IT'S YULE, FOOL

Doc40 hopes everyone has a roaring Yule!

The secret word is Light

(Thanks for the image, Iggy)

STILL WORKING, BUT...

Click here. Trust me.

WHAT'S UP, DOC?

Round here we run a kind of ad hoc Doc Holliday Fan Club, and thus, when HCB sent over this news flash, I had to pause in my weekend labors to make it clear that any and every movie industry troll associated with any piece-of-shit Doc Holliday movie in 2010 will be under some seriously lethal shot-in-the-head-execution-style fatwa, okay?

"Paramount Pictures has picked up a spec script titled The Further Adventures of Doc Holliday, which they hope to turn into a summer tentpole, according to Variety. The spec was written by Chad St. John, who does not currently have any titles, but his name has been attached to Warner Bros. remake of the Sean Connery film Outland and his script The Days Before ranked as the 10th best unproduced screenplay on this year's Black List. While I would be ecstatic to see a genre so important to the history of film return, I'm not happy that it may come as the result of a Lorenzo di Bonaventura production. The whole thing reeks of Wild Wild West and that's a vomit-worthy smell. And while westerns may only come every now and then these days, the best possible Doc Holliday was already done by in Tombstone, and there is no way to top that.” (Not to mention Kirk Douglas, Dennis Quaid, Stacey Keach, and Victor Mature.) Click here for more.

The secret word is Warned

Cody Jarrett says. “That’s right. Warned.”

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

WHO NEEDS THE EGG? (A temporary reduction in service?)

Doc40 may prove a bit sparse this weekend. I have a major project to finish, plus the Yuletide disconnects are starting to kick in. Regular readers may recall that, back in April, I participated in something called Hawkfest at the Hollywood Knitting Factory. (Now closed as a sign of the times.) There’s now a clip up on YouTube with the usual dire camcorder sound. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, except it was around 1.30 am, everything was running a couple of hours late which had caused me to consume more Jack Daniels than I had originally intended. This in turn, made getting Sonic Attack under way resemble herding cats, but at least I was standing, and had to good sense to both abandon the script, and exit the stage before the lady in white started skipping about. Click here if you want to relive the confusion.

The secret word is Labor

ALASKA FALLS INTO SEA

Klondike Barbie salutes the receding Alaskan coastline. “Isn’t Russia getting further away, by golly?”
(Image lifted from Dangerous Minds.)

A study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that a substantial piece of the northern Alaska coastline is eroding at an astonishing rate of 45 feet a year thanks to three major threats - less ice, more waves, and warmer water. In other words, climate change is eating away at Alaska, and fast.

"The conditions have led to the steady retreat of 30 to 45 feet a year of the 12-foot-high bluffs -- frozen blocks of silt and peat containing 50 to 80 percent ice -- which are toppled into the Beaufort Sea during the summer months by a combination of large waves pounding the shoreline and warm seawater melting the base of the bluffs, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Anderson, a co-author on the study. Once the blocks have fallen, the coastal seawater melts them in a matter of days, sweeping the silty material out to sea." (Click here for the whole story and a time lapse video.)

Meanwhile UN climate negotiations become more and more chaotic…

COPENHAGEN - Fed up with the lack of progress in the climate negotiations, campaigners marched on the Bella Centre. NGOs at the negotiations staged a walkout to connect with civil society outside, but police violently broke up this ‘people's assembly' and arrested the ringleaders. (Click here for more)

The secret word is Moose

Click -- Gotcha!

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

Important news comes from the world of Victorian literature.

"What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text. As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helema Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author's day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford." A virus problem seems to have occured on the link. See Comments.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

The Frozdick Search Engine was never able to outperform Google.

AND LET US NOT FORGET…

John Dillinger died for our sins.

SPACE OPERA

Protect those scantily clad minxes!
(Thank you, Valerie)

350

I have no desire to hear what a woman as stupid as Sarah Palin has to say about the environment, but my TV thinks I do. The smoke is blowing so hard on both the environment and US health care that you can’t see the woods for the bears. The induced confusion over the UN climate negotiations is absolute in the msm. If you really want to know what the fuck is going on inside the Bella Centre in Copenhagen you have to go and look for it. This seems to be a reasonable, short-attention-span breakdown of the real numbers involved and how the big countries will fuck the little countries while Corpoate Global (and China) will fuck everyone. I figure between them and Monsanto we’re probably doomed. (But don’t take my word for, I’m not having an optimistic day. You shoulda caught me yesterday, when I still thought we had a prayer.)

“The number to know is 350. It's what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history," with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the "largest interreligious gathering on earth" sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.
When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world's CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.” (Click here for the whole thing.)

