More Evidence Bush Inc. Caused (or Allowed) Northeast Blackout

Bush Inc. may not have caused 911. But he did allow it.
He may have even caused it. Who knows? He shut the books.

The same can be said about the Great Northeast Blackout...

[Bush is where? In the Southwest. Coincidence?]

Bush Inc. cronies Enron and Reliant were behind the California Blackout...as this event will recall in the minds of many Californians...who, after all, are in a recall kinda state of mind.


One has to ask oneself: Is our "president" petty, vengeful and mean? Like Nixon?
I, for one, suspect he is.

Think back...

Bush spends megabucks and many hours courting California voters in 2000. They do not respond the way he wishes.

BLACKOUT!

Then he gets selected, visits New York (which he openly disdained) and they treat him, well, as one would suspect. America was already going down the tubes. The looting and lotting had already begun. New York embarrassed Bush...

911!


Today, there are a confluence of forces which may have prompted Bush Inc. to whack the Northeast again.

As I said yesterday...to take news from Arnold...and to simply show how all-powerful he fancies himself.

But today I learn from Buzzflash and Greg Palast that there are yet other reasons...

GREG PALAST:
"Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, "Rio Dark."

So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.
"

As the Saint Pete Times put it:
This Enron saga is far from over.

Expect the usual chaos and confusion. The many chads. The impossibility of knowing how the blackout started. That sort of ruse...

DEVELOPING...


http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/08/15_blackout.html

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/15/Columns/Blackout_serves_as_jo.shtml

"Oh yeah? I'll show you!": Bush takes issue with 'biggest political story'

Bush takes issue with 'biggest political story'

Thursday, August 14, 2003 Posted: 1:07 PM EDT (1707 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Is President Bush a tad jealous of all the attention fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting from the national media?

Speaking to reporters at his Crawford, Texas ranch, Bush seemed miffed this week when one asked him about the recall election in California. The reporter prefaced the question by describing it as the "biggest political story in the country."

That phrase caught the president's attention and he just couldn't let it go.


Surely not...

???

Is Enron Behind the Blackout?

Is Enron Behind the Blackout?

What a shame that such an idea would naturally come to mind...but recent experience in apparently memory-dead California, lead me to believe that such an occurrence would not be unprecedented...

Bloomberg vs Bush : Who is the real leader?

Bloomberg vs Bush : Who is the real leader?

The contrast between Michael Bloomberg's reassuring and remarkably informed press conference, and Mister Bush's mutterings, could not be more glaring.
Is this, essentially, Mayor Bloomberg's first major national address? Has he greater offices in sight?

Sure would be better than what we have now!

I guess his years as a Democrat paid off...

Koppel duped by "phone terrorist"

Koppel duped by Subgenius Dobbs
Telling Ted Koppel, and millions of others, to go to thankyoufortakingmycall.com and watch the video, a caller named "Bob Dobbs", for a good five minutes, unfolded what appears to me to be a massive, and potentially dangerous hoax. I could be wrong, as I have not gone to the website, but at this early date, it sure seems fishy...just as the entire power outage smells of Enron and memory-dead California.

UPDATE

Here is what Google says about the website:


Thank you for taking my call!
Thank you for taking my call! This site is dedicating to spreading word
about the phenomenon of the phone "goof". Sometimes television ...
www.thankyoufortakingmycall.com/ - 5k - Cached - Similar pages

Links
... 2) www.fueltv.net CIA Music - Chattanooga Independent Artists www.ciamusic.com The
Goofs Tape www.thankyoufortakingmycall.com Church of Now www.angelfire.com ...
members.aol.com/boggob/links/links.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

Talk Radio 102.3 - Website du Jour Archive
... 19 - www.soschatt.com; Friday, May 16 - www.herofund.com; Thursday,
May 15 - www.thankyoufortakingmycall.com; Wednesday, May 14 - www ...
www.wgow.com/fm/websites.htm - 30k - Cached - Similar pages

Recreation > Humor > Pranks > Prank Calls
... shows. http://www.thankyoufortakingmycall.com. 40 The Telephone Terrorist
Marketing an audio CD of prank calls by comedian Harry Gio. ...
www.xasa.com/directorio/dmoz/Recreation/ Humor/Pranks/Prank_Calls/ - 23k - Cached - Similar pages

Yep. We were had.

Pray for light.

News Summary

NEWS SUMMARY

Blackout hits East Coast, Midwest
DEVELOPING...

