Oct 11 2007
According to the LiveScience.com story picked up by Yahoo!News, the website BetUS.com is taking bets as to who will win the Nobel Peace Prize. (LiveScience.com is a great website which I wholly recommend; BetUS.com is a subscription site I’ve never participated with.)
Al Gore is currently the favorite at 5:2.
Long shots paying at 100:1 right now include George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Blair.
Oct 11 2007
AP:
English writer Doris Lessing, who ended her formal schooling at age 13 and went on to write novels that explored relationships between women and society and interracial dynamics, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, was born to British parents who were living in what at the time was Persia. The family later moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where she spent her childhood and adolescent years.
She made her debut with “The Grass Is Singing” in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical “Children Of Violence” series, set in Africa and England. . . .
Her breakthrough was “The Golden Notebook,” in 1962, the Swedish Academy said.
“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.
Oct 11 2007
Outrage Alert!
Today’s distraction of the day is brought to you by, wait for it, republicans in Congress. Imagine that, a distraction from a republican. This time it combines many of their favorite topics, godless Democrats, the flag and how religious folks are persecuted.
Oct 11 2007
Also available in Orange
From the Washington Post:
“We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor.
Oct 11 2007
Scream All You Want. Its an Open Thread
Yesterday President Bush announced that he was against the passage of a Congressional Resolution calling the massacre of Armenians by the Turkish military in 1915 Genocide.
I urge members to oppose the Armenian genocide resolution now being considered by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.
However when the “Cheerleader for Torture” was a candidate in 2000 he was signing a whole different tune.
The twentieth century was marred by wars of unimaginable brutality, mass murder and genocide. History records that the Armenians were the first people of the last century to have endured these cruelties. The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.
Look Inside and Discover WaiWai
Oct 11 2007
 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…
[Inside: Part VI and Epilogue of America the Ugly]
Oct 11 2007
Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year. I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best. Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them. And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather. So, I’ll tell you why.
It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind. Take, for example, Marxism. Marx knew a lot about economics, about philosophy, and about politics. But every single society based on Marxism, from the Soviet Union to each commune and kibbutz has eventually failed, and failed badly. The reason for that is simple: Marx understood people, individual people, very poorly.
This is the root of my politics: that it has to be about people, and how they really live. I don’t support legalization of heroin and marijuana, prostitution and gambling, property rights and gun rights, because I think any of those things are so great in and of themselves. People will abuse drugs beyond their capacity to manage, cheat on their spouses and lose their paychecks, believe in the ownership of their property and seek to defend themselves with violence, whether I condone it or not. Policies meant to attack these things will inevitably fail and cause great injustice.
Oct 11 2007
Incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier on the “Highway of Death,” a name the press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bombing and strafing the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being [pictured above] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who “are out of combat.” —War Crimes
The 1990/91 Gulf War, The Death Of Reason, the ensuing long years of the sanctions war against the people of Iraq, the 2003 invasion of the country, and the ongoing occupation of Iraq since, are all aspects of and symptoms created by something much larger and much more insidious: War On Terror: The Rise Of The Politics of Fear.
Oct 11 2007
I don’t really like swimming very much though I’ve done a lot of it. I find it difficult to enjoy myself in the water because there’s always this sense that I should be doing something.
When I was in Swim Team we’d do 3 to 5 miles a day and it is the most boring, grinding, isolated kind of exercise you can imagine. No view except the feet of the person in front of you. Nothing to hear except an occasional whistle when you breathe. Endless circles of aching effort regulated by 15 or 30 second breaks before it is time to push off again. I’d sing symphonies in my head (I was into long haired music- Mozart, Bach, and Brahms) to alleviate the endless counting. Stroke, stroke, stoke, stroke, stroke, stoke… 25. Stroke, stroke, stoke, stroke, stroke, stoke… 50.
Everything about me stank of chlorine all the time. My hair turned green. I’d tell you my fingers and toes turned permanently pruney but that’s not quite true, they usually recover after a couple of hours.
Monday through Friday 6 to 8 and if you were on the elite squad there were the mandatory practices from 6 to 7 in the morning. In the winter your hair would freeze and in the summer?
Ah… nothing like an outdoor pool in the early morning after it’s had all night to cool off.
I’ve had my head burnt to near Emergency Room levels when someone flushed the toilet while I was in the shower (actually I should probably have gone, it was that bad). I’ve swum in pools so green you couldn’t see the bottom and had to feel for the wall (no flip turns, Team safety orders).
You get to a point where you can tell by feel fast water where you’ll get good times and personal bests from slow water. But it’s slow for everybody as coach would say.
Anyway, now that I’m no longer a professional Life Guard and have to do my 400 yards every day, I rarely swim except to get somewhere and it should be somewhere fun. A rock you can jump off. A boat you can sail. I will take a dip to cool off, but I hardly call it swimming, in and out. I watch kids play in pools and I think- how are they having fun?
Oct 11 2007
People like comparisons because they help to give them some perspective on historical and recent historical events. Direct comparisons cannot be made for the obvious reasons: No two eras or people are the same. Yet politicians seem to thrive on making just such comparisons especially when it comes to Americas greatest Presidents. George W. Bush is no exception as he likes to compare himself to President Harry S. Truman. As stated direct comparisons really can’t be made but lets try and compare their leadership styles.
Oct 11 2007
Hey, y’all. I have just recently returned from the NYC Mega Meetup. And I’ll freely admit to being somewhat on the too many side of my two or too many rule. It was a lovely event, invigorating both socially and politically. Good thing, since I’ve been feeling pretty politically depressed.
It’s fun to get out of the tubez and into the flesh!
Anywho, I mentioned this to the one and only Ms. Nightprowlkitty and she and I think that a Docudharma Meet-up is in order! Now, not only because New York is the center of the world (I keed! I keed!), but also because she and I both live here, we propose to hold a Docudharma meet-up in NYC.
So, who’s up for an NYC Docudharma Meetup?
Mid-week is best for a Manhattan venue–not too crowded. Npk and I are looking at November. How does Wednesday, November 14th work for people? Let’s figure out the who and the when and then we can take care of the where.
Out of the tubez and into the flesh, Docudharmists!
