WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's Journal
I am eating my own face.
Poll: 50 percent say GOP majority is badhttp://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/225556-poll-50-percent-say-gop-majority-bad-for-country
I quote DUer belzabubba333: "this makes me want to shoot myself in the face with a bazooka"
GOD DAMN SHIT FUCK BALLS TITS ASS AND SHIT, fucking VOTE, you stupid complacent lazy fuckwits, you ball of lint-riddled uselessness, you appetizer on the plate of those who are EATING YOU, summon the requisite calories from your last pasty feast of whatever it was that isn't food to raise your hand ONCE every TWO YEARS and TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR OWN DESTINY. You can do it. Really, you can. The WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM was designed to let you, yes you, do EXACTLY AND PRECISELY THAT. When shit goes sideways and everything sucks, it's because you aren't levitating off of your pillow-ass to waddle down to a polling station IN YOUR OWN GODDAM NEIGHBORHOOD - literally, like, a couple of blocks down - to fill in a box with a felt pen in order to have a say about your future. YOUR FUTURE, AND MINE, you fucking baggage.
WHAAAAAAARGARBLE THIS SHIT MAKES ME CRAZY. However you may feel about Bill Clinton, he said this in his first inaugural address, and nailed it: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America." One thing that is right with America: VOTING. Decisions are made by those who show up, period, end of file.
Ermahgerd, half the country thinks a GOP congressional majority is bad? IF HALF THE GODDAM COUNTRY HAD BOTHERED TO SHOW UP, just half, just a meager fucking 50%, THIS WOULDN'T BE A PROBLEM.
Ugh.
(waiting for the first person to tell me the low turnout was my fault, cuz I need the laugh)
St. Louis Rams Players Enter Field With "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" Pose
St. Louis Rams players recognized this week's Ferguson protests with an emphatic gesture during player introductions when several members of the team's receiving corps entered the field in the "hands up, don't shoot" pose.
Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt came out with their hands up, before being joined by the rest of the team to start the game.
Video: http://deadspin.com/rams-players-enter-field-with-hands-up-dont-shoot-1664860731
Thanksgiving Day and the Powerful Play
(Photo: Lotus Carroll; Lost and Taken; Edited: JR/TO)
Thanksgiving Day and the Powerful Play
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Thursday 27 November 2014
Two hours ago, as of this Wednesday night writing, the ground around my back porch was brown and bare and sere. Where only scant weeks ago there was deep color in the New Hampshire woods - an astonishing riot of maple red and oak orange and birch yellow, the likes of which I have never seen before and may never see again, because it was simply that extraordinary - there are now only the skeletal fingers of bare trees holding court over a graveyard of fallen leaves. A few studiously green pines stand the watch, as they always do, but in the main, it is the Autumnal end of things in this particular patch of this particular place.
And then, two hours ago, it began to snow. The East Coast, from the middle of Florida to the middle of Maine, is getting slapped with a good old-fashioned early-winter walloper that is going to perfectly and profoundly screw anyone looking to put the rubber to the road ahead of this Thanksgiving holiday. I feel for them, I really and sincerely do, but the branches of the cherry tree are graced with two inches of latticed snow, the forest beyond is a laden mystery of white, and all I can do is stare out the window and wonder at the exchange of one beautiful for another beautiful as the seasons change right before my eyes.
(snip)
When we sit at table, there will be no place set for Pop, who has gone from us after Thanksgivings beyond memory. In Woburn, there will be no place set for my beloved friend and roommate and partner in crime, who passed last week. At tables in every city and town and village from one shore to the other, places will not be set for those who cannot sit and eat, or join in a laugh, or share a tale, or simply smile, because they are also gone from us. There will be a hole in many tables and many hearts on this Thanksgiving Day, and that is a truth of this life.
So.
Hold tight to who you have in this world, even if you're down deep in a ditch. I hope someone sets a place at table for you on Thanksgiving, but if not, remember that you're still here, and if you're here, it means matters can change for the better, because you're here. Hold tight to who you have, and tell those who are your heart you love them. Do not let the grass grow under the last conversation you had with one who is a part of who you are. I am here to tell you, from the well of my soul, that it is a savage, brutal shock to lose that chance forever.
We live in a world of shrinking margins, of narrowing visions, a world ruled and ruined by fools. This is the fact of our time, and no one is going to fix it today. Tomorrow, perhaps, but in the meantime, hold close what you hold most dear, and give thanks for the chance of that holding. If you truly appreciate what you have, no matter how mean or meager, you are doing it right. On this day of all days, remember where you came from, contemplate where you are, imagine where you can be, stand stock still a moment, and be thankful that you are here.
"That the powerful play goes on," Mr. Whitman reminds us, "and you may contribute a verse."
Contribute a verse. Because you can. Because you are here.
Happy Thanksgiving.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27694-thanksgiving-day-and-the-powerful-play
For Brian
Take a deep breath before you open this thread.
A line of roses down the centerline of the street where Michael Brown died.
I have no idea who did it. But it happened.
It happened.
"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots."
"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."
Martin Luther King, Jr., 14 March 1968
Ferguson Medical Examiner didn't photograph Mike Brown's body because...wait for it...
..."My battery in my camera died."
Straight from the Grand Jury testimony: https://twitter.com/grasswire/status/537261193736368128
“Atticus–” said Jem bleakly.
“Atticus–” said Jem bleakly.
He turned in the doorway. “What, son?”
“How could they do it, how could they?”
“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it — seems that only children weep.”
— "To Kill A Mockingbird," Harper Lee
For those of you who have lost someone dear to you...
I'm not sure how according-to-Hoyle this is as a GD post, but here goes.
I found out on Monday that one of my oldest and dearest friends - my college roommate, Jamaica Plain roommate, South End roommate, and partner in crime for years that included a run of madness in San Francisco - had died suddenly. The news frankly obliterated me; I've lost plenty of dear people, including all four grandparents and the parents of many good friends, but Fitz was three years younger than me, and was royalty in my core crew.
I've been a pudding since I got the news...and then a friend sent me this. I'm still in utter anguish, but reading this helped to quiet the banshee scream in my head just a bit, and that is frankly a mercy beyond measure.
I know there are a whole lot of people here who have also lost someone who was utterly irreplaceable, some very recently. This really helped me. I hope it helps you. I'm not sure of the original source, but it is, basically, a eulogy from a physicist.
===
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.
-Aaron Freeman
I want to sing his name.
There was this guy I met in college who had the wicked pissah Woburn accent. He was ten feet tall, with bright green eyes, and handsome in the way that makes you hate handsome guys like that just a little bit even though he's you're friend. The funniest guy in the room, and hilariously OCD; we'd rearrange the books in his dorm room ever so slightly, and he'd walk in, put the books back in order again, sit down, crack a beer, and tell us to fuck ourselves with this megawatt smile on his face. Smart as all get-out; he took a class titled "How to Make an Atomic Bomb" thinking it was a history class, found out it was a hardcore physics/engineering class, stuck with it, and aced the goddam thing anyway.
After college, I moved to San Francisco, and bugged him to move there until he did. He bought two motorcycles and promptly wrecked them both, but made a home for himself, and we had good great grand and wild times. I left to return to Boston after two years, and he stayed, and a few years later I happened to look across the bar at the Plough & Stars in Cambridge, and big as life, there he was. We were roommates on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain, and on Wellington Street in the South End after that, and then he met a no-shit goddess, and moved out to get married.
I just found out that he died on Monday. My heart is...what? I don't frankly know. I have no words for how I feel.
His name was Brian Fitzgerald - "Fitz" to his friends - and he was one of the most remarkable people I've ever been privileged to know.
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