The secret word is Finite

I was never a big consumer of Oreos. I needed more of a chocolate jolt. Let’s talk Three Musketeers. In the world of sweeties, I’m really quite a grown-up. But when you first become a drunk, you tend to give up candy. Unless you count the Brandy Alexander. Here’s more from Brad Reed on AlterNet.

“Typical frosting is made mostly from butter, milk, sugar and vanilla extract. No one will ever accuse it of being good for you, but at least you're eating fairly natural fats. Oreo stuffing, on the other hand, is basically sugar-flavored Crisco. Seriously, that’s what you’re consuming when you eat an Oreo. Oreos' death filling is so bad it even inspired an ill-fated lawsuit in California a few years back that tried to stop the sale of Oreos to children. While the suit was eventually dropped, it did introduce trans fats to the public consciousness and helped spearhead the campaign to make food companies indicate on their labels whether their products contained any trans fats, so it wasn’t a total waste. That said, I think the best way to stop people from eating Oreos wouldn’t be to ban them outright but to force Kraft to rebrand them to reflect their actual ingredients. So let’s say you mandate that Kraft label its cookies "Criscoroes" and have the package depict a kid gorging himself in a tub of vegetable shortening. Yum!"

AND TALKING OF FOOD, HERE’S A SHOT OF CLASSIC GAHAN WILSON

Who are these women and who is the guy bowing?

SPAM, IT SEEMS, IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU

Do you remember the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith’s neighbour declares the nameless pink stuff that hardly pretends to be meat and is served with the slop in the Victory Canteen to be “double plusgood”? It’s not an easy admission that I feel much the same way about Spam. Spam is double plusgood. I confess it. I like Spam. Vikings sing about it. Probably an aberrant result of being raised in the ruins of Europe when dead Messerschmitts still rusted in the fields. For many years, my mother preserved a weird World War II cookbook called something like “Meals To Beat Hitler.” Sometimes I suspected she wrote it. It contained many Spam driven recipes. I’m actually happy to eat Spam cold, diced and with ketchup, but if cooking is involved, my favorite is the Spam fritter, a thick slice of Spam deep fried in batter. I have never been under any illusion, however, that Spam might actually be healthy. File along with cigarettes under deviant lethal pleasure. Brad Reed’s note on AlterNet was certainly no surprise….

“Spam was really a major miracle of food science, as it solved a mystery that humanity had been trying for centuries to figure out: namely, how to make meat-flavored Jell-O. Developed in the 1930s, Spam is derived primarily from pork shoulder meat (seriously) and combined with water, sugar, sodium nitrate (of course) and copious amounts of salt. The result is a meat-like goo that derives 80 percent of its calories from fat and that delivers a whopping 790 mg of sodium per two-ounce serving. Spam first hit the big-time during World War II when its highly preserved state made it the ideal food to feed to our protein-needy soldiers fighting over in Europe. Now there's a fine tribute to our fighting boys! Thanks for risking your butts against the Nazis, fellas, now here’s a mound of pork slime! When you think about it, it’s remarkable that more of our troops didn’t defect to the German army, which assuredly would have offered them generous helpings of bratwurst, knockwurst and schweineschnitzel in exchange for changing sides. The fact that Americans bravely suffered through Spam prior to fighting the Battle of the Bulge adds yet another heroic chapter to the Greatest Generation’s legacy.”

The secret word is Bypass

SPAM SASHIMI?

SOMEWHERE OVER GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

“When did you last watch a cool Thomas Pynchon promo-video?”

Or have I run this before? It’s one of those winter sunset timewarps. Click here anyway.

REINDEER GAMES

Click here for something somewhat disturbing with cartoon reindeer.
Click here for something somewhat disturbing with yelling and violence and maybe bagpipes..
Click here for the Doc40 solstice offer.

SPACE OPERA

SUNDAY WITH CHUCK

Late last night HCB and I were exchanging emails (as in our wont.) The topic in this instance was Chuck Berry. H was concerned with inaccuracies in lyric transcripts, and I couldn’t help but recall how, when I interviewed the man for the NME in the mid 1970s, he came off like a slick, greasy, obnoxious conman with something close to contempt for his own work. (And don’t even mention the stories of his sex life.) But, while seeming wholly reprehensible, he did write all those songs. All those incredible songs. Was Chuck idiot savant of 20th century poetry? Check “No Money Down” reproduced below – a perfect, custom-paint vignette of the USA, like some hipster Norman Rockwell – preserving the days when the transaction between capital and labor at least kinda worked, when the UAW had plenty of juice and capitalism seemed to be creating a consumer version of the workers' paradise. Of course, we were burning natural resources like there was no tomorrow – and here in tomorrow we’re going to have to pay the price – but ol’ Chuck could make it all so seductive.

