Rock Stacking is an Art, not a Crime…

~ Boohunney ~ 3 Comments

Check out this video…

Boulder, CO police wanted to make rock balancing a crime…

Michael Grab, a Boulder artist who goes by the name Gravity Glue, said that police threatened to ticket or jail him for creating stacked river rock sculptures that the community has been enjoying for years.

In a Monday Facebook post, Grab explained that a Boulder police officer had informed him that there would be stiff penalties for continuing his art.

“For the past 7 years i have been creating this art in and around Boulder, Colorado, USA. nearly every day!” he wrote. “[J]ust this weekend, one police officer has decided that balancing rocks in Boulder, Colorado is now illegal, obscurely referencing two city codes [5-4-8 and 5-4-2] about ‘destruction of public property’ in relation to rocks.”

“So now the police have belligerently taken it upon themselves to write tickets and/or arrest ANYONE balancing rocks in Boulder, CO. and specifically threatened to ticket me and/or arrest me if they catch me in the future,” the artist lamented. “[I] encourage as many people as possible (especially locals) to contact the city council here in Boulder and voice your support for this long standing tradition in Boulder. [I]t is something that an overwhelming portion of the community supports.”

Grab said that he would be forced to leave Boulder if the city council did not step in to clarify the city ordinances…

Rooster Magazine wondered why Boulder police felt the need to focus on “Draconian rock art witch hunt” instead of higher-than-average rates of rape and theft.

“Why is any of this important? Because if we ban every bizzaro Boulder character that causes a stir (see: nude gardening woman), we’re left with nothing more than a college town with a Target that’s about to become Google’s new headquarters,” the magazine noted. “At a time like this, we need less kid gloves in the form of overzealous legislation, and more attention paid to retaining the city’s core personality. And if you don’t like that, f*cking move to Westminster.”

“Keep Boulder weird, and keep Gravity Glue making weird ass rock art.”

In the end, the call to action worked. Grab said that the city attorney personally called to let him know that rock stacking was not illegal in Boulder.

Pfffft to the Boulder Police! All communities need more folks like Gravity Glue. I found a stacked rock garden in Florida recently and it was beautifully weird!

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Was Invading Iraq the Right Thing to Do?

~ Boohunney ~ 3 Comments

Here’s a graphic of the results of a new Quinnipiac poll ….

 

Poll

Jay Bookman at the AJC…

It’s not a surprise that Republicans remain more supportive than most Americans of a war initiated and led by a Republican administration. But the scale of the divergence between Republicans and their fellow Americans is pretty stunning. To this day, and by more than a two-to-one ratio, Republicans still believe that the war was a good idea.

Or at least they say they believe that. Given the blowback from the war, I have to think that some of those 62 percent are acting out of sheer cussedness in refusing to admit the mistake to a pollster. But Republican pollsters are probably producing similar numbers in their own internal surveys, which helps to explain the awkward straddling act by their candidates. It tells you a lot about what the GOP base will be demanding from a potential nominee.

And that is not good news for Rand Paul.

In my unscientific polling around social media, many of my Right of Center friends in the sea of Red I live in prefer really not to discuss this particular topic much. If they do, there is some kind of twisted logic that it was all Hillary’s fault… or something.

 

 

 

The True Benghazi Outrage …

~ Boohunney

One of the more perplexing things regarding the Benghazi hearings was questions regarding the mission’s purpose in Benghazi. The mission performed no diplomatic functions as entertaining dignitaries or issuing passports. Why would a long time American diplomat be assigned to such dangerous post in war torn Libya? Why were there far more CIA personnel in the area than State Department personnel in the area?

Marcy Wheeler ….

What did the CIA know and when did they know it?

That’s the real question that ought to be raised by a recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The August 2012 document describes how the U.S. ended up on the same general side in the Syrian Civil War as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning,” the report explained. Meanwhile, “[w]estern countries, the Gulf states, and Turkey are supporting” rebel efforts against the Assad regime in a proxy war, putting them on the same side as, if not working together with, the terrorists now overrunning Iraq.

Some outlets have concluded that this means “the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad.”

But as Juan Cole counters, the report that western powers supported rebels “doesn’t say that the US created sectarian groups and it does not say that the US favors al-Qaeda in Syria or the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq.’” Cole continues, ”It says that those powers (e.g. Turkey and the Gulf monarchies) supporting the opposition wanted to see the declaration of a Salafi (hard line Sunni) breakaway statelet, in order to put pressure on the al-Assad regime.”

In a nutshell, Cole Aagues that the U.S. didn’t support Al-Qaeda in Syria directly. But its allies certainly did.

Two months after the report laying out AQI support for the rebels — another of the documents obtained by Judicial Watch shows — the DIA provided a detailed description of how weapons got shipped from Benghazi to Syria, presumably for rebel groups. “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Qaddafi] regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012,” the report explained, “weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

The report obtained by Judicial Watch says that the weapons shipments ended in “early September of 2012.” But note what event this second report conspicuously does not mention: The Sept. 11 attack on the State Department and CIA facilities in Benghazi at the same time that the flow of weapons stopped ….

Read the rest. It is fascinating.