Here are the numbers from the United Nations on the breadth of devastation in Pakistan from the floods:

• 1,539 people have died and 17 million have been directly affected
• 1.2 million houses have been destroyed, leaving an estimated 8 million homeless
• 3.2m hectares of standing crops have been lost or damaged
• 2,055 people have been injured
• 1.6 million have received food aid
• 2 million people have received drinking water but “large numbers” have no access to water or sanitation
• Reports on increasing migration towards Sindh province from other affected areas [BBC]

According to the BBC, the UN has raised 70% of the $460m needed for emergency relief.

I stumbled across this unlucky fat fellow on East 6th Street on my way to breakfast this morning.  I would estimate that he was about two to three pounds.

Licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution

There are 60 diseases humans can contract from pigeons, and this guy in Washington Square Park must be one of the loneliest souls in New York City.  Really, to be such a bird man, loving their bird-brained adoration as they climb all over you; he revels in the trust that they give few.  It makes this man feel special, a Dr. Doolittle of downtown New York.

That is what I think when I see bird people like him in my neighborhood, because their adopted pigeon progeny roost on my windowsills and fire escape.  To pity this man is the only way I can make sense of what posses him and neighbors of mine like him to nourish these filthy birds to flouish.  Here are a few diseases this guy can get from these pigeons that he doesn’t care about:

Histoplasmosis - also known as “Cave disease,” is caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum. Symptoms of this infection vary greatly, but the disease primarily affects the lungs. Occasionally, other organs are affected; this is called disseminated histoplasmosis, and it can be fatal if untreated.

St. Louis encephalitis – an inflammation of the nervous system, usually causes drowsiness, headache and fever. It may even result in paralysis, coma or death. St. Louis encephalitis occurs in all age groups, but is especially fatal to persons over age 60.

Escherichia coli - Virulent strains of E. coli can cause gastroenteritis, urinary tract infections, and neonatal meningitis. In rarer cases, virulent strains are also responsible for hæmolytic-uremic syndrome  (HUS), peritonitis, mastitis, septicemia and Gram-negative pneumonia.

All images of this dirty birdy man are licensed Creative Commons 3.0.

The world is rightfully pissed off at British Petroleum, but what does the world expect when we rely upon a disgusting energy source that we have to buy from countries that dislike the cultures that the filthy sludge engenders?

Greenpeace–haha, yeah, they’re still around–has a great campaign to rebrand the oil giant that swims in money while we swim in carbons.  The problem with the campaign is not its brilliance, but that it’s not Creative Commons.

I more and more have trouble understanding the “All Rights Reserved” mentality in situations like this.  Why launch an effort to re-brand a company with copyright protected submissions that are meant to go viral?  What’s the point?

Regardless, here are my favorites:

Go find yours on Flickr and blog it, damn the copyright.

Below is an incredibly well-edited YouTube video of convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala, who went on a murder spree a few months after this appearance on the Dating Game in 1978.  The contestant, Cheryl Bradshaw, later refused to go on the date:

Though Alcala won the date with Bradshaw, she ultimately refused to go out with him, according to reports.

“One wonders what that did in his mind,” crime profiler Pat Brown said in an interview with CNN. “That is something he would not take too well. They don’t understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: ‘She played me. She played hard to get.’ ”

Alcala became a killer just months after his appearance on the show, prosecutors said.

Watch the video (he apparently has never changed his hair):

Am I the only one who thinks Cheryl Bradshaw was *hysterical* in her appearance?  And kudos to her wisdom for backing out of this date, whatever the reason.

So Eric Cantor is freaking out that a mentally-ill man, Norman Leboon, posted a YouTube video threatening him and his family.  But Leboon is really not at the same level as the the Christian Militia terrorists, or even Joseph Stack, the anti-tax nut.  His insanity was not focused.