"Well Mister I want a yellow convertible

Four door de Ville

With a continental spare

And wire chrome wheels
I want power steering

And power brakes

I want a powerful motor

With jet off take

I want air conditioning

I want automatic heat

I want a full Murphy bed

In my back seat

I want short wave radio

I want TV and a phone

You know I got to talk to my baby

When I’m riding alone

I want ten dollar deductible

I want twenty dollar notes

I want thirty-five in liability

(That's all she wrote)

I got me a car

And I'm going to drive it down that road

And I won't have to worry

Bout driving that broken down old ragged Ford"

Click here for Chuck doing it live. And click here for a quality Chuck Berry fan site.

The secret word is Jitney

AY CARAMBA! (Part 2)

Yesterday we talked about how drug money has taken over the Mexican economy. Now our buddy Bernard sends this story about how it may have saved the banks…

“Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago.” (Click here for more)

“Have you noticed whenever the narcs seize drug money they arrange it all neat and photogenic, and garnish it with guns?”

(Now scroll back to last Wednesday for the Doc40 Solstice special offer.)

AY CARAMBA!

This came in from Delancey Place…
“By the estimate of journalist Philip Caputo, the most violent city in the world is not located in Afghanistan, Iraq or some Sub-Saharan African country, but across a river from the United States in Juarez, Mexico. And in the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, some 14,000 people have been killed in the country of Mexico, and part of the country is effectively under martial law: "The U.S. government estimates that the cultivation and trafficking of illegal drugs directly employs 450,000 people in Mexico [out of 110 million people]. Unknown numbers of people, possibly in the millions, are indirectly linked to the drug industry, which has revenues estimated to be as high as $25 billion a year, exceeded only by Mexico's annual income from manufacturing and oil exports. Dr. Edgardo Buscaglia ... concluded in a recent report that 17 of Mexico's 31 states have become virtual narco-republics, where organized crime has infiltrated government, the courts, and the police so extensively that there is almost no way they can be cleaned up. The drug gangs have acquired a 'military capacity' that enables them to confront the army on an almost equal footing.”

I’m going to say this very quietly and very slowly because I’m hoarse from repeating it for more than four decades. “This is only caused by the illegality of recreational drugs in the United States."

The secret word is Tether

CLICK -- Ignorance is strength.

WHO IS THIS FAT FOOL?

The fat fool depicted is Mack Steven who appears the be some cousin-marrying hillbilly cat who has managed to eliminate both taste and shame from his work. Even by the notches on the Bible Belt this idiot is a holy prize. Click here for his classic Downward Road.

“Wake up, asshole, we’re almost out of drugs.”

SPACE OPERA (Fundamental)

NAZI PENGUINS GUARD THE SECRET ANTARCTIC ENTRANCE TO THE HOLLOW EARTH

I have a grave suspicion that I’ve spent the last few days hiding in alien fantasy from the incredibly depressing cable news reality. Of course, the spiral light over Norway was major and the Frozdick family has to keep on rocking, but, where maybe I should have been chronicling the disappearance of Barack Obama’s credibility and my dissolving dreams of sweeping FDR reforms, I’ve been avoiding the ugly hopelessness of the now. As it is, I can barely stand to watch healthcare in the USA circle the toilet bowl, and two wars aimlessly dragging on for no clearly defined purpose, with one in a theatre of operations that even Alexander the Great wouldn’t touch with rubber gloves. The world has plainly been handed back to Goldman Sachs who, in their myopic ultra-greed, cannot even grasp the basic principle that unless you pay the worker/consumers enough to buy the goddamned goods and services, money becomes an abstraction and vanishes in hyperinflation, and even their Blackwater guards won’t save the rich from the cannibal hordes.

The secret word is almost Despair. (But not quite.)

“ALL EXTREMITIES, ALL FILTH, ALL ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES -- SUCH COMPLETE CHAOS THAT EVEN LOVECRAFT'S MONSTERS WOULD BE FORCED TO MAKE A SANITY CHECK”

Our pal Jon has sent us a heads up on a place called 4chan. He wonders "Real cyberpunk or real bullshit?"

