Saturday Morn

Acoma © Robert Sommers

It is wonderful news that Aung San Suu Kyi has been finally freed from her long time house arrest in Myanmar. My hope is that she stays free from any continued harassment by the ruling dictatorship. Perhaps the light is finally starting to shine in Burma. Our buddies India and China have been enabling the junta for years.

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Typical knee jerk reactivity from the authorities re: new calls on banning printer cartridges from airlines after the failed Al Qaeda attempts to blow up airplanes using similar devices filled with PETA. It's merely a delivery system folks, they will pack it in something else next time. These terrorists may be immoral homicidal maniacs, but stupid they are not.

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On the heels of my tell all tripping story and Windowdancer's own recount of his brown windowpane, pockmarked redneck, ghost story, I am thinking of starting a new column called "When hippies get old." I encourage you all to send your favorite tale of any weird hallucination's from your past that you would care to anonymously share with the world. And rest assured that if your secret identity is inadvertently breached, you can always play the jesus card.

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Great Washington Post opinion by E.J. Dionne - Dems should hold their ground.

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I was talking to a friend in San Francisco the other day about the California Attorney General's race. Kamala Harris, a San Francisco D.A. who is a woman of color with a funny name against Republican Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles D.A.. Out of 8 million ballots cast, they are less than 4000 votes apart with Harris having a slight lead at present. Cooley is not a bad guy, I disagree with him on some issues. Bob Feuerstein worked with him for years. Don't really know Harris. My friend and I both had the same thought and fear about the race. Americans have had their fling with politicians with ethnic names. That is so over. Kamala is too barackasized for our white bread, xenophobic nation and that is probably turning voters off. All the other Dems were in like flynn in our state. Maybe if she had changed it to Nikki or Bobbie, she would have had a better shot.



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I have a strange mental game that I play when evaluating candidates, will they pass the party test? Seriously, I wonder about hanging out and laughing and having a few pops with some of these people. With most of the Republican candidates, it's a definite negatory. Pardon the expression but they are a bit dweeby. Sure, I could knock back a few gin and tonics with Boehner and listen to his war stories about floozy blond hookers and hot lobbyists but I am afraid even that would get old after a while. Gingrich, McConnell, Cantor? I'd rather drink curdled milk. Huckaby? Please... Might be fun to have O'Donnell telling stories of the old days with the coven and the wild sex and all but I am afraid that she would start getting preachy and I just know that I would lose it. Is there a member of the grand old party that you think would be fun to party down with? And please no RINO's like the governator, we are talking real republicans here.

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In the midst of the far right, theocratic juggernaut that swept through the last election, it is comforting to live in California, where people seem to have kept their sanity and good sense.

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Here is a neat one from Huffpo:

The highest-ranking House official in charge of environmental and energy policy may soon be a Republican legislator who denies climate change on the grounds of his belief that nothing bad can come of the Earth unless it is preordained by God.


Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce since 1997, submitted a letter to his colleagues earlier this week asking for their blessing in his campaign to assume the gavel when Republicans take control of the chamber.


Such a possibility is likely to be particularly worrying to climate change scientists and their supporters, especially considering a specific incident in which Shimkus appeared to wholly reject any potential for man-made climate consequences due to his faith that only God can "destroy this Earth."

The source story from the Toronto Star.

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Deathwish
n.

1. Psychiatry.
   1. A desire for self-destruction, often accompanied by feelings of depression, hopelessness, and self-reproach.
   2. The desire, often unconscious, for the death of another person, such as a parent, toward whom one has unconscious hostility.
2. A suicidal urge thought to drive certain people to put themselves consistently into dangerous situations.

Thanatos - The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state.

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would require graphic warning labels that cover half a package's front and rear and the top 20% of all cigarette ads.

The labels will feature either drawings or photos illustrating graphically the dangers associated with smoking and will be accompanied by text stating that smoking is addictive or that it kills. The pictures feature such things as a diseased lung, a corpse and a man smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube.

Let me be the first to predict, right here on the Blue Heron Blast, that cigarette sales will freaking soar if they do this. Ever hear of a death wish? They have tried this type of behavior modification before and it never works. I remember studying this phenomenon in college psych classes.