See, Norman Leboon is megalomaniac and probably schizophrenic.  In other words, he’s insane.  Batshit insane, in the classic Apocalypse Now sense.  It’s unfathomable that all of this occurred and yet the man was not committed to a hospital:

Leboon’s brother, Peter, said yesterday that his brother’s behavior had become so erratic in recent months that he also had notified the FBI after Norman Leboon posted one antigovernment YouTube rant.

“They dismissed it as no big deal,” Peter Leboon said.

Peter Leboon said he tried several times to have his brother committed to a mental institution, most recently before Christmas. [...]

Peter Leboon was concerned because his brother, who he said began showing signs of mental instability three years ago, had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

“The last time I tried to get him help, we searched the whole house, six or seven of us, we couldn’t find the gun,” Peter Leboon said. “I found the permit, though, and destroyed it. Whatever happened to that gun, who knows?”

Christina Wilson, 28, a neighbor, said FBI agents took Leboon away in shackles on Saturday.

That morning, Leboon was outside his house screaming at his neighbors.

“He was ranting and raving: He was going to blow everybody up on the block,” said Wilson, who lives two doors from Leboon.

“For the past two years, he’s been off his rocker,” Wilson said. “I’ve called the cops plenty of times.”

The police would take Leboon away, but never for more than a few hours, said James Hopkins, 39, brother of Leboon’s live-in partner, John Hopkins III.

“I’ve called the police for two years, and the City of Philadelphia has done nothing,” said James Hopkins, who lives across the street. [...]

According to Philadelphia court records, Leboon was arrested by police June 14 after he threatened to kill John Hopkins and slammed his face into a wall.

But at a July 28 hearing in Municipal Court, neither Leboon nor John Hopkins appeared, and Municipal Court Judge Frank T. Brady issued a warrant for Leboon’s arrest – a warrant that remains outstanding. [...]

“He’s made threats to Obama,” he said. “There’s threats to the pope. He threatens to stone him.”

The videos were made in Leboon’s kitchen on a desktop computer with a Web cam attached to the monitor, Hopkins said.

Wilson, who has three children, said parents would have to run out and grab their children when Leboon would come outside and start preaching that he was God.

Incredible!  The real story, given all of the above, is how the Reagan era policies that led to the closure of federal mental health hospitals, and thus no place to put the mentally ill, have been a complete failure (they knew it back then, too).

The failure is still with us.  Look at how many times Leboon, unstable and possibly carrying a gun, came into contact with authorities.  Now what is likely to happen to him?  He’ll be locked up in prison, which is the new mental health hospital.  He clearly needs treatment, not prison, but that’s not the way we roll in the U.S.A.

Wonkette is right to make light of the way this poor, troubled soul expressed himself on YouTube because it shows how much Cantor overreacted in an effort to discredit real threats made against Democratic lawmakers.

The larger issue remains that our country has no functional way to deal with our mentally ill.  It wasn’t just Eric Cantor that Leboon’s insanity focused on from his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Mayfair.  As Wonkette sardonically wrote, “He threatened George W. Bush and Barack Obama and David Duke and Harry Reid and the talking pig-god Babe, and we did nothing.”

Here’s his threat to President Obama from November 2009:

So to all the Republican folks who jumped on this poor schizophrenic’s ramblings as damning evidence that violent extremism is on both sides of the political spectrum (read this gloating post at Gather.com), you might want to hold your pens.  This guy is no more a liberal activist than he is the God of Enoch (which he claims he is).

I’m not insane.  I’m a normal person, just like you. Ok, so maybe I’m not normal.  Me and my hyperbole.  But still. I’m sane. I’m sane, and  I have a ghost living in my house.

I’m not one to easily believe in such things, but sometimes some powerful truth reaches out and grabs you no matter how practical a person you are.  During my divorce, I moved into this house in 2006 with my son who was then under three years old.  Shortly after I got a dog.  After a while, we added some fish.  Now?  We’ve added Nancy the ghost.

