Words fail me, but Baldilocks is one of the people I admire most in the world, and we will, together—conservative, liberal, libertarian—find a way to help the school in Kenya that Obama forgot.

And the L.A. Weekly has the story. Yeah: you heard that right: the L.A. Weekly. I was not prepared to have the world come to an end today.

Juliette has never forgotten her roots. She is one of the brightest people I know, and one of the loveliest. Plus, she giggles in the nicest way when (despite having dated/lived with/married a "former" Marine) I mess up on military nomenclature.

And as far as money goes, it means wearing my hair long, shapeless, and in a ponytail for yet another year, I'll find a way to help Juliette reach her goal and help this Kenyan school out (no matter whom it is named after).

Stay posted. I'll get more info from Baldi, and we'll figure out how to kick this thing into high gear. Meantime, if you want to hit my PayPal jar for Juliette's charity, please send me a note so I'll know it goes to Kenyan education, rather than, um . . . gin.

I know Baldilocks: this project is not about shaming Barack Obama, but about taking care of something important that fell off his radar when he started running for President of this country. Taking care of Kenyans.

Are you an American worried about public schools here? Fine: hold a bake sale. But please send a portion of the money you make to Kenyan education, whether you are white, Indian, black, Asian, Native American, or merely (like me) ethnically confused.

Details later, boys and girls. Minimum donation is $20 for Juliette's charity. Send it directly to her, or to me (annotated, please! tagline: Kenya. I'll know.). If you want to send a check, mail it to her or to me (our addresses are findable, if you're clever--or just write me and I'll give you my mail-drop).

Via a Tweet from Flap's Blog.

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We're also stingy.

Though I would like to see our private charitable donations corrected for the parts of the country that have lower taxes--particularly if we're going to compare ourselves with the Western Europeans, who tend to have less disposable income because it all went to their governments.

The business of Obama and his half-brother, however, makes me sick. You'd think Big O would at least send him a stipend . . . or would that make him a target? It seems even a tiny amount of money could make a big difference in this man's life.

Of course, I'm sensitive about this: I still feel sorry for Julian Lennon, and I should have gotten over that years ago.

Not that I'm really comparing the elder Lennon son to Obama's half-brother. Or to David Cassidy's upbringing vis a vis Shawn's.

It's all relative, but the unfairness of life grates on me.

Anyway, in this particular context Obama's a pig. End of story.

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David Foster:

[There are] plenty of other ways [aside from blocking oil/natural gas drilling, that the far-left can do to sabotage the economy and revamping/maintenance of our energy infrastructure]. They can protest the bulding of power plants and transmission lines. They can lobby for the destruction of existing hydroelectric dams. They can protest the building of new (energy-saving) rail lines and railyards. They can impose crippling taxes on all traditional sources of energy, and ensure that new sources are so politicized that they will generate only corruption, not megawatts.

It's increasingly probable that we are going to have a major electricity crisis, and there is nothing that the environmentalists and lawyers will allow us to do to prevent it.

I fear he's right. We have to fight just as hard for electricity as we are for liquid fuels (both petroleum-based and the newer types). Tell 'em it's for those electric cars we'll all be driving in ten years or so.

We should all, BTW, review that segment from Soylant Green wherein everyone has to ride a stationary bike in his/her apartment just to keep the lights on for a little while. That's where we're headed.

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How could I have considered leaving her for Suzi Quatro? I must have been drunk last night.

The thing about Shivaree is, you listen to the song—it's melodious and sweet with just a bit of a sinister undertone.

Then you watch the video, and you see that the composition was, from the beginning, a lot darker than you realized.

Ms. Waldorf Salad sort of scares me. But . . . in the good way. I mean, this is sick and disgusting . . . and yet. And yet.

As Martin G. once said about the Wicked Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe . . . "I'll take two."

Thanks to Professor Purkinje for creating, as he once put it when the hiking boot was on the other foot: "a major rupture in my musical tastes."

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And I was thinking of voting for John McCain?

No, no: Buerge-Goldstein 2008. Like their campaign stickers say: "Hard Men for Hard Times."

Plus, when one guy's superb in a standard barroom brawl, and the other's made a serious study of the "mixed martial arts" (AKA UFC-style fighting), there's no one whose ass they can't kick. And if there were, they'd just shoot 'im.

