Holodomor Remembrance Day

Today, the fourth Saturday in November, is Holodomor Remembrance Day.

Soviet authorities, who have the most to lose from a high estimate, believe that between 2.5 and 3.5 million people died during the Holodomor. Outside historians put the total as high as 14 million. Very few put the total as low as the number that perished in, say, the Holocaust.

With Chairman Mao's excursions into Central Economic Planning being the only exception, this famine is the worst thing that any government has ever done to its own people.

Apologists from the left are embarrased by it, which is why you didn't learn about this in your High School history text. It was the ultimate big government intervention into the free market. And it was planned, implemented, and later justified as being for a good cause (eliminating a troublesome social class, ending individual ownership, taking over the means of production, etc.)

Chances are, you've never heard of it.

Slouching Toward Foggy Bottom

What rough beast slouches toward Foggy Bottom, waiting to be born?

The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Pics of She Whose Name Is Not Spoken from here and here and Yeats poem from here.
Blame for attitude toward She Whose Name Is Not Spoken may be placed here and especially here.

Suzette Watkins, Candidate For Fort Worth City Council, District 8, May 2009

Suzette Watkins, occasional commenter on these pages, is a candidate for Fort Worth City Council, District 8. Please, please, please, hit the link and get back to me.

She writes the Morning Coffee, Evening Wine blog, and I don't know anyone who cares more about the East Side than Suzette.


Here's something I wrote about her back in June: Suzette at Morning Coffee, Evening Wine generally raises hell and rolls stumps under it. All the time. East Fort Worth is a better place with her living here. I'm not even bothering to link to a specific post. Suzette grabs an issue, writes emails, takes pictures, picks up the phone, and changes things. Hit that link a year from now, and she'll be doing the same thing about a different problem.


Here's Tarrant County Libertarian Guy, from a recent email: "She (Suzette) was recently escorted out of a public meeting by four police officers under threat of arrest for basically attending a "Town Hall Meeting". Even Ms. Watkins' political adversaries have stated that the incumbent, Kathleen Hicks, and her functionaries have gone too far. Suzette Watkins, as you can tell by the article, is not one to avoid upsetting political applecarts in her quest for transparent government, fiscal responsibility and tolerance. Her straight shooting has ruffled a few feathers and she has shown a light where needed. Check out her website; http://www.suzetteforcouncil.com - and from there you can check out her blog too..."


Here's the Fort Worth Weekly's account of the unpleasantness that went down at the recent Town Hall Meeting.
Here's Suzette's Meetup Group.
And here's an invitation for Suzette to email me anything she wants to have posted here, once a week, until the election in May of 2009.

And here's how to send Suzette a campaign contribution ! Hit this link !

Magenta Is Now A Trademark

In April, "Deutsche Telekom, owners of the global T-Mobile brand, sent Engadget a late birthday present: a hand-delivered letter direct from their German legal department requesting the prompt discontinuation of the use of the color magenta on Engadget Mobile."

This, of course, is total horse manure. Colors are merely colors. They cannot seriously be considered as intellectual property. Nobody worked for years in trial-and-error experiments before they discovered magenta.

T-Mobile doesn't deserve exclusive rights to the color magenta. So it's time for more rebellion and civil disobedience. I await the sound of heavy boots on my steps, and the sound of fists banging on my door in the middle of the night.

For the next 24 hours, or until I get sued by T-Mobile, the colors on this blog will be magenta. Or the closest I can find for free on the Blogspot color palette.

The Only "Change" Candidate For Secretary Of The Treasury

....in which the investment gurus at "The Motley Fool" website propose the only logical candidate for Secretary Of The Treasury.

What Can Brown Do For You?

This is a formal protest. Civil disobedience. The background of this blog has changed from Blue to Brown for the next 24 hours, or until they sue me. Whichever comes first.

I noticed this abomination while tracking some of our UPS shipments today.
This is horse manure. The government shouldn't allow companies to copyright a color.

Addition from 11-19-08..... After further reading, they can't copyright a color. They can only use it as a trademark. Somewhat different, but still goofy.

On a slightly related note, this is what passes for humor in the shipping and logistics industry:
Did you hear about the UPS shipments that were in the cargo holds of the airliners that hit the World Trade Center?
UPS denied the freight claims because of "inadequate packaging".
Ok, ok, it's not that funny to everyone else. But if you work with UPS, it's a real knee-slapper.

I can't believe they've trademarked a color.