"Mr. Droopy" Loserman, his facial flab dragging the ground and voice sounding constipated, gets roundly booed for saying that his colleagues ""run the risk of sending a message that they don't know a just war when they see one."

Arnold has been sleeping with California Energy Rapist, Ken Lay.

Hans Blix wants US and UK to stop bullshitting and reveal the final truth.

Al Gore has become the "Standard Bearer" of the Democratic Party.

Enron GATS what Enron wants.

Rove: Florida will be Ground Zero in 2004. Expect usual shenanigans.

Who Owns What?

Will the Pussycrats grow nuts? Will the Media?

[blog in progress]

Will the Pussycrats grow nuts?
Or will they allow the god, Enron, to seal their lips about its role in California's collapse?
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/demron.html
EXCERPT:
DO DEMOCRATS LACK THE COURAGE TO EXPOSE THE ENRON-BUSH ROLE IN THE CALIFORNIA DEFICIT?
TBTM writings and links culled from a DemocraticUnderground thread by RICHM.

The coming fiasco in the California Recall is going to be, IMHO, an unusually literal example of the expression "they can't tell the truth to save their own lives."

The California Democrats are in a perfect position to expose Bush-Cheney for what they really are: gangsters & looters, intent on destabilizing & destroying democratic institutions. The only pretext offered by the rightwing to justify the Calif Recall is the budget fiasco. There are 2 main factors that created the budget deficit: the popping of the high-tech bubble, & the raiding of the Calif Treasury in 2001 by Enron & Reliant -- which was DIRECTLY ABETTED by Bush & Cheney, who went to bat for their Enron pals.

---

At what point do leaders' connections become treason?

SOME people use words like ‘‘treason'' and ‘‘traitor'' to describe people who disagree with their world view. Many Americans now seem to believe that to disagree with them is simply to be un-American. Nothing could be more un-American than that. I, for one, do not use words like treason or traitor lightly.
http://www.whittierdailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,207~12044~1555967,00.html

flash mob

flash mob", "flash-mob" or "flashmob"? NAME THAT PRODUCT!

But is it just a product...or is it a tool for Chaos & Confusion?


I'm no expert on flashmobs (or whatever)...in fact, I've never even been in one. Not sure that I ever will. I do so enjoy sitting. Much easier to write to you, my beloved reader. But I do enjoy linguistics and language. When a new meme makes it to the forebrain, the curiosity is roused, and, when time allows, I will often allow myself to ruminate upon it. Better than fecating upon it, I suppose.

Anyway, back to said flashmob...

Normally, in the evolution of terms, there is a process which goes like this:

When two words are unrelated, they remain apart.
Then, as they begin to be used together, the use of hyphens become the norm.
Finally, as they meld as an acceptedness...one word, unhyphenated.
Thus:
flash mob>flash-mob>flashmob
or
never the less>never-the-less>nevertheless

Current occurrences on Google are:
flash mob - 38,000
flash-mob - 40,800
flashmob - 15,600

Of course things are skewered by the presence of "Flashmob" as a proper noun...since references could be for the blog named 'Flashmob" and the social phenomena.

In the future, there will be flashmobs of war. Imagine, say, that the Redcoats are marching through Cambridge, heading for Concord and Lexington. The word is put on, and hundreds or thousands of citizens come out to "greet" them.
As it turns out, it sort of happened that way anyway. And the effect was disarming to the British soldiers.

But what if this happened in Iraq? (God forbid)

Maybe it is something in the word, "mob", that throws up warning flags for me...

Even the word, "flash" conjures up imagery of war...


Granted, flashmobs, so far, have probably all been a real hoot. A knee-slapper even. And a way to meet people very quickly. But there is also the fairly new concept (or should I say "product"? -- everyone else is!) known as speed-dating...which will accomplish the same goal, and in fact has it as it's chief goal.
(It is hyphenated because of the two "d"s, no doubt.) 'Twill be interesting to watch the evolution.


I just did a Google News search and found that a flashmob has brought "chaos and confusion" to London's West End. Sheesh! Chaos and Confusion. Bush's 2 favorite C-words. (The other being Conservative.) I really am beginning to smell a rat...or maybe it's a con...

He brought it to Florida, he brought it to Iraq and Afghanistan, and had brought it everywhere he goes.

When Bill Clinton was asked what the Democrats should do (before the 2000 selection), he said: "Seek Clarity".

