ExtraordinaryDom

#OccupyWallStreet - And Its 900+ Offspring - Has It Correct

Percent of Americans who approve of #OccupyWallStreet: 54

Percent of Americans who approve of the “Tea Party:” 27

Percentage of Americans who say the gap between the rich and poor has grown too large: 79

Percentage of Americans who say the rich should pay more in taxes: 68

Percent of all US economic growth that went to the top 1% of income owners over the past decade: 65

Combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans, measured by Forbes: $1.5 trillion

Combined net worth of the bottom 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion

According to Mayor Bloomberg, the average salary of Wall Street financiers against whom the protesters are protesting, saying they “are struggling to make ends meet”: $45,000-$50,000

Actual average salary in New York’s Securities industry in 2010: $361,330

Average annual salary increase in the securities industry over the past 30 years: 11%

Average increase in compensation for private-sector employees outside securities industry during the past 30 years: 1.8%

Average price inflation rate during past 30 years: roughly 3%

Decline in average salary of middle class families in past decade: 7%

Decline in the average income of the average poor family in the past ten years: 12%

Number of times Bloomberg said protesting banks would discourage them from lending money and cost jobs: 2

Rate at which the volume of commercial andindustrial bank loans grew in the second quarter of 2011: 9.6%

A CIA drone operator killed the notorious proponent of radical terrorism against the United States, Anwar al-Awlaqi, on Friday. The killing provoked controversy because al’Awlaqi was a US citizen and was simply assassinated without any due process.

The issue of extrajudicial arrests and executions is a thorny one, and English common law – even our own Constitution – evolved in a time long before there were multi-national terrorists with access to the Internet and a global audience.

While I deplore the assassination of al’Awlaqi for a whole host of reasons, I also wonder how we as a society deal with direct threats posed by people – American citizens or not – who are beyond the reach of police, FBI, CIA or military units, making their capture for trial problematic. On the one hand, simply assassinating al’Awlaqi goes against everything this nation stands for and risks turning him into a martyr; on the other, how do we contain or neutralize a threat that already has carried out at least three plots, two of which were thwarted, to attack US citizens and is actively inspiring others to do the same thing?

I’m not sure there are any easy answers. Changing federal law to allow a FISA-like secret court to issue a warrant isn’t the right approach; the existing FISA court has a dismal record of allowing the government to conduct a raft of constitutionally questionable activities just on the say-so of the FBI and Justice Dept. affidavits. The un-Patriot Act is a black mark against the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens and has done little to actually stop or capture actual real or potential terrorists, so another version of it isn’t the answer, either.

As a long-time member of the ACLU, I am against any attempt to further weaken the provisions of the Constitution and our sacred Bill of Rights. At the same time, I am deeply troubled by the legal and ethical issues raised by people such as al-Awlaqi and the threats they pose.

L'Shanah Tovah.

A Creed To Live By

"No one got rich in this country on his own. You built a factory out there? Good for you.

“But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

– Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Senate Candidate

There is a room which only a certain kind of man knows. It is a room dark and carnal and infinitely supplied. It is where light and dark meet; where between the metal and leather a girl’s fears succumb to the beast inside her. This room is for my imagination alone where my creative mind and implements will mould my girl, my lover, my slave.

Imagine a girl, not just any girl but a tall, busty, beautiful vision. Just imagine the girl trapped in my room where her innocence is to be lost. Imagine her quivering lips, her shortened breath as she hears me approach, and know that first her moans and then her screams excite me as my hands touch and work her flesh.

- Source unknown

The Tea Party tore into Obama
for staging a taxation drama.
They would rather he cut
doctor visits somewhat
and save millionaires from such trauma. 

A very sincere and heartfelt thanks to everyone who wrote - and I was surprised at the number of people who took a moment to do so - offering me their sympathy and kind thoughts in response to the previous journal post about the death of my buddy Sparky. I am touched, more than you can know.

I'm still quite raw although I did dump out Sparky's litter box a while ago because I didn't want it to start to smell. But his toys are still scattered around the house and I can't bring myself to pick them up yet. I feel like what Robert Oppenheimer said right after the first test of the atom bomb at Alamagordo: "I am become death, destroyer of universes."

My Buddy Sparky – 1997-2011

“Where’s Sparky? Where’s my buddy Sparky?”

