February 7, 2008 archive

Not long after the 2006 election, I came to the realization that the Republican party needed to go, and so I wrote a piece explaining my reasoning and an overview of how I thought it could be accomplished.  But for various reasons (primarily I still lacked the self-confidence), I never posted it anywhere and eventually forgot about it completely.

Then buhdy posted his essay Good Thing They Don’t Believe In Evolution and I saw this line:

DESTROY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

“Holy shit,” I thought!  “I wrote something saying exactly that about a year ago!  Wonder if I ever finished it….”  So I went off in search of it, and lo and behold, there it was, still sitting on my hard drive.  And it was completed, too!

I wasn’t sure if I should post it in it’s original form or edit it to reflect my current outlook.  I was naive enough at the time to believe the Dems might actually start working for us, and I had done very little research into voting systems, laws, etc.  I might also have worded some parts a bit differently, now.  But after looking at it and wavering back and forth, I finally decided to leave it as is.  (Okay, I admit laziness played a part.  I don’t feel like rewriting it.)

I wrote this a little over half a year after I beat my depression.  (Took me about 15 years to do it, and it’s been about two years since, but that’s another essay.)  In a comment I wrote, I said that it can take me a long time to decide on something, but once I decide, I don’t mess around.  This is a case in point.  Once I decided to become politically engaged (around mid to late summer in ’06, I think; first comment I ever made on DK was in August), from that point to when I wrote this piece, I went from being completely clueless about politics to someone who was engaged and actually knew more in some cases than the rest of my immediate family (who aren’t exactly political slouches).  I became the family political geek.  So for me, this is not just an essay about destroying the Republican party, it’s also a look back at a milestone in my personal growth.

The only editing I’ve done is some formatting so it looks perty.

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…

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

An international team of experts has submitted a report that lists nine tipping elements — areas of concern for lawmakers — that quantify how much time is left to address their impending impact.

Produced by scientists from the U.K, Germany and the U.S., the study states: “Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,” and goes on to predict the critical threshold at which a small change in human activity can have large, long-term consequences for the Earth’s climate system.

“These tipping elements are candidates for surprising society by exhibiting a nearby tipping point,” the report states. “Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought,” said lead author Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England. “Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under human-induced climate change.”

Link to the list below the jump…