Air Water Ground

Another fun watch from The Long Now

2012-03-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Always interesting fellows on "Human Progress"
http://fora.tv/2008/04/28/Niall_Ferguson_and_Peter_Schwartz_on_Human_Progress#fullprogram

We coulda been a contenda

2012-02-27T08:38:00.000-08:00

"I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughing stock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case."

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/27/147351252/space-chronicles-why-exploring-space-still-matters

Hardly news

2012-01-25T19:00:00.000-08:00

For some reason this is big "news" today. Hardly news. Is this not what we have been doing since 1945? this document only clarifies that we are now permanently adopting the geo-political status of Great Britain in 1939.

National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_strategy_for_global_supply_chain_security.pdf

China, the momentum is now yours...

Harris v Hedges

2012-01-04T09:29:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prWFkt9-HT0

An Interesting Chris Hedges Interview

2012-01-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zotYU21qcU&feature=youtu.be

The first privatization

2011-10-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany, Germà Bel* Universitat de Barcelona i ppre-IREA http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.pdf

The Mad Max Skill Set?

2011-10-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

"Here are 10 invaluable skills that will likely help you sustain yourself in a hand-made local world: "
http://www.luckinlove.com/madmaxskills.htm

Just for fun...

2011-08-11T13:02:00.001-07:00

Thanks for the link Susan

Scale of The Universe Toolhttp://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

Way cool

An American Creed?

2011-08-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

The I Believe monologue by minor character Samantha Black Crow, from the book "American Gods", by Neil Gaiman. The book is being adapted into a 6 season series by HBO. But, read the book anyway.

" I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Idiot Wind

2011-07-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to the incurious majority on this date, in the House of Representatives of the Congress of The United States of America.

"Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skullFrom the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe"
Bob Dylan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWLjgPTR_c&feature=related

The original meaning/use of the word "Idiot"

"An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private--as opposed to public--affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education . ...Today, educators and political scientists increasingly resurrect this terminology's etymological origins in order to discuss a growing major problem with modern American republican democracy: self-centeredness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_(Athenian_democracy)

And today's wind:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr2560pcs/pdf/BILLS-112hr2560pcs.pdf

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bd8Nls:@@@D&summ2=m&/home/LegislativeData.php

.

Open Access journal on evolutionary psychology

2011-05-31T12:12:00.000-07:00

"Evolutionary Psychology is an open-access peer-reviewed journal that aims to foster communication between experimental and theoretical work on the one hand and historical, conceptual and interdisciplinary writings across the whole range of the biological and human sciences on the other."

http://www.epjournal.net/

Pinker on Violence

2011-05-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

A short take on something that is factually supported (I have read a number of books & papers on this subject.)
( I recommend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization )

http://www.virtualprofessors.com/a-brief-history-of-violence-steven-pinker-harvard

Ed Markey 03/10/2011

2011-03-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

Ed Markey, Representative for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, addressing the United States House of Representatives, 03/10/2011

"Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won't physically rise, because I'm worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won't call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I'll embody Newton's third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America's importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger's cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair's amendment pile."

.

Which side are you on?

2011-02-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeKYVxvzKcU

Hmmm and this guy was a Republican

2011-02-15T13:23:00.000-08:00

New Nationalism Speech

Theodore Roosevelt
1910
Note: The audience: veterans of the Civil War army (Union).
We come here to-day to commemorate one of the epoch-making events of the long struggle for the rights of man-the long struggle for the uplift of humanity. Our country-this great Republic-means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. That is why the history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world; for the world has set its face hopefully toward our democracy; and, O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind.

There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated; and, in the second of these great crises-in the time of stress and strain which culminated in the Civil War, on the outcome of which depended the justification of what had been done earlier, you men of the Grand Army, you men who fought through the Civil War, not only did you justify your generation, but you justified the wisdom of Washington and Washington’s colleagues. If this Republic had been founded by them only to be split asunder into fragments when the strain came, then the judgment of the world would have been that Washington’s work was not worth doing. It was you who crowned Washington’s work, as you carried to achievement the high purpose of Abraham Lincoln.

Now, with this second period of our history the name of John Brown will forever be associated; and Kansas was the theatre upon which the first act of the second of our great national life dramas was played. It was the result of the struggle in Kansas which determined that our country should be in deed as well as in name devoted to both union and freedom; that the great experiment of democratic government on a national scale should succeed and not fail. In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life. I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present. I speak of the men of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the future.

It was a heroic struggle; and, as is inevitable with all such struggles, it had also a dark and terrible side. Very much was done of good, and much also of evil; and