When I'd call out his name, Sparky would come trotting into whatever room I happened to be in, stretch out on his side and lift his head for me to pat it before I stroked the length of his spine. It always produced a continuous rumble from deep inside him, a purr of contentment and affection that we both enjoyed as I enthusiastically told him, “It’s so good to see you, Sparky!” while he flipped the tip of his tail back and forth.

But when I called out “Where’s Sparky?” this morning, there was no response. Sparky, the thoroughly sociable and personable cat who deigned to let me share my life with him for the past 13 years, died during the night.

The house is missing a heartbeat and seems dreadfully quiet.

I wrapped Sparky's body in his blanket, then sealed him inside a large, green, "construction strength" bag before burying him in the back garden. I taped a small note on top that reads "Here Lies Sparky - 1996-2011 – ‘My Buddy’” so that if someone, long after I'm gone, is digging back there and finds it, they'll know they came across a beloved pet, not some stray animal.

Like me, my dog, a gentle giant of a Golden Retrieverm is very mopey today. Unlike me, he knows something's amiss but I'm not sure if he has figured out what although he keeps sniffing around the areas where Sparky would usually sleep. Unlike Prince, I've been crying a lot.

Interesting, don't you think, that every day a raft of new "female submissives" appear. They all have one enticing or at least cute photo, they are all 23, they all stand 5'5" tall and none of them have a completed profile. Do men really fall for this anymore? Sheesh!

The Real Price Of 9/11

The decade kicked off by the 9/11 attacks has been a nightmare for the United States, from which we strive and fail to awake. The attacks themselves were an exercise in mass terror, and among the more effective such operations in modern history. They were intended to have one of two consequences. One possibility was that they would draw the US into the Middle East, as the Soviets had been drawn into Afghanistan, which would allow al-Qaeda and its allies to mire its troops in a fruitless and enervating guerrilla war.

Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan visited Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996:

”It seems Osama bin Laden had a long-term strategy. He told me personally that he can’t go and fight the Americans and their country. But if he manages to provoke them and bring them to the Middle East and to their Muslim worlds, where he can find them or fight them on his own turf, he will actually teach them a lesson.”

The other possibility was that the US would decide that imperial micro-management of the Middle East was not worth the cost, and would withdraw from the regionm thus allowing the overthrow of their clients among the Arab governments. The entire ideology was never more than a crackpot vision, entirely unrealistic and all the more violent for that.”

The US public responded nobly to the attacks, but US elites replied with perfidy. Americans pulled together, so that feelings of racial alienation declined. They were careful not to blame Muslims in general, and remembered that American Muslims were among the victims. They were ready to sacrifice to make their country safe.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4-million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity or wisdom.

The political leaders of the United States refused to look in a cleared-eyed way at the roots of Middle Eastern anger at Washington, and they missed the opportunity to deprive al-Qaeda of its recruiting tools. Had the US moved the region quickly to a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, it would have resolved 80% of the dissatisfaction with the US. Had it lifted the blockade on medicine and chlorine in Iraq, it would have forestalled charges of being implicated in the deaths of half a million children. But the Bush administration believed in beating people into submission, not in working toward political compromises that might repair the American reputation.

At home, our politicians, bureaucrats and even many judges actively pursued a profound betrayal of the US constitution and its bill of rights, virtually overturning the fourth amendment right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure of private correspondence and effects. Nearly a million Americans were put on a travel watch list and their travel often interfered with, most of them for no reason other than that they had attended peaceful demonstrations. The US government advocated for torture, assassination, and extra-judicial kidnapping. Via Abu Ghraib it became the world’s largest purveyor of prison pornography. A vast and labyrinthine national security state was constructed that appears to be under no one’s control, and the intelligence estimates of which are too numerous and too closely guarded for them ever to be given practical effect by our legislators.

The al-Qaeda masterminds of September 11, now mostly dead or in prison, imagined that they would destroy the US as an imperial power and would go on to take power in the Middle East. They were wrong on both fronts, being megalomaniacs and having no sense of reality. And they were reduced to irrelevancy in the region by leftist youth movements such as April 6 in Egypt.

