You will remember from previous discussions, Green is good, Red is bad, Purple isn't terrible, but it ain't all that helpful either.

Oopsies, no Green!!!!! 

From my friend Richard Nolle,

"The workplace shooting in Connecticut and the school massacre in China, the fires in California, Canada and Russia, the border skirmish between Israel and Lebanon, the grenade tossed at Iranian President Ahmadinejad, the riots in Karachi, Kashmir and Dhaka, and a rash of crashes including today’s multivehicle pile-up (including two packed school buses) in Missouri: it’s the stuff of headlines all month so far. It’s also, pretty much word for word, the stuff of my August forecast, published last month: 

The fires, crashes, clashes and explosions that accompanied theMars-Saturn conjunction of late July are bound to continue well into August, with the Red Planet and the Ringed Planet staying so close in alignment for so long. Arguably, because it feeds into the Great T-Square pattern (which include Venus, up to mid-month), this looks to be more or less continuous through the 13th, with peaks around the 1st and 13th. It’s a cycle that operates at the individual as well as collective levels, from domestic violence and accidents to riots and rampages to spectacular mass-transport crashes; from spree killings and mass murders to military and paramilitary clashes. No global thermonuclear war stuff shows up, just threats and probes, surgical strikes and strategic assassinations, war lords and drug cartels mowing each other down . . . “ 

Now, the argument can been made that this kind of stuff goes on all the time, and I mostly agree.

Except at this instant it all feels a lot more intense to me.

In my little community, the little blind guy who has been walking around town for probably 20 years without incident was attacked by a gang of our local idiots, beaten with his own cane, and robbed.

My young friend Evan's dog was attacked by an enraged Muskrat.

Now, that don't happen everyday.

With regards to "The Bradley Model" as it pertains to the Stock Market?

Not so much.

More on that, Saturday.

And just in case, keep keeping your head on a swivel.

 From the Christian Science Monitor.

The photo links to the story, the story links to some outstanding photography and easy science.

Missed Tuesday's northern lights show? Another is on its way.

For folks along the northern rim of the US, a second chance to see the northern lights will come when another solar outburst hits Earth Wednesday or Thursday. 

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer / August 4, 2010 

If you're still in the hunt for aurora borealis, the outbursts of hot, ionized gas the sun sent toward Earth on Sunday may just keep on giving.

Space-weather forecasters say that there's a 20 percent chance for a major geomagnetic storm tonight – an event stronger than last night's that would make any auroras visible farther south than last night's northern-light show reached.

Carolyn, Paul A. and Don C. (my new best email buddy, having replaced Teddy who went to Florida for Easter and hasn't been heard from since) have been sending me some real good political cartoons.

As the Little Wiffer, my secretary, and anyone else charged with the responsibility of taking care of me can attest, sometimes it's hard to get me to pay attention.

Up until this morning, it never dawned on me to check the artist.

It's all the same guy.

A.F. Branco.

Click on the cartoon below to link to his fine site.

He's looking for donations and selling coffee mugs, tee shirts and some other stuff.

I'm guessing the New York Times isn't returning his calls.

And for damn sure the Freep ain't.

 Teddyyyyyyyyyy, where are youuuuuuuuu??????

From spaceweather.com

The movies the story links to only sort of work on my browser.

Still, they're pretty cool even only sort of working.

Click anywhere below to link to one or the other of the two headings.

Recommended.

COMPLEX ERUPTION ON THE SUN: 

On August 1st around 0855 UT, Earth orbiting satellites detected a C3-class solar flare. The origin of the blast was sunspot 1092. At about the same time, an enormous magnetic filament stretching across the sun's northern hemisphere erupted. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action: 

The timing of these events suggest they are connected, and a review of SDO movies strengthens that conclusion. Despite the ~400,000 km distance between them, the sunspot and filament seem to erupt together; they are probably connected by long-range magnetic fields. In this movie (171 Å), a shadowy shock wave (a "solar tsunami") can be seen emerging from the flare site and rippling across the northern hemisphere into the filament's eruption zone. That may have helped propel the filament into space.

In short, we have just witnessed a complex global eruption involving almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun.

A coronal mass ejection (CME) produced by the event is heading directly for Earth: SOHO movie. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives on or about August 3rd.

