Enough was enough. Why was "Gays in the Military," June 1, 2014, the most read post in the last 30 days, the last 7 days, and today. So finally today I googled "Bryan Sikes Green Beret," the subject of that put-down.

Ah. He's at it again. Wrote an open letter to Michael Moore, called him a "turd." Moore made some movie and said he thought snipers were "cowards." Snipers are cowards...Snipers are cowards? Really? I can see why Moore would think something about that. Snipers are sort of sneaky, right? Like they hide, out of the most dangerous danger and take shots at an unsuspecting enemy. They don't, like, "Forward, March!" into enemy lines. So, I see how you could get within a country mile of calling snipers cowards but no closer, snipers are not cowards.

Sikes is a sniper. Sniper does not equate with coward so I can understand Sikes being offended and insulted at Moore calling snipers cowards and going off on Moore. Sikes was a sniper who was a coward when he shot at Gwyneth Paltrow for her offense of equating the pain she felt at twitter hate directed at her as "war." This-is-war, that-is-war, everything is war, the war trope is so common, Paltrow did not personalize it toward Sikes or his class of snipers as Moore did, nor toward soldiers. Sikes personalized it, he directed his hate toward Gwyneth Paltrow personally--and then didn't when David Ortiz used the war metaphor just a few weeks later! That's a sniper who is a coward. Sikes was a sniper who was a coward toward Paltrow. 

The Israel Lobby.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, an opponent of President Obama's on almost everything, including sanctions against Iran, invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also an opponent of Obama's on Iran sanctions, to address a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu accepted without coordinating with the White House. Netanyahu is going over the head of the President of the United States to speak to the people of the United States. This is a stark example of the arrogance of the Israel Lobby in the United States. And a stark example that Benjamin Netanyahu is an ass.

Israel has got its own nuclear weapons. It conducts its own foreign policy. It spies on the United States, and vice versa. If it disagrees with the American policy toward Iran it should take the action it thinks in its national interest. Israel should not be lobbying the United States to act for it. It has been 65 years? Far past the time for Israel to be a grown up, to cease being a dependent, to fight its own battles. 

It becomes our disagreeable duty to report that the ubiquitous in-flight magazine SkyMall, purveyor of objects d'art like that, is no more, a victim of printing expenses and online shopping.

There are those who loved her.

It is Friday. 10:30 am in the Far East, the middle of the night in Britain and just an hour and one-half away on the Least Coast in 'Murika. Let us dance with the devil while inhaling nitrous oxide on this Friday.

Oooh-eee. Thank you.

Not natural gas, laughing boy-LAUGHING GAS 

We need laughing gas ASAP!!!!!

Boy. That is the prettiest, best made-up woman in labor this boy's ever seen. That is a total B.S. photo. She could be having an O, she T'AIN'T havin' a child! Where'd I get that photo?...Oh, lovely, "whattoexpect.com." First time moms, listen to Uncle Ben, do not listen to "whattoexpect.com": YOU ARE NOT GOING TO LOOK LIKE THAT! You're going to look like you were in a serious automobile accident! And if you ever want to have sex with your husband again (and maybe you don't) DO NOT LET HIM SEE YOU GIVING BIRTH! It will make his pee-pee shrivel up and recede back into his body and it will never return except for the au pair.

Laughing Gas News.

And now for the laughing gas news:

Laughing Gas Becoming Popular for Women Giving Birth

-ABC News.

Oil.

"King Salman, Saudi Arabia’s new ruler, probably will stick to the oil policy of his predecessor, the late King Abdullah, maintaining production levels to preserve market share even at the cost of depressing prices.
...
The kingdom’s refusal to surrender market share to rising U.S. output has contributed to the worst slump in prices since the global credit crisis of 2008."
-Bloomberg (emphasis added).

I see. That is at least part of the reason why prices have fallen 50%. And since American "output" of oil is up (fracking, "the natural gas revolution") and American demand is not increasing as much due to "the green revolution" a glut exists, the oil just sits there, and prices fall. 

The Saudi strategy here is to make further fracking too expensive. At the current oil price it doesn't pay frackers or whatever they're called (they who frack), they're already stopping. So the Saudis are going to let this glut soak its way through 'cause their conventional drilling still pays at these prices, they'll maintain their market share and they'll delay the frackers.