The real danger of 9/11 for the US was that it was used as a pretext by a coterie of powerful American nationalists tied to right wing billionaires, who, like termites, were eager to gnaw away at the foundations of the rule of law, individual rights, and basic liberties on the domestic scene. In that regard, September 11 was not primarily an event in US foreign policy but rather a launching pad for domestic forces of the worst sort, neutralising public opinion by constantly frightening them with alleged Muslim terrorists. The US took a turn to the far right 10 years ago toward a praetorian state of perpetual war, a society where workers were forestalled from unionizing, a society where the government routinely spied on phone records and emails, a society where warrantless surveillance became routine, a society where basic rights such as habeas corpus were placed in doubt, a society that hid from itself its own methods of empire – torture, disappearance, bombing raids on civilian cities with no shred of international legal justification.

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal of civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back.

Remembering 9/11

Television and newspapers will be flooded with 9/11 stories and shows this weekend. Last night, IFC ran Fahrenheit 9/11, the Oscar-winning documentary by Michael Moore, and that’s just the start.

I lost a co-worker who happened to be in the South Tower that morning, and a friend who was in the North Tower.

That was the day more than 3,000 people lost their lives and America lost its soul, thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney who used it as an excuse to terrify people into everything from surrendering their civil liberties to backing an unnecessary and totally illegal war in Iraq based completely on lies that killed more than 5,000 brave Americans, 600,000 innocent Iraqi’s and displaced more than 4-million others.

That’s what I’ll be thinking about on 9/11 – memories that are sad and memories that make me seethe with anger at bin Laden (who wanted to destroy America and partially succeeded), Bush, Cheney and the whole cabal of neo-cons.

TEXAS UNDER SNAKE OIL SALESMAN PERRY
So Rick Perry, the latest darling of the Republican Party, is running around the country telling primary voters he is a “job creating machine” that is the best in the nation. But Jim Hightower, a Texas journalist with countless awards to his name, is running a one man truth squad about Perry, pointing out that not only does Texas lag way behind other states – something like 17^th out of 50 – it falls far below job creation rates in states such as New York, California and even New Hampshire, all of which have very liberal governors and state legislatures.

Hightower has also built a list showing how Texas ranks among other states in categories ranging from overall health to the number of citizens with health insurance
Overall Birth Rate – 2nd
Teenage Birth Rate – 7th
Births to Unmarried Mothers – 17th
Percent of Women with Pre-Term Births – 9th
Cervical Cancer Rate – 11th
Percent of Women with High Blood Pressure – 16th
Number of Executions – 1st
Percent of Women Living in Poverty – 6th
Percent of Children Living in Poverty – 4th
Average Monthly Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) Benefits per Person 47th
Total Health Expenditures as % of the Gross State Product – 43rd
Health Care Expenditures per Capita – 44th
Percent of Low Income Population Covered by Medicaid – 49th
Per Capita State Spending on Medicaid – 49th
Per Capita State Spending on Mental Health – 50th
Workers’ Compensation Coverage – 50th
Rejected $555 million in federal unemployment insurance funding
Percent of Uninsured Children – 1st
Percent of Population Uninsured – 1st
Percent of Non-Elderly Uninsured – 1st
Percent of Population with Employer-Based Health Insurance – 48th
Percent of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance – 50th
Physicians per Capita – 42nd
Registered Nurses per Capita – 44th
Percent of Population Who Visit the Dentist – 46th
Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms – 40th
Percent of Pregnant Women Receiving Prenatal Care in First Trimester 50th
High School Graduation Rate – 43rd
% of Population 25 and Older with High School Diploma – 50th
State Aid Per Pupil in Average Daily Attendance – 47th
Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) Scores – 45th
Per Capita State Spending on State Arts Agencies – 43rd
State budget shortfall: $27 billion
Income Inequality Between the Rich and the Poor – 9th
Income Inequality Between the Rich and the Middle Class – 5th
Income tax (16th) amendment is bad
Median Net Worth of Households – 47th
Average Credit Score – 49th
Mortgage Debt as Percent of Home Value – 47th
Homeowner’s Insurance Affordability – 46th
Foreclosure Rates – 10th
Retirement Plan Participation – 47th
Consumption of Energy per Capita – 5th
Amount of Carbon Dioxide Emissions – 1st
Amount of Volatile Organic Compounds Released into Air – 1st
Amount of Toxic Chemicals Released into Water – 1st
Amount of Recognized Cancer-Causing Carcinogens Released into Air – 1st
Amount of Hazardous Waste Generated – 1st
Amount of Toxic Chemicals Released into Air – 5th
Amount of Recognized Cancer-Causing Carcinogens Released into Water – 7th
Number of Hazardous Waste Sites on National Priority List – 7th
Women’s Voter Registration – 45th
Women’s Voter Turnout – 49th
In another one of his flights of fancy, Perry has said publicly that Senators should be elected by state houses, which would remain repealing the 17th amendment. We saw how well having state pols involved in selecting Senators in Illinois, where former Gov. Rob Blagoiavich is on his way to prison because he tried to sell Pres. Obama’s former Senate seat.

