Monthly Archives: June 2013

SCOTUS Trips Then Flips; Paula Deen Comes Afro Clean; What the Frack?!

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Oyez oyez oyez the Supreme Court of the United States predominantly made up of angry old men lawyers has jilted many citizens this past few days with some interesting and volatile decisions sure to confuse some of the resident zombies in this fair land. Firstly a decision was made to eliminate the Voting Rights Act! Just think, prejudice has been vanquished! Gerrymandering and redistricting are no longer an issue we need to pay any attention to! Let the hatemongers do as they may it’s just a matter of time until their sons and daughters are marrying outside the Klan! It’s out of our hands, this is our last stand!

Secondly the Defense of Marriage Act was voted to be unconstitutional. Hail Mary! This sure made quite a few Christian zombies upset. How interesting this decision is juxtaposed against the aforementioned vote! Maybe now people can actually begin to be comfortable about their sexuality and there will be no societal stigma attached to their own personal way of life. Certainly the confused and conflicted will continue to be just that,  however,  this is a landmark decision in the right direction for the advancement of human kind!

Paula Deen comes afro clean! Ah the pitiful revelation of a butter slinging television “chef” that she used a hateful term for another race thirty years ago and now repents. Perhaps the media has judged her too harshly. No, it is quite evident that she has judged and convicted herself. She has caused her own demise and toppled herself from her gastric throne of high calorie dishes. Her public relations firm, Butter, Cupcakes and Tears has failed bitterly in it’s attempt to buoy her reputation as well as retain her sponsors. She should have hired Anthony Bourdain as her lawyer and her public relations person and she might have been better off. But there is a sliver lining! Her cookbooks are now flying out of the Amazon warehouse! Apparently butter can still lubricate the tightest of situations!

Speaking of lubrication, oil man who? It appears that we keep getting oil men in the White House! We went from George W. Bush who was a very obvious oil man and friend of the Saud to Barack Obama who seems to lean with the oil companies whether the majority likes it or not! In his speech Tuesday he avoided saying outright that he opposes the Keystone XL pipeline. Instead saying that he would not approve it if it is shown to affect climate change! Say what?! Sounds like the old “we need more studies” bull excrement that we’ve been hearing for years. Yes Mr. President fossil fuel will affect climate change in a deleterious way. Period. End of story!

All that hot air brings us to this gas. If you think fracking is safe think again. The oil companies are doing everything in their power to convince us that this is a safe fuel source and what a bedazzling public relations extravaganza they have constructed. We now have a “fracosauras” by the name of “Talisman Terry” extolling the “clean” and widely available energy source of natural gas. It would be better to have Ronald McDonald trying to convince cows that eating beef was in their best interest! If we can sell it to the kids the adults will follow suit right?! What the frack!?

“I is what I is” — Paula Deen

Get off the cell phone and Drive! — Jake Shween

Good News! The Currency is Signed Stylishly!

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Good News to report today fellow Americans. The horrible insult to the currency of the United States of America, committed by Jacob Lew, has been amended and what was once an immature doodle of a scribble of a signature is now almost legible! The New York Times reported today that Jacob Lew, Secretary of the Treasury and also the “Chairperson, Financial Stability Oversight Council” has been practicing his long hand signature and has perfected it to such a degree that it is now worthy of imprinting on all denominations of American currency. Turns out that he will be starting with five dollar bills to be released later this fall.

Perhaps he is aiming to stabilize our finances slowly with such an approach. Now about that other title of his.The Financial Stability Oversight Council was established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Apparently, we the people, now have another federal agency making sure we are safe from financial idiocy and greed! Just imagine avoiding what occurred during the derivatives fiasco that brought the worlds financial markets to its respective knees. The world is a better place now, the financial markets have been made secure and stable! We actually have an ace on the case! Finally a man whose signature we can almost read is on the job! He will stick up for the little guy who was run over by the “Too Big to Fail” fiduciary institutions that so bitterly failed us in the past.

With news like this our minds should be at ease. Hopefully everyone had a Happy Father’s Day. Now we can embrace the upcoming summer solstice with a renewed sense of hope, trust and diplomacy. Someone who can write in script is in charge of printing money and protecting the consumer. Hooray for America and Wall Street!

“Gotta get down to the cumberland mine.
Thats where I mainly spend my time.
Make good money, five dollars a day. made anymore, I might move away.”  — The Grateful Dead Cumberland Blues

The author is saddened by the loss of a brother from Jersey, James Gandolfini. He will be fondly remembered at the end of his television show driveway, in his P.J.s, retrieving the morning paper as showed in the opening scenes of The Sopranos. Arrivederci Goodfella!

Get off the cell phone and Drive! — Jake Shween

Edward Snowden and the Game of Phones or What’s the Price of Information?