Sounds like a plan. Good plan for the Saudis; good plan for American consumers  in the near term, bad plan for others, the frackers in the Pennsylvania Oblast and the drillers in Russia. Bad plan for Rooski.

More of Laughing Boy.

Look at his face. That is the face of brutality. And he's the band director!

He looks like he's directing the torture of puppies--and enjoying it!

Fun! Fun! Fun!

Hitler mustache, is that?

That is the face of a man, and of a people, who would shoot down passenger planes. As the Russians did with KAL 007 and MH 17. Brutal, absolutely brutal.

Back in the USSR.

These are stills from my favorite YouTube video of the old Soviet national anthem. The lyrics (with the exception of one noteworthy and funny inadvertent omission) are the official 1977 version as sung by the Red Army choir, the video images of course are not official, they are those of the YouTuber.

As I have written previously, this is a beautiful and heroic piece of music. Though heroic the lyrics are not any more martial than those of the "Star Spangled Banner" but the YouTuber's images superimposed on the lyrics and music glorify nothing but the military might of the USSR, which was the only thing there was to glorify!

What struck me about this video immediately and made it my favorite YouTube version is the guy in still five. I will post more on him and explain in a separate post.

"freedom" omitted after "the sunrays of."

"The [Kashinsky] district [in which the Yurino rectangle is located] specializes in agriculture. Other developed industries include logging, liquor and vodka production, mineral water bottling, and production of electrical equipment.

The main natural resources in the district are mineral water and peat."

-Wikipedia.

Liquor and vodka! Likin' the whole milieu of Yurino!

First thing I look for in a town is a good, rational town layout, know what I mean? That's key. A rational town plan can make up for a lot! It's -15 degrees in Yurino, Tver Oblast, Russia at this particular moment in time, however, I don't know if they use the Julian or Gregorian system. It's cold! but a good rectangular town layout warms the spirit, know what I mean? It gives you faith in rationality and that goes a long way. Know what I mean?

Everything is never quite enough.

That is the  most important news story today or as the charity Oxfam puts it in their world inequality report:

Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More

Eighty people possess as much wealth as everyone else on the whole earth combined. The New York Times dryly notes that this is worse, it used to be eighty-five.

Happy MLK Day.

Today is a national holiday in America and those who work for the federal government have the day off from work. NSA is taking the day off for example. The courts are closed but as I work for my ownself I must toil in the vineyards of justice in my private office and shall imbibe the fruits at the end of the day. 

"Working long hours makes people drink more, according to a new study."-UPI

You got that right.

Speaking of the DPRK...they were able to hack Sony because NSA hacked them in 2010. The D-Parkers simply followed the breadcrumbs back. Ha! I would have thought NSA would have covered its tracks better than to allow that. Which is also why Obama was so sure it was the DPRK this time. 

Shin Retracts.

Oh, lord. Speaking of Korea, as I did a moment ago, Shin Dong-hyuk, the Great Escapist from north of the DMZ, has retracted parts of his breathless, lapel-grabbing, page-turning book Escape from Camp 14, co-authored with the Washington Post's Blaine Harden. Like, it wasn't Camp 14, but Camp 18. More than a numerical misrepresentation there. Camp 14 is like Devil's Island, it is a DPRK "total control zone." He escaped from there? It turns out he didn't escape from there. And the torture happened later in his life.

Shin became a cause celebre in the West. He met with John Kerry, probably went for a walk with Kerry, and was a key witness before the United Nations to get DPRK leaders charged in the International Criminal Court. Does this hurt that cause? Clearly. The DPRK issued a heated denial of Shin's story, the Post and others followed up and now the DPRK has been proved partly correct. Yeah, that's going to hurt. Why did Shin "embellish?" He had a good story as it was! That question is unanswered tonight.