Oh, and Perry wants to opt out of Social Security and Medicare, even though these are insurance programs Texans have paid for
Finally, Perry – who some Texans refer to as “all hat and no cattle” – redirected millions from a low-income electricity program, hundreds of millions from education to campaign donors, $16 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to campaign donors and $14 billion in federal stimulus money diverted to cronies.

Good News On The Renewable Front

Here are the week’s top ten energy good news stories.

1. A Japanese technical innovation has the potential to double or triple the power generated by wind turbines.

2. Germany now gets 20% of its energy from low-carbon sources: 6.5% wind, 5.6% biomass, 3.5% solar, 3.3% hydro and 0.8% other.

3. Over 100 nations are researching wave energy which will likely provide 180 gigawatts of power by 2050. It takes the world’s 440 nuclear power reactors to produce 376 GWe at the moment, so this would be equivalent to building 220 new nuclear plants.

4. Global windo power installations rebounded in the first half of the year, growing 18% more than in the same period in 2010. By the end of 2011, wind will account for 3% of the world’s energy, but that percentage is rapidly growing.

5. The EU is cooperating with Egypt to make the country a solar and wind powerhouse. Egyptian activists said back in July that the Mubarak government had given renewables short shrift because of Saudi Arabian pressure.

6. Europe gets 5.5% of its energy from wind but it is much larger for individual European states. Denmark gets a quarter of its electricity from wind power, while substantial wind power producers include Portugal and Germany.

7. Japan has decided to throw a lot of money at renewable energy. The so-called feed-in tariff will spur growth so much that Japan’s solar energy production will like grow by a factor of 5 in the short term.

8. New and more efficient solar panels are coming on-line almost daily. The bad news is that Solyndria was done in by this development to some extent. The real meaning of the failure of Solyndria last week is that there are better and more efficient competitors, not that solar energy doesn’t pay or that the US has gone in for it too fast.

9. China’s wind energy market is booming with the Asian giant having added over 8 gigawatts in wind energy capacity in the first half of 2011. China constitutes 43% of the world market for wind turbines, and its demand is rising quickly.

10. The “Light Middle East” exhibit in Dubai underlines Middle Eastern building techniques that minimize the use of energy. For centuries, Muslim architects have been masters at using courtyards and fountains to cool buildings naturally.

The bad news, of course, is that the right in America and Canada continue to deny there is a problem and poo-poo the very idea that the world needs to greatly reduce its use of petrocarbon energy.

The end of the last long weekend of summer always seems to be so depressing. While the weather can stay warm in Toronto and New York as late as the last week of November or so - and the long-range forecast is for a warmer and drier fall than normal - that doesn't stop the days from shortening, the flowers and plants eventually withering, and the coats on my dog and my cat from getting thicker.

Within a few weeks, the firewood will be delivered and the city will leave a reminder in everyone's mailbox about the kind of bags to use when raking and cutting back plants.

And I still won't have a clue why a total stranger blocked me. (See the previous post.)

OK, so this is totally weird.

I noticed that a woman had read my profile yesterday so this morning I sent a short, polite, "thanks for looking at my profile and I thought a lot of what you wrote was quite funny" note. But when I hit send, the computer machine clicked and whirred for a while, finally telling me "User has blocked you, message not delivered."

Uhm, what's going on here?

Why would someone read a profile and then block the other person when they'd never written to you, never tried to open a chat window with you, never even knew you existed until it was noticed you had read their profile?

I guess it'll remain one of life's little mysteries.

Something just came to me and when I thought about it, I laughed out loud. Given all of the internet scams and con games that originate in Ghana and Nigeria, don't you feel sorry for someone who actually does live in either country and who wants to truly meet somebody out there in the ether?

Stay Safe ...

To my many friends on the East Coast, from Annapolis Maryland up through New York and Boston and into New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces, I hope you come through the storm safely and without damage to you, your loved ones and your homes.

A Footnote To My Profile ...

