its dark when we leave the radio station now.
There is nothing quite as magical as driving through the crisp, autumnal dark, peering at all the headlights... and then Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode pops up on your radio dial. Otherworldly, perfect.
All I ever wanted, all I ever needed... is for special moments like this to go on forever. :)
The article in The State [Columbia, SC newspaper] also reported that [John] Frampton [head of South Carolina's Department of Natural Resources] retired in 2012 after conflicts with Caroline Rhodes, then the Chairperson of the Board that oversaw the Department of Resources. Rhodes had been appointed to her position by Republican Governor Nikki Haley. The DNR climate change study pre-dated the Haley administration. Although current DNR officials are claiming that the refusal to release the study is not politically motivated, it's hard to accept their denials at face value. The report was on track to be released until Haley, a Tea Party favorite, was elected as South Carolina's governor and appointed her own people to the DNR Board after assuming office in 2011.
The only logical conclusion is that her administration quashed the climate change report prepared by the state's own scientists based on political considerations.
Smalley’s life has become a mission to stop bullying, and youth suicide. Kirk now spends his days telling his son’s story at schools around the world. He has told Ty’s story at more than 500 hundred schools and has talked to hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and school administrators since Ty’s suicide nearly three years ago. He said,
We do it because we don’t want another family to live our nightmare. Laura doesn’t ever want another mama to find her baby the way she found ours. We don’t want another kid to ever feel the way Ty felt, that that was the only option. We’re not doing it for Ty. We’re doing it for all the other kids out there. The main part of our message is not to stand silent and watch it happen and that’s addressing the bystanders. If we can empower those kids to be willing to stand up and say ‘you know what – this isn’t right. It’s not funny,’ then we’ll greatly outnumber the bullies. One kid, one voice can make a difference.
Government sources say the Justice Department will by day's end articulate a legal position in the so-called Proposition 8 case, a ban by California voters over same-sex marriage that is now being challenged in the Supreme Court. At the very least, the administration will express general support for gay and lesbian couples in that state alone to wed.
That case and another appeal over the federal Defense of Marriage Act will produce blockbuster rulings from the justices in coming months.
Gay rights groups have privately urged Obama and his top aides to go beyond his previous personal rhetoric in support of the right and come down "on the side of history" in this legal fight. Those sources tell CNN that Obama has made the final decision over whether to file a brief and what to say.
As of earlier this week, there was still internal debate among White House and Justice Department staff about whether the president should take the big step and say there is a constitutional right of gay and lesbian couples to wed. The administration was also considering a compromise position -- affirming previous support for same-sex marriage, at least in California, while conceding other states may have the option to ban it.
After two months in military jail in Kuwait, Manning was moved to the US Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29, 2010. He was held there in maximum security confinement for nearly a year, where he sat alone in a cell for 23 hours per day and was denied a pillow and sheets. An online petition at Avaaz.org received more than 500,000 signatures calling for President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to "end the torture, isolation, and public humiliation of Bradley Manning." And in February of this year a UN report from Juan Mendez, the special rapporteur on torture, concluded after receiving information from the US government about Manning's treatment that "imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity…"
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I heard Toubab Krewe last night, on the namesake of this blog, the indispensable UNCLE DAVE'S DEAD AIR. Loved em! Sharing their musical genius here... apparently, they play frequently at the Orange Peel in Asheville (their hometown), and I am fervently hoping to get up there to see them in the future.
This is an acoustic set recorded live at The Festy Experience, October 2011. Their electric sets are just as impressive.
As the sky grew light this morning out at the Cliffside power plant construction site in Rutherford County [North Carolina], half a dozen activists chained themselves to the heavy earth-moving equipment that was parked there. Among the 20 or so people who were initially gathered there were at least three Asheville residents, who had traveled out to Cliffside to join others from across the state in staging a protest against Duke Energy’s recently permitted, 800-megawatt coal-fired facility. The activists roped off the construction site with tape that read “global warming crime scene,” and held banners with the slogans, “social change, not climate change” and “coal fuels climate change.”
Within half an hour of their arrival, the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office responded, and eight people were arrested on charges of trespassing. Some faced additional charges of resisting arrest. Records showed that those arrested were David Elliston, Brittany Cusworth, and Clare Rappleyea of Asheville, and Matthew Wallace of Hot Springs. Also arrested were Christine Irvine, Attila Nemecz, Joseph Monteleone and Evan Webb.
