The Wind in the Willows Played Tea for Two

hub3rt @ 2008-11-22T03:23:00

2008-11-22T11:24:04Z

So many people...have their problems
Im not interested...in their problems
I guess ive...experienced some problems
But now ive...made some decisions
Takes a lot of time to push away the nonsense
Take my compassion...push it as far as it goes
My interest levels dropping, my interest level is dropping
Ive heard all I want to, I dont want to hear any more

What are you, in love with your problems?
I think you take it...a little too far
Its...not so cool to have so many problems
But dont expect me to explain your indecisions
Go...talk to your analyst, isnt that what theyre paid for
You walk, you talk...you still function like you used to
Its not a question...of your personality or style
Be a little more selfish, it might do you some good

hub3rt @ 2008-10-23T14:12:00

2008-10-23T21:12:52Z

hub3rt @ 2008-09-09T13:11:00

2008-09-09T20:13:37Z

150 years ago: abolition of slavery
100 years ago: emancipation of women
50 years ago: interracial marriage and intergration
Today: same-sex relationships

Why is it that the church always has to be dragged kicking and screaming (by secular outrage) towards the tolerance and compassion that, ironically, it claims to hold a monopoly on?

hub3rt @ 2008-05-29T02:35:00

2008-05-29T09:36:20Z

Goddamn, well I declare, have you seen the like?
Their wall are built of cannonballs, their motto is don't tread on me.
Come hear uncle john's band playing to the tide,
Come with me, or go alone, hes come to take his children home.

hub3rt @ 2008-03-10T02:28:00

2008-03-10T09:31:55Z

Glaucus atlanticus, pelagic nudibranch (sea slug)

Glaucus atlanticus (right, floating upside down) feeding on Portuguese Man O' War (left)

hub3rt @ 2008-03-04T02:54:00

2008-03-04T10:54:33Z

hub3rt @ 2008-03-02T14:30:00

2008-03-02T22:30:30Z

So now we fly ever free we're free before the thunderstorm on towards the wilderness our quest carries on far beyond the sundown, far beyond the moonlight deep inside our hearts and all our souls

hub3rt @ 2008-02-26T03:36:00

2008-02-26T11:39:20Z

""To illustrate this point, one need only look at the biggest gainer in this religious competition -- the unaffiliated group. People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all "religious" groups."

(source: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/743/united-states-religion)

hub3rt @ 2008-02-10T04:23:00

2008-02-10T12:23:14Z

hub3rt @ 2008-01-23T01:46:00

2008-01-23T09:47:39Z

10 months whoo!

hub3rt @ 2007-12-25T13:41:00

2007-12-25T21:41:26Z

Nollaig shona duit!

hub3rt @ 2007-12-07T15:54:00

2007-12-07T23:56:32Z

Humans are now one large step closer to producing armies of undead, zombie hordes who live only to feast on the brains of the living and reproduce by infecting non-zombies with their "zombie virus" through their saliva or other bodily fluids. This is thanks to the work of a team of scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, who have documented a kind of wasp that zombifies cockroaches.

Ampulex compressa enjoys licking pieces of wood, long walks on the beach and necromancy.

The Ampulex compressa actually stings a roach twice, once to disable it, and again (this time directly into the brain) with a cocktail of neuro toxins to create a willing slave. The wasp then grabs the cockroach's antenna and walks it "like a dog on a leash", according to Frederic Libersat in this article, back to its evil lair. There, the wasp lays an egg on the belly of the cockroach. When the egg hatches, the adorable larvae then eats the cockroach alive. Once it's done feasting, it weaves a cocoon inside the cockroach, waits a little while, then BOOM bursts out of the cocoon and the cockroach as a beautiful zombie-producing wasp of its own. Who said the story about the ugly duckling was just a fable?