I'm amazed at this because I'd think that people seeking what is clearly an alternative relationship would be more thoughtful and open-minded. Yet in reading journal posts, profiles and in more than a few of the e-mails I've received, I am dumbstruck at the noticeable number of right wing conservatives lurking about here, as well as religious fundamentalists. Clearly, these women haven't read any of my journal entries so it leaves me wondering if they even read my profile.

I finally had to put a footnote on my profile warning these people off. As a progressive, I don't have a problem with anyone being a rational conservative - they used to be commonplace but that was a long time ago - and I enjoy discussing everything from politics to economics to science with them. I do have a problem though with people who can't decide whether Michelle Bachmann or Gov. Rick Perry would make a better candidate because, in a race for the stupidest award, these people clearly have no interest in education, science, problems real people in the real world are struggling with, and the nuances of foreign policy.

Sheesh!

Bravo To Maxine Waters And The Black Caucus

California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters spoke recently in Inglewood, CA, during a tour with the Black Congressional Caucus, and really got fired up when talking about the Tea Party, whose cultural push rightward is part of the reason the president has had to compromise so often. She told a cheering crowd, “The whole damn Tea Party can go straight to hell, they’re ruining the country!”

She's talking to you, "rookkeeper."

Cut The US Deficit By Making Corporations Actually Pay Tax

With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.

Sanders renewed his call for shared sacrifice after it was reported that General Electric and other major corporations paid no U.S. taxes after posting huge profits. Sanders said it is grossly unfair for congressional Republicans to propose major cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the reality that some of the most profitable corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.

Sanders compiled a list of some of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders:

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009.  Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.

6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

Sanders called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He also introduced legislation to impose a 5.4% surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion a year. The senator has said that spending cuts must be paired with new revenue so the federal budget is not balanced solely on the backs of working families.

"We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed," Sanders said, "but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We've got to talk about shared sacrifice."

Sometimes, it seems that commercials are funnier and better produced than many of the television shows in which they appear. Here's a great example making the rounds on YouTube, especially its tag line: Hail to the V. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW_ZCd64tg

 Watch and laugh!

Try, Try Again ...

Demanding but understanding Owner, strict but caring Dom, firm but loving Daddy. Wonderful mentor, loyal friend, faithful lover, great confidante. Intense disciplinarian, sensual tormenter, creative playmate, erotic lover. Highly experienced in all aspects of the life and lifestyle. I am at least all of these things because I don’t think anyone fits in just one box ticked on a list, despite what some Dom’s and Domme’s claim.

I know because I’ve been actively dominant for more than 15 years, had a number of long-term relationships with submissives and thoroughly enjoyed owning two different slaves at different times.

Now, I am here trying to find a relationship again with a truly submissive woman who knows that a genuine D/s bond is built on caring, trust, knowledge, understanding and – most of all – love, passion and friendship.

Something For The Religous Right ...

I just read this somewhere and it made me laugh out loud: "The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. It doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals; it's just that they need more supervision"

Fox Viewers Overwhelmingly Think We Should Prepare for Alien Invasion Before Fighting Climate Change

A new, supposedly NASA-funded study postulating that aliens may attack humans over climate change had all the ingredients for a perfect Fox faux controversy: It bolstered their anti-science narrative, painted their opponents as clownish radicals, and highlighted wasteful government spending on a supposedly liberal cause. Fox reported the “news from NASA” several times, presenting it as official “taxpayer funded research.” A chyron on a Fox News show read: “NASA: Global warming may provoke an alien attack.”

But as Business Insider pointed out, they’re wrong: “That report was not funded by the government. It was written by an independent group of scientists and bloggers. One of those people happens to work at NASA.” NASA distanced itself from the report as well, calling reports linking the government to it “not true.” A Fox news host finally corrected the record, saying, “I was making that up.”

But before she did, she was so bemused by the study that she directed her viewers to complete a poll on her website which asked how we should respond to the study: “Immediately increase efforts to curb greenhouse gases,” “Develop weapons to kill the Aliens FIRST,” or “Gently suggest scientists research how to create job.”

Not surprisingly, most suggested they research something else. But more than six times as many respondents (19% to 3%) said we should focus on building weapons to kill aliens before curbing greenhouse gases.

The poll is of course not scientific, but you can hardly blame the viewers who did respond, considering Fox’s constant misinformation. For instance, as she presented the poll, the host said of curbing climate change, “just in case, right?” — as in, “just in case” the science is right. She did not make a similar qualifier for alien invasion.