SUNSPOT SUNRISE:

 Sunspot 1092, a key player in yesterday's Earth-directed eruptions, is big enough to see without the aid of a solar telescope. Oleg Toumilovitch "spotted" it on July 31st rising over Blairgowrie, South Africa:

"During the first few minutes of sunrise only a fraction of the sunlight makes it's way to the observer - mostly from the red part of visible spectrum," notes Toumilovitch. "During this time large sunspots can be seen without a special solar filter." Be careful, though! Even when dimmed by clouds and haze, direct sunlight can hurt your eyes. "If you try to take a picture like this," advises Toumilovitch, "look only at the screen of your digital camera, not the optical viewfinder."

The following vid appears with an 8/2/2010 article by Nick Winfield at the The Wall Street Journal titled,

Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy.

The article and the vid are not the same, both are good.

One of the first posts at the old Justthinking.us was also one of the first posts brought across to the new (this) Justthinking.us.

It was titled, Race, Family, Crime and Poverty.

It mostly had to do with ....... you know ....... Race, Family, Crime and Poverty.

It ends with a short discussion of and link to the famed Moynihan Report of 1965, which offers the following on the state of affairs in Black America in that year.

The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.

I was poking around at Fred on Everything this morning.

And having exhausted that content which offers a laugh at the expense of Fred's frustrations and outrage over the state of the world we live in, I scrolled upon his essay titled, Rape in Tennessee.

Among the items on Fred's long and strange resume' is a tour as the law enforcement columnist at the Washington Times.

The result of which is a point of view about race, cops, and crime that is not presented by organized media.

First of all, apologies to Shannara Johnson and Casey Research who week after week are providing consistently good stuff, as I cut and pasted the entirety of the following article which was published yesterday, July 30, 2010 at Casey's Daily Dispatch along with some other good stuff under the heading, A Rock and a Hard Place.

Secondly, apologies to you, as this one hopefully will take up a little more or your time than I usually shoot for.

As you know, when I find something I like, usually I just grab off a paragraph or two along with the heading and the byline and just link you up to the site itself.

My opinion is that about half of you follow the link.

My hope is that all of you will read this one to the end.

Please do.

Remembering all the while.

Really, it isn't like I ever ask all that much from you ..... you know, the occasional comment ..... maybe ask how I'm doing before you call me a fascist moron.

You know who you are!!!

Something Fishy About RightHaven Suits?

By Shannara Johnson

Cracking down on the blogosphere seems to have become the latest fashion. Since March, lawsuits were filed against at least 88 blogs, message boards, advocacy organizations, and other websites, according to various news reports.

And they’re all coming from the same source: Las Vegas-based RightHaven, a firm that deals with copyright infringement.

Reason.com reports that “RightHaven’s business model involves acquiring the copyrights for specific articles originally published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, then filing lawsuits against website owners who have posted those articles without permission.”

The owners of one of the affected sites called The Armed Citizen, Clayton Cramer and David Burnett, complained to Reason magazine that they never even got a chance to remove the articles in question. “With our e-mail addresses right there on the front page [of our site], all it would have taken is an e-mail asking us to remove or alter the listing so as not to infringe,” said Burnett. “By not contacting any of the websites with a takedown notice beforehand, they’re showing they’re interested in money, not resolution.”

Which Steve Gibson, CEO of RightHaven, readily admits to. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights,” he told Reason. “These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.”

With many of the targeted sites being blogs, conspiracy message boards, and government-critical websites, however, some of the victims suspect much more sinister motives behind RightHaven’s attacks. The legal trouble, they believe, may be part of a larger operation initiated by the Obama administration to silence independent, critical voices on the Internet.

And browsing the evidence, this contention may be not be all that far-fetched.

Recently, Blogetery.com, a little-known Wordpress platform, was abruptly shut down by its hosting company, BurstNet, taking down about 73,000 blogs. According to CNET, “[the] service was terminated at the request of some law enforcement agency, but [BurstNet] wouldn’t say which one. As for the reason, BurstNet hasn’t made that clear either.”

Rumors have it that the government may have gotten involved as part of anti-piracy operations, but many liberty advocates don’t buy it. And who can blame them, with frustrated sound bites coming from President Obama himself, implying that unsympathetic bloggers may have a part in his inability to connect with the public.

