"60 or 70"

That's the "crowd" that attended Wart's speech in GJ yesterday, according to 11News. Worth every penny of that $350 Confluence Media Collective paid him. He spoke for two fucking hours, "mostly," the TV station says, "about Memorial Day." "During the better part of his two hour long talk, he raised questions about why Americans don't honor soldiers on both sides of other conflicts, particularly those involving Native Americans."

Yeah, sure. And the Japanese and Germans in World War II? Why don't we honor them? Huh? Huh?

Other quote: "'I speak truth to people as best I can and try to stay consistent with that understanding and that obligation," said Churchill. "That's my concept of integrity.'"

Integrity. Bwahahah--by the way, I'm a child molester.

Update: JWP notes that the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to hear Wart's case. Frankly, I was hoping they'd just blow it off. The pirate with the parrot who leans to the right has interesting facts and figures.

Seven p.m. to five a.m.

That's apparently the timeframe, according to East Bay Indymedia, for Wart's appearance at the Eastside Arts Alliance and Cultural Center in Oakland June 3, along with Ericka "My current Heart Question is: How do we facilitate learning about the intersections of race and gender" Huggins, Liz Derias and Claude Marks, to panel-discuss "COINTELPRO 101." Good Christ, Wart, get off it.

Still no word on how Wart's speech in Grand Junction went today, if it's even happened yet, though a TV station there says Tea Partiers are going to protest.

Tis the season

Local power provider Xcel Energy is set to restart its June-September two-tier energy pricing (scroll to last item) Wednesday. The idea is to discourage air-conditioner use by nearly doubling the price per KwH over 500 per month. Commenter Judy F. on a WUWT open thread notes:

Tonight on the 5 O’Clock news on KCNC Channel 4 in Denver, the newscasters reported that the snowpack in Colorado was 232% of normal and A Basin (a ski resort on I-70 east of the Continental Divide) received 53 inches of snow in May. Where I live on the Eastern Plains, today it was a cloudy 63 degrees F and normal is 76 degrees F. Then the newscasters reminded us that Xcel Energy’s two tier rate plan would go into effect on June 1, because of the increase in electrical demand in the summer. Shoot. Except for 3 days last week, my furnace has run everyday since last fall. I hope it warms up enough so I don’t have to pay summer rates to HEAT my house…

Yeah, me too. It's been a very, very cool spring here, with somewhere around four inches of rain in the last three weeks (Denver averages just under 17 inches annually). And yes, our furnace has been running every day too. When it's springtime in the Rockies . . .

Scary cover

Of the Beatles' Run for Your Life by Cowboy Junkies:



Update: That's really a hell of an arrangement. Love the bass line. And it continues a decades-long tradition of other artistes doing Beatles tunes better than the Beatles did (see Cocker, Joe).

After you, Alphonse

Ack-ronym

'Bout halfway through Stanley Kurtz' Radical-in-Chief. Meh. Not that he doesn't demonstrate that Obama hung around and worked with a lot of socialists. It's just that the book has too many acronyms. This isn't Kurtz' fault. Socialists are famously acronym-happy. But it makes for a slog, particularly for bedtime reading.

But I did run across one acronym that was pretty good. Page 202:

Another indicator of ACORN's ideology in the leadership's strong sense of continuity with American socialist history. The first ACORN handbook for new organizers, published in 1976-77, features ACORN leader Wade Rathke's tribute to H.L. Mitchell, leader of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union (STFU). . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Update: Yes, I know that's not a true acronym. STFU.

Where the elite meet to advocate the destruction of the world economy and the micromanagement of your life

For years now, and particularly since Climategate broke, one blog or another will post on the latest lie, end-of-the-world fatuity, statistical manipulation or sinister government grab related to AGW, and without fail either the poster or a commenter will say something like, "They're getting desperate," or "It's all falling apart" (I'm repeatedly guilty of that one).

