Graffiti Wars at The Fahm

At least three times since we have lived here, someone with pronounced political opinions and zero regard for private property has tagged a large rock next to the road which happens to be on Fahm property. Twice I've been out with textured stone spray paint to cover the graffiti, and now there has been a third incident. This time, in addition to reporting the latest incident to the Princeton Police Department, I flipped it on the culprit. See below for details.

Before

The tag offends me on at least two levels. First, tagging our rock is illegal and invasive, and displays a lack of respect for private property; second, I think the current tea party is woefully misguided. My solution to the problem is below.

After

Our next step is to install a camera trap so we can get pictures next time our local patriot scofflaw tries something with spray paint!

More Business as Usual

Financial Snake Pit Rife with Greed, Conflicts of Interest, and Wrongdoing

Our economic collapse was...

"hardly a fluke occurrence, the meltdown was the product of a deeply corrupt financial system, one fueled by profit-hungry banks that deceived their clients, and overseen by lax regulators who were complicit in the firms' chronic abuse of the most fundamental rules of the game" - Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Read the report here.

Lawmakers Spend Much Of Their Time Just Taunting One Another

HA HA HA HA!!!!  At last! Quantitative evidence! According to a recent study directed by Professor Gary King, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University:

"[M]odern members of Congress spend about 27 percent of the time just taunting each other.


“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we want Congress’s members to trust one another enough to make deals.


“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” King said in a telephone interview. “We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”


To come up with this insight, King and two graduate students analyzed 64,033 press releases sent out by all U.S. senators from 2005 to 2007."

And the biggest taunters are the ones in the safest districts - they don't HAVE to play nice, so they don't.  Kinda like a ... hmm... what's the word? Oh right - kinda like a bully!


It's all fun and games until the government grinds to a halt, further threatening the not-really-recovering global economy...

Nuclear Regulators Privately Had Doubts - And Lied About Their Doubts to the Public

While none of the specifics published in this report are specific to Diablo Canyon - the particular situation that I am personally interested in - I nevertheless have the temerity to suggest that if U.S. regulators and industry officials are willing to gloss over the truth about these particular locations, they are likely to have no qualms about doing the same vis a vis other locations:

U.S. regulators privately have expressed doubts that some of the nation's nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan's nuclear crisis began...


Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed after the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday.


"While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about -- that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan -- it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure," said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.


The e-mails in question are part of an NRC review of how the operators of nuclear plants in Delta, Pennsylvania, and Surry County, Virginia, would cope with a prolonged power outage that knocked cooling systems offline, as occurred at the Tokyo Electric Power Co-operated Fukushima plant.


In a July 28, 2010, e-mail, one NRC staffer said that contingency plans for Exelon Corp's Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Delta "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents."


Another document, undated, said backup plans included just having equipment on the plant grounds that could be useful "when used by knowledgeable operators if post-event conditions allow." - Reuters

Why lie? Why not tell the public the truth?  


...


Oh right. I forgot. FOLLOW THE MONEY. 

$75 Million as of This Morning

...is what our government has spent to have 50 fighter jets and nearly 40 support aircraft operating in Libya.

According to HuffPo, The total U.S. costs for the Libya air campaign as of March 28 were $550 million, not counting normal deployment spending.


ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING? In light of the current budget stalemate in Washington, D.C.?? Really?? Wow! That's not just greed - that is f**king psychopathology!


How else is one to explain the utter disregard for those of us who supply those funds? GAWD.


Here's the latest budget proposal:

Over the next decade, [They] want to cut $389 billion from Medicare, the public health insurance program for seniors. Over the same period, [Their] budget puts $735 billion less toward Medicaid, which benefits Americans too poor to afford private insurance. Discretionary spending on domestic programs is also reduced by $923 billion. - HuffPo

To quote a commenter on HuffPo,

"...As teachers are fired, collective bargaining rights stripped, and countless American towns and cities [see: Detroit] transformed into third-world ghost towns, we lend Gaddafi and company billions at near-zero interest rates. "Sorry if you can't feed, clothe, or shelter your kids, but we just ain't got no money." Uh, right.


The most important thing we must all keep in mind is the following premise; this is intentional. You don't "accidentally" turn your back on the nation's homeowners and then lend billions/trillions to foreign dictators, corporations, and hedge funds ...You do this intentionally. As a matter of policy. You intentionally shower the already-rich with more riches, and suck the life out of the lifeless.


Before I turn this into an unreadable ramble, I'll say just on more thing. If you want to see the future of America, look to the nations who have already received the Washington-imposed IMF/World Bank treatment. They received the treatment at gunpoint, we are receiving it slightly more gradually due to that darn Constitution and that silly necessity to abide by (at least, appear to abide by) the rule of law. A handful of mega-billionaires, crumbling infrastructure, degraded public institutions, a militarized and increasingly brutal police force, and an oppressed people."