Anyways, here's Buerge, on how shamefaced Russia is over that regrettable little Georgia incident:

DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGH IN GEORGIA:

RED-FACED RUSSIAN PARTY CRASHERS RETREAT

Tbilisi, Georgia—Bowing to a withering barrage of pointed criticisms and strongly-worded letters of reprimand from the international diplomatic community, an embarrassed Russian military today abandoned its attack on the former Soviet republic of Georgia late this afternoon and retreated sheepishly over the Caucasus.

"Look, I don't really know what to say—other than, 'hey, our bad,'" said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an awkward, shoe-gazing statement to the United Nations. "Seriously, dude, it just totally wasn't like us to lash out like that. We've been having a couple of bad decades, and I guess we just sort of snapped."

According to Moscow newspaper Pravda, Lavrov and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin left several messages on the voice mail machine of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili offering apologies and help cleaning up the damage from the weekend invasion. Sources say an angry Saakashvili was in no mood for forgiveness.

"Haven't you done enough damage already?" asked a testy Saakashvili, according to a U.S. State Department official. "Just get out. Come on dude, leave."

Russia's embarrassing geopolitical faux pas began over the weekend, just as the world was celebrating the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Friday, several armored divisions of the Russian Army and Air Force found their way into Georgia through an unguarded back door.

"Russia said South Ossetia invited them, to try out some of their pipeline stash," explained a source with the French Foreign Ministry. "I know Russia used to have something going on with Georgia, but nobody thought it was going to turn into a big ugly scene."

Russia's invasion prompted a quick stern response from GOP presidential candidate John McCain, while Democratic candidate Barack Obama urged Russia and Georgia to "work together to iron out their differences," and "chills, y'all." After learning that Georgia was a U.S. ally, Obama clarified the remarks, demanding that Russia withdraw its troops north to Tennessee and West Virginia.

By early Saturday morning, however, Russia's loutish behavior had gotten out of control, and according to some included wearing lampshades and carpet bombing of civilian areas. In response, the U.S. State Department prepared a carefully worded rebuke, reading "Dude, totally not cool," and the UN Security Council issued a special envoy to the region expressing "grave concern" and warning that "come on dude, you're drunk."

The harsh international diplomatic verbal response brought an immediate halt to the Russian firebombing campaign, followed by what observers termed "an uncomfortable silence."

"Everyone was just sort of staring at Russia, who's in the middle of beating the hell out of Georgia, and Russia's like, 'what? Come on man, you have to admit it's funny,'" said a source with UNSCOM. "So Russia's going around, looking for high fives and is like, 'don't leave me hangin', bro,' but the G8 gives him the total gas face, so he's like, 'whatever, dude, this party sucked anyway.'"

Read the whole thing, because I came, like, this close to breaking the rules and quoting his whole post. So go now, or it will cause me deep, physical pain and I won't let you back on my site.

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It's like a "what's hot" site that (1) has some actual diversity of interests within it, and (2) includes those activities that we do when there isn't a keyboard in front of us. (Yes: for some of you that means "stuff you do in your sleep.")

Anyway, I haven't tried it out yet, but it's called "Mindthrow."

I'll do the actual review this weekend.

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. . . on the Perdido Platform in the Gulf Coast. It's fascinating stuff, originally put together by the people who are investing millions in trying to keep our economy functioning and the country secure until we can perfect the next generation of energy sources Big Bad Scary Oil and Natural Gas People.

I hope it makes Engineering Marvels soon on The History Channel; the whole thing is quite an accomplishment. Here's a teaser, from my spies:

The Shell-operated Perdido Regional Development Spar has arrived in the ultra deepwaters of the Gulf of Mexico and is currently being secured to the seafloor in about 8,000 feet of water. Once completed, the Perdido spar will be nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and weigh as much as 10,000 cars. Perdido will be the deepest oil development in the world, the deepest drilling and production platform in the world, and have the deepest subsea well in the world; positioning the spar into place required carefully-orchestrated maneuvers.

Perdido will be a fully functional oil-and-gas platform with a drilling rig and direct vertical access wells, full oil and gas processing, and remote subsea wells. The facility is designed to produce 100,000 barrels of oil per day, and 200 million standard cubic feet of gas. The production from these fields will be transported via new and existing pipelines to U.S. refineries.

