An open letter to Grist on the propriety and greenness of urination

Dear Grist:

It may not be "cool," but what do you think about urinating in the great outdoors? Say it's 12:30 AM and nature calls. Rather than go to the bathroom, you slip outside in your backyard and relieve yourself there? Discretely, of course, and perhaps shifting the target area nightly to prevent nitrogen burn?

Certainly you've saved at the least 1 gallon of water. Or is there some kind of enviro blowback from depositing urine with its various chemicals, untreated, onto the earth, where it will inevitably end up, in my case, in Puget Sound? Over the course of a year, you may well save, say, 500 gallons of water. Or is that 500 gallons nothing compared to the impact on the earth of performing this act?

Anxiously awaiting your word, I am

Holding It In Ballard,

Jack Brummet
Seattle, Wash.

President Bush succumbs to blackmail and commutes Scooter Libby's prison term

President Bush today commuted Scooter Libby's multi-year sentence to time served (that is, zero days). While I suspect Bush will wait to actually pardon Libby until his last day in office, January 20, 2009, this is just about as good. Bush seems to have waited until the last minute. The court had just ruled that Libby must begin his sentence while his appeal winds it way through the court system. This meant Libby would go to prison in the next couple of weeks.

It seems like The President let Libby sweat it out until the very last moment, possibly in hopes he would actually be clipped, or to let him stew on it so long that when it actually came, he had Libby in his pocket forevermore.

click White House website capture to enlarge...

From the administration-friendly Drudge Report:

Bush Spares Libby From Prison...Grant of Executive Clemency...Statement by
President...

Special prosecutor challenges Bush assertion...

Obama: 'This is exactly the kind of politics we must change'

Fred Thompson: 'I am very happy for Scooter Libby'

Pelosi: 'The president shows his word is not to be
believed'

Statement From Libby's Attorney...

Hillary: 'In this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice'

Why did the President exercise executive clemency to protect Libby? Obviously one reason is to protect the shadow president, VP Dick Cheney. As you know, All This Is That has speculated over the last year or so on other possible reasons, including various blackmail schemes involving variously, the Attorney General Roberto Gonzales, the Vice-President, and Donald Runmsfeld, among others. Recent All This Is That articles on the events and personalities surrounding the Scoter Libby fiasco and sentence commutation:

The Scooter Libby Pardon

President Bush Paints Himself Into A Corner Over Not Firing Gonzales And Insisting His Aides Can Only Testify Without Taking An Oath

White House sources reveal Cheney under suicide watch

Revelation: President Now Suffers Enuresis--More Trouble Every Day

Fitzgerald Vs. The White House In Executive Privilege War

Rove & Scooter Libby Will Resign When Indicted

Veep Dick Cheney threatens to resign (again)

VP Dick Cheney owns extensive snuff film collection, rumored to use them as a fluffer

Family Is Split

President angrily refuses to accept Veep Cheney's resignation

Flashback: President Bush vows to "take care of" CIA leaker (with SFW POTUS photo)

Rumsfeld, reacting to resignation pressure threatens to expose drug use, sex, and corruption in White House

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Ann Coulter and a love-letter from Henry Rollins

Since I was on vacation, I didn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about Ann Coulter or her latest hate-gaffe. Thankfully, Henry Rollins did, and composed one of the periodic letters he writes, and created a video. It probably captures what a lot of us think about Ann.





Other recent posts on Anne Coulter on All This Is That:

Caption of the week: "Coulter's Ugly Crack"


Ann Coulter calls Presidential Candidate Edwards A "Faggot" & Howard Dean Fights Back


Ann Coulter: Justice John Paul Stevens Should Be Poisoned


Ann Coulter Says POTUS Picked The Wrong Guy


$25,000 Worth of Ann Coulter
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Word about Dean Ericksen Spreads Around The Internet

click images to enlarge....

Since publishing our expose of Dean Ericksen's activities, we have been innundated with horror stories, photos and other examples of his degenerate lifestyle as well as the development of his nefarious cult. Dean Ericksen Must Be Stopped seems to be leading the charge.


Click to enlarge - Ericksen enjoying drinks with an old friend
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Paris Hilton's Prison Self-portrait

Click Paris's drawing to enlarge

Paris Hilton drew this self-portait while she was in the hoosegow in Lynwood. These days, however, she's enjoying her freedom, while pledging to work for prison reform (because, she said, so many prisoners told her they were innocent).
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Poem: Bible Stories 3/Babylon and the unfinished tower

Babylon and the unfinished Tower of Babel

1
The ark stopped bobbing and settled in the mud
Earth began her long drying
Noah popped the hatch

And the animals charged out of the ark
Behind Noah's wife sons and daughters-in-law
Earth began to fill once more

The begetting began again and the earth blossomed
With Noah's grandchildren and the birds and beasts
(The Bible doesn’t mention what became of the fish)


2
The corner of the world
Near the Tigris and Euphrates filled with people
But none crossed the eastern mountains

Or the desert to the west
The great world beyond was without people
After the flood families sought new homes

A group of people who wanted to serve God
Decided to build a city to rule all people
From bricks with walls of stone

3
The people said let us build a tower
Reaching to the sky so we stand as one
And not scatter across the earth

So they built a great tower from bricks
One story rising above another
But God did not want people all living together

If they stayed together
The wicked would lead the good
Into evil and away from their God

4
God began to change their language
So families and tribes by degrees all spoke
In different tongues now

Families and tribes stayed together
The men building the great tower
No longer knew each other's speech

And abandoned the tower for the faraway lands
Nineveh Assyria Egypt Sidon and Tyre
And the earth had many people in many lands
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Further reader submissions of Dean Ericksen Stories And Photos

The Gathering Storm Around Dean Ericksen

click to enlarge


It looks like a storm has erupted over Dean Ericksen's entry into the world of blogging. Unfortunately for Dean, the moment he hit the net a firestorm over his character erupted.

