Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

CNN is showing a shocking video that’s made the rounds on YouTube: It’s of a supporter of Barack Obama who took a live fish from an aquarium and swallowed it whole!

Ruby the goldfish is owned by a neighbor of a preacher who made a guest appearance this week just two blocks down the street from Barack Obama’s church in Chicago. Until this morning, Ruby had shared her fish tank with a guppy named Jewel. Now, Ruby lives alone. She ate Jewel alive.

When will Barack Obama repudiate this live-fish eating Muslim extremist cult among his followers? Why has he not spoken out?

There’s been a great deal of concern about the foreclosures of American homes, and plummeting home values, but there’s a different kind of real estate crisis: A foreclosure of green values.

Solve Climate reports that out of the top dozen homebuilding corporations in the United States, not one has integrated environmentally-sustainable design into their work.

Maybe it’s a good thing, then, that homebuilding is down. There will be less of a bad thing, until green building can increase. Over the next four years, green homebuilding companies are expected to almost double their market share.

For someone a lucky, the wait won’t be that long. HGTV has held a Green Home Sweepstakes, and will announce the winner of an eco-friendly new home in a few days.

Right wing Republicans keep on saying that it’s okay to deny same-sex couples equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution because same-sex marriages are inherently unnatural. The idea is that anything unnatural is therefore ungodly. Of course, these Republicans don’t spend their time attacking unnatural things like cars, or light bulbs, or chewy granola bars. Their righteous wrath is oddly restrained to just same-sex marriage.

The scientific truth is that same-sex marriages are not really unnatural at all. There are many examples of same-sex reproduction in nature. In fact, in many species, three are no males at all – only females who breed with each other. Then there are hermaphrodites, like snails, and even fruit trees. Oh, the immorality!

Today there’s a report of research by Lindsay Young, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. Her studies have included observations of lesbian albatrosses setting up long-term nesting relationships with each other that involve considerable physical intimacy.

Same-sex marriage occurs in nature, it seems. Therefore, same-sex marriage is natural. By the standards of right wing Republicans, that ought to mean that evangelical churches should start pushing Congress to make same-sex marriage legal across the United States.

How likely do you think that is it happen? Maybe the right wing Republicans’ efforts to deny equal protection under the law to same-sex couples doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s natural. Maybe they’re just jerks.

A startling development in the coastal waters of the Southeastern United States calls into question the amnesty for illegal immigrants that is being planned under the secretive North American Union. The big-government Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research warns us that lionfish, a large predatory animal with strongly poisonous spines, has invaded our territorial waters, and is waiting, hidden underwater, sometimes within clear sight of land.

They refer to the Indo-Pacific lionfish as “a non–native predatory fish first reported off the North Carolina coast in 2000. Since then, the number and geographic distribution of lionfish within the northwestern Atlantic has increased dramatically. Lionfish now inhabit coral reef, hardbottom, and artificial structures.”

Hold on a second, there! What are these lionfish doing inhabiting artificial structures? Did the lionfish make these structures, or did someone make the structures for the lionfish?

If someone made these artificial structures for the lionfish, which I believe to be the obvious logical answer, then we need to ask ourselves the following: Who would profit from providing subsidized housing for illegal immigrants?

It all reminds me a little bit too much of factory farming – only worse. In the case of the Indo-Pacific lionfish invading the coastal waters of the Southeastern United States, what’s being farmed is not fish for food, but fish for poison!

Someone call Lou Dobbs – but don’t think for a second that this is just about the lionfish stealing American jobs. It goes much further than that.

Take a look at the map. These are Indo-Pacific lionfish, so they can reasonably be expected to have moved up the Pacific coast of the United States by now. Perhaps there have been sleeper cells there for generations. That’s on one side of us. Now they’re up and down the East Coast of the United States. It’s almost as if they’re fixated on the USA in particular. They’ve got us in their sights, so to speak.

Communities of illegal immigrants hiding underwater in artificial structures set up by nobody knows who, right up and down our nation’s borders, armed with neurotoxins. In biological evolution, nobody develops a weapon like that unless they intend to use it. When will they attack us with these biological weapons?

I can’t tell you for sure, but I’ve seen these lionfish up close, and I can tell you one thing – they don’t want to talk.

According to a May 17,2008 AP article, Alabama’s county sheriffs are are given $1.75 per day to feed a prisoner – and are allowed to pocket the difference, if they can do it cheaper.

