I made this my wallpaper

My daughter found this in the yard. It's dated July, but that's no guarantee that that's when the picture was taken.  She took the picture and that's her hand.

The kids and I just got back from watching "Megamind"

All the adjectives in the trailer here are dead on. Foremost, it's a hilarious movie. I'd go see it if I were you.

The Onion's got a pretty butt-kickin' article:

Mom, Jeremy Won't Let Me Create An Atmosphere Of Sustained Menace By Daniel Gellman.

Read it all the way to the bottom.

Somethin' else y'all should read:

Kenneth E. Hartman, "The Trouble With Prison":

Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues that are beyond profound, bordering on the pathological far too often. The vast majority has never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education or even an opportunity to look at themselves as human. Were any of these far less draconian interventions even tried, before the descent into this wretched cave, no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives. Nothing else works is not a statement of fact; it is the declaration of an ideology. This ideology holds that punishment, for the sake of the infliction of pain, is the logical response to all misbehavior. It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interest groups hide.

Prison employees benefit by our failure. This startling fact contains within it a monstrous truth. These well-organized government workers created the victims’ rights movement, a sad shill for the prison-industrial complex. Using the handful of politically active victims of crime to obscure their actual agenda, propositions are passed, laws are changed, and policies that could prevent victimization in the first place are suppressed. Both of these groups, working in tandem with the corporations that supply and construct prisons, pour millions of dollars into the political process to achieve a system guaranteed to fail. But this failure by any other measure – high rates of recidivism, high rates of internal disorder, growing prison populations serving longer sentences – results in greater profits to the corporations, increased membership in the unions, and ever growing piles of dollars to buy still more influence.

Raimondo

from AntiWar.com:

The TSA can conduct a full-body search, prison-style, on everyone who gets near an airport: we can lock down the country, and treat everyone like a potential criminal, conducting random searches on the streets like they’re already doing in New York City. We can turn the country into one big prison yard, and still the terrorists will get through, eventually.

They’ll get through because we’re creating new enemies every day, many thousands of them, as we extend our perpetual "war on terrorism" to new regions, and claim more blood sacrifices on the altar of our new god, Revenge. The conduct of our foreign policy for the past decade or so ensures that the supply of terrorists will be endless, as the relatives and loved ones of our victims come gunning for us. By hook or by crook they will get us – unless the cycle of revenge is stopped.

I guess, perhaps, I haven't come right out and said it, though I think it: The Probligo's analysis of American foreign policy is, and has been, correct.

Here's my dog

Our dog.

Here's something you may not know

I found this thanks to Arther Silber's article, "All You Know Are Lies":

The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.

Silber's quoting Paul Craig Roberts.

I feel what Silber says about it deeply:

In our world today, if you are minimally conscious and honest, profound anger and bitterness are major indicators of psychological health. Given the suffocating cocoon of lies in which we live, it requires an almost unfathomable amount of sheer willpower to try to pierce the noxious air of our culture.

I look forward to his next article.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

is available as a free download here. Get it and read it.

There is nothing more important that I could say right now.

Acrobat Reader will even read it to you if you prefer.

There's something important

here that I need to deal with later.

Nope. I was mistaken. I figured some Homer Price fan must have a more singable version of "42 pounds of edible fungus" than I do. I get the impression that they do, but they're not singing it on YouTube.

This gal's got the lyrics.