“cult busted on whidbey island”

A search phrase that popped up in the stats page.  It doesn’t take a genius to know what set of entries this will lead one to on my blog, but I do wonder… some news here?

And looking up Whidbey Island in google news, I see this… with its typical suspicion and speculation about “Satanic Cults”.

Orange lights, flying saucers, cows killed by cults or aliens, we have it all here on South Whidbey and thanks to the Internet, the whole world knows about us.

A veritable Twin Peaks.  It’s a case where this place was just gnabbed by the public at large, pick a random point on the map and designate it as a place you can claim such horrors.

Otherwise I land on…  the “Chocolate Flower Farm”, described here as “The most amazing cult out there”, though I see no evidence of such a thing.

Of course, then we get this…

I used to live on whidbey island for several years and i must say, there was a problem with witchcraft there.

Hm… Boo?

Surely this term isn’t swerving into the world of Hate Groups of vintage history — you don’t usually look up “cult” to find White Aryan “Martyrs”.

So… who knows?

As for other big events of Whidbey Island… I would go ahead and take this line about a “Local Figure in the National News” —

Island County Commissioner John Dean, a Camano Island resident, said the high-profile case has shattered a lot of residents’ sense that they live in a place that’s “stuck in the 1950s” and there’s no need to lock doors.

And so goes the End of Innocence:

A local farmer who runs a produce stand on the “honor system” says theft has become such a problem that she’s been forced to close the popular business.

Not sure if I should really be all that sad a business like that is going away — seems to be false sentimentality here that I have to force myself toward.  I refuse to implant false nostalgia and fret over the lessons of “human nature” too much.

Hm.  Ziggy is taking on some heavy issues of Government secrecy.  Speaking out on behalf of Bradley Manning.  If he continues on this path, and such hard hitting themes, I expect that’s what Tom Wilson’s gravesite will look like.

Mutts, on the other hand, is going the way of the tv show The West Wing, which served for Democrats during the Bush Administration as a model of a more ideal presidential administration.  In this case, this is the liberal fantasy of how a Senate Filibuster should work  instead of forcing a 60 vote threshold on all votes– what we should see is Mitch Mcconnell sending out his troops to bark and bark and bark and put in the effort when stifling the 60 vote tally.

The next Mutts episode features a reference to The Big Lebowski.  The next Ziggy is a mouse joke.

In certain respects, I kind of just want to take all the Kevin Curtis asides — my comment in the sort of “Boston Marathon bombers are more like Columbine than al Qaeda” mode was that he is “more like the man who shot James Garfield than the man who shot Abraham Lincoln —

and just burn them.

The Man’s Innocent.  He’s been dragged through some mud here, and whatever his mental state is it does not include sending ricin to President Obama and Senator Roger Wicker.  So, blah de blah to “Elvis Has Left the Building”, and at the end of it I don’t even know if my seconding of such a sentiment is a joke:

Maybe he will get some gigs out of this. After all, embedded in all the articles about his alleged crimes came the ringing endorsement from Sen. Roger Wicker, who hired him as a Elvis impersonator one time and commented that “he was very entertaining.” If his interviews so far are any indication, that’s surely true.

An interesting twist here, for the partisan grabber gotchers.  This suspect was a Democrat (if a very flaky one.)  The new suspect is a Republican — by the name of Everett Dutschke.  And here the politics gets a little curious.

Dutschke has also run unsuccessfully for the Mississippi legislature, and at one point, according to the AP, he threatened to sue Curtis for claiming to be a member of Mensa. Meanwhile—how did I get this far without mentioning this part?—Curtis claims to have uncovered a “secret shadow government” that exists to conceal an “illegal organ harvesting market.” In 2011 he issued an appeal to former Reason reporter Radley Balko to protect him from the conspiracy.

So… was the Elvis Impersonator framed… by this Dutschke guy who I guess has a vendetta against Curtis, Obama, Wicker, and — we may note –that the third person that ricin was sent to… was the “mother of the person who defeated Dutschke” in his  race for state legislature.    [Margin of defeat … 71.03 percent to 28.57 percent.)

