From seemingly calamity comes something amazingly new

I just finished watching Dogtown and Z Boys on cable. It’s a documentary about the Venice/Santa Monica skateboarders in the 70’s who re-invented and re-defined the entire sport, taking it to levels no one even thought possible.

One fascinating tidbit. They pioneered skateboarding in swimming pools, which soon led to the quantum leap of vertical skating - which changed everything.

This happened because a severe drought forced mandatory water rationing and consequently there were lots of empty swimming pools. So they, um, took advantage of empty pools wherever they found them (ignoring quaint concepts like “private property” and “permission.”)

The skaters took something apparently bad, the drought, used it for their own ends, and ended up creating something utterly new - which in turn had massive impact on the culture at large; in skateboarding, in related sports, in punk and metal, in alt culture, in all sorts of areas.

Given the current imploding of progressive/Green politics under the withering drought of Lesser Evil politics, maybe there’s some metaphorical empty swimming pools that can be used to create something radically new too.

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We just report the news!

Russia sends 80 tons of poisoned corn back to the US

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Is this a jolly good time for another invasion?

Deep Audit, who provided the amazing research and links for our “Are the Bushies itching to invade Cuba” post, speculates on that, as well as on the seven US aircraft carriers nearing the coast of China.

“War forecast factors

Bush & Company may be positioning to equate China-Taiwan with U.S.-Cuba. After all, the U.S. doesn’t need Taiwan, especially if there are massive oil deposits in Cuba’s territorial waters.
 
Hurricane season has begun & goes through Nov 30. However, there has not been a major tropical storm to hit Florida in the first week of July since 1919, and the Atlantic/Gulf are relatively quiet right now.  So if July is typically a quiet month for the Atlantic and Gulf vis a vis storms, it would be a good month to launch a naval strike.
 
As mentioned, those 7 aircraft carriers will reach striking distance of China by mid-July. And 2 or 3 are prowling around Cuba in the Atlantic, making Fidel nervous.
 
Olympics are mid-August. I don’t imagine the Bush administration wants the press to be distracted by Greece.
 
September and October are big months for hurricanes.
 
October 1983 was the Grenada strike, so there is the anniversary factor. Bush seems to like “likening himself” and honoring anniversaries with sabre-rattling behavior.
 
1983 wasn’t an election year. But still I favor October because Americans tend to swell with pride when their President kills people, especially if he can do it with a cowboy swagger.
 
The attack in Grenada happened without notice to the Americans living there. Iraq received notification it would be attacked … but that was a lot of macho bravado by Bush & Company — what I once heard a chef call “penis on a plate”.
 
So it appears that should an attack happen, July would be a good month, since the miliary force is already heading for strategic positions.
 
July would also be bad, (thinks the pragmatist in me) because Cuba would not be a pushover, will take a lot of pounding to even get it to nominally submit, and the resulting breakdown in infrastructure will cause cholera and dengue fever outbreaks.  But Bush probably isn’t paying attention to Pentagon studies that show a war with Cuba would be extremely costly, just like he didn’t pay any attention to studies that showed a war with Iraq would devolve into guerilla warfare that the U.S. would eventually lose.
 
So July would be risky, because there would be the swelling with pride, and then realistic press reports would leak through the walls of patriotism, and citizens might end up feeling ambivalent about war and Republicans. And Democrats will have time before the election to gather data and object to unilateral war … oh, wait a second. The Democrats favor unilateral war, too.
 
So there you have it:
 
July or October. I’m leaning toward July, because Bush is stupid and the Democrats complicit. We will soon see.”

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