It is so difficult to fact-check a secret story. Like the Tiananmen Papers, how are you going to fact-check that? Like the University of Virginia non-gang rape which the Post did much to unravel. We are all left with the reporter's or co-author's or publisher's gut feeling about the credibility of the narrator. He or she has looked the person in the eye, observed the body language, that's about all one can do in "escape froms" and those are not substitutes for fact-checking. Sabrina Rubin Erdely could have fact-checked "Jackie's" story but didn't. I do not know what Harden did or did not do before publication of Camp 14 in 2012 but talking to the accused apparently was not one of them. The DPRK didn't issue its denial until last fall.

And like the first-person memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. I have joked that if I ever wrote a book on China it would be a fake of one of those escape froms, like Donkey Baby by that non-existent pumpkin-eater "Sonia J. Song." Jung Chang's Wild Swans popularity demonstrated the endless Western appetite for the genre and there have been gaggles of them. I'd take the name of some guy, preferably dead, place myself somewhere plausible and just run with it. You could fact-check it against the others. That wouldn't be hard at all. Writing the truth meticulously is hard.

This is Public Occurrences.

The demographics of Publocc have changed since the last time we did a full T.i.P.O last June. The Top Ten countries of readers are now:

1. United States
2. Russia
3. Germany. Up a notch, replacing the UK.
4. United Kingdom
5. France. Up a notch, replacing China.
6. China
7. Canada
8. Ukraine
9. Slovenia. New altogether.
10. Australia

Dropping out was the Philippines or the Netherlands, I forget which. So this Public Occurrences is slightly more Slavic (and the Czech Republic, fourth this month would make it more so) and slightly less native English-speaking, very Northern, very Western, very white. The only up-and-cummer that would diversify would be South Korea, tenth this month.

Same ten most-read posts as before.

Inn-teresting search keywords recently:

-mainstream movies. (Today)
-publick occurrences reader particip...(This week)
-bryan sikes green beret (This month)
-clayton christensen why america w...(This ditto)
-francois hollande and bob avakian (ditto). I googled those two to see if there was any connection that would put them in the same sentence joined by the conjunctive and there was not.

In doing researches into the "Great Pumpkin Commonwealth" the undersigned has determined to his satisfaction that the images below are of giant pumpkins. Really big ones. Further, the undersigned has determined that in 2011 I believe it was, but if not, one of those other years, the giantist pumpkin in the history of the G.P.C. was grown in Northern Cambria. :o Which I don't believe Volina, Tevar Obast, Russia can say the same thing.

The undersigned recognizes the venue for the GPC weigh-in or whatever as the Bi-Lo (Get it, Bi-Lo=Buy Low?) Supermarket which the undersigned thought was the IGA Supermarket but they must have changed the name like they did Barnesboro which replaced the A&P Supermarket which burned down. The undersigned does not recognize the guy or the pumpkin and knew nothing about the GPC until just now when he did his researches but the first image above reminded the undersigned of this:

That giant matzoh ball is actually a giant pumpkin. It was grown neither in Northern Cambria nor in Yolina but somewheres in China and that is not the Bi-Lo nor the IGA nor the A&P but Beijing. That pumpkin was not grown for the GPC but for the suspiciously similarly sounding GLF or Great Leap Forward (1958-1960). The undersigned does not know if there was any Chinese influence present in the Bi-Lo parking lot but he finds it suspicious that both photographs depict pumpkins grown during "Greats." The undersigned will do further researches into this matter. 

The undersigned then recollected certain other photographs from the GLF, the one in China. For example, this one of a homegrown atomic bomb, excuse me, watermelon.

Huge shocks of wheat shoosting out of the ground they're so healthy and energetic.

A large potato. From which one can see the Bi-Lo Supermarket.

Onion, or uncircumcised penis. Large. 

Some cabbage or something. With kids reading on its leaves.

Cotton? I don't know. 

Now except for the Chinese lady that could be the Bi-Low, excuse me, Bi-Lo.

Need I go on I think not. Alls I know is...Well, you'd have to be a complete MO-RON not to see. Alls I know is there ought to be, imo, a full blown INVESTIGATION into this People's Republic of Giant Pumpkins--and into the Bi-Lo parking lot--for potential--potential--communistic infiltration and influence. And if they ever "expand" if you catch my drift and I think you do into watermelons or cauliflower OR WHATEVER...Well, need I go on I think not.