Numerous studies consistently show that Fox viewers are among the most misinformed of news viewers, while at least one study has shown that — perversely — watching Fox actually makes people less informed than they were to begin with.

Send In The Clowns … Oh, Wait, They’re Here

And so begins again the Herculean task of wrapping my poor, abused mind around yet another crop of Faustian caricatures lined up to scrap and scrape for the Republican presidential nomination. They seem to get worse every year, but this time around, there are definitely a lot more bananas in the bunch.

Let's see. We have Newt Gingrich, who pointedly continues to declare that he remains a viable candidate, despite having blown four tires and an engine immediately after leaving the starting line. We have Rick Santorum, whose name, when Googled

, is given a whole new definition that appears at the top of the search engine list (presumably despite the best efforts of Mr. Santorum's campaign and supporters). There is Ron Paul, whose much-ballyhooed libertarianism fails to encompass his desire to give the Federal government whole and complete control of a woman's reproductive process. There is Jon Huntsman, who seems like a fairly balanced guy (he has openly declared his belief in evolution and global warming), which means he is utterly doomed in the GOP primary chase. There's Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, and Buddy Roemer, too ... and if you said "Who?" to any or all of those names, you're far from alone.

According to the "mainstream" news media, however, there are only three Republican presidential candidates worth paying attention to. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has already been running for something like thirty weeks, not that you'd know it from his deliberately stealthy campaign. Romney, of course, ran for the nomination in 2008, but was undone by Mike Huckabee, who stayed in long enough to keep Romney from collecting enough GOP base votes to survive. John McCain essentially won the nomination by default in the aftermath of Romney's collapse, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Rep. Michele Bachmann has been in the race since late June, having declared her candidacy early this summer (with no small amount of historical irony) in Waterloo, Iowa. Bachmann is a Tea Party darling who has, at various times, blamed Presidents Carter and Obama for the outbreak of swine flu, claimed that carbon dioxide is not harmful to your health, stated that the elimination of the minimum wage would be a cure-all for unemployment, and sincerely believes that gay people are looking to take over the country so as to crash the planet into the sun.

The most recent entrant into the 2012 Republican field is Texas governor Rick Perry, who jumped into the fray howling like a werewolf in the rut. He began by accusing Fed chairman Ben Bernanke of treason, followed up by questioning President Obama's love of country, and concluded his trifecta of crazy with the claim that environmental scientists who warn of global warming are only in it for the money. I’ve known a lot of scientists over the years and the only ones who had two cents to rub together had won a Nobel Price. Perry was first brought to national attention when he made it known that the state of Texas might secede from the union after Obama's election, and once tried to end a drought with a state-wide prayer drive.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your 2012 Republican presidential field.

Feel better?

I don't.

Granted, the freak-show reality of the GOP's Big Three – Romney, Bachmann and Perry, oh my! – is sure to deliver a great deal in the way of entertainment value. When Perry ripped off his "treason" remark about Bernanke, about thirteen dozen former Bush officials came down on him like a ton of bricks

, exposing for a national audience what is already widely known in Texas: Bush and Perry do not like each other. This dynamic promises to expose any number of rifts within the Republican Party, as Mr. Bush remains at the right hand of God in the minds of many GOP base voters. Perry has been learning foreign policy at the knee

of such catastrophically failed luminaries as Douglas Fieth and William Luti, presumably the last two people in America who still think invading Iraq was a good idea.

Romney, for his part, is believed by many Republican voters to have no principles worth mentioning. Exhibit A will be the fact that he is running as fast as he can from his own health care reform plan for Massachusetts, adopted to no small degree by Mr. Obama for his own health care reform legislation. Add to that the fact of Romney's Mormon faith, which many GOP evangelical base voters consider to be a cult, and what he has before him is a very long row to hoe.

Michele Bachmann is ... well ... simply insane on any number of levels, and so she will certainly give us all fits before the curtain comes down on this sorry show. She barely has a voting record to speak of and is only in the race because Tea Party voters like her style. If she stays in long enough, she could wind up playing the evangelical spoiler role (a la Huckabee in '08), thus upending the whole show and delivering the GOP nomination to one of the also-rans who linger at the back of the pack.