Not long after I moved in, I heard some odd noises in the house, and they scared the bejeebers out of me. I cannot recall the full context, but I believe I heard someone other than my son calling “Mommy”.   It was so odd, and so scary, that I blocked out the specifics. Being a person of relatively sound mind,  I chalked it up to being in a new house under very new circumstances. I talked myself into believing I was just on edge, which was understandable under the circumstances. It was an unfamiliar old house, I was on my own with a young child for the first time, and I was going through a divorce.  Clearly, a life in transition.

There had been rumors about ghosts living in this house from before I moved in, but I wasn’t sure I could sign onto that.  I began to question my reticence  when a neighbor came in to let my dog out while I was at work, and her daughter saw an old woman at the top of the stairs.  The woman was gone by the time the child’s mother got to the landing to look.

Then one night about a year after I moved in, my boyfriend at the time, Andrew, and I were in bed.  I heard an erie, high pitched, girlish voice say “MOMMY” from the room adjoining my bedroom.  Then I heard it again.   It was long and drawn out, like:  ”MOOOOMMMMY”. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at full attention.

The room where it came from is not near my son’s room, and the voice was not my son’s.  I turned quickly to look at Andrew, and he nodded and said, “I heard it too”.  My first thought was that it had to be my son, “how could it not be my son?” I thought as my mind raced for an explanation.  I got up out of bed to investigate.

Barefoot, I walked across the wide wood planks of my second floor landing to my son’s room, where the door was ajar as always. He was fast asleep.  It wasn’t him.  If he had spoken from his bed, the voice would have come from the other wall of my bedroom. The high pitched, almost creepy voice came from inside the adjoining room of the master bedroom.

Confused, I turned from my son’s room to walk back and was then facing the staircase down to the first level.  I then saw that the baby gate was not up.  Since I’d moved in I’d been putting a baby gate at the top at night, just in case my son got up in the middle of the night. I didn’t want him to accidentally fall down the stairs in a sleepy moment.  I fixed the gate, and wondered if that had been the reason for the disturbance.

I broke up with Andrew quite a while ago, and I’ve been with Dan now for over a year.   I’d warned Dan about this odd stuff in my house.  He was very kind to not call me the cookoo bird that I know he thought I was when I told him.  The ghost then saw to it that he knew I was not nuts, at least not about this.

A few weeks ago we were both in bed sleeping when Dan heard “MOOOOOOMMMMY”.  He says it woke him.  He was groggy, so he thought maybe it was my son, or maybe he had dreamed it.  Just when he was about to go back to sleep, he heard it again, loud and clear.  This time, he was certain it was not my son.  I never heard it, because I was fast asleep.

I mentioned this to my neighbor, who is apparently a medium and spiritual guide.  She offered to come over and see what she could pick up.  From her visit, we learned that this ghost dislikes my dining room.  There was a disturbance whenever she walked into the dining room.  I spend a lot of time in the dining room on the computer writing and facebooking, and sometimes working.  Tina looked at me and said “What do you do in here? She hates it here”.  Then Tina moved to the kitchen.  She said the kitchen was a place the ghost liked.  She liked the fish.  She wanted me to know the white fish was not named Cindy (my son named our boy beta fish Cindy.  The ghost, rightfully so, thought this was absurd).  She also wanted me to know that she liked our playroom, but that she wished she could have a toy of her own.  ”All the toys are boy toys”, she said.

Tina says that this ghost is a young girl of about 10.  She likes to be called Nancy, although we suspect this is not her real name.  She did not come with the house.  She was drawn to the house because of us.  We were already here when she arrived.  Tina communicated with the ghost a bit, who asked if she could please show me when she was around more often.  She also told us that my son, who is now 6, has no idea she’s here, and that she’d never scare him.  She wouldn’t promise, however, that he’d never see her, which was a bit disturbing.

Nancy did not want to tell us who she belonged to.  Initially she admitted that she came from someone Tina and I “both knew”.  Questions to figure out the identity were met with some anxiety.  The chain tina carries to sense these spirits began to twirl quickly.  Time to switch subjects.

