Bydio

Sunset – September 30, 2009

Sunrise is nice
Like scented oil on your back
And a gentle kiss on your shoulder
As I rub deep

But sunset is better
A pink crescendo,
An orange purple red blue
Love bite on my neck

Each day is lustrous
Starting with a tickle
Ending with a pinch
Sighing with contentment into sleep

Wednesday night I published an article on Lakeland Local. I was told an office had discovered an advertisement that made it appear a candidate for Lakeland City Commission had his home for sale. On Thursday, the candidate objected to the article. I asked for answers or comment from the candidate. Though I was confident in the accuracy of the article, I offered to hold the article from display while he readied a response. I asked for a response by an 8am deadline.

I received no return calls or emails. I reinstated the article this morning.

The following is for readers who would like to see the process both before and after publication:

via Lakeland Local News and Info from Lakeland Florida » Blog Archive » Final Word on This Ol’ House.

Chuck refuses to get punked by a politician and brings the honor back to reporting. That’s not to say that reporters aren’t honorable as a rule, but there have been too many reporters throwing out fluff and not bringing the public enough substantial reporting. By explaining the processes he used to bring the article to us, he gives the reader a full version of events and of his reporting — and basically makes James Goetz show us how much of  a useless fool he really is. If he’s this unresponsive to a reporter about a serious issue, we can expect him to be far less responsive to the general public if he gets elected.

It’s reporting like this that makes or breaks political campaigns and careers, and Chuck Welch puts his community above the politics. Well done, Chuck.

Big ups to LakelandLocal.com.

Update 20091014: Has Goetz resigned the campaign?

I stand before you chastened, a humble man who is must admit the errors of my ways.

You see, I thought the bailouts were going to be terribly expensive. Adding up all of the direct cash injections, loans, assumptions of debt, commitments, guarantees, and other obligations, I reached the unimaginable sum total of $14 trillion dollars.

As it turns, I was off by a few trillion. Thanks to the frugality of the Federal Reserve, the new total appears to now be a downright reasonable sum of a mere $11.6 Trillion dollars — a perfect bargain, an affordable expense for the new era of frugality !

via Bailout Costs Shrink to $11.6 Trillion | The Big Picture.

To put $11.6 trillion into context, lets add up some major US expenses, adjusting for inflation: Take the Marshall Plan ($115.3B), the Louisiana Purchase ($217B), the Race to the Moon ($237B), the S&L Crisis ($256B), the Korean War ($454B), the New Deal ($500B), Invasion of Iraq ($597B), (Vietnam War $698B) all of NASA ($851.2B) and WWII ($3.6T).

By way of comparison, all of that totaled $7.52 trillion dollars. Hence, the bailouts have been the greatest commitment of capital the US has ever engaged in.

Lulz

QuestionableContent.net Very funny comic.

DALLAS – Police arrested a man Thursday after he allegedly placed an inactive car bomb near Fountain Place at 1445 Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas.

via Man arrested in alleged attempt to bomb Dallas skyscraper | Latest News | WFAA.com.

Stupid-ass Muslims. I guess the pattern is accurate with the New York/Denver plot, the Illinois plot stopped, and now this. New president, new attack(s).

NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA’s newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)

Top 10 GISS U.S. Temperature deviation (deg C) in New Order 8/7/2007

Here’s the old order of top 10 yearly temperatures.

via Watts Up With That?: 1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA.

Ohhhhh SNAP! The Y2K bug strikes Al Gore! Snigguldy-lulz

Bets on Obama stopping his push for immediate climate control legislation and plunging yet another knife into the back of our economy because we’re all going to die in hellfire if we don’t DO SOMETHING? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Norman E. Borlaug, who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat used to prevent famine in developing countries throughout the world, died September 12 from complications of cancer in Dallas.

via Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug dies | American Society of Agronomy.

I know this is late in posting, but I forgot to post about it when I originally read about it, and then after a while I figured everyone else had mentioned it, so whatever.

However Randy Cassingham’s Honorary Unsubscribe, which is usually a wealth of information on the recently deceased who affected the world in a special way, hasn’t mentioned it at all. And then I’m thinking about the guy, and all I can think of is “agronomist”. Yeah, odd word to recall — I didn’t even know if I was right — but eventually I found the name (Norman Borlaug) and figured I should put it on my own blog in case I need to remember it again.

So, anyway, dude seems to have been awesome, should be mentioned, rest in peace.

Up in smoke: FDA bans flavored cigarettes : Consumer Reports on Safety.

Well, the fascists have banned my cigarettes. How do these assholes get away with this crazy banning bullshit?! I’m punished because younger people like flavored cigarettes more than the regular licorice flavored dreck. Yeah, I like them better than the regular butts, too, and I started smoking Marlboros when I was in Israel (and Time cigarettes and Rothschild cigarettes). When I found out about vanilla flavored cigarettes, I was very happy. This was about 3-4 years ago, about 15 years after I started smoking. Now, I’m forced to either go back to those shitty licorice cigarettes (yes, normal cigs are flavored with licorice, the “candy” of the time when they started to be mass produced), or I’ll have to find a dealer. It’s time to go commando, all because some do-gooder law makers think they’re doing it “for the chiiiiiiiildren.”

Fuck Obama, Fuck Congress, Fuck the bureacrats, you’ve just made me angrier… and a criminal.

A recently divorced single mother explores the honest truths about dating and aging in a beauty and youth obsessed culture.

via ABC.com – Cougar Town – Home.

I liked it. I wasn’t enriched by it, the laughs were sparse, but it was upbeat and played well on sexual themes. I am amused, and therefore I like it. And Courtney Cox is hot.

Now, the Kansas Court of Appeals has called foul. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. Other than GlobalResearch.ca, I have yet to see any MSM coverage of the issue. The Court stated that MERS’ relationship is not that of a true party possessing all the rights given a buyer. Hence, the court ruled:

via Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Loses Legal Shield | The Big Picture.