September 24, 2007 archive

Pony Party: Monday NFL Roundup (with poem!!)

Arizona 23 Baltimore 26
San Diego 24 Green Bay 31
Indiannopolis 30 Houston 24
Minnesota 10 Kansas City 13
Buffalo 7 New England 38
Miami 28 NY Jets 31
Detroit 21 Philadelphia 56
San Francisco 16 Pittsburgh 37
St Louis 3 Tampa Bay 24
Jacksonville 23 Denver 14
Cleveland 24 Oakland 26
Cincinnati 21 Seattle 24
Carolina 27 Atlanta 20
NY Giants 24 Washington 17
Dallas _34 Chicago _10

Tennessee @ New Orleans, 8:30 edt (ESPN)

Bury My Heart In Mother Earth [Updated & Updated]

Now that Native Alaska Villages will probably have to relocate, because the ice is melting underneath them,I have no words at this point, only tears.

Emily Dickinson – I measure every grief…

There’s grief of want, and grief of cold,–

A sort they call ‘despair,’

There’s banishment from native eyes,

In sight of native air.

[Update #2]:

I want to respond to all the beautiful comments, I just can’t think right now. I came home from work sick and need to take care of myself. I’ll remember this moment though, etched in my memory forever…of where I was and what I was doing when just before the tipping point was by and large unavoidable and highly likely to be totally breached in the near future – and it already has been breached
“on parts of the world – in particular Africa, Asian river deltas, low-lying islands and the Arctic.” My god, am I reading that right?

I’m choosing love over fear

Mitakuye Oyasin

Fighting Faux

Since so many essayists and commenters are interested in the activities and consequences of people espousing ideology of false patriotism, dominionism, fundamentalism and other -isms, I thought I’d play with the principles a bit and explore what can be done to counteract the effects.

The framework of a preferred paradigm that I’m using is that of embracing the classic virtues. Don’t remember them?  You’re not alone.

But along with rediscovering our shared history, we might do worse than to rediscover and revisit the classic virtues.

A caveat for those of you who aren’t familiar with my posts:  I am very dyslexic, myopic, and arthritic.  I re-read my posts and most often continue to edit them for wrong words, poor grammar and unclear sentences after I post. I appreciate it when readers point our errors, and I do my best to make posts works-in-progress which reflect commenters’ participation and contributions.
 

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News THE TOP STORY

And the only one-

1 US says Iran smuggling missiles to Iraq
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer
59 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – The U.S. military accused Iran on Sunday of smuggling surface-to-air missiles and other advanced weapons into Iraq for use against American troops. The new allegations came as Iraqi leaders condemned the latest U.S. detention of an Iranian in northern Iraq, saying the man was in their country on official business.

Military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said U.S. troops were continuing to find Iranian-supplied weaponry including the Misagh 1, a portable surface-to-air missile that uses an infrared guidance system.

Other advanced Iranian weaponry found in Iraq includes the RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade, 240 mm rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, Fox said.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Suggested Improvements for America…

Suggested Improvements for America in No Specific Order

When it comes right down to it all we have are our thoughts:

1. American television needs to modernize and by that I mean it needs to get away from entertainment and into filling needs.  Ex: An Employment Channel – it would list jobs available in different cities, explore union issues, explain apprenticeship programs and promote job fairs.  Ex 2. The Real Estate Channel – it would list real estate real time and give quick tours of the select properties, explain the ins and outs of home ownership in various regions, explore public and private home ownership programs, etc.

1a. Mandatory Free Air Time for Candidates – the time could be used in ads, campaign infomercials, one on one discussions with other candidates, interviews etc. Each candidate is given the same amount of airtime on any stations they choose.

2. Late Night Delivery Vans for College Towns – they would sell beer, condoms, tampons, smokes and snacks.

3. State Worker Dorms – save the environment and a few lives each day in your  State Capitol.  State Workers must live in the dorms 5 days a week.  :P~

4. Republican Detainment Centers – in order to save us all from non-stop verbal abuse and pathological incompetence on a grand scale each town will convert a defunct Magnet School Campus into a republican detainment center.