In January, an obscure academic article from 2008 made the rounds in the blogosphere that had been written by Obama’s information czar, Prof. Cass Sunstein.

Here’s an excerpt:

...we suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies ... will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

Why should you be worried about this?

Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com explains it:

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups."  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).  This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." 

Sunstein's response to these criticisms is . . . as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some "conspiracy theories" previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in "mind control" experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government "conspiracy theories," discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good -- i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama:

Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so.

But it's precisely because the Government is so often not "well-motivated" that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that "we will use them well" is every authoritarian's claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we're Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.

FOX’s John Stossel hit the nail on the head, quipping, “That's right. Obama's Regulation Czar is so concerned about citizens thinking the wrong way that he proposed sending government agents to ‘infiltrate’ these groups and manipulate them. This reads like an Onion article: Powerful government official proposes to combat paranoid conspiracy groups that believe the government is out to get them...by proving that they really are out to get them.” 
And the RightHaven case has only fueled the fears – especially since evidence points to potentially close ties between the Obamas and Gibson.

Recently targeted by RightHaven, outraged members of the conspiracy message board godlikeproductions.com (GLP) set out to get to the bottom of the matter, digging in RightHaven CEO Steven A. Gibson’s background.

According to a resume found on the Net, Gibson attended the Chicago-Kent Collage of Law and graduated cum laude in 1990, and, his work history states, “Prior to establishing his own firm, Mr. Gibson was an associate at Sidley Austin LLP,” a Chicago-based law firm.

President Obama’s Wikipedia page, in turn, states that “In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. . . During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.”

Coincidence? GLPers don’t think so, especially considering that Michelle Obama, too, is in the picture. “She met Barack Obama when they were among the few African Americans at their law firm, Sidley Austin . . . and she was assigned to mentor him as a summer associate.” (Wikipedia)

“At the firm,” the Wikipedia page goes on, “she worked on marketing and intellectual property,” the latter being Gibson’s specialty as well.

In other words, it would be reasonable to assume that Barack and Michelle Obama and Steven Gibson have known each other for 20 years and (of course this is conjecture) may even have been, or still be, friends. Making Gibson the perfect henchman, the conspiracists surmise, to carry out Obama’s death sentence on free Internet speech and open dissent.

Tall tales or the beginning of the end for a truly free Internet? We’ll see; but we will keep our eyes open to other warning signs.

The following was taken from a piece at globalphysics.com titled The Global Cross of Julya and August (evidently, the editing at globalphysics is exactly as lame as it is at JustThinking)

I think it offers some insight into that aspect of astrology that promotes the most skepticism, if not outright scorn.

Aspect ..... get it?

That being the tendency on the part of Astrology's practitioners and true believers to just flat out cram an interpretation for a particular chart into their own, personal world view ........... after the fact.

In fairness to Astrology, the same can be said of climate science.

Or at least that which passes for climate science as practiced at Penn State University, the University of East Anglia, and NASA.

Although in the instance of climate science, financial considerations must be recognized.

I think what it comes down to is simply people being people, and feeling a human's need to define down the universe in which we live in order to feel bigger, stronger and a maybe little less like a pinball.

Mars conjunct Saturn, exact July 31.

This happens every two years on average. Mars swinging past Saturn tends to lend a militant edge to Saturn’s restrictive presence, quite often as a start/stop energetic that usually lasts only a couple of weeks during “normal” times. Mars will be within a five degree orb of influence to Saturn from July 21 to August 9 , effectively bracketing the most intense phase of the Cardinal Cross.

Mars’ previous conjunction with Saturn happened in July 2008, right when US voters were making up their minds about who would be next to enter the White House. Mars’ touch of militancy signaled a turn-off of McCain’s overly debilitated Saturnian (war-mongering) persona, switching many over to Obama’s more Uranian side, just a few short months before Saturn (McCain) and Uranus (Obama) reached their first precise opposition on Election Day.

Mars’ subsequent opposition to Saturn (April 2009) represented Obama’s attempts to wisely (Saturn) utilize troops (Mars) in Iraq and Afghanistan, a process necessarily involving extreme Saturnian patience. This is “why” it took him so long to come up with effective strategies, and why the jury is still out on the effectiveness of those moves.

And once again, at the risk of redundancy.

From Michigan Capitol Confidential. 

Outbound Michigan