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Another week another scandal. The United States runs itself like a corporation out of control at times. It’s nice to believe this country has it all together but apparently that’s not even close to what reality is behind closed doors. Does the National Security Agency really know what is going on? Well if they did why couldn’t they have stopped the wall street fiasco of 2008? If the NSA were actually intercepting and reading all those emails between the gigantic financial institutions that have a stranglehold on the world economy they would have clearly smelled a rat in the works of the derivatives market. They would have been able to help all those “muppets” who were bankrupted and set out to dry when Lehman Brothers went belly up.  Maybe they knew and decided not to say anything!

So who are the smartest guys in the room? Are the smartest ones just observers who watch as the financial world spins out of control? Maybe they have a piece of the action and have been bought out, you know the saying, everybody has a price. What can all this information possibly be worth? Apparently the world economy that’s all. Or maybe they kind of knew but just didn’t want to be definitive about anything and let the proverbial cat out of the bag! Playing dumb to let someone else take the hit. Maybe this was the plan to redistribute the wealth after all! It stands to reason that if an intelligence agency is actually intelligent wouldn’t they be able to not only stop terrorist activity but also to decrease crime in every sector? Wouldn’t the banks who now launder money for the drug lords now be held accountable for their misdeeds? How about the banks that let elderly people be bilked out of their retirement funds by telemarketers? Suddenly wouldn’t the potential murderer become suspect by their google searches, emails, insurance purchases etc.? Should we call the NSA and ask them? Does Facebook know more than the NSA?

Corporate spying is nothing new. Carly Fiorina of Hewlett Packard was spying on her people back a decade ago. Never mind that the fall guy was Patricia Dunn. That must be the way to do it perhaps. Have some one else take the hit when the skullduggery is exposed. In other words just spy for your own teams self interests and well being and if something else turns up either ignore it or if you just can’t ignore it have a fall guy be the whistle blower to step forward and expose the sordid truth! We often complain about bribery and corruption in other less well developed industrial countries but here in the United States  we call it democracy.

Sadly none of this is really new. It seems now that the increasingly popular “Game of Thrones” series on HBO, based on the book Fire & Ice by George R. R. Martin, is surprisingly relevant to the worlds’ current state of affairs. It is all represented, the corruption, the horrendous scandals, the strife and war. Of course there is also the value of information gathered by whatever means necessary be it prostitution, torture or even murder. Yes indeed art is again a reflection of reality. These are interesting times for the kingdom. Tune in to see the fate of Edward Snowden and the Game of Phones!

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.” — Christopher Hitchens

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.” — Christopher Hitchens

Get off the cell phone and Drive! — Jake Shween

The Last Flight

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It was a brilliant spring morning the breeze blowing gently in off the coast. The dew drops drying in a slightly sticky way on the end of the juniper branches. She flew as she always flew on these mornings to the clusters of flowers that her sisters had told her about. Working tirelessly, churning and gathering masses of pollen from the bright yellow flowering squash plants that swayed seductively in the sunlight. Growing slightly drunk from the work and the pollen as well as the heat of the late spring morning. Soon she was headed back to the hive with the results of her gathering. The golden rays on her shoulder and the trail of scent in the air let her know she was going the right way. Back and forth she swayed magically through the wafting heat from the meadow.

The hive was bustling today. She flew in to the mad frenzied dance of her extended family. On to the honeycomb to regurgitate her prize. As she flexed and regurgitated her pollen she noticed a strange feeling, the back of her head felt sore. She had not noticed this feeling ever before and it itched uncomfortably. After she deposited her treasure she noticed her sisters seemed strange as well. Something wasn’t right, something had changed. The hive was not playing the right jazz she had become accustomed to. The jazz was disjointed, the dance had become slower than it should have been. The honey was wrong. It was tainted. It was as if someone had introduced an insidious poison into their unwitting midst. She flew away without recharging. She need to escape this feeling on the back of her head. Maybe if she flew fast enough!

She flew as this great feeling of dread crept over her. The sun had become darker even though it still shone brightly. The world was harsh and sharp, it cut into her perception like glass. She headed for the blue on the horizon. Maybe the blue would still the dread and kill the buzzing inside her head. Her wings seemed to move without her conscious thought. Somehow they seemed to be slowing down but in actuality they were speeding up. Over the junipers she soared, higher than she had ever flown before. Over the black top road along the shore where the heat now rose in billowing zephyrs. The sand now beneath her like an endless ribbon bordering the blue, the blue. The salt pierced her eyes and nose now. She was miles from the hive but she did not care. Only to escape the feeling in the back of her head, that’s all that mattered.

The sound became muffled and slowly faded to silence. Her energy now ebbed and a dying calm came upon her. Things were dimming, dying, darkening. The engine sputtered as the train ran out of track. She hit the hot sand just as a wave from the incoming tide broke over the masses of her dying sisters beside her. There was nothing now but the rumbling of surf and the churning of sand. Her sisters and herself no longer.

“Honeybees are responsible for approximately 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the United States.” — Beebrothers.org

Watch: The Dance of the Honey Bee
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Get off the cell phone and Drive!