Clarity...the opposite of Confusion.

Maybe Bush is just projecting his own mind as he spreads chaos and confusion, and maybe flashmobs won't devolve into mere tools for those who would spread chaos and confusion, rather than clarity, sweetness and light. I don't know. I just blog. A blogging machine. Only slightly more advanced than SHRDLU or Eliza...and with the disadvantage of having to eat...which I am about to go and do.

Maybe we all should! How 'bout Maxim's at 2!



For more on the product, check out blogmeister Oxytocin. There you will find much to delight the brain...including why peepees are shaped the way they are.

Republicans are fed up with Bush's incompetence

Republicans are beginning to say they are mad as Hell and not gonna take it anymore...

Biggest Blunder In History?

Here is a letter from a Texas Republican which ends with these words:

Folks, our world image is in free-fall and our egomaniacal invasion of Iraq is still costing Iraqi lives, young American lives and the U.S. taxpayer $4 billion a month. Economic and technological preeminence was evidently not enough — military dominance is more glorious. What was the president's comment when asked about the assassins still killing our troops in Iraq? "Bring 'em on," he says. Sure.

It's time to dump this administration and all its congressional lapdogs. And if the next bunch doesn't clean up this mess, we should dump them, too.

And yes, I've been a registered Republican for over 50 years. Today I'd even vote for Hillary.

ENRON: Genetics at Work OR Why California Fell

Why California Fell...

---

New logo found scrawled on napkin:

Dope-Smoking Son-of-a-Nazi Runs for California Governorship

Dope-Smoking Son-of-a-Nazi Runs for California Governorship
and other news...

It All Depends on What You Mean by 'Have'
By STEVE MARTIN

The war in Iraq is just starting
By JON CARROLL

Arnold's Nazi Problem
Why won't he repudiate Kurt Waldheim?
By Timothy Noah

The Movie Arnold Doesn't Want You To See
Where Arnold lights up a fatty...


The Clinton legacy and America
By TODD GITLAND

5 Foes of Bush Form PAC in Bid to Defeat Him
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

This is the worst government the U.S. has ever had in its more than 200 years of history

The ghost of Al Gore comes back to haunt Chimpy

"This is the worst government the U.S. has ever had in its more than 200 years of history."
- 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof

"What we have here is a form of looting" - George Akerlof

AL GORE DELIVERS REMARKS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ON PRESIDENT BUSH'S IRAQ POLICY
Thu Aug 07 2003 11:48:22 ET


The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics,
George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany
when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst
government the US has ever had in its more than 200
years of history...This is not normal government
policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies
on
America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here
is a form of looting."





READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH HERE
(It is one for the history books. Think Tom Paine...)

Flash-mobs and Flascism: What Would Kant Say?

Flash-mobs and Flascism: What Would Kant Say?

Flashmobs (flash-mobs, flash mobs [reverse-order]) are everywhere.
Here are just a few headlines today:

Flash mob fever
Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA - 17 hours ago

Hundreds Flock to Coop for Local 'Flash Mob'
The Harvard Crimson, MA - Aug 1, 2003

'Flash mobs' spread to Europe
CNN - 9 hours ago

Internet-organized 'flash mob' makes Twin Cities debut
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN - Jul 22, 2003

A flash-mob is when and where people, notified by email, gather at a chosen place and time for a variety of reasons. So far, there hasn't been (as far as I have seen) any real negative consequences from this social innovation. I hope it stays that way...but I'm too reminded of certain intimidatory thugs who flash-mobbed vote-counters in Florida...

People can start to think they are invisible or lacking in responsibility as the throng swells around you. Floors are built to hold limited weight. Perhaps the appeal is just that the unexpected can happen...and is certainly more likely to.

But even though bad things may come of this trend -- and come they certainly will -- good and even great things can also occur. And not just Art. Healing can also occur.

'Twill be interesting (in the Strunkian sense) to see what new forms of flash-mobs come to fruition. I will check back now and again.

Zzzzzzz.....

Nicotine Beer: or Hath Hell No Basement?

An Addicted Customer is a Customer For Life

I've heard of stupid things before. In fact I have written about stupid things. Lots of 'em. In fact I am doing so right now.
But I also did several years ago -- 16 years ago in fact -- when I was writing a quasi-humorous pamphlet called Proper Gander, within which I had a "news item" the headline of which read:

Traces of Cocaine Found in Beer, Cigarettes

The point of the seemingly ludicrous item was to bring to attention the lure of addictive products, and the strange bedfellows who share business models.