Really, I want to bite people - and not in a fun way.

Business As Usual

And it is so very DISAPPOINTING. From Matt Taibbi at Rollingstone.com:

"The fact that Boehner supported TARP and No Child Left Behind and mega-handouts to the pharmaceutical industry and a range of other federal subsidies is hardly surprising, for this is what mainstream Washington politicians of both parties do — they take great buttloads of money from giant transnational companies, play golf with the CEOs of those same companies ("If someone I've gotten to know on the golf course comes into my office with a good argument," Boehner once said, "I tend to want to listen"), and deliver taxpayer money back to their buddies when the need arises, or sometimes even when the need doesn't arise. 

...Boehner, in short, has for most of his career been ... a corporate schmoozer and a remorseless spender of taxpayer money for whom the notion of small government is just something to say when the cameras are on, or when the public money in question might go to poor people or immigrants or other such unlikely golfers. This was a fine way to be during the 2000s, back when America was still unfucked enough to enjoy a phony real estate boom and launch recreational wars of conquest in the Middle East — but in this new decade, post-Bush and post-crash, there is serious doubt on the Hill that a reflexive favor-churner like Boehner will be able to keep delivering Republican votes to lavish taxpayer money on his industry pals. Money is simply too tight now, and people are too pissed off." 

There Have Been Some Shortages II

As I say, there have been some critical shortages during this most recent snow storm surge, and I dare say that people's nerves are getting a little frayed. From Chicago Tribune:

"A man was shot and robbed of a snowblower in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side early this morning...The 47-year-old man was walking down the middle of the street...at about 1:40 a.m. with the snowblower when a white four-door sedan pulled up, police said.

One of four people inside the car asked, "How much you want for the snowblower?"

The man told them it was not for sale...Two men got out and took the snowblower and $27 from the man's pockets...One of the men asked the man if he wanted to "get popped" just before the man heard a gunshot and was wounded in the thigh...The victim was reported in good condition at Stroger Hospital, where his mother said he was undergoing surgery this afternoon."

I am a little curious as to why the guy was walking down the street carrying a snow blower at 1:30 in the morning but I'm afraid to ask.

There's a Serial Litter Bug on the Loose in Princeton, MA!

The Fahm is situated on a truly lovely road in the middle of some truly lovely countryside.

Our road is shared with a handful of other people, and is mercifully not a heavy commute artery.  This is also mercifully a low crime area, with one glaring exception.  An individual - as yet unknown - who regularly drives our road also regularly dumps articles of trash on the road.

  

The trash contained in the deposits each time are remarkably similar in one aspect: each litter drop includes at least one large Bud Lite beer can.  

Often an empty bag of chips is also involved although that is not always the case.

I suspect The Princeton Litter Bug is a regular on our road, either a local who uses it like any other back road to get from point A to point B, or (gasp!) one of our neighbors. I try not to take it personally that so very many of the Bud Lite cans end up between our place and Ball Hill Rd.; I prefer to think of it as coincidence, and not as someone showing their displeasure at our presence in the neighborhood.


Being the Great Detective that I am not I've even thought about taking the trash down to the Princeton police and ask them to take fingerprints off the can since littering isn't just ANNOYING, it is also ILLEGAL.  Oh yeah, stand back, I'm about to get all C.S.I. on this crime wave.

I'm done picking up somebody else's garbage, and even though I find it hard to believe that anyone who drives this road regularly would also deliberately befoul it, that is indeed the case.  Pack it in, pack it OUT, 'bro. I'm tired of seeing your SCAT.

Facebook & Privacy ... HA HA HA!

Here's one reason to aggressively manage your Facebook privacy settings and to limit the information you do post to that which you actually intend the world to see and exploit.  "Ah!" you say, "No worries HERE - I've never sent naked pictures to anyone."  Before you get too comfy in illusions of having your privacy intact, ask yourself if there is anything in your e-mail "Sent" folder that you would prefer be kept private?  Say...a message to a lover?  Or your lawyer?  Hmm...that makes it a whoooole different story, don't you think?

[Name Redacted] Used Facebook To Hack Women's Emails*

* [Name Redacted] in this instance is not the same [Name Redacted] as the one mentioned here, here, and here.

Sterling, MA Police Log Nuggets

Sterling, MA Police Log


Monday, Dec. 20


9:43 p.m.: Meetinghouse Hill Road, a basset hound is howling in their yard; nothing found.


Tuesday, Dec. 21


3:55 p.m.: Pratts Junction and Legate Hill roads, cow in the road; owner said the cow is tied to a tree in the front yard to take advantage of the last grass patch, and the rope is not long enough for the cow to enter the road. The owner will move the cow.


5:39 p.m.: Beaman Road abandoned emergency call due to argument, all is calm now.


Wednesday, Dec. 22


1:43 p.m.: Riverview Road, small dog found with tag number; owner will be picking up Dexter.