The Perdido Spar will bring in production from three fields: Great White, Silvertip, and Tobago. These fields are located in ten Outer Continental Shelf blocks in Alaminos Canyon, approximately 200 miles south of Freeport, Texas. This development will provide the first Gulf of Mexico commercial production from a Paleogene reservoir.

All three fields have been granted production units from the Minerals Management Service, and the accumulations are completely in U.S. waters, some eight miles north of Mexico's international border. The first production from Perdido is expected around the turn of the decade.

That makes me feel a lot better— and even more resolute in resisting the Gang of Ten plan, which doesn't even allow drilling off of Texas (or any other states that might have oil nearby).

For more info on the Perdido project you can drop byhere, where they even have some helpful maps.

And you can follow the project as it unfolds right here.

More later; but it's nice to see that every dollar the oil companies have pumped (so to speak) into R&D on domestic production hasn't just gone to government pork.

Via one of my contacts at API.

I had no idea, BTW, we were only a few years away from bringing production online in this part of the Gulf. Keep in mind that this area has reserves of petroleum competitive with those in ANWR. It's critical that this project be brought to completion on-schedule—not just for this country, but for the developing world. And, of course, for emerging countries such as China and India, that are experiencing their own Industrial Revolutions: the cleaner we can extract/use coal and natural gas and petroleum, the better. The cleaner our cars and A/C run, the better. Because the planet cannot afford for them to depend upon second-rate, polluting technologies and inefficient, decades-old means of energy generation. (Believe me: I'm an allergic girl who remembers what the air was like in certain parts of L.A. County in the 1970s and 1980s. There were days when I felt sick; I just couldn't breathe.)

We have to do this, because we will do it in a more environmentally responsible fashion than nearly any other country out there. We need to do it, because we know how.

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Heartbreak.

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Pussy.

Cuatro, Baby.

Which reminds me: do you know Suzi?

As a friend once remarked about David Bowie, back in the 1980s, "he's a genius, and I don't know whether I want to be him, or make love to him." I sympathized with the dilemma; I really did.

And I'm not claiming that Suzi's a genius, but just look at her: the hair. The ability to scream and hold a note at the same time (I can't hold a note even when I'm not screaming; I can't hold a note if I put it on my jump drive and wear it around my neck on a thin silk ribbon).

The black leather jacket. The fact that she was doin' this back before Joan Jett was even a gleam in Kim Fowley's eye. And her body; it's just freakin' perfect.

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I doubt that people are eating more pizza during this "economic downturn," but I imagine that they could be, if they are working more overtime or whatnot. But there are only three reasons one might eat Domino's pizza as opposed to another brand:

1) it's the closest pizza place to where one works;
2) it's the only pizza place that delivers and can figure out how to get to your house out in the middle of nowhere in Flintridge;
3) it's the cheapest pizza made that is still edible.

I suspect that factor (3) is the operational one, here.

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The Wall Street Journal takes an almost, well, skeptical tone:

It took a few months, and more than a few polls, but Democrats have concluded that they've lost the debate against more oil-and-gas drilling. The surrender became official on Saturday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that even she was ready to "consider opening portions" of the Outer Continental Shelf to oil exploration.

That's great news, assuming she and her fellow Democrats really mean it.

. . . . . . . .

For example, the [Democratic Party] platform draft now says that "We know we can't drill our way to energy independence." Then there's the bit about ending "the tyranny of oil," which will require "far more than simply expanding our economic and political resources to keep oil flowing steadily" from overseas and elsewhere. There's also no mention of drilling offshore, much less in Alaska, and nothing about exploiting our vast domestic supplies of oil shale.

Fortunately, Democrats have time to fix these political oversights. If they are serious, surely Democrats will have someone rise on the convention floor next week and offer an amendment that endorses offshore drilling and pledges not to extend the Congressional ban on drilling that expires on September 30. Come to think of it, Democrats should offer this amendment in prime time. How better to steal the drilling issue from Republicans?

. . . . . . . . .