“They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed. For the blissfully innocent, 4chan is an image board -- a format copied from popular Japanese sites, it allows users to post text and images anonymously. The anonymous nature of the board, of course, allows users the courage to post everything from the most extreme pornography to death threats to the coordination of raids on public institutions. The site was started in 2003 by a kid named “moot” (then fifteen) who set up the site with his mom's credit card, and who has managed to keep it going with sporadic ad revenue from only the dodgiest, least scrupulous advertisers. (Improbably, moot was a top 100 finalist for Time magazine's “most influential person of the year” award for 2009.) 4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.—are the black hole of the Internet. They collect the worst that the Internet has to offer, a morass compounded from the ids of the world's adolescent shut-ins.” (Click here for more.)

AINA VASILEVSKIS – RIP

Aina Vasilevskis – my friend of some thirty plus years – was buried today in Dorsington Wood in Warwickshire.

CATTLE MUTILATION ALL OVER AGAIN

“What are you little grey bastards looking at?”

So, after the big thingy over Norway – although we’re now being told it was a Russian missile test gone wrong – it would seem that cattle mutilation has started up again in the Midwest.

“There by the trough - past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne - was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. [Rancher Tom] Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere . . .” (Click here for more plus a very unpleasant picture.)

COSMIC WONDER TOY

But we can take a look at the nicer quadrants of the universe. I haven’t had time to really shake it down, but MrMR has sent us links to an amazing cosmic toy called The Chromoscope that enables users to look at various section of the heavens in a variety of wavelengths including those of normal light, X-ray, Heat, Hydrogen, Radio, and a bunch of other ways. He writes…

“Check out this incredible tool for viewing the heavens on many levels. That such a tool has been developed it amazing in itself, but more amazing to me is that it is just sitting out there in cyberland waiting for anyone to come by and play with it!”

Click here for a video introduction, and click here for the Chromoscope itself.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Minnesota Frozdick had a very unorthodox approach to the game of pool.

BIG WEIRDASS THING OVER NORWAY (“They’re here?")

I worked all night and rose at a highly unreasonable hour and the emails were already in. (The first came from the fabulous Wendy.) Yes my friends. A huge unearthly thingy has been hovering over Norway. If this is indeed the herald of the mothership or somesuch, I’m damned glad it’s Norway. I’d hate the first extraterrestrial encounter to be with hostile, born-again, lumpen fascists. The UK Daily Mail reported…

“A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave - although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm - which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world. The mystery deepened tonight as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area. Fred Hansen, from Bø in Vesterålen, described the sight as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it again.' 'It spun and exploded in the sky,' Totto Eriksen from Tromsø told VG Nett. He spotted the lights as he walked his daughter Amalie to school. He said: 'We saw it from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. It was absolutely fantastic. 'It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally down the heavens. 'It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain, but then came something completely different.” (Click here for more story and a video.)


Our pal Faux Smoke sent a link to VGTV in Norway for more video (Click here) and a article that he Google translated from Norweigan. (Click here.) He noted...

“What I find interesting about this article, was that one of the comments said to "look up Project Blue Beam", which I hadn't heard of, so I did... didn't find a whole lot, other than info about how the article on the subject had been deleted from wikipedia & a number of conspiracies involving nasa [or other agencies, governments, secret groups and various organizations, nasa just being the most popular and mainstream of them] implementing some sort of plan to dominate the globe and implement some sort of new world order via the manipulation of the minds and thoughts of the masses from outer space. I didn't read too thoroughly into any of the conspiracies, I've got finals this week and really don't have the time... Nonetheless, I figured that you, being a connoisseur of most things UFO & outer-space related, might find it interesting if nothing else.”

The sercret word is Encounter

ANOTHER IMAGE

DOC40 WAR ON CHRISTMAS SPECIAL OFFERS

"Now go away."

Thanks to our homeboy Joly, of WWWhatsup, we have a Doc40 free offer of I HATE CHRISTMAS buttons. All I need is to be sent a stamped and addressed envelope and I’ll mail them out. The only snag is that you have to email byron4d@msn.com to get the address. (I don’t give it out to bad company.)

HOWEVER…Doc40 is also doing a special Solstice AMAZING OFFER. Just stuff a US ten dollar bill in an envelope and we will send you both an I HATE CHRISTMAS pin and a signed copy of ZONES OF CHAOS. (That's almost six bucks off the cover price.) I know sending cash is risky, but WTF, if any are lost we’ll cover it. Screw Paypal. But again you need to email byron4d@msn.com to get the address.

PIN

SPACE OPERA

Here’s the promised Jack Kirby, but maybe it’s redundant if the aliens are really about to land in Norway.