The comedic aspect of this fool's gallery is far beside the point. Not one of these individuals should ever be allowed anywhere near the kind of power one is given upon assuming the office of President of the United States. And yet the "mainstream" news media has been propping these three up as legitimate, thoroughly normal candidates for the highest office in the land. It is a testament to how utterly deranged our political culture has become that any of these people would even be considered appropriate for dog-catcher, and yet we will spend the next fifteen months being spoon-fed the idea that these three are perfectly appropriate potential nominees, and not a pack of deranged fanatics who couldn't govern their way out of a wet paper sack.

Who knows, though?

Some heretofore unannounced challenger could parachute into the race and change the whole dynamic. People have been muttering the name Jeb Bush as a potential candidate, which would be interesting; I think it might be easier to run for president with a dead koala bear tied around my neck than it would be to run with the name "Bush." Sarah Palin could make a late entry, thus answering all of my most earnestly delivered prayers.

These people frighten me for a variety of reasons, but what frightens me most of all is the fact that, almost certainly, one of them will be the Republican nominee for President and the "mainstream" media will tell us how perfectly normal that is.

Pssst ... it isn't. These people are uniformly terrible, no matter what the TV says. Pass it on. As Mark Twain once said, “All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.”

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Is A Lunkhead

Toronto’s accidental mayor, Rob Ford, was elected earlier this year because two reasonable candidates split the independent and liberal vote, allowing a man to slide into office who hates cities and the people who live in them. Now in charge of Canada’s largest city, Ford is a reactionary conservative suburbanite who doesn’t believe in any government. Yet he and his brother, who is Ford’s chief aide, is now running the largest municipal government in the country.

So far, Ford’s a disaster, a complete lunkhead who says Toronto is in a debt crisis but has found hundreds of thousands of dollars to abolish most of the city’s bike lanes, one or two million to hire private security guards to chase after refugees whose asylum claims were turned down by the federal government, and even more millions to discard a carefully thought out, long-range mass transit plan for the Greater Toronto Area to build an unneeded, multi-billion dollar subway line.

He wants to privatise a raft of city services, from water treatment and street cleaning to garbage collection despite a mountain of evidence from across Canada and the States proving that when similar moves have been undertaken by conservative politicians, costs rose dramatically while service declined horrendously.

The fact is, Ford’s privatisation plans are nothing more than a way to bust city unions, another thing he hates despite the economic reality that unions created and maintained the city’s vibrant middle class. That many city workers happen to be members of Toronto’s countless, visible minority groups – Ford’s electoral campaign was a vaguely concealed racist screed – only adds fuel to the fire he’s ignited in the city.

Ford is so incompetent that even The Toronto Sun, an arch conservative tabloid that was a strong backer during the campaign, turned against him only months after he took office.

I hope Ford will enjoy being mayor over the next three-plus years because he’s an aberration, a complete abortion, who will not get re-elected. Hopefully, city council will stymie his most destructive politics before he totally ruins North America’s most liveable large city.

While I've met a few interesting submissive women over the past however many months I've had a profile here, I am fed up with the overflowing bushels full of fakes, pretenders, fantasy indulgers hiding behind the anonymous safety of the site, cam girls posing as "submissives," and men posing as women - guys, you really are easy to spot and avoid so give it up already.

And then there are the supposedly submissive women who make a date to meet for coffee, drinks or dinner but never show up, nor do they phone to cancel or send a simple "I changed my mind" e-mail.

Vas gibts?

OK, so every "dating" website is going to attract a marginal number of loonies; that's a given. But when did simple manners and common courtesy exit the stage?

I'm just about ready to throw in the towel and give up trying to meet, click and connect with anyone. If I were a nasty person - well, nasty in the conventional definition, not the D/s context - I'd start posting their IDs here so others could avoid the irritation. But I've got better things to do with my time.

With the swelters upon us, this old fella has the right idea about keeping cool.

www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/52648/hot-dog-attacks-sprinkler.asp

I should clarify something in my profile: I am not looking for cyber or cam anything; I'm not being judgemental but it is not my thing and I am here hoping to find a genuine, sincere submissive. Also, since I've received a few emails from African "princesses," I ought to let you know that I am not planning to send you my bank account number so you can wire transfer money to me out of whatever horrible country it is you claim to live in.

Sometimes, I truly wonder how women put up with men.

Yes, I am one so you'd think that I'd know the answer, but I don't. And based on notes I've received here from men - even though my profile notes that I am straight and am looking for a submissive woman slave candidate - far too many men are total idiots. Which probably explains why so many women with profiles are so leary of men who write to them.

