Wow. musically, the band Porno para Ricardo sound great! And even better in this Internet age that the Cuban government has just arrested their front man, Gorki Aguila, on charges of ”pre-crime social dangerousness”. I hope there was something lost in the Cuban-English translation of that charge because if not, the charge just makes the Cuban government look silly and out of touch. Too bad for a Cuban government who has learned that there is no such thing as bad press.
From the Associated Press, “Cuban law defines ’social dangerousness’ as behavior contrary to ‘communist morality,’ and police use it to detain offenders before they have a chance to commit a crime.”
Porno para Ricardo have been pissing on Fidel and Raul for awhile now with their angry lyrics and humorous insults hurled at their Communist leaders. It’s not surprising when the AP states that Porno para Ricardo is banned from official Cuban airwaves. Their newest album is tentatively called ”Geriatric Central Committee”. Fabulous.
The convention gets a great Biden speech, a surprise Obama cameo, the entire Biden clan on the stage hugging to ‘We are family’, then a benediction. I understand why, but it looked forced to get the crowd to instantly shift to solemn prayer. Maybe it was the fact that, during all of this, Michelle was up in the crowd and msnbc kept cutting to her in the stands, smiling and laughing. seemed dis-jointed, but the message of the evening is still clear.
I’ve got a couple of gripes with our state capital’s leading newspaper that are enough to push me over the edge and look elsewhere for links to use in my blog posts.
Collecting information to access random articles. This is just a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. But if you are looking to increase traffic to your site and thereby increase the eyeballs looking at your web ads, would you not want to make it as easy as possible? Yes, they are using this anonymous information to sell off to fund the paper, but I wonder what the site abandonment rate is for the paper due to these annoying little questions about my gender, date of birth, etc.
Removing stories from their site after an un-determined amount of time. This one is the big griping point for me. I’m a pack rat on the Internet. I use Del.icio.us to save thousands of URLs for all sorts of reasons. Everything I book mark from indystar.com to use in a research paper or to blog about is useless. One would think that these blog references to potential archived news stories would be a no-brainer from a site hit count and increased ad revenue based on the increased hit count. Apparently not. Is it too much to ask of the Indystar.com IT department to budget for a couple more servers to house the paper’s archived news stories?
Oh well, I guess I’ll just keep on using the Indianapolis Business Journal, Inside Indiana Business, the states other newspapers, et al. rant off.
Rep. Carson pays respect to Indiana’s 7th Congressional district and his grandmother with his statements around being raised by the Indianapolis village. The village here in Indianapolis, despite its serious problems (IMPD, dirty air, dirty water, etc.), is a diverse landscape that needs more publicity. It’s exciting to see him help re-define Indiana, a traditionally ‘red’ state, in a more progressive light.
From andrecarsonforcongress.com(and curiously not his official House web site), Carson has secured a half million dollars to to fund technology upgrades for the Indianapolis Metro Police Department. These laptops in patrol cars and a corresponding broad band network will “allow police officers to spend more time out on patrol keeping the streets safe and less time trying to track down information”, according to Carson.
Following on the heals of IDEM accusations of being too cozy with business interests in the state, our department of environmentalbusiness management gets trumped by the EPA and the federal agencies inclusion of 14 counties.
Even a day of air that meets federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency exposes people to as many harmful free radicals as smoking one cigarette, the researchers learned. But breathing heavily polluted air could expose a person to 100 cigarettes’ worth of free radicals in one day, researchers said.
The EPA said in 1997 that cutting fine-particle pollution would save 15,000 people a year from premature deaths due to heart and lung diseases aggravated by soot-filled air
I received this post (actually two submissions of the post) in my spam queue when I blogged on Andre using twitter to keep us in the loop. For those of you who don’t know, Andre Carson is the second muslim elected to the House (Go Hoosier progressives!). It’s not surprising that there’s a large fear movement on Islam’s alleged takeover of the U.S.
There’s not a lot out here on the Internet on Carson, something I’m looking to rectify. This goal to post more information on Rep. Carson won out over my hesitation to leave these posts in my spam folder. We’ve got a ways to go, eh?
Sal |
It seems your congressman is socializing with CAIR, named unindicted co-conspirator in a federal terror financing trial whose many of its members are in jail for that matter.
In this link: http://www.masjidomar.com/images/Vote2008.jpg , you will see that the congressman whom you helped elect has participated in an event at the Islamic Institute of Orange County last Saturday, 8,16, 2008
Learn more about Congressman Carson activities with terror orientated groups here:
According to a report by KUSA-TV, at least four people are under arrest in connection with a plot to kill Obama during his speech Thursday night at Invesco Field. The television station cited law enforcement sources as saying one of the suspects said the group planned to come to Denver to kill Obama.
One of the suspects told authorities they were “going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a … rifle … sighted at 750 yards,” according to the KUSA report.
The station said police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and methamphetamines.
They were planning to shoot Obama from over 7 football fields away? I’m already disgusted with much of this country. Please white supremacist people, calm down and understand that you’re time has passed. Please go quietly in the night.
*UPDATE - evidently this lunatic never posed a credible threat to Barack. good thing.
Like it or not, we are colonizing Iraq. And why not do it with heavy metal? The genre has it all and is cultural imperialism at its finest. It questions political authority (system of a down), it’s positive, it doesn’t trust Christianity/religion, It’sinternational, rallies around animal rights, and has an affinity for literature. It’s even got a sense of humor.
The band Acrassicauda claims to be Iraq’s only metal band. While I prefer thrash, industrial, grindcore, and the new wave of American metal, Acrassicauda does come off as a competent metal band raised on Metallica and Slayer. Yes, for the un-initiated, these are real sub-genres in the family of metal. Check out the decent VH1 documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey , as well as this fairly accurate ‘metal family tree‘ for more.
Metal has been pissing on Christianity since its inception, why not take on Islam as well? The band is the subject of what looks like a great documentary, Heavy Metal Baghdad.
Here’s the movie trailer:
Interested in the metal over the politics? Check out some live video performance here:
On the surface, it sounds great. In fact, it sounds genius. What do need? fuel. What are we introducing as a fuel alternative? ethanol. What do we have tons upon tons of? garbage. Add all of those things together and it seems like we are killing a couple of birds with one stone. Lake County, IN is moving forward with a gasification plant to convert 1000 TONS of garbage a DAY to ethanol. Sounds like a no brainer. Yes and no, saysSandy O’brien of the Dunelands Sierra Club group. The plant will essentially be burning garbage, she says. The gasification process will be burning a lot of plastics, which could be recycled, and would introduce a yet unknown amount of air pollution to the surrounding county.
Officials building the plant state that air pollution will be less than the pollution already created than the fleet of trucks that already carry garbage through the county to the landfill. This seems a bit of an odd justification for the plant given that the new plant won’t reduce the number of garbage trucks flowing through the county. Especially when this same official suggests that more garbage could be shipped into the county to meet the demand for the new plant.
The Lake County Solid Waste Management District Board, according to Dunelands Sierra Club group, is washing its hands of any environmental impact assessment, leaving it to IDEM to gauge and assess. Judging on past performance and positioning by IDEM, That spells trouble for an accurate assessment.
So it’s no silver bullet, but you do have to give Lake county some credit for some creative thinking on energy production
Sal | 
