Virginia Tech Massacre

I’ve been trying to get my head around this tragedy since it happened yesterday. This is an emormously devasting event for those involved and I my heart goes out to the loved ones of those lost. This is truly senseless violence, it makes no sense and is therefore incomprehensible to anyone but the man who committed this horrible crime, and we will never know if it even made any sense to him.

Naturally when I got home I turned on The Mighty Wurlitzer to see what was being reported but it was all so loud and frantic that I had to turn it down and preferred to read. One of the first things I read was this:

Dana Perino says the president was “horrified and his immediate reaction was one of deep concern for the families of the victims, the victims themselves, the students, the professors and all the people of Virginia who have dealt with this shocking incident.”

Perino said “The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.”

This man, who calls himself our President, seems to me to have no sense of decency whatsoever and seems willing to politicize anything. Personally, I find it repulsive.

Larry Johnson has a post up at No Quarter about the reaction of America to this tragedy and how it relates to our attitudes about the death and destruction that is integral to our nation’s foreign policy at this time. Trex has a two-part post up at FDL where the Firedogs were discussing the same thing. In that discussion marksb added this, which I thought was also quite relevant:

Lots of people are unstable and under pressure, and when one of them (one of us) snaps, the idiots have to blame something so they can get some mileage from the tragedy. It’s so sad; then it seems to get sadder still. Damn.

My wife had a dilemma with a student last semester. He was an Iraq war vet, Army, in her college communications class. He wasn’t completing assignments according to her directions and wanted to talk with her about it. From the way he was talking in class and in his papers, from his stress level and the anger he sometimes suddenly displayed, she was a bit scared. He was unable to talk about himself, even in a written description of dyadic communications—he had to make up a fictional account of two people communicating. She was able to work with him and find a middle ground that fulfilled the class requirements and respected his evident, but unspoken, PTSD…but he didn’t have a counselor from the VA or at the college.

When I heard about the VT shootings today I flashed on this kid at my wife’s college. I’m afraid of the issues we will have to face in our society over the next decade.

In the bizarro world the wingers are out there spewing a ration of shite that says that this would not have happened if there had been more guns on campus.

I think it may be time to watch “Bowling For Columbine” again.

100X Fuckeder

This pretty much sums it up.

(h/t peter)

More Manna

The oldest and greatest rock band in the world – meet The Zimmers and their amazing cover of The Who’s “My Generation”.

Lead singer Alf is 90 – it’s quite something when he sings “I hope I die before I get old”. And he’s not the oldest – there are 99 and 100-year-olds in the band!

The Zimmers will feature in a BBC TV documentary being aired in May 2007. Documentary-maker Tim Samuels has been all over Britain recruiting isolated and lonely old people – those who can’t leave their flats or who are stuck in rubbish care homes.

The finale of the show is this group of lonely old people coming together to stick it back to the society that’s cast them aside – by forming a rock troupe and trying to storm into the pop charts.

Some massive names from the pop world have thrown their weight behind The Zimmers… The song is produced by Mike Hedges (U2, Dido, Cure), the video shot by Geoff Wonfor (Band Aid, Beatles Anthology), and it was recorded in the legendary Beatles studio 2 at Abbey Road.

Look out for the single being released from May 21 – with proceeds going to a good cause.

And check out more photos and info at:

www.myspace.com/thezimmersband

Make sure you watch it all the way to the end!

Is WiFi Wiping Out The Bees?

Update: I cross-posted this article to dKos and there has been a lively discussion going on over there.

This could be a more immediate threat than either terrorism, global warming, or nuclear annihilation.

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world – the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon – which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe – was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Albert Einstein speculated that if the honey bees were to disappear, human beings would be gone very shortly thereafter. A few weeks ago Steve posted here about this threat, and Steve was right, we are interfering with the primal forces of nature, and if we don’t stop doing it we will atone (a prize for anyone who can guess the reference). At first there were speculations about climate change, or pesticide use, or chemtrails, but now we may have learned more about what is causing Colony Collapse Disorder, or the collapse of a beehive’s population due to the inability of the bees to find their way home.

Digital Manna

I have these friends that send me things. They send them because I send them things too. It’s just an occasional, “Hey, check this out, and by the way, Fuck Bush”, kind of relationship. So today I got up and these two lovely pieces of digital manna that could keep me going for the rest of the month were in my inbox. The first is an excerpt from a message board thread that my friend shared with me.

Is This Creepy To You?

Red, white, and blue, this is for you
If you were home I would hump on you
Home of the brave, let’s misbehave
We’ll be gettin’ freaky like at Abu Ghraib

Uhhh…I don’t know, I’m going to assume it’s satire. You tell me what you think, please, I’m dumbstruck.
(h/t Tbogg)

Silent Coup, The Fundamentalist Takeover

(Updated twice below the fold)

From Krugman (This is behind a New York Times subscription, here is the meat of it):

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

Rapping Union

By Stephen Fleischman

In Memory of Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays, and a Tribute to Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers

(to the rhythm of Talking Union)

Now, if you want higher wages let me tell you what to do
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you

In the system under which we live, called Capitalism, the owners of the means of production don’t believe in sharing profits. They believe in maximizing profits—for themselves and their stockholders.

It ain’t that simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train

One of the least endearing features of capitalism its tendency to boom and bust. The economists of the system, descendents of Adam Smith, call these wild swings “economic adjustments”. When they swing in a downward direction they’re called “recessions”. Occasionally, they go beyond recession. They go Ka-Boom as they did in the 1930s and dumped us into the depth of “The Great Depression”.

You may be down and out, but you ain’t beaten,
You can pass out a leaflet and call a meetin’

During that grim period, some were eating grapes of wrath, farmers spilt milk and plowed under crops while people starved and men sold apples on the street. It took all the President’s horses and all the President’s men plus a World War to put us back together again. Franklin Roosevelt saved the system by a horse’s whisker.

Rose Mary Woods In The Toobz

Remember Rose Mary Woods?

Well it seems that she’s been down in the toobz all these years just waiting for another opportunity.

Lotus Notes? Microsoft Outlook? And we trust the security of our nation to these fools?

Blog Quote Of The Week

What’s that sound? Off in the distance, do you hear that? It sounds kind of like…frogs marching. They say that means it’s going to be a really, really hot summer in Washington.

Thanks Trex, I needed that.