Flash-forward seven odd years...

A crooked line of CEOs are all testifying to Congress that nicotine is not addictive. A joke then, and a joke now. A bad joke. A joke that kills and enslaves. Who knows which is worse? And yet here they are again. Double-whammy this time. Alcohol AND Nicotine. Why not cocaine too while they're at it?


Did you know that Blockbuster Video covers their video cases with angel dust?
And that when you touch the video, you become addicted?

Well, that is because they don't do that. It would be heinous, and the perpetrators of such a scheme would surely do time.

Adding addictive substances to products should be illegal...but it is clearly not. Soft drinks contain unnecessary caffiene, cigarettes are super-charged with additional nicotine and lord only knows what other kinds of designer additive/addictives.

Sure it is profitable. But only for a handful, and at the expense of the enslaved.

Slavery has been abolished.

We just need to keep reminding ourselves.

MORE ON NICOTINE BEER:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffiles.html

Weapons of Goliath

In 1991, Noam Chomsky spoke of some of the atrocities of the first war in Iraq:

There was an awesome demonstration of this in Iraq./ Military operations were designed so that no battles took place...When U.S. troops entered Kuwait they were led by a battalion of engineers using bulldozers. These were used to bury possibly thousands of Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches. They simply drove the bulldozers over the trenches and buried the soldiers alive. This is a horrible war crime, but nobody cares. Nonetheless, it does reveal something about U.S. military planning. If you attack someone who can defend themselves, you don't send bulldozers into battle. This makes it clear that the United States had prepared everything in such a way that there was never going to be a war. And effectively, there never was a war, only slaughter and atrocities.
-Noam Chomsky

When I hear about the graves of dead soldiers we now keep "finding"...whom should I assume put them there? Questions, questions...

The Edge

The Edge
Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.

The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.


Edge: The Third Culture
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

Edge: The Reality Club
From 1981 through 1996, The Reality Club held its meetings in Chinese restuarants, artists lofts, the Board Rooms of Rockefeller University, The New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. In January, 1997, The Reality Club has now migrated to the Internet on Edge. Here you will find a number of today's sharpest minds taking their ideas into the bull ring knowing they will be challenged. The ethic is thinking smart vs. the anesthesiology of wisdom.

Through the years, The Reality Club has had a simple criterion for choosing speakers. We look for people whose creative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. A few Reality Club speakers and/or Edge presenters are bestselling authors or are famous in the mass culture. Most are not. Rather, we encourage work on the cutting edge of the culture, and the investigation of ideas that have not been generally exposed. We are interested in "thinking smart;" we are not interested in the anesthesiology of "wisdom." The motto of the Club is "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."

Including ideas of Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Howard Gardner, George Lakoff, Jaron Lanier, Marvin Minsky, Todd Siler and others...

Edge: Digerati
Who are the "digerati" and why are they "the cyber elite"? They are the doers, thinkers, and writers who have tremendous influence on the emerging communication revolution. They are not on the frontier, they are the frontier.

The digerati evangelize, connect people, adapt quickly. They like to talk with their peers because it forces them to go to the top of their form and explain their most interesting new ideas. They give each other permission to be great. That's who they want to talk to about the things they are excited about because they want to see if it plays. They ask each other the questions they are asking themselves, and that's part of what makes this cyber elite work.

Advice for Democratic Candidates

Compromise is not necessarily a good thing.

The way to activate the seeds of your creation is by making choices about the results you want to create. When you make a choice, you activate vast human energies and resources, which otherwise go untapped. All too often people fail to focus their choices upon results and therefore their choices are ineffective. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

-Robert Fritz

Oh yes...and be like Dean!

>"...all that is left is compromise." Hmm... could he also be referring to the ersatz American Left -- which, in the main, is nothing more than those people who are not also corporations. The disinterested...although not uninterested...as some seem to mistakingly conclude. The unshowered hordes. You and me. (No, Ken Lay is not reading this.)

The High-Toned Old Christian Woman
by Wallace Stevens


Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Beckwith Institute Home Page

Beckwith Institute Home Page

The Official Anonymosabbatical

The Official Anonymosabbatical



Gonna take a few days off and do some genealogy research. Please hang around though. Make some coffee. Envision world peace. Raise your kundalini. Think thoughts...

Be
Peace.
-Anon