5. Resort Reclamation – Resorts of all sorts do not add to the bottom line of local economies, in fact they often are a drain on local economies, push taxes higher, ruin the local ecology and increase traffic 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the area surrounding the resort.  Every year for the next 10 years every resort in America must turn over 15% of it’s properties for lower income families to live in. 

My 9/11 Theory Vol.2: 9/11 Changed Everything

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A basic Pamphlet for Non-voters and Republicans alike

This is a work in progress. To say the least.  I tapped this out this morning. Basically, I can only feel my heart drop when I hear uninformed people making comments about what is going on in the country and about all of our futures.  I don’t even debate them. But I want to have something to hand them. A pamphlet. Something that paints the entire picture.

Below the flip is just the introduction to pamphlet I am creating. If you care to read through some or all of it (I know it’s long), I would appreciate any critiques or advice.  I got to where I stopped today… the part where I start to go into what the Bush Administration has been up to. I am going to have to tackle that more methodically; there are so many crimes!

It’s Confirmed: Dick Cheney is an official “Evil Genius”

Doctor Evil can’t hold a candle to this guy, both in the depths of his machinations and in his proclivity to do exactly the wrong thing strategically.

I did a quick search to see if anyone had noticed this little item buried deep in the
Newsweek article on Israel’s raid on Syria… didn’t see it anywhere, so here’s the money graph:

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Kate Bush


Wuthering Heights

Neo-Nazis Target Jena 6


The American National Socialist Workers Party has reportedly targeted the Jena 6 and called for some vigilante justice.

The FBI is reviewing a white supremacist Web site that purports to list the addresses of five of the six black teenagers accused of beating a white student in Jena and “essentially called for their lynching,” an agency spokeswoman said Saturday.

Sheila Thorne, an agent in the FBI’s New Orleans office, said authorities were reviewing whether the site breaks any federal laws. She said the FBI had “gathered intelligence on the matter,” but declined to further explain how the agency got involved.

CNN first reported Friday about the Web site, which features a swastika, frequent use of racial slurs, a mailing address in Roanoke, Va., and phone numbers purportedly for some of the teens’ families “in case anyone wants to deliver justice.” That page is dated Thursday.

The Allure of the Fake Everything

One

Let us all nod our heads sagely . . . 

The Axiom of Existence: “Existence exists.”

The first axiom states that something other than one’s own consciousness exists. If it did not, according to Rand, consciousness itself would be an impossibility. Rand believes that this principle is self-evident (its truth is given in perceptual experience) and such that any attempt to refute it implicitly assumes it. This axiom entails metaphysical realism, the view that things are what they are independently of the mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) of individual cognizers.


— exposition of Ayn Rand

Now . . . you tell me.  I think I’ve just been told that a tautology entails “metaphysical realism”.  In other words, if you’ve ever scratched your head wondering if maybe you haven’t lived your life in a dream, or in the Matrix, you can rest assured you have not, because, well, “existence exists” and whatnot.  This is heady stuff!   Ice cream headspike heady.

Moving on . . .

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. This is the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character. 

— Ayn Rand herself

I enjoy being told that my character is “determined” by my “only freedom” (drum roll please): the freedom to not think.  Self-improvement with a good mallet.  Well, it worked for Harrison Ford in “Regarding Henry”, though he needed a bullet. 

On the list of sentences I get a real kick out of, the first was pointed out by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison: the Frugal Gourmet reminding us that “Irish immigrants came to this country wishing to maintain their love for the potato.”  But, “Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival,” is a close second, for sheer moxie.  Objectivists do like their “reason”, dontcha know.

One would have thought that a person willing to trumpet her view as “Objectivism” would have the decency never, ever, to say that “reason” is the “only source of knowledge”.  The world can go take a hike, apparently — a hike in an objective park, I hope.  Love dem objective boids.

(Continued . . .)

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