Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
\n— Susan Ertz<\/i><\/p>\n
It’s one of those days that isn’t exactly rainy, but not exactly not<\/i> rainy, either. Mists swirl between here and the hills. The pavement gleams. A raincoat might be a good idea during a dog walk. Or maybe not. (No unbrella, of course. People in the NorthWET don’t do umbrellas. We may own them, but when you see somebody actually using one, you know they’re foreigners.)<\/p>\n
After a good, but semi-hectic week, I promised myself a sabbath day<\/a>. I’m just now getting to the “drink wine” part. But I didn’t drive anywhere. Didn’t spend any money. Didn’t occupy myself with mindless activities. Just read a little. Relaxed. Played with the dogs. Sat in the garret room for a while, petting the cat who lives up there. And in the evening I made one of my favorite cold-weather comfort foods, chicken-cheddar soup topped with almonds.<\/p>\n Nice. Restful and renewing.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Last week I went into information overload. There were so many things I wanted to blog about that my brain got too full organize any coherent blogitude. Sorry for the days of non-posting. But sometimes you got it and sometimes you don’t.<\/p>\n So many amazingly good things happened in the opposition to TSA porno-scanners and “enhanced” groping. Blogs<\/a> are popping up. Michael Roberts, the bold pilot who refused both the porno-scan and the retaliatory grope-a-thon has started FedUpFlyers.org<\/a>. There’s a National Opt Out Day<\/a> set for the busiest travel day of the year. There are several lawsuits in the works. And (tip o’ hat to Pat) people are starting to resist<\/a> — and they’re getting mega-clicks, attaboys, and promises of support.<\/p>\n Dozens of great articles appeared, like this one<\/a> and this one<\/a>. (Although I must correct the record a bit. The words attributed to me in that second piece were posted here by me, but they actually came from an anonymous frequent flyer who reads this blog<\/a>. He deserves all the credit.)<\/p>\n We got some blunt confirmation of what TSA screeners think of us and our rights<\/a>. And boy, is that making the rounds and opening some eyes. Can’t really know if the author is, as she claims, a former screener. But it rings true.<\/p>\n And the Boycott Flying<\/a> Facebook page went in less than a week from having 20 “People who like this” to 652. Sure, that’s a small number when you consider all the millions of flyers. But the power of those little drops of water is growing — and growing fast<\/i>.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Alas, there was also some real sh*t in the news last week, also. The worst of it ran on LewRockwell.com<\/a> and got mention in the trade press<\/a>, but received scarcely a whiff of attention in the mainstream. As we long feared, microchips are soon to go into medications — right into the indifidual pills. No doubt we’ll soon hear how “good” this is for people — how it will encourage them not to forget to take their meds and so on. But in the long run, you know exactly where this will end up. Wonder how long it’ll be before the first SWAT raid on some poor slob whose transmitter reports that he’s not taking his mood-altering meds? Not to mention that nobody in Big Pharma seems to be asking just how healthy it can be for us to keep swallowing microchips.<\/p>\n Last week, too, financial pundits began to catch on to just how “cooked” the October jobs numbers really were — you know, the jolly good numbers that came out just before the election<\/a>.<\/p>\n And while this thought won’t surprise anybody here, it’s nevertheless depressing when you realize that fraud and complicity with fraud are now so widespread in our institutions that they’ve become “the lifeblood of the status quo.”<\/a><\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n I wanted to blog all that last week, but I didn’t want to just toss it out as miscellany — especially not after tossing out a blip last Wednesday that turned out to be easily disproven. That missile story, you know. Sigh. Being wrong is an inborn hazard of rapido-blogging. It’s not the first time and probably won’t be the last time I post something that needs fact-checking. But … the good thing is, there’s usually somebody around to do exactly that. (In this case, tip o’ hat to DrillSgtK.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. — Susan Ertz It’s one of those days that isn’t exactly rainy, but not exactly not rainy, either. Mists swirl between here and the hills. The pavement gleams. A raincoat might be a good idea during a dog walk. Or maybe not. (No unbrella, of course. People in the NorthWET don’t do umbrellas. We may own them, but when you see somebody actually using one, you know they’re foreigners.) After a good, but semi-hectic week, I promised myself a sabbath day. I’m just…<\/p>\n