Friday morning quick hits

11 years for the Long Island Millionaire who enslaved her housekeepers Varsha Sabhnani, the Indian immigrant who held two Indonesia women as slaves and forced them to live in squalor and sleep on mats in the kitchen of her two million dollar home has been sentenced to eleven years in prison for keeping and torturing slaves in 21st century America. The depths of her depravity include forcing one of the women to eat chili peppers until she vomited, then forcing her to injest the emesis. Her defense attorneys say he should be shown mercy because she was generous to charities. The prosecution was ready for that ploy, saying that made her actions all the more deplorable. "Indeed, her shocking and despicable conduct is arguably made worse by the evidence of her ability to selectively show some form of kindness to others who were not held in a state of servitude and tortured in her home for years." My question is: After her sentence is served, we are kicking this bitch out of the country, right?


I do not think that word means what he thinks it means If it wasn't so fucked up and tragic, it would be funny to watch that idiot neocon fuckhead John Bolton twitch and writhe, but the damage his ilk has done to the country I love negates any glee I get out of watching him twist in the wind and make an ass of himself in public. He has been reduced to snapping that any questioning of him or the rest of the craven neocon fucks with their fascist bent constitutes an ad hominem attack. Mr. Bolton, questioning your credibility is not ad hominem, it is common sense. I tried to clear it up for you by illustrating what an ad hominem is by calling you names and mocking you. Hope it helps further your obviously malnourished understanding.




Iran takes on addiction Many are shocked to learn that Iran, a country in which discussion of some social and cultural issues, such as homosexuality, is all but taboo, drug addiction is openly acknowledged as a serious problem, to the point that it is talked about openly in schools and on television. Posters and public service announcement encourage people to think of addiction as a disease and to seek treatment. THe theocratic government of the Mullahs has encouraged and financed a vast expansion in the number of drug treatment centers to help users confront their addictions and to combat the spread of H.I.V. through shared needles.


Ain't that America? With energy prices soaring, the number of solar collectors applying for permits in the sun-drenched west are at a record high - so the federal government - the same folks who don't regulate chemicals - are halting the construction of new solar plants on public lands...to study environmental impact. (Most of the west is public lands - the state of Oregon, for example, is (iirc) 53% public land) “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

This is a recession, and it's just getting started This column made me simultaneously want to crawl under the bed with a blankie and a binkie - and - head for the hills with a stock of seed and ammo.

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That's it for me for a while - I actually left this in the lineup on the timer - about the time it posts, I will be in my orthopedists office getting my regularly scheduled knee injections. The next couple of days I will be blogging with an ever-present cloud of opiates. In other words, don't expect much. Except cats. You can expect cats this afternoon.

Toodles for now...

~~BG