The report says “critics charge that Alabama, in effect, is paying law enforcement to skimp on food and might be rewarding sheriffs for mistreating prisoners. “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way,” said Buddy Sharpless, executive director of the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

I don’t understand the negative reaction to the fact that Alabama’s county sheriffs are allowed to profit by, in my opinion participating in what amounts to legal graft, by scrimping on food for prisoners. (Alabama jails bank on cheap meals – Law allows sheriffs to pocket leftover food allowance, AP May 17, 2008)

What’s the big deal? Isn’t this exactly what private prisons do? While condemning the practice by county sheriffs, I’m sure Mr. Sharpless would listen attentively to executives from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) making their pitch to privatize public jails and prisons.

CCA claims to save states and counties money by negotiating a per-head fee for housing and feeding prisoners. They profit by pocketing the difference between what they spend and what they charge the taxpayers. Contracting-out public services had been a gold mine for ARAMARK, too. In addition to prisons, ARAMARK also turns a tidy profit feeding children attending public schools.

I agree with Mr. Sharpless opinion, “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way.” As a taxpayer I want to know my dollars are going to provide public services, not lining the pockets of CCA and ARAMARK.

Under the cover of darkness, the American military entered the town of Baiji last night. Residents tried to get away from the assault, and then were gunned down by American helicopters as they fled.

Eight civilians were killed. Among the dead were two boys, one eleven years old and one eight years old.

The town’s police chief called the American attack “a criminal act”.

It’s not the first time this has happened. The United Nations has called for tough investigations of American attacks from the air against civilians in Iraq. Those investigations have not come.

They call this a “war”. What kind of war is it in which the strongest military in the world attacks children after their bedtimes?

Frustrated by the stalled development of human society, I find refuge in the new green growth of spring.

Two sets of financial numbers in the news are the focus of my attention tonight:

First, the price of regular unleaded gasoline where I live is not four dollars per gallon yet. It’s three dollars, ninety nine cents and nine tenths of a cent – a whole whopping tenth of a penny less than four dollars per gallon.

Second, Open Secrets reports a huge difference in the character of the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Barack Obama: $250
The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Hillary Clinton: $1,216,842

My wife says that Randi Rhodes says that the Washington Post says that some anonymous insiders in the Clinton and Obama campaigns say that there are secret meetings to figure out how to introduce Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate!

Yeah, or maybe not. Notice how this story line sounds an awful lot like that of the urban legends, in which someone’s cousin knows someone who knows someone…

The Hillary Clinton campaign is kicking its public relations efforts into high gear, desperately trying to manipulate the media to buying into their hype about Hillary Clinton being chosen as VP by Obama. After all, it’s Clinton’s last chance to get her White House back.

The truth is obvious – there is no way that Barack Obama could have Hillary Clinton as a Vice Presidential running mate. She has become poison to both Democrats and Republicans. She would only drag Obama down.

That, and there’s no way that Barack Obama could ever trust Hillary Clinton, or her loose lips husband. He could not operate effectively as President with those two trying to mess him up at every step.

The Hillary Clinton for VP talk is just desperate talk from Washington D.C. insiders who once thought that their power was inevitable, and now find themselves on the outside, just like everyone else.

There is no story.

I don’t subscribe to cable television — it’s a lot of money to pay every month for a lot of commercial-laden dreck. I don’t watch the commercial networks over the air on television either for the same reason. But I do watch PBS, and so do my kids, and I value a good number of their programs. I didn’t want to lose the ability to watch PBS in the February 2009 switchover from analog to digital signals. I also noticed that the PBS station here in Columbus, Ohio has been broadcasting three channels with digital signals. One of those channels broadcasts Ohio state legislative deliberation along with a local civic and political talk show and the occasional speech or public forum. That’s a service of great benefit to me as a political blogger, and I wanted to take advantage.

So off I went to DTV2009.gov and got my complimentary Department of Commerce coupons for $40 off a converter box that would allow me to watch digital television on my analog TV. I bought a converter, which after the coupon only cost me $19.99. It easily installed, and that’s nice.

But then I discovered that even though I live very close to downtown Columbus itself, my indoor antenna can’t pick up PBS digital stations! None of the PBS stations come in. That is a major bummer on a personal level — and it also makes me realize on a social level that if I can’t pick up the PBS digital station and I’m living right here in central Columbus, there must be many people also in the city or living outside the city who receive PBS analog signals and will lose that PBS station come February 2009.

From the vantage point of me and many people like me, the conversion from analog to digital television isn’t an upgrade — it’s a blackout.

P.S. Anybody have any ideas about how I can boost the signal inexpensively? I rent and don’t have permission (or frankly the money) to attach a big outdoor antenna.