I've received e-mails from dominant men asking to join in a three-some with a submissive woman; guys, if I had a submissive woman in my life, would I have a profile here?

I've received one-liners from sub males asking if I'd Dom them; what about the word "straight" don't you understand? Sure, I've been at parties and occasionally helped flog a male sub for a little while but I am not interested in finding a man. Still, they write.

I've received pleas from men asking how they can find a Dominant Woman and wondering whether I could introduce them to one; I don't reply but wonder why these yahoo's are cruising dom male profiles instead of domme's.

One fellow wrote asking me to send him photos of any women I've had on any of the gear in my playroom; yeah, right, that's what I'm going to do.

Sheesh!

A wonderful joke about Tea Bagging Republicans in the US ...

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost as she floated over a river. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below.

She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.”

She rolled her eyes and called down, "You must be a Democrat."

"I am," stated the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled, saying "You must be a Tea Bagging Republican."

"I am!" replied the balloonist, brightly. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep and you expect me to solve your problem.

“You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met but, somehow, now it's my fault.”

A submissive woman with a profile here, gaggedanal, has done us all a huge favour by creating a list of scammers and rip-off artists here. I won't duplicate her list but it is worth making a note of to avoid problems.

I don't read men's profiles so I'm not sure what goes on over on the male sub and dom side, but there are ways to spot scammers or women who are actually men. Here are a few things I've learned while here.

1. Women who put their e-dress in the profile itself. They always have some silly reason why they can't access e-mail here and want people to write to them directly. All they want is your e-mail address so they can sell it to porn sites.

2. Women who want to chat off-line as soon as you send one e-mail. They are all cam girls who want you to go to an "amateur" site and provide your credit card number even though they say that first visit is "free." No it isn't because they are fronting for identity theft and credit card scam entities.

3. Anyone whose profile says "no limits." Bullpuckey. Does "no limits" mean they wouldn't mind being strangled? Or have a scene with barnyard animals? These are all men posing as women.

4. Women whose photos look like porn stars. These profiles are usually from men who downloaded the shots from the web or, in a few instances and once in a while, a women who is a total fake.

Hope this helps.

I've been asked several times about the reference to my dungeon torture garden playroom in my home. Yes, I do have one and, yes, it's nicely furnished with some fun pieces to use during play, training or discipline sessions. Most of what I've acquired comes from Extreme Restraints and, so far, the room has:

• Forced Orgasm Tower (at www.extremerestraints.com/dungeon-furniture_18/the-forced-orgasm-tower_2937.html
  
  )
• Back Stockage (www.extremerestraints.com/dungeon-furniture_18/the-back-stockade_2466.html
  
  )
• Punishment Bench (www.extremerestraints.com/dungeon-furniture_18/the-extreme-punishment-bench-dungeon-furniture_2340.html
  
  )
• And I've just ordered the Impaler Tower (www.extremerestraints.com/dungeon-furniture_18/the-steel-impaler-tower_2484.html
  
  )

Of course, the playroom also includes a nasty collection of various wrist and ankle restraints, hoods, blindfolds, crops, cats, quirts, canes and birch switches.

If you don’t live in the US or follow US politics, this might not make a lot of sense to you. But as an American who lives in Toronto, I was dumbfounded to read that Sarah Palin is coming out with a new film. Just what we’ve all been waiting for, right? The current title of Palin’s bio-flick is Undefeated, which makes no sense because it ain’t true – but then Sister Sarah never makes any sense, either.

With some friends, I came up with several much more appropriate titles for the picture, which will be released across the US in a few weeks. It’s expected to be seen by several hundred people.

For Whom The Tweets Toll
The Abominator
Frisky Business
Breakfast At Tiffany's With Newt
Hal
State Trooper - The Sequel
You Betcha Life (TV Adaptation)
Wasilla Nights
Sarah's Andromeda Strain
The Palin Identity (in the works, a sequel: The Palin Inferiority)
The Pipeline Redemption
Fast Times At Birther High
A Fistful Of Dollars From My PAC
For A Few Dollars More From The Kochs'

The Birther Of A Nation

Triumph Of The Shrill

Bridge Over The River? Why?

The Lyin' In Winter

Love And Dearth

They Shoot Moose, Don't They?

Out OF Alaska

Naturally, the soundtrack will be done by Bachmann Palin Overkill.

(Sorry about the weird line spacing; I can't seem to correct it when I go back into 'edit.')