The team from Ben-Gurion claims to be able to replicate the effect on a cockroach on their own, AND release the cockroach from the zombie spell using an antidote. Their work has immediate implications for understanding how chemicals influence creatures' behaviors. The family of Katie Holmes has also expressed interest in securing some of the team's antidote.

hub3rt @ 2007-12-06T13:38:00

2007-12-06T21:42:24Z

Sloth

Saiga Antelope

Long-breaked Echidna

Jaguarundi

Hedgehog

hub3rt @ 2007-11-30T04:08:00

2007-11-30T12:08:34Z

hub3rt @ 2007-11-15T19:06:00

2007-11-16T03:06:27Z

hub3rt @ 2007-11-04T22:58:00

2007-11-05T07:00:49Z

We set sail at half past four
Looking for a new tomorrow
Don't know when we're coming home
So we drink and we dance and we drown our sorrow

We don't know what there lies in store
But it's better than this, that's why I'm willing
To stake my claim on a foreign shore
With me spoons and me fiddle and half a shilling

They've dreamt a place and I know it's true
Where the dolphins play and it's always sunny
They dance around in the old true blue
That's what you do but you make more money

I must be off by morning's light,
I can hear our bosun's whistle blowin
One more kiss and one more fight
And one more song while the beer is flowing

When the sky is grey look out to sea
When the waves are high and the light is dying
Well raise a glass and think of me
When I'm home again boys I'll be buying

hub3rt @ 2007-10-26T03:18:00

2007-10-26T10:19:23Z

hub3rt @ 2007-10-09T03:00:00

2007-10-09T10:00:28Z

hub3rt @ 2007-09-20T03:45:00

2007-09-20T10:46:22Z

thank GOD no one remembered it was international talk like a pirate day

hub3rt @ 2007-08-30T23:37:00

2007-08-31T06:37:50Z

Even the rats know that trouble's gonna come
To the edge of the city, see the little guys run
I hear Spring's nice in Canada

Maybe the men up on Capitol Hill
need a little less Jack and a little more Jill
You can have my stereo

Even though the race may never be won
I can lay like a dandy, get heavy in the sun
take a love song and beautify

I hear the words but the meaning gets lost
Its a game, it depends on who the ball gets tossed
Its the same ball anyway

You're tuggin' me now, cut me lose or take me on
You can pray, you can play the piper all night long
That's some good home cooking

Even though the race may never be won
I can lay like a dandy, get heavy in the sun
take a love song and beautify

hub3rt @ 2007-08-30T03:17:00

2007-08-30T10:20:01Z

hub3rt @ 2007-07-20T15:28:00

2007-07-20T22:28:49Z

It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.

A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.

But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.

The Bush administration has opened this Pandora’s Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.

The lies and terror tactics with which it deluded this country into war — they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place — the most disastrous geopolitical tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process — that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The criminal lack of planning for the war — the total “jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly” tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein — that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The utter, blinkered idiocy of “staying the course,” of sending Americans to Iraq and sending them a second time, and a third and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed — the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake — that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating or containing or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11, the total “Alice Through the Looking Glass” quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for al-Qaida — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault!

The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of... Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now-vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “Don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”

Sen. Clinton has been sent — and someone has leaked to The Associated Press — a letter, sent in reply to hers asking if there exists an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.

This extraordinary document was written by an undersecretary of defense named Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq,” Edelman writes, “reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”

Edelman adds: “Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman’s remarks are “at once both outrageous and dangerous.” Those terms are entirely appropriate and may, in fact, understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.

After the South was defeated in our Civil War, the scapegoat was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the ideas of the “Lost Cause” and “Jim Crow” were born.

After the French were beaten by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871, it was the imaginary “Jewish influence” in the French Army general staff, and there was born 30 years of self-destructive anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrific Dreyfus case.

After the Germans lost the First World War, it was the “back-stabbers and profiteers” at home, on whose lives the National Socialists rose to prominence in the succeeding decades and whose accused membership eventually wound up in torture chambers and death camps.

