Pacificapocalypse

Okay my True Love had nothing to do with this outrage, but I couldn’t pass up a good post title.
Continuing the Wedding/Halloween countdown, I give you: Clown Last Supper *shudder*

Click to embiggen… if you dare.

Catholic iconography?
Check.
Clowns?
Check.
Unending parade of waking nightmares?

Oh you better believe it… check.

Let’s start this thing right, shall we?

100% Guaranteed Weapons Grade Nightmare Fuel™
Joshua Hoffine’s horror photography blog. Creepy. Uncomfortable. Awesome.
Full gallery here.

I wonder if he does wedding photography?…

“Did you hear something?”

Via Boing Boing

We made an offer on the place in Oakland last night, an offer with MASSIVE contingencies. Now we wait; it’s like some Rube Goldberg machine; every piece of the puzzle has to fit and function perfectly for the whole thing to work. If one part fails, even a little bit, the whole deal falls through.

Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, the worst thing would be Raptors with with guns, or carnivorous bunnies or swarms acid diarrhea bees. That’s worse that losing this deal. Seriously, especially the bee thing.

A report hit on Monday, January 26, regarding High Fructose Corn Syrup and mercury.
Not cool.
I’ve been a nay-sayer and hatchet man against HFCS since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma about two years ago. (An excellent read by the way, if you have any interest in where your food comes from.) Suffice to say I’ll take sugar or honey (though honey has it’s own set of problems) any day over HFCS. The funny thing is that right around the time people started becoming more aware of HFCS, how pervasive they are, and the potential health risks associated with it, the Corn Refiners Association (the trade association that represents the corn refining industry) who have a vested interest in the production of HFCS, apparently hired a PR firm and threw together a little site called The Truth About High Fructose Corn Syrup, to plead their case before the public. It’s filled with all sorts of fascinating information about Our Friend High Fructose Corn Syrup™. They play a little fast and lose with the details, but come on kids! It’s from CORN! So it has to be good right? It’s natural. Yeah. Right. Lead, arsenic and cancer are all naturally occurring, let’s slather some of that on your toast. Big tobacco plays this game too.
So of course they had to respond to this negative report ASAP, and here’s what they had to say:

“This study appears to be based on outdated information of dubious significance. Our industry has used mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, for several years.”

Hydrochloric acid and caustic soda?
Really, Corn Refiners Association? Is that what you wanted to say?

You’re not helping.

Ok look, I’m no fan, by any means, of Pat Buchanan, but the man does have a handle on history.
Ignore the messenger ( odious though he may be ) and listen to the message.

Will the Terrorists Succeed Again?

“Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.”

So, will they? I’m not so sure. I do believe he’s correct in his argument that the real target of this attack is Pakistan itself:

But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani government.
Pakistan’s offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and the border region, battling al-Qaida and the Taliban, withdrawing from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where 170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.

I pray ( as I seldom do these days ) that cooler heads prevail and that these ten criminals do not end up in the history books, but instead, as Trotsky said:

“You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on / into the dustbin of history!”

Jim Kunstler on the recent ‘economic unpleasantness’ and possible fall-out and the future; he’s a little hyperbolic and I’m not completely convinced about all the doom and gloom, but still and interesting take. I might have taken this with a slightly smaller grain of salt if he hadn’t recently penned a fiction novel that falls right in line with this prediction.

In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg’s All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches?

I was joking before, but yeah, maybe I should learn blacksmithing and baking… you know, just in case this whole Mad Max thing plays out.
Or maybe I’ll just get another game for the Wii.