Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, November 21, 2011
Why I’m (we’re?) not blogging any more.
posted by The Vidiot @ 2:04 PM Permalink Update: Bill Arnett wanted to share his thoughts on the closing of this blog.I’m so glad we had this time together,I know we didn’t sing all that many songs, though many an excellent tune was posted by my friend Sailor and I occasionally posted lyrics, both original and parodied from time to time.
Just to have a laugh, or sing a song.
Seems we just get started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say, “So long".
As things do in the cosmos in which we reside that Great Wheel of Life has turned yet again, as it did late last year and again mid year. Unfortunately with each new turn the centrifugal force seemed likely to force insurmountable, undesirable changes upon me. I know that they did on Sailor and the Vidiot as well.
These two people have been a pivotable force in my life. I met Sailor on a different website and when I grew weary of the bickering and the troglodytes there I asked Sailor if I might try my hand blogging for this site. After checking with his partners here he gave me a warm welcome and I immediately felt I had a new family, one that did not judge me nor censor me nor ever do anything but offer me their wholehearted support and the friendship, camaraderie, respect, and love that is often found when least expected, but needed the most.
The Vidiot is one of the most fascinating people I “know,” and she never ceases to surprise and amaze me with her style, wit, and intelligence. Her take on too many issues to count were so close to those beliefs I hold that she often addressed an issue before me and left me unable to add anything!
As to Sailor the bond we had already formed on that other site became cast in stone, irrefutable; I have a new brother from a different mother. Stay in touch my friend. I’m still hoping you can take some vacation time and come out and stay awhile.
I did then, at the beginning so long ago, and do now live trapped in a web of never-ending pain and that pain, combined with the obvious inequities now institutionalized in our government fueled a hatred that eventually threatened to consume me entirely, so I stepped back, reassessed, fought through the influence of the many medications I must take, and decided that for the sake of my mind and self-identity I must renounce the hatred building within me or lose my identity completely. I have never before been a man that hated; I dedicated my life to public service, as I saw it, first in the military, then by hunting bail skips professionally for fifteen, returning thousands of accused felons and misdemeanants to court or custody.
Then I got clobbered with two Agent Orange cancers from my service in Vietnam. I don’t have the heart to recount the travail of those rampaging sicknesses that nearly killed me and left me with neurological damage which means massive pain 24/7/365.
I did also recount much of the story of my Warrior Woman, with whom I fell in love at first site and within the first five minutes of meeting her I told her that she would be mine…oh, yes, she would be mine.
It’s almost 39 years later now and oh, yes she is and will always be mine. True love is an amazing gift; it uplifts you, centers you, shows you the joy of life, and yet somehow keeps you grounded in reality at the same time.
This, probably more than anything else, brought me back from the precipice over which hatred was threatening to drag me. I am grateful for that, but it took the fire out of my writing and I have become more consumed by further major upcoming surgeries that I know worry my Warrior Woman and our wonderful son (who will be getting his BA in psychology next spring) more than they will say. As “they” say, one day at a time.
When I get out from under these new health difficulties and if the blog should happen to still be here and I can ever figure how to log back in directly (the Vidiot is being courteous and sweet enough to post this for me) perhaps I’ll be able to return for second go round.
Thank you, Sailor. Thank you, Vidiot. We’ve had much fun together and I love you both. Let’s get together and do this again sometime soon, eh?
And a special thanks, too, to all our readers with a special farewell to DanD, which whom I have gone round and round with, but always with a measure of civility and good humor.
Farewell for now…my friends.
Bill
Personally, I’ve lost the steam to blog. For The Sailor, he feels like his “sense of outrage became dulled and it started to seem like 'same shit, different day'.” He also pointed out that when “you go read through our archives, we were covering the same issues we started with, it seemed nothing had changed.”
You’d think that with the OWS movement, I’d have even more steam, but no. I don’t live in NYC anymore, (I really really REALLY wish this had all happened while I was still there though.) and my life has gone off onto a different road. I’ve come to realize a few things about blogging, but mostly, it started to feel like I was spitting into the wind. I hadn’t even wanted to address it, or make a last post, until I read this on Dr. James Petras’s website that so perfectly summed up how I felt:
To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”. It is a form pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed. Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind. The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power. By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual: of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere. The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little. The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity. The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office. The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.
I no longer want to be a desktop militant. I’m tired of feeling like I’m contributing and knowing, deep down, that I am not. The blog was necessary for me to get to this point. I am now going to take everything I’ve learned over the years and focus on something more productive. (Hint: I’ve started writing Chapter five) Once that is accomplished, I will be back, only within a different forum.
My days as a “pseudo militant” are over.
Huppy the Anarchist lives!
Labels: blogs, end of an era
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Why can't they just be straight up with us?
posted by The Vidiot @ 1:55 PM Permalink So, I'm surfing around, and I find a youtube that shows that the rain this AM here in St. Louis was hotter than Hades, radioactively speaking.ALERT!!! 178 X Background Radiation in Saint Louis Rain
STAY OUT OF THE RAIN!
This data may be indicative of a RECENT SIGNIFICANT radiological event in Fukushima.
The reading was taken at approximately 10:20am on 8/20/11 in Saint Louis Missouri from a vehicle that had driven approximately 4 miles through the trailing edges of a thunderstorm.
