ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©: May 2012

Thursday, May 31, 2012

End of May Pics

What will June bring?

UPDATE: Pool orbs

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Kraphammer of the Gods and the Dolchstoss

Warning: link is to the Daily Cruller, and it's not just Kraphammer, but also the Doughy Pantload explaining why polls of veterans show a preference for Rmoney.

"At the same time, it seems to me that if you were a traditional military voter, you might have some serious problems with Obama. The way he sometimes talks about the military, he talks about the troops — it can often seem narcissistic, political, and rub people the wrong way."

- the Doughy Pantload

"And we heard Obama today doing essentially doing penance for a country that spat on soldiers who returned from the Vietnam War."

- The Kraphammer of the Gods

Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth

By Kevin Baker (Harper's, June 2006)

Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.

Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.

...

It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces.

And there you go.

(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

House Finch

The House Finch is supposed to be a very common bird around America now, but I can't remember seeing one before. "What is that, a red sparrow?", I thought to myself.

Other beesness:

Forest Bathing:

In Japan, they call it shinrin-yoku – literally, “forest bathing.” Here, we might just call it a walk in the park. Either way, people around the world have an intuitive sense of the restorative power of natural environments. The question is: Why?

Scientists have advanced a wide range of theories about the specific physical and mental benefits nature can provide, ranging from clean air and lack of noise pollution to the apparent immune-boosting effects of a fine mist of “wood essential oils.” But the most powerful benefits, a new study suggests, may result from the way trees and birds and sunsets gently tug – but never grab – at our attention.

Pictures of the American West:

An earlier visitor: Nearly 150 years ago, photographer O'Sullivan came across this evidence of a visitor to the West that preceded his own expedition by another 150 years - A Spanish inscription from 1726. This close-up view of the inscription carved in the sandstone at Inscription Rock (El Morro National Monument), New Mexico reads, in English: "By this place passed Ensign Don Joseph de Payba Basconzelos, in the year in which he held the Council of the Kingdom at his expense, on the 18th of February, in the year 1726."