Tina explained that Nancy was saying she liked our house because there was so much here that she never got to have.  She felt like she never got to have a mom, and she never got to have all those toys.  She liked being here, because she felt on some level, that I was like her mom.

Tina said that Nancy wanted me to know that she thought if I’d paid better attention, I’d have noticed her more often.  She told Tina that if I would just listen, then I’d know she was there.  Then, she told Tina to tell me that she only wakes us for a purpose.  She then explained, through Tina, that Adam had been having a nightmare the night she woke Dan, and she had wanted me to go to him.

Nancy also clarified that it had not been her at the top of the stairs when my neighbor’s child saw an old woman.  Nancy explained that while she is the only consistent entity here, sometimes “others come and go”.

Fantastic.

After talking extensively with Tina about the things she sensed from Nancy, it was finally time for the night to draw to a close.  Tina walked up the block to her house, and I was jittery all night.  Since then I haven’t really seen or heard anything else, although there have been episodes where I’ve smelled a super sweet smell of candy and vanilla in the dining room when I’m writing.

I’ve put a little pink VW bug in the play room, which has since gone missing. I don’t know if the children moved it, or if Nancy did.  The dog is sometimes hesitant to enter the playroom, and sometimes needs coaxing to go out through there to get to the yard.

I’m not sure what I believe about all this.  I can tell you that I do believe something is happening here in this house.  I have a pretty strong sense that whatever it is, it’s not malevolent.  What it is, exactly, I cannot say.

During the last snow storm I sent an email to Tina, asking if she thought perhaps Nancy might like to help shovel.  Apparently, the answer was no.  Oh well.  Can’t blame a girl for trying.

Angie Jackson was the first to do what we all knew was inevitable in the age of social media and exhibitionism: she tweeted her abortion live on Twitter.  From the Daily News:

In an attempt to “demystify” abortion, the 27-year-old shared her experience on Twitter, YouTube and her personal blog.

“I’m doing this so other women know, ‘Hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was.’ It’s just not that bad,” Jackson said on her YouTube video.

According to Jackson, she has received a negative response.  From an interview with the woefully misnamed website (for this story) Frisky:

A lot of them are sort of these throwaway statements in the comments of conservative blog and things like that. “Someone should put a bullet in her,” or “If the whore can’t keep her legs closed …” People have threatened to call Child Protective Services and take [my son] away from me because [of the abortion]. They’re either calling me a killer or calling me a monster, which is their right, but … I think we need to say quality of life matters. I don’t think an embryo gets to trump the life of my live son. I see this as risking my life.

New photos were released from both the NYPD and ABC News of aerial views of the burning and collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

When I look at these photos, I think about how people all over my country who only saw it from their television screens now use it in a way many New Yorkers disagree with, including myself.

Click either image to see more at the BBC.

Right now everywhere in political circles the recently-deceased John Murtha is being toasted by friend and former foe alike.  He was a man’s man and a politician’s politician.  It was hard not to like the character he cut.

That said, I don’t miss the King of Pork Congressman Murtha, who felt no shame in the game that earned him his moniker; the white elephant of waste that is the $200 million John Murtha airport his true legacy.

Liberals sort of fell for Murtha when he became anti-war because he was continually trumpeted in the media as a real “hawk”.  He’s still loved for that.

However, Murtha’s ‘grasp at the swill for my constituents because it’s my Constitutional duty’ style of politics were foolish before and ruinous now that the country’s economic outlook is so dire.  If we don’t start capping people like Richard Shelby at the knees, as we should have done to Murtha, our entire standard of living is threatened.  We simply can’t afford to spend this way anymore, nor allow our government to be run so ineffectually.  The war, tax-cut and high spending policies of the last ten years have hurt this country’s finances greatly, and we haven’t woken up to the economic reality yet.  Our leaders won’t tell us how bad it is because they are all too much like Congressman Murtha, or Senator Shelby, and because the cold hard truth of it all does not get them re-elected.

But a toast to John Murtha the man, may he rest in peace.

New York Times obituary.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)