The sample returned a reading of 1.786 mR/hr, which equates to ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT times greater than normal background radiation. This reading is almost 3 times greater than are previous high reading of 62x background radiation.
And what does that mean? Well, I'm not entirely sure, but it does SOUND bad. Having worked in a lab that used a lot of radiation, whenever the geiger counter sounded like that, we panicked.
I found an explanation somewhere else that may or may not be correct. I'm hoping it's wrong.
2,400CPM = 1 mR/hr
1.78 mR/hr * 2400 CPM = 4272 CPM
so that would be about 4272 CPM (Counts Per minute)
anything over 100 CPM is considered Alert Level
Now, it could've been cumulative. Who knows. But jeebus. Why does the news totally not cover this? Don't they give a damn? They live here too! When I go to the EPA website, there are huge gaps in the data and the spikes are unexplained. There's no context. I don't know if I should be frightened or terrified.
Like, here's a scary data point for St. Louis:
2011-08-16 12:57:10 132.0000 CPM
Now, keep in mind, anything over 100 is bad. And wouldn't you know it, the data stops on the 17th which means there will probably be no reading for today. The thing always goes down near a storm.
When you listen to the news, there's nada. When you read the news, nada. Nada, nada, nada. The nada is deafening. Obviously, there's something more going on in Japan for this new wave of radiation to be hitting us. But I guess they want us to be concerned with who Perry slept with instead.
Obviously, we're just cannon fodder, or lab rats.
I wanna go back to Peru.
Now!
Friday, August 19, 2011
If you wanna barf
posted by The Vidiot @ 10:25 PM Permalink Watch this:Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear joins Thom Hartmann. Meanwhile, Japan is not out of the danger zone...in fact the nuclear crisis is getting worse and worse! We've recently learned from Japan that the amount of radiation released was more than 20 times that from the Hiroshima bomb, and now it looks they may be experiencing the early stages of a total China Syndrome meltdown. And is the United States in danger too?
We're still spiking here in in St. Louis. Teen Vidiot still won't believe me when I say the rain his hot. It was nice being in S. America where I knew the radiation hadn't spread in mass quantities yet.
Yet.
Keep tabs on what's going on near where you live here.
Labels: japan earthquake, nuclear power
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Aeeya! This crap makes me nuts!
posted by The Vidiot @ 6:29 PM PermalinkExcerpt: ThinkProgress has found that a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then quietly went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line.
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see
what I see?
Labels: banksters, corporate greed, goldman sachs
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tobacco Companies Suck
posted by The Vidiot @ 10:52 AM Permalink Because Heaven forbid that anybody who smokes should be reminded of what smoking actually does to a human body.Four tobacco companies filed a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over what they say are unconstitutional requirements for warning labels on US cigarette packaging.
I'll tell you right now, the warning labels on the cigarettes in South America are far more explicit. In fact, the labels are so large, they nearly obstruct the brand name of whatever cigarette pack you buy AND they're so graphic, they'll turn your stomach. One pack I saw had an emaciated comatose cancer patient, all yellow skinned and dead looking with a ton of tubes sticking out of his body. Jeebus.
The companies only put up a stink here because they can. The US government will always be railroaded by corporate interests.
Labels: cigarettes, corporate greed, stu
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
I'm Baaaack.
posted by The Vidiot @ 3:39 PM Permalink Actually, I've been back for a few weeks, but I had no idea how many i's needed dotting and t's needed crossing after such a long trip. All sorts of things were spiraling out of control, including my credit rating for some odd reason. All of my bills were automatically paid and I'm not overdue on anything. Yet, my credit rating is in the crapper. Once I know why, you'll know why because I suspect it's something so ridiculous it's laughable.The trip itself was pretty amazing. What we did wasn't for everybody though. We spent one month in Quito, Ecuador studying Spanish. We rented an apartment so I got to actually buy the food I've only ever drooled over in the mercados in Latin America. Dr. Vidiot's Spanish really improved, my Spanish only got a little better. But, in my defense, I only had half the hours a day he did. After Ecuador, we made our way south to Cusco, Peru. Yes, I saw Machu Picchu and boy was it something. And we spent a night with an indigenous family on one of the islands of Lake Titicaca. We stayed in hostels for the most part and though the hot water wasn't always reliable (or even existent) it was all pretty cheap. Two months is a long time to be away though and we really missed our dog.
While there, I ended up sending reports every three or four days to family and friends so they wouldn't worry about us. (Close to half of them were worried we'd be kidnapped. I honestly don't know why. We're just not that interesting.) The reports ended up being pretty lengthy and not half bad to read so I'm going to be self publishing them at some point, just as soon as I can decide if I want to illustrate it with with photos or drawings.
Politically, back here in the States, I didn't miss much. I mean, the whole debt ceiling thing was going on and I guess I missed Wiener's wiener. Both issues were ridiculous. Whatever was decided about the debt ceiling was a done deal way before it entered the public discourse and well, a wiener is a wiener. I couldn't be bothered with any of it.
Of course, I returned to the launching of the Republican primary debacle, otherwise known as the "Ignore Ron Paul" road show. WTF is up with that? Jon Stewart's "Ron Paul is the 13th floor of Republican politics" really says it all.
I shall resume some semblance of regular posting. It seems my blogmates have had busy summers as well.
It's good to be back... sorta.
Labels: blogging, south america