And after the generation before ours, and leaders of both political parties, escalated and re-escalated and carpet-bombed and re-carpet-bombed Vietnam, it was the protest movement and Jane Fonda and — as late as just three years ago — Sen. John Kerry who were assigned the kind of blame with which no rational human being could concur, and yet which still, across vast sections of our political landscape, resonates unchallenged and accepted.

And now Mr. Bush, you have picked out your own Jefferson Davis, your own Dreyfus, your own “profiteer” — your own scapegoat.

Not for the sake of this country.

Not for the sake of Iraq.

Not even for the sake of your own political party.

But for the sake of your own personal place in history.

But in reaching for that place, you have guaranteed yourself tonight not honor, but infamy.

In fact, you have condemned yourself to a place among that remarkably small group of Americans whom Americans cannot forgive: those who have sold this country out and who have willingly declared their enmity to the people at whose pleasure they supposedly serve.

A scapegoat, sir, might be forgivable, if you hadn’t just happened to choose a prospective presidential nominee of the opposition party.

And the accusation of spreading “enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia” might be some day atoned for, if we all didn’t know — you included, and your generals and the Iraqis — that we are leaving Iraq, and sooner rather than later, and we are doing it even if to do so requires, first, that you must be impeached and removed as president of the United States, sooner rather than later.

You have set this government at war against its own people and then blamed those very people when they say, “Enough.”

And thus it crystallizes, Mr. Bush.

When Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered a disastrous attack on Fredericksburg in which 12,000 of his men were killed, he had to be physically restrained from leading the next charge himself.

After the First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, authored and enabled the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that saw a quarter-million Allied soldiers cut down in the First World War, Churchill resigned his office and took a commission as a front-line officer in the trenches of France.

Those are your new role models, Mr. Bush.

Let your minions try to spread the blame to the real patriots here, who have sought only to undo the horrors you have wrought since 2002.

Let them try it, until the end of time.

Though the words might be erased from a million books and a billion memories, though the world be covered knee-deep in your lies, the truth shall prevail.

This, sir, is your war.

Sen. Clinton has reinforced enemy propaganda? Made it impossible for you to get your ego-driven, blood-steeped win in Iraq?

Then take it into your own hands, Mr. Bush.

Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations.

Go there and fight, your war. Yourself.

hub3rt @ 2007-07-19T04:24:00

2007-07-19T11:25:22Z

Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

"Moderate" believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.

"Moderate" atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

"Militant" atheists: "Oh for fuck's sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is fucking WRONG with you people?"

hub3rt @ 2007-07-16T17:02:00

2007-07-17T00:03:13Z

THE WORLD/INFERNO FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY: your circus-related, punk-rockety orcestra gang from Brooklyn, New York! You know: overdressed boys/girls, double digits, capable of startling aggression, making punk a treat again for more than 10 years now? More a tribe than a band, really. Well, they've worked out this mathematical equation reconciling bravery, idealism and fun, and they'd like to show you an example. Punk rockers armed with orchestra elucidate the 20th century through the life of world-battered, morphine-crazed, tragi-comic character actor Peter Lorre, from whose laconic idealism WORLD/INFERNO seems to have taken most of their career cues. The manically beautiful song "Spiel" trips through vampires, Berlin, strings, horns, anti-fascist action, '40's Hollywood, piano, guitar, drums and heroism with a good criminal heart and a smile for which to die.

TRACK LISTING:

01. Peter Lorre Overture
02. With A Good Criminal Heart
03. "M" Is For Morphine
04. ,,,And Embarked On A Life Of Poverty and Freedom
05. Ich Errinere Mich An Weimar Republik
06. I Just Make Faces
07. Everybody Comes To Ricks
08. Cathy Catherine
09. Thumb Cinema
10. Addicted To Bad Ideas
11. Heart Attack '64

hub3rt @ 2007-07-07T03:04:00

2007-07-07T10:04:24Z

7/7/07