WORST CASE SCENARIO

Back in the 1970’s, in paranoia movies like Three Days Of The Condor, the projected day when the oil ran out was also when civilization collapsed and the barbarians busted down the gates. With this ancient cultural toxin lodged firmly in my lizard mind, I was obviously dismayed when the latest email arrived from our highly informed pal Aeswiren

“This came in from Energy and Capital newsletter. While global warming is on many minds, we should also be thinking about the ongoing decline in oil production. Panic may be just a few months away. More than one-quarter of our crude production comes from just 20 oilfields. Most of these massive oil fields were discovered about 50 years ago. Another 50% of global oil supply comes from about 110 other fields, with the remaining production produced by approximately 70,000 smaller fields. The natural rate of decline in fields past their peak was approximately 9%. Of course, of those 20 largest oilfields, every one of them has passed their peak production. If you really want an idea of what can happen to these oil fields, look no further than the once-mighty Cantarell field in Mexico.
Discovered in 1976, the Cantarell field was the second largest oil producing field in the world at one point. In 2000, Pemex began injecting nitrogen into the field. Three years later, Cantarell was pumping out 2.1 million barrels per day.
Since then, the field has been in an out-of-control death spiral that nothing could stop. Production started to decline at a rate of 14% per year. Today, production has fallen to half a million barrels per day. The consequences will be even more drastic: Approximately 90% of Mexico's electricity generation is dependent on fossil fuels. Recently, the country's energy minister announced its goal to have 26% of its power-generation come from renewable sources. That may be little more than wishful thinking. Revenue from Pemex accounts for 40% of the country's budget.
It's only a matter of time before Mexico becomes a net oil importer. If so much of their budget is dependent on oil, how can they possibly afford it?”

ARE YOU READY?

In his autobiography We'll Be Here For The Rest of Our Lives, Paul Shaffer quotes verbatim the time-honored introduction by Danny Ray, James Brown's formidable master of ceremonies. ..

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time? Thank you and thank you kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time the artist nationally and internationally known as the hardest-working man in show business. Yes, he'll make your bladder splatter, he'll make your knees freeze and your liver quiver. The star of the show, Mr. Please Please himself, soul brother number one, Mr. Dynamite, the man with the crown ... James Brown and the Famous Flames.” (And click here for some fine, hard-working JB.)

ABSTINENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW

The stuff one can stumble across is nothing short of amazing. A catalogue of Christian merch? Damn me. And are these young woman modelling the God-wear the arm-waving, Christian-rock singing, Rapture-confident, Palin-boosting, sexually abstaining, wide-eyed youth that I have seen on those annoying CD commercials? Um, okay. But the look of them does rather enhance the scurrilous rumours that the abstinence movement has devianted to a weird ass postion in which Jesus is kinda okay with anal and oral, and only draws the line at actual, all-the-way, penetrating missionary fucking. But hell, what to I know? I’m damned to hell anyway.

SPACE OPERA

From the great Jack Kirby's Forever People. (And there may be another one tomorrow.)

WAITING FOR JUSTICE FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY

We remember 1984 mainly for George Orwell’s novel, or maybe for how Michael Jackson swept that year’s Grammies, or Tommy Cooper died of a massive heart attack live on live on TV, or that “Nightstalker” Richard Ramírez started his slay-spree, but how many of us remember Bhopal?

“In December 1984, a cloud of poison gas escaped from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal and went on to kill thousands of people. Twenty-five years later, the tragedy continues to dominate the lives of those who live in the city, as Allan Little discovered.
Swaraj Puri - urbane, eloquent, hospitable - tugs up a sleeve to reveal a series of little white scars on the inside of his left wrist. "I can't remember," he says, "how often they had to puncture the vein to measure the cyanide in my blood. It is amazing I'm still alive I suppose." Mr Puri was the police chief in the state of Madhya Pradesh that night. Roused from his bed after midnight, he made straight for the plant to find out what was going on with still no notion of the scale of the catastrophe that was being unleashed.
"In the control room there was only one official," he told me, "a very junior sort of a person. I asked him what had leaked and from where. He said he didn't know. Did he have any way to find out, I asked. He said no." Mr Puri climbed to the highest part of the plant that night. "It is probably what saved me,"
"The poisonous gas methyl isocyanate is heavier than air so, when it escaped from the plant, it settled in a dense cloud and moved silently through the poor neighbourhoods around the plant. "I could see," he said, "the black density of the poisonous cloud making its slow progress through the dimly lit streets." (Click here for more.)

Thanks to Valerie for the link.

The secret word is Criminal

LIBERALS WON’T SAVE YOUR ASS

I don’t mean to make reprinting Chris Hedges Monday columns from TruthDig a regular thing, but this one is just so damned right.

“Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.” (Click here for the rest.)

SPACE OPERA