“The new plant will increase greenhouse gas emissions substantially — which we can’t do,” said activist Liz Veazey, a native of Morganton, who spoke with Xpress outside the Rutherford County Jail. “We need to reduce our emissions 80 to 90 percent, James Hansen and other scientists are saying. So we’re here to say that we have to stop that and all fossil-fuel projects.”
Veazey described the scene that unfolded at the plant at daybreak: “People [were] locked down with lock boxes around some of the machinery,” she said. The activists had appointed a liaison to communicate with law enforcement, she says. “We had a police liaison, and people were standing along the side of the street with signs, and we were taking pictures. The police liaison got arrested really quickly. Then our photographer got arrested.” Veazey asserted that tazers were used during the arrests, and said she’d heard people screaming while they were locked down.
According to Rutherford County Sheriff Jack Conner, tazers were used as stun guns, but the nonlethal weapons were not used to deploy the full electric current. “It’s just like sticking it right up against them and stunning them, like a stun gun,” he explained. “The actual tazers were not used, just the stun position.” One week ago, Duke Energy held a groundbreaking ceremony and tour at the construction site, which straddles the Rutherford and Cleveland county lines. The Division of Air Quality granted approval for the plant in January. Since then, legal appeals have been filed by grassroots environmental organizations from across the state.
The day after the arrests were made, Avram Friedman, executive director of the Canary Coalition, issued a statement supporting the activists. “Eight courageous, young non-violent protesters were brutally arrested at the construction site of Duke Energy’s planned new Cliffside coal-burning power plant in Rutherford County yesterday,” he wrote. “Two of these people of conscience were tasered for no apparent reason by police. The police, whose salaries are paid for by taxpayers, not by Duke Energy, arrested the wrong people. The protesters chained themselves to bulldozers to prevent a crime.”
In a letter sent March 25, NASA climate expert James Hansen urged Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers to abandon the project. “It would be a tragic mistake for Duke to proceed with plans for new coal-fired power plants in Cliffside, North Carolina and Edwardsport, Indiana,” Hansen wrote. The new coal-fired generator would emit some 6 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Duke Energy spokeswoman Marilyn Lineberger painted a much different picture of the controversial project. “The Cliffside permit is a legal permit, and the project is a good project for North Carolina and the environment as it continues forward,” she told Xpress. As for this morning’s protest, she noted, “Clearly, people were trespassing and causing some illegal activity on Duke property, so the local law enforcement was handling that, and we appreciate their support in that situation. At Duke Energy we have zero tolerance for illegal activities.”
“The activity this morning had no impact on construction or plant operations,” she added. Conner, the sheriff, echoed her statement, and said, “Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office will do whatever is necessary to protect that plant, along with the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office.”
When asked what the central message of the protest was, Veazey responded, “No more fossil fuels, and no more fossil fools – like Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, who likes to say good stuff like energy efficiency is good and we need a carbon tax. But he can’t really mean that if he’s going to build a coal plant at the same time.”
The message seemed to have gotten across to Sheriff Conner. When asked if he knew what the protestors’ objective was, he replied, “The only thing that we can determine is, their objective was ‘no coal.’ No coal, and ‘earth first.’ That’s basically what we noticed on some of the units that they were using to hold onto around the equipment. They said, ‘no coal’ and ‘earth first.’”
After 20 years of marriage, me and Mr. Daisy have certain rules worked out. One of these rules: whoever drives gets to choose the music. That's seems fair enough.
And since I refuse to drive in nightmarish metro-areas such as Atlanta, Houston, Washington DC, etc. this means that I am subjected to continuous, ear-bleeding rounds of Stiff Little Fingers, Dinosaur Jr, Social Distortion, The Clash, etc. (What? Did you say something?) Mr. Daisy likes to punctuate blasts of The Clash with Elijah Wood's addled statement in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as he memorably jumped up and down on the bed while smoking dope with Kirsten Dunst: The Clash, the only band that mattered! They called themselves that for a reason!
I find Atlanta traffic terrifying. My driving-panic-threshold seems to be cities the size of Austin, Columbus, Cleveland, Baton Rouge, St Augustine, where I can drive fairly decently. Atlanta? Not on your life. Or mine!
And so, I invariably arrive half-deafened at my in-laws. I hope they don't take this personally and think I am not listening.
This year, I handed my mother-in-law a fancy gourmet cinnamon crumb cake, and she deadpanned, "I hope you brought your own water. Don't need CAKE, need WATER."
Indeed, we had just passed Lake Hartwell, which is usually quite majestic, blue and beautiful in the sun. (From the air, it looks like a large and lovely blue flower imprinted on the earth.) Not today. The drought is so severe, an ugly brown island was poking up out of the lake, that I didn't even know was there. The coast of the lake is lined in dried reddish Georgia clay. What's happened to the water? What the hell is going on? Georgia politicians are threatening to take water from South Carolina, which as you might imagine, is not going over so well around here.