The fossil-fuel love-in could also extend to oil shale. Abundant on federal lands in the Mountain West, these deposits could yield more than seven times more fuel than Saudi Arabia has crude oil reserves. While extraction technology is still a work in progress, the immediate hitch is that a pilot leasing program was deliberately killed last year in legislation offered by Colorado's Democratic Senator, Ken Salazar. His partner in imposing that exploration ban was none other than House Democrat Mark Udall, who is now running for Colorado's open Senate seat.

Mr. Udall recently had his own pro-drilling epiphany, after weeks of getting pounded on the issue by his Republican opponent, Bob Schaffer. Mr. Udall's lead in the polls has vanished. "We've got to produce our own oil and gas here in our country," he now says in a new TV spot. But a campaign ad isn't enough. Surely, Mr. Udall will now want to acknowledge his mistake of a year ago and fight to lift the oil-shale ban on the House floor next month. That is, unless his new pro-drilling rhetoric is merely campaign triangulation that he doesn't really believe.

We'll know Democrats are not serious if they limit their drilling support only to the so-called Gang of 10 proposal in the Senate. The bipartisan Gang would allow drilling only offshore of four states -- Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas -- and only if it is farther than 50 miles out. It would leave the most promising areas off limits, especially in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico.

And in return for this de minimis drilling, the Gang wants to spend $84 billion more in subsidies for ethanol and other "alternatives," while hitting the oil industry with a $30 billion tax increase. This proposal is a trick designed to give Democrats political cover while opening up very little new land or offshore area for drilling.

No doubt any or all of these three actions would enrage the green lobby, but politics is about choosing. In this case, the Democratic choice is between sticking with an anticarbon theology that opposes all new drilling, or siding with American consumers who want more energy supplies so they don't have to pay $4 for gas and blow their family budget to keep the lights on. [ . . .]

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So, if Obama doesn't put her on the ticket, what will you do?

1) Hold your nose and vote for Obama, but be on the lookout for any future blackballing of national-level female candidates—and maybe hope that the estrogen level will be at least as high among Obama's senior appointments as it has been among Bush 43's.

2) Vote for McCain; after all, he's a centrist's centrist, and he clearly has more experience than Obama. (Can he "think on his feet" better? Does he have a better sense of humor? You tell me.)

3) Write in "Hillary."

4) Stay at home.

5) Go to the polls so you can support all the other important people and issues important in your state and locality, but leave the spot for "President" blank—maybe even so the party knows you didn't just have the flu, and so that other issues and leaders do not suffer because of mistakes made by the national party and/or a few within Hillary's campaign.

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That would be shrewd.

I'm afraid, though, that he's going to nominate that unicorn he's been riding around on; they two of 'em have bonded, you know.

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Here's an argument for moving it higher on the priority list; I'm surprised I didn't think of this, but I was probably already seeing red from the Feds' infringement upon the rights of Californians, so I wasn't able to "zoom out" and look at the international picture.

The War on Drugs is even more destructive when one looks beyond the U.S. borders—and, within and without those borders, when one takes a peek at where that "black-market premium" is going:

The Taliban is able to sustain their operational pace in fighting against ISAF and the supported Kabul government because they have been able to tap into the cash flows generated by the opium/heroin production and distribution markets. Opium eradication efforts sponsored by either the Kabul government or foreign military forces pushes farmers to turn non-state actors for protection. Those non-state actors provide protection for a cash fee and temporary loyalty. The loyalty buys silence and logistical support while the cash provides weapons, corruption and a means of making credible promises.

We also know that prohibition has not been successful in eliminating drug use in the United States or other rich nations. It is a moral/political posture of luxury that may bite us in our ass as it fuels a visible insurgency in Afghanistan, potentially funds Hezbollah in Lebanon and could potentially lead to a massive failed state in Mexico with the attendant mass migration flows that would entail.

Bringing the drug market into the overt and open white market and away from the black market would be a significant blow to these insurgencies. Legalizing most narcotics and then taxing them at a high rate is a viable option. It will strengthen weak states where the United States has a strong interest for stability. This will occur by removing a significant funding stream for the guerrillas and transferring it to the state.

Fester, quoted above, was in turn riffing off of this piece from the Small Wars Journal. Read both articles, mkay?

Along with energy policy, drug legalization should be placed within the interconnected set of issues that affect national security, and shame on me for not noting that when I blogged about the "War on Drugs" earlier in the day.