Topics for further reflection and study

* President-elect Obama has resigned his Senate seat. There is a big vote coming up on the bailout of the Big 3 automakers. Obama's trend of voting "present", or not voting at all, continues.... Mr. President, there are no more rungs on the ladder. There's no point in carefully preserving your record of neutrality any longer. Do something. (Nawwww. I take that back. Please don't do anything.)

* California needs a bailout. Detroit needs a bailout. Wall Street needs a bailout. A.I.G. (headquartered in New York City) needs a bailout. Are there any bailout candidates that aren't located in the traditionally Blue states? Just wondering.

* The United Auto Workers spent upwards of 80 million dollars on this election. The unions are pushing for something called "Card Check", which does away with the secret ballot when voting whether or not to unionize. Is there any rationale for doing this other than bringing fear and intimidation into the picture?

* Grey's Anatomy, the prime time hospital soap opera, has ended its Hot Lesbian Doctors storyline. One of the characters has since been written out of the series. Why aren't people rioting in the streets?

* Obama plans to nominate Eric Holder, someone that I seem to remember favorably from the Clinton years, for Attorney General. But according to the Newsweek blog, "The only hesitancy about Holder’s selection was that he himself had reservations about going through a confirmation process that was likely to revive questions about his role in signing off on the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Although there is no evidence that Holder actively pushed the pardon, he was criticized for not raising with the White House the strong objections that some Justice Department lawyers and federal prosecutors in New York had to pardoning somebody who had fled the country." What do nominations like this one, plus the possibility that She Whose Name Is Not Spoken will be leading the State Department, do for those who bought into the "Change We Can Believe In" mantra?

* I have a Serbian friend who claims that everyone in Eastern Europe is telling their friends and relatives in the U.S. to get rid of their dollars. The currency is going to collapse in February. Mostly for reasons outlined here. Note to the dreaded secularists, secular humanists, and atheists....if this happens, it'll be a perfect moment to remove "In God We Trust" from the currency.

Another Historic Breakthrough, The Literal End Of Another Barrier, The Seat Of Power, etc

According to Slate, the noted journal of Politics, Foreign Policy, Ethics, and Culture, Michelle Obama will be bringing intelligence, beauty, style, and at least one other commodity into the White House....

As The Beast Foretold In The Book Of Prophecy Continues The Quest For World Dominion

Revelation chapter 13.



But seriously, does she have any qualifications at all for the Secretary Of State spot? Any at all that could move her in front of the thousands with more experience?

Michelle Obama on 60 Minutes, regarding the D.C. Public Schools

Where will Malia and Sasha go to school, part 2....

60 Minutes: Would you seriously consider sending the girls to public school?

Michelle Obama: You know, we're still in the process of figuring out that transition, and what we have asked people to understand is that the decision that we make will be based on the best interest of the girls. We haven't made that decision yet, you know, we want that to be a personal process, and people have been really good about respecting that.

The Whited Sepulchre: Almost everyone wishes that they could select their school based on their childrens' best interest. They can't make that decision yet, you know, because the government insists on assigning kids to various schools based on residential zip code. Everyone wants their school choice to be a personal process, especially since they're taxed to pay for schools.
Therefore, Mrs. Obama, some of us have difficulty accepting your rationalization for not putting your kids in the Washington D.C. Gladiator Training Facility.

If the government absolutely has to be involved in education, the government should do the decent thing and issue tuition vouchers for the school that the family chooses. We don't need any more White Flight Suburbs. We don't need to keep funding bad schools that don't work.

On a related note, here's a suggestion for politicians who oppose socialized medicine: Insist that public medical care be provided based on residential zip code, just like public education. Nobody in his right mind would vote for it.

Vouchers would go a long, long way toward solving the education problem.
And The Hypocrisy Watch continues....

On an unrelated note, those are some cute little girls. It's going to be good to have some children (with a new dog) in the White House. Just trying to find an upside....

Dr. James Hansen, The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Climate Change, and Convenient Errors.

According to The Daily Telegraph,.... "On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record."

Or maybe it wasn't. Looks like they just carried over some numbers from the previous month.

Ever go away from home on a long vacation, and return to an impossibly high electric bill? And when you called to complain that you couldn't have possibly consumed that much electricity, the electric company admitted that they just carried over numbers from the previous month? Honest to God, that's what they're claiming happened.

Do you wonder why Dr. James Hansen, Al Gore's chief scientific ally, might be getting sloppy with the numbers when Obama is seriously considering Hansen's chief Sugar Daddy, Al Gore, for a position as "Climate Czar"?

These questions are provided as a public service by The Whited Sepulchre Outreach Ministry.