Just today, someone sent us a new web site that is trolling for tales of Ericksen's misdeeds. And a picture of him with a well-known despot. And those are just the things we feel comnfortable publishing.

Ericksen's days as an internet impressario appear to be drawing to a rapid denoument. You may recall this story first appeared here, followed in rapid succession by dozens of other blogs and news outlets.

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Time Magazine Goes Metric? - The U.S. Is 40 Years Behind Going Metric - Correlatives With The JFK Fitness Program & The Move Toward Total Hydration

I remember in 4th and 5th grade (circa 1963-64) diligently studying the metric system in preparation for the big changeover. There would be no more pints or inches. We all received a small bundle of wooden blocks corresponding to various metric measures. Yes, the U.S. was slated to go totally metric 40 years ago. However, we seem unable to shuck the US customary units system (our version of the Imperial system). But you may also remember JFK's physical fitness initiative. The entire country would be buffed up by about 1970. Of all those initiatives, the only one that appeared to have caught fire was the move toward hydration. We were told to drink eight glasses of water a day without fail. OK, we may be fat and unable to determine what a metre of millilitre is, but we are well-hydrated. We won that one!

Much is made of the imperial system's basis of the size of a foot, or the distance between your knuckles. And yet the metric system is based on the speed of an electron, I think. That makes more sense than the distance between some emperor's knuckles?

If the metric system is so wonderful, why then have we not converted to metric for our measure of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds? Why was it so important to convert linear measures, but not the temporal ones?

As far as I can tell, some foods and fluids are sold my metric measure, but not much else. Except:::::::::::::::::::::::::Hootch! Whiz! Wine! Whiskey! Beer is sold by the fluid ounce, but whiskey and wine: totally metric. The formerly beloved fifth of whiskey is now the slightly smaller 3/4 of a litre bottle. Those little bottles of wine you buy on the airplane: 187.5 millilitres (or, 1/4 of a 750 millilitre bottle [the "new fifth"]. So, we may have really sucked on our adoption of metric measures, but the drunks have it down pat, at least on the fluid measures.

'Time' Switches To The Metric System - Time managing editor Rick Stengel is attempting to force the U.S. towards the metric system? A new memo yesterday told writers and editors that from now on, all measurements will be expressed in "both imperial and metric equivalents." Clearly, this is a losing battle Stengel is waging.

Here is Stengel's memo on taking Time metric:

Time is going global. And metric. Starting with the next issue, we will provide both imperial and metric equivalents for distance, weight, volume and temperature. (We've been doing this for some time in our graphics. Now we'll extend this to the general text as well.) This will help ensure that one text works for all of our international editions.

In most cases, we'll use the imperial measure first and then show the metric equivalent in parentheses: five ft. (1.5 m); 170 lbs. (77 kg); 5 gallons (19 liters); 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees Celsius).

Meet the Thompson Twins: Fred Thompson's wife, Jeri Kehn (with photos)

Unless she's crazier than a s***house rat, Fred Thompson's wife Jeri Kehn probably won't hurt his chances of being elected. Since jumping in the race, Thompson has had a fairly meteoric bump in the polls (even pulling ahead of McCain). Whether or not that is due to what some bloggers call The Thompson Twins is unknown.

People have written all sorts of nasty things about her, without any idea of the cut of her jib. Or any knowledge of her at all except having seen her photos. She, in fact, has been a Republican consultant and lobbyist, and sounds pretty interesting. It is clear, however, that having her standing next to the former Senator makes him look every day of his 64 years, and more. Pundits seem to think Jeri Kehn will not sell very well in the red/flyover states. I'm not sure Joe and Josephine Lunchbucket will hold her looks against her anymore than they did with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy [Onassis].

Jeri Kehn
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Photograph: Chicken Love Tragedy - A Cautionary Tale of Beastiality in Iberia

This photo and the mangled grammar in the caption first appeared on the internet in the early 90's, back when we were all using the Spry browser to cruise between the few hundred websites that existed then...
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Americans actually do seem to care, and the frogs appear to be sitting on their wallets

According to the Associated Press, Americans gave nearly $300 billion to charitable causes last year, even beating the 2005 total was swollen by the of aid to victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the devastating Asian tsunami.

U.S. Citizens contributed an estimated $295.02 billion in 2006, a 1% increase when adjusted for inflation, up from $283.05 billion in 2005.

"What people find especially interesting about this, and it's true year after year, that such a high percentage comes from individual donors," Giving USA Chairman Richard Jolly said. Individuals gave a combined 75.6% of the total.

The biggest piece of the donations, $96.82 billion or 32.8%, went to religious organizations. The second largest donations, $40.98 billion or 13.9%, went to education, including gifts to colleges, universities and libraries.

The report showed that about 65% of households earning under $100,000 give to charity, "It tells you something about American culture that is unlike any other country," said Claire Gaudiani, a professor at NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and author of The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism. .

Gaudiani said Americans give more than double the next most charitable nation--Great Britain, who gave roughly 0.73%. Not surprisingly, the frogs a/k/a France, kicked in at a 0.14% rate, far far behind countries like South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany.

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