The Boulder Daily Gamera, though, makes me wonder. Their "editorial advisory board," which each week answers a reader's question, answered this one last Saturday:

An 11-year-old boy whose neighborhood burned in the Fourmile Fire has joined with a friend afraid of losing favorite hiking trails and an 18-year-old student with a growing asthmatic condition in a lawsuit filed in Boulder County District Court against the state for failing to protect the environment. The lawsuit is part of a youth effort in all 50 states. A nationwide team of legal experts has been assembled through the nonprofit organization Our Children's Trust to represent the young people in their lawsuits. What do you think?

Well, it's Boulder. What do you think they think? Board member Judy Amabile, while calling the lawsuit "frivolous," adds this:

I applaud these young people`s activism. They should be encouraged. Their passion for the environment can bring about real change. The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the formation of the EPA, all came about because passionate citizens pressured the government to act.

We need more environmental legislation. We need to make sure we continue to fund agencies like the EPA. We need to elect representatives to Congress who believe that environmental stewardship should be a top priority for our government. . . .

Board member Marc Raizman:

We unthinkingly do things on a daily basis that adversely affect the environment. Driving cars when we could be riding a bus or a bicycle. Using plastics that will last 1,000 years. Generating too much garbage that threatens to overwhelm our dumps. Using too many forest products, such as paper. Do we really need Kleenex when handkerchiefs are renewable?

A related problem is that we are caught in a cultural treadmill that the corporate world insists on feeding us primarily through advertising. For example, If we began avoiding products that carried too much packaging, the corporations would adopt [sic] and reduce their use.

Keep in mind: There is no infinite growth in a finite world.

Steve Fisher:

This lawsuit raises three points for me. First, what is the role of an individual state or local government in the solution of a global problem? In my nearly 40 years working in and for governments, I`ve developed great respect for the grave limitations of governmental entities to solve broad social problems or engage in grand social experiments. We have done it before, but I think the global environmental problem dwarfs all previous problems.

Yet what is the alternative? Can we wait for voluntary action? Do we need something like a global green benevolent despot? I, for one, come up without an answer other than to continue muddling through. Ultimately is the solution a zero population growth, low consumption global society? . . .

Anne B. Butterfield:

The youth could not have more daunting science to buttress their case. Geoscientists are now holding that we have entered into a new geological period called the Anthropocene marked by sustained human impact on the earth`s biological conditions through resource depletion and climate disruption. And the National Research Council this week issued a requested report warning Congress about the grave advance of human-caused climate disruption that will thrust "profound" threat on future generations. Like the youth, the NRC calls for action on a national level.

The kids` somewhat quixotic efforts perhaps could be aimed at Exxon Mobil for apparently funding a team of denier-skeptics who have co-authored a blizzard of supposedly independent papers opposing conclusions of climate science, with the result of misleading federal officials who in turn block climate action. Perhaps in time they will.

There were one or two others, but you get the idea. The unexamined assumptions, the ridiculous assertions, the sententious pronouncements, the judicious panic. And these are not dumb people (or rather, not uneducated people). Sometimes you just want to shake them till their teeth rattle and their eyes roll back in their heads. Don't, though. It's against the law.

Tenants, again

So I have this tenant, a woman with three kids. She's nice enough, and so are the kids, but when she moved in she told me she had a husband she was separated from who is a diagnosed schizophrenic.

Fine, fine. He's gone, right? Yep.

Well, a few weeks ago, and unbeknownst to me, he moved in. Generally speaking when something like this happens I look the other way, at least for a while, and then, if the person stays, we redo the lease to add him or her and, of course, raise the rent. This is what I told the woman we'd do. The guy might be a schizo, but he didn't seem to be causing any problems, so big deal.

Not so sure that's going to happen after today. While I was staring blankly out my office window this morning (one of my many talents) I noticed the guy coming up the sidewalk. As I watched he turned and waved cheerily behind him and yelled, "Hi!" Then he walked a few more steps and waved cheerily ahead and again yelled "Hi!"

Now, I can see a couple of blocks both ways on this street, and naturally I looked to see who he was waving at.

There was nobody. Not behind him, not in front of him.

I don't want to make too much of this. For all I know he was just practicing his walk through the well of the House prior to giving his first State of the Union speech. Hell, I do that all the time, except in my case I'm waving to the reporters during my perp walk.