Via Insty.

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. . . that offshore drilling is a done deal. One might hope that all is not lost, and that there are other ways to sabotage the economy and American/Western security.

Via a tweet from Hackbarth of The American Mind.

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1) It could only have happened once. Ever. If any captor ever expressed secret solidarity with a prisoner by drawing a cross, we need only track down the one time in human history that this ever occurred, and if it wasn't in front of John McCain during his time in the Hanoi Hilton, then he is lying about it having happened to him.

2) The story is from Ben Hur. So, given that it only happened once, and that the time that it happened was fictitious, McCain is lying. Lying!

3) The account from another prisoner who heard the story directly from McCain when they were both POWs is clearly addled. You know how POWs get: it's very stressful, and it plays tricks with their minds. Next thing you know, they're taking sleeping pills. I would never vote for a former POW for C-in-C: You just can't trust those guys.

4) The fact that it didn't happen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn only proves that the only time in human history that such a thing was done was in Ben Hur, and that means it only happened in the world of fiction, and that means McCain was lying! Or maybe he can't remember. He probably has PTSD, and he's really, really old. Totally unreliable. And lying! And high on Ambien. And old.

Also, he can't make gestures with his arms as well as Obama can. Probably a sign of having a bad temper. Or being old. Or taking too much Ambien.

Furthermore, he can't match Obama's record of bridging the party divide, reaching across the aisle to . . . wait. Didn't Obama do something bipartisan during his ten minutes in the U.S. Senate? I could have sworn . . .

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"Yes?" I asked.

"Last Wednesday morning, someone remarked on the fact that the photo had changed on my Wikipedia page. And I looked; sure enough, there was a new pic there. One that had been taken only several hours before."

"Right," I responded. "What's that to me?"

"Because you took the picture."

"How can you be so sure?" I enquired.

"Well, let's see. It was taken at the L.A. Convention Center, on that day that I had two days' growth of beard because I hadn't shaved, and I was behind on sleep. I was clearly taken from across the table, and I remembered you snapping the camera at that moment. Is that enough?"

"Absolutely not. What if there were someone behind me, with a telephoto lens, who managed to take a photo within a split second of when I got that image?"

"I guess I'd never know."

"I guess you never will know. Anyway, you hated that other picture. Remember? This has to be better, beard or no beard."

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(That would be the Oakland Hills, by the way. Not those ones in Hollywood. Nor the ones in Texas. Are we clear?)

Jan Steckel got a nice writeup yesterday in the Oakland Hills Examiner.

Jan is an extraordinary writer, and has been since at least high school; I've known her since junior high, when we were respectively just forming as wordsmiths, under the guidance of Carol Jago (and, fellow fact-checkers, Ms. Jago did teach at Lincoln Junior High before she transferred to Santa Monica High, so bite me; I studied under her at both places).

One of the interesting things about Jan Steckel is that despite her lyricism, she's not the least bit adverse to indulging the left side of her brain. Well, she did tell me once in the Samohi library (where she was actually researching something, and I was flitting about like an intellectual hummingbird, looking for everything I could lay my hands on by William Saroyan, who was IIRC that week's literary obsession) that she had "a love/hate relationship" with the world of mathematics.

"Oh," I replied. "Mine is just hate/hate." So much simpler.

But the fact that Steckel went on to earn an M.D.—and even practice, for a time, as a physician—shows a unusual level of comfort with the natural sciences. Above-average for a poet, I believe, though few statistics are available.

Anyway, she does amazing work that certainly deserves a wider audience.

Congratulations, Jan.

UPDATE: If Jan had written this, there wouldn't have been as many digressions. She also would have been able to slip something poignant in about the human experience. It would have made me cry. But I do not like to cry.

Steckel's Home Page
Steckel on Wikipedia
Woman-Stirred, a literary blog co-founded by Steckel—along with Merry Gangemi, Julie R. Enszer, and Nicki Hastie

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PJ Media, "Will Rank-And-File Democrats Vote for Obama?"

Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. Meanwhile, rank-and-file Democrats who are uncomfortable with a candidate who has precious little experience in anything and worrisome personal connections will have some real soul-searching to do on November 4.

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has solved my fruit juice problem, among others.

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