And, I don’t know… Please don’t do this.

Just when you think the GOP can’t get any crazier …

Understand, this man may well be cleared in the end… though his reaction to hearing of the charges dropped did reek of the “oh, shit”… nevermind, a few days ago I’d have suspected the damned Elvis Impersonator… In the meantime, as we wait for things to play out, I do enjoy the Current Digital Age where the news media provides url link fills of tangentially connected data — see here:

has turned its focus to J. Everett Dutschke, a Tupelo, Miss., taekwondo instructor [Link], blues band frontman [Link] and failed political candidate, according to the local Clarion-Ledger [link] newspaper.

[VIDEO: Watch the Elvis, Johnny Cash Impersonations of the Accused Ricin Mailer]

Followed in this story by youtube video where he uses the phrase “don’t hardly know him”… Southern dialect, I suppose…

And No, I don’t know that the supposed motive  makes sense…

Curtis’s attorneys suggested in court that their client may have been framed by Dutschke because he is a rival, according to the Clarion-Ledger. Both men do martial arts, are politically active and are local music celebrities, though Dutschke’s group describes itself on Facebook as “rock with tons of lasers,” while Curtis mostly sticks to impersonations of 50 rock ‘n’ roll icons including Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash and Elvis.

Rock with tons of lasers?

And what does his twitter page reveal?  Fan of Glenn Beck.  You know… maybe I will go ahead and go with the partisan angling.  What I’m looking for is details of the political race he was running, and all I see so far is …

Brandon Presley, Mississippi’s northern district public service commissioner and a distant cousin of Elvis Presley, attended the 2007 political rally in Verona. He told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he remembers Dutschke giving a “militant” speech with personal and professional attacks Steve Holland.
Presley, also a Democrat, said he doesn’t recall details of the speech — just the tone of it, and the crowd’s reaction.
“I just remember everybody’s jaw dropping,” Presley said.
Dutschke, who ran as a Republican, said his speech included sharp criticism of Steve Holland’s record in public office.
Steve Holland said earlier this week that his mother made Dutschke get down on his knees at the 2007 rally and apologize. On Wednesday, he said he was mistaken about her telling Dutschke to kneel.
“She just got up and said ‘Sir, you will apologize,” Steve Holland said.
Dutschke said Steve Holland exaggerated the incident. Presley said he remembers Sadie Holland chastising Dutschke.

And looking about for more… his youtube videos from the campaign have been “privatized”.   That Figures.

Point:  The message ‘Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,’ was tweeted from the Associated Press news agency, causing panic to some of their near 2 million followers. […]

In a graph capturing traders’ apparent panic, the DOW Jones Industrial average took a straight dive plunging from about 14,700 to around 14,570 before gradually shooting back up in a three-minute roller coaster. 
Some traders blamed automatic electronic trading for the sharp fall and recovery and not human reaction to the report.
‘No human believed the story. Only the computers react to something that serious disseminated in such a way. I bought some stock well and did not sell into it. Humans win,’ Rick Fier, director of equity trading at Conifer Securities LLC in New York, overseeing $8 billion in assets, told Bloomberg.

Counterpoint:  On the one hand, it illustrated the efficiency of the markets, said Henry Hu, a law professor at the University of Texas and former top Securities and Exchange Commission official.

Just so long as you step away from the computer and override it, or is the theory that “things will work themselves out”.  (Ie:  market recovered pretty quickly from this glitch, right?)

I like the fact that the BBC dredged up this “Cat in tree” photo to illustrate the metaphor of … the global economy being like a cat stuck in a tree.

  It makes me wonder what other stock images, easily grabbed by looking the phrases up on google, that they could pull out.

Imagine the headline that things are like …

The current global economy is like…

We’re Up a Creek Without A Paddle!

  OR MAYBE… What we’re seeing is all a DOG AND PONY SHOW.  

Or… Everything’s Gone to Pot.

Well, those will be the next BBC articles on the topic of the global economy, I presume.