But it made me a little nervous.

Gravy train for Wart

The Daily Reporter, taking from the Grand Junction Sentinel:

A former University of Colorado professor known for his comparison of Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi plans to speak in western Colorado.

The Daily Sentinel reported Tuesday that an alternative media group, Confluence Media Collective, invited Ward Churchill to speak in Grand Junction Memorial Day weekend.

Officials with the group say they're willing to let him cover any topic he chooses. They're paying him $350 and providing lodging.

What happened to that "up to" $11,000 he once supposedly got for a speech? And they didn't even throw in a carton of smokes? You're being ripped off, Wart.

Update: Good God, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel has a paywall. What's their motto, "The New York Times of far-western Colorado"?

Update II: The Confluence Media Collective puts out a variety of publications, among them The Red Pill, which describes itself as "independent, horizontalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and all-inclusive." . . . They also publish Cuntastic, a twice-yearly "Journal of Reproductive and Sexual Freedom," and Mammaphiles, "a compilation zines [sic] about radical parenting . . ."

Update III: In an update of his own, the pirate with the prognathous parrot (it's all about alliteration, baby!) notes the AP's spin on Churchill's firing.

Update IV (5/20/11): JWP says the church Wart was going to speak at has rescinded its permission for him to do so. He has their statement. Even Universalists know the Anti-Christ when they see him.

Update V (5/22/11): Wart gets new venue: a public park. He'll be speaking on Memorial Day.

Guard on the Right

Telegraph:

Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Italy, has launched a bizarre personal attack on his opponents accusing them of not "washing themselves enough."

Mr Berlusconi, 74, who has been charged with having underage sex with a prostitute [one imagines they mean "sex with an underage prostitute," but no matter], accused the centre left of being smelly as tensions rose ahead of local elections this weekend.

There's your problem right there. Tension. Here in the U.S., which thank God maintains its decades-long lead over Europe in anti-stench technology, guys can do death-defying motorcycle jumps and come out not the least bit gamy, I have learned via televisionic device.

The billionaire media tycoon is currently involved in four separate trials with charges also including abuse of office and corruption. The the [sic] election was being seen as a test of his popularity.

During a final rally in the southern Italian city of Crotone, Berlusconi said: "The leaders of the Left don't wash themselves much. When they go into the bathroom, and they don't go often since they don't wash much, they look in the mirror when they shave and surprise themselves."

Not exactly the Gettysburg Address there, Silvio.

Mr Berlusconi has a reputation for disliking beards, seeing them as sign of left leaning political sympathies. His obsession with hygiene has also emerged from intercepts of his infamous "bunga bunga" parties.

The phrase is said to refer to a crude after-dinner sex game and from the wire taps girls invited to the parties reveal how Berlusconi asked them to wash before performing sexy stripteases and lap dances for him.

Berlusconi has often resorted to personal attacks on his opponents particularly on their looks - last year he slammed centre left female opposition MPs as "ugly."

No doubt.

His comments provoked an immediate reaction from opponents including Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of Italy's the centre-left Democratic Party who said: "If we don't wash much, it's because we are clean." . . .

Yeah, sure. There's more, but it has nothing to do with smelliness, so read it yourself if you want.

Glenn Beck notes Wart's appearance at Tucson school board meeting

Where high school students were protesting changes in an ethnic (specifically Mexican-American) studies program.


"Whoa-oh. Who's that guy?"

(via Westword)

Update: In recapping the Churchill saga, Westword's Jonathan Shikes says that "A long legal battle [between CU and Wart] ensued, ending in November 2010 when an appeals court rejected Churchill's efforts to get his old job back."

Er, no. It ain't over yet, Shikesy, as the Westword piece you link to points out.

Hmmmm

Comcast weather page for Denver: forecast high of 37 degrees, forecast low of . . . 42 degrees. Anyway, it's damn cold, snowing and sleeting this a.m. and raining constantly all day. The coolest spring of the last three very cool springs. Won't bring up AGW, won't bring up AGW, won't bring up . . .