The real estate pimps at Lake Hartwell, eager to contain the damage, are assuring everyone everything is A-OK, and arranging the Lake webcams (see left) to minimize any appearance of drought. Everything is fine! Getcher lakefront property here! Everything IS FINE FINE FINE.
Extreme drought conditions have persisted across much of Georgia with moderate to severe drought conditions over most of the Savannah Basin. Over the past 30 days, precipitation has averaged less than 30% of normal for this time of year in the Upper Savannah Basin. As a result, the soil is very dry which reduces the amount of runoff and inflow from tributaries after rain events. Additionally, low soil moisture reduces the amount of water available for evapotranspiration that causes cloud formation for afternoon thunderstorms this time of year. Current long term forecasts from the National Weather Service do not indicate a change in the current dry pattern over the next 90 days.
The updated Savannah District Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) took effect on September 30th, 2006. The DCP includes the operational rules for the reservoirs as drought conditions develop. This plan was developed with extensive stakeholder input and seeks to balance the needs for water resources during times of shortages.
Drought Level 1 was triggered at the end of June 2007 resulting in a flow reduction to a maximum weekly average release of 4200cfs at Thurmond Dam. Drought Level 2 was triggered in mid-August 2007 resulting in a flow reduction to a maximum weekly average release of 4000cfs at Thurmond Dam. Additionally, as of Tuesday, October 23, 2007, after gaining agreement from other federal and state stakeholder agencies, the minimum daily discharge from Lake Thurmond has been temporarily reduced from 3800 to back to 3600 cubic feet per second. These flow reductions at Thurmond cause flow reductions at Hartwell that are necessary to keep the pools near balance. The Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA) is purchasing replacement energy from other sources to cover the reduced hydropower generation from the DCP implementation.
And in Atlanta, emergency measures have been utilized for some time now, hence, my mother-in-law's joke:
An unprecedented drought stretching across the southeastern United States has forced some of the region's largest cities to declare water emergencies.
The situation has become so serious that officials in Atlanta, where rainfall totals are more than 16 inches below normal, said they could run out of drinking water in a matter of weeks.
"Without any intervention, we are likely to run out of water in three months," said Carol Couch, the director of the Environmental Protection Division in Georgia.
The drought has been sucking the city and its water sources dry.
"We have actually classified it as an exceptional drought," said David Stooksbury, a climatologist at Georgia State. "Basically [it is] the type of drought that we expect to see about once in 100 years."
Most of Atlanta's water supply comes from two lakes. Lake Lanier is the main source, but the drought has affected it.
The city's second source for water is Lake Allatoona, which should be about 16 feet higher than it currently is and continues losing a foot a week. Docks used for boats sit high and dry, hundreds of feet from the water's edge.
At the heart of the drought drama is the question of how state and federal officials ration the shrinking water supply.
Georgia officials have threatened legal action if the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers does not drastically cut the amount of water it releases from state lakes for agricultural and industrial use. Much of that released water ends up in Florida and Alabama, where officials are likely to oppose any additional decrease in the flow of water. Florida officials say low water levels already threaten the survival of endangered river mussels.
The corps already came under fire when it accidentally released 22 billion extra gallons of water from Lake Lanier last June, just as the region was sinking into a deep drought.
The dry weather has caused the state governors in the region to request that residents cut back on their water usage.
In the Atlanta area, while the conservation measures inside the home are still voluntary, the entire state is under a mandatory outdoor watering ban.
And so, the horrible consequences of global warming continue to manifest. And all while various Republicans and conservative wackos refuse to believe global warming is real.
How about those global-warming-skeptics start bringing THEIR own water?
The swaying palms, the gentle surf lapping upon the sand
A gentle breeze so keen to please slowly gusts across our land
Our island home is all we have known as centuries rolled by
Our island people stood alone on reefs so barren and dry.
But as years go by we wonder why the shoreline is not the same
The things we knew as always true somehow do not remain
The breakers break on higher ground - the outer palms are falling down
The taro pits begin to die and the village elders wonder why.
For what is happening to the beautiful isles we know
Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tokelau - the Marshall isles, that place of smiles
The rising sea will reclaim our ground - nothing but water will abound
Our people forced to leave for higher ground.
While far away they pour their fumes into the clear blue sky
Not knowing and never caring why the world is beginning to die
So land of our forebears despite how much we cared for you
The time will soon be when we must bid you adieu.
