newsrackblog.com

a citizen’s journal by Thomas Nephew

  • Recent Comments

    • Thomas Nephew on Ladies and gentlemen: your infinitely cunning Democratic Party
    • Nell on Ladies and gentlemen: your infinitely cunning Democratic Party
    • Thomas Nephew on A city’s ‘city issue’ issue
    • Seth Grimes on A city’s ‘city issue’ issue
    • Joe Blunt on How’s that lesser evil thing working out?
    • Thomas Ray Worley on National Popular Vote vs. fixing the electoral college
    • Dan on County Council’s retreat loses respect — and Busboys
    • Thomas Nephew on From sundown towns to a midnight county
    • Bruce Godfrey on From sundown towns to a midnight county
    • Thomas Nephew on Were recalls the way to go?
    • ballgame on Were recalls the way to go?
    • Thomas Nephew on Were recalls the way to go?

  • Recent Trackbacks

  • Real News

  • RSS my delicious

    • In Congress, Dem and GOPer Working Together to Change the NDAA | Mother Jones
      "Smith and Amash's effort comes amid a bipartisan backlash against indefinite detention that has already produced legislation on the state level. Republican-dominated legislatures in Arizona, Maine, and Virginia have passed anti-NDAA legislation. Proponents of indefinite detention argue that Congress' 2001 authorization of the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban permits the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens, even those apprehended in the United States. But the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the issue. Opponents counter that indefinite detention of American citizens in the United States is unconstitutional."
    • Review & Outlook: The Tea Party's Inner ACLU - WSJ.com
      The Wall Street Journal has a conniption fit about conservative opposition to the NDAA: "The ACLU tea partiers may be well-intentioned but they are woefully uninformed about the war on the terror. Their efforts would undermine executive war-fighting authority and the legitimacy of a terrorist detention and military tribunal system that has been established over many Congresses, endorsed by two Presidents and confirmed by the Supreme Court. They should stick to shrinking the entitlement state."
    • Arizona Joins Virginia in the NDAA Exodus. Is Nullification the Next New Thing? (Cutting the Gordian Knot)
      "In less than a week’s time a second state has put a foot down making it clear that it will not cooperate with Federal Law which is blatantly unconstitutional. Yesterday Arizona became the second state to pass a nullification of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)."
    • How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare | | AlterNet
      “The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”
    • ‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth (Stephenson, Grist)
      I don’t think any “climate movement” is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil “1%” destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.
    • Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
      “You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked. “We can’t say that,” Torrance answered. “Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked. “That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said. Advertisement “Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked. “We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered. “What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.” “We have not come to a position on that,” he said. “So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said. “I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”
    • America brings the ‘war on terror’ home (Wolf, Daily Star)
      "(Judge) Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. [...] We now have it from the U.S. government lawyers’ own mouths: This law may put journalists at risk, or at least the lawyers explicitly refused to rule out that option for their client – and, as Forrest put it, they have “one very big client.”"
    • Obama’s evolution: Behind the failed ‘grand bargain’ on the debt (Wallsten/Montgomery/Wilson, WaPo)
      "That night, Obama prepared his party’s congressional leaders. He warned Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he might return to the position under discussion the previous Sunday — that is, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for just $800 billion in tax increases. [...] White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table."
    • Not All Labor Leaders Happy With AFL-CIO’s Obama Endorsement (Elk, In These Times)
      “There's not a lot of choice here, that’s the sad part of this,” says Matt McKinnon, political and legislative director of the Machinists union (IAM), which is affiliated with AFL-CIO and endorsed the president earlier this year. “He’s been a disappointment in several areas, but he came through with some decent appointees.” The expected endorsement represents the reality that organized labor leaders still feel trapped in a two-party system, with a not-always labor-friendly Democratic Party on one side and a downright hostile Republican Party on the other.
    • Elections: What Are They Good For? (Swanson, War Is A Crime.org)
      Voting isn't everything. "I think Emma Goldman had a point in saying that if voting changed anything they would ban it. I think Howard Zinn had a point in saying that it doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House so much as who is doing the sitting in. The relentless ubiquitous question of how you can change the world if you refuse to engage in electoral politics strikes me as crazy. Women didn't vote themselves the right to vote. Workers didn't elect the eight hour day. India didn't vote the British out."
    • Part II Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States (Zeese, Occupy Washington, DC)
      "When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy. "
    • Critiques Of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ (Huben)
      "The purpose of this FAQ is not to attack libertarianism, but some of the more fallacious arguments within it. That done, libertarians can then reformulate or reject these arguments. This is also needed to help people place libertarianism and its arguments in context. It is very hard to find any literature about libertarianism that was NOT written by its advocates. This isolation from normal political discourse makes it difficult to evaluate libertarian claims without much more research or analysis than most of us have time for. Compare this to (for example) the extensive literature of socialism and communism written by ideologues, scholars, pundits, etc. on all sides. Libertarianism is scantily analyzed outside its own movement. Let's fix that."
    • UPDATED: Limbaugh's Misogynistic Attack On Georgetown Law Student Continues With Increased Vitriol (Media Matters for America)
      Always good to have a reference, this is it. "Rush Limbaugh is not backing down after widespread condemnation over his misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before Congress recently about the problems caused when women lack access to contraception. " Multiple clips for future show and tells.
    • America's Death Squads (Davies, PDA Community/ZCommunications)
      "Barack Obama has halted the macabre parade of hooded, shackled suspects in orange jumpsuits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine at Guantanamo, but he has not done so by restoring the rule of law. Instead, to a great extent, he has replaced Bush’s policy with a global campaign to simply kill a wide range of people in cold blood: terrorism suspects, resistance fighters, and anyone else added to secret lists for secret reasons. From a uniquely American “exceptionalist” point of view, killing suspects instead of capturing them is a convenient way to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping up hundreds of mostly innocent people in an indiscriminate global dragnet and then not knowing what to do with them. The dead tell no tales. Public outrage is contained within the faraway countries where the killings take place and does not cause domestic political problems."
    • Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay' (Abdul-Ahad, Guardian)
      Iraq ten years after: instead of one Saddam, many little ones. "Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison. "We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else.""

  • Subscribe

  • Meta

Blogged.com
«« prior: Down here below
next: A new national anthem »»

Lessons of the Snowpocalypse

Posted by Thomas Nephew on February 16th, 2010



Narnia in Takoma Park and other pictures from the Snowpocalypse
Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
  1. Magnolia trees do not do well in heavy snow.  If 10 inches or more of snow are forecast, consider chopping down the tree, most of it’s coming down anyway.
  2. Vintage Comfortmaker gas furnaces are sentient, know the difference between good and evil, and have chosen evil.  They do this by arranging for their ignition devices to fail the morning after a blizzard makes your house and neighborhood inaccessible to repair technicians.
  3. To relight a vintage evil Comfortmaker (non-pilot light) gas furnace:
    1. turn the thermostat to its lowest setting
    2. go to the basement,
    3. return to the dining room for a flashlight
    4. return to the basement, turn off the electricity to the furnace and basement lights.
    5. wait 5 minutes.
    6. squeeze through a six inch opening to a 18 inch space behind the furnace, remove panel
    7. light a candle.
    8. yell upstairs to set thermostat to 65.
    9. repeat request loudly but without yelling because you don’t need to yell
    10. light wooden kebab stick in candle flame, wait
    11. when you hear a ‘click’ put lit kebab stick above burner-looking things where you hope gas will be pumped in 5-10 seconds.
    12. wait 15-20 seconds; relight kebab stick quickly at least once.
    13. second 21: FWOOMP.  Resolve not to peer in quite as closely next time.
    14. Since ignition device is still broken, set heat to 78; the furnace will go out, the house will cool, and you can repeat steps 1-14 whenever you’re cold enough.
  4. The co-op will have everything you need that you spent three hours buying inadequate substitutes for at Safeway.
  5. While deep snow is your enemy, it is also your friend, cushioning falls from ladders.
  6. Try not to use ladders any more than necessary.
  7. A cat staring at a door for five minutes is unnerving.
  8. When released into conditions of deep snow, cats will either
    • retreat immediately
    • vanish for unpredictable lengths of time
  9. When you look for a cat in deep snow, the cat will appear at the front door either
    • just after you’re done suiting up to go outside to look for her again dammit
    • just before you return from looking all over creation for her dammit
  10. When removing ice dams from a roof gutter, avoid being swept off your ladder by an avalanche of snow no longer blocked by those ice dams.  One way to do this is by not removing ice dams in the first place.
  11. When snow first falls, take time to really enjoy the serene beauty of the scene.  It’s the last time you’ll feel that way for days.

Category: Post. Tags: , , . Thread RSS, Comment, Trackback. Print This Print This

3 Responses to “Lessons of the Snowpocalypse”

  1. RobertNAtl Says:
    February 17th, 2010 at 10:23 am

    Enjoyed the pictures and learned from the lessons. Hope things are back to near-normal now.

  2. RobertNAtl Says:
    February 17th, 2010 at 11:22 am

    Of all things….I ran across an article on preventing ice dams.

    http://www.diylife.com/2010/01/28/prevent-ice-dams-cool-your-roof-protect-your-home/?icid=main|compaq-desktop|dl3|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.diylife.com%2F2010%2F01%2F28%2Fprevent-ice-dams-cool-your-roof-protect-your-home%2F

  3. Thomas Nephew Says:
    February 17th, 2010 at 11:59 am

    Thanks, Robert! Some useful stuff here; in particular, I may see if the local hardware store has a roof rake, esp one I can screw on to the all purpose telescoping pole I have. For whatever reason, we don’t appear to have serious ice dams yet ourselves (possibly because we’re relatively shaded even in the winter, so there’s less melting). But I may be wrong about that since it’s hard to get a good look, and even if I’m right it may not last.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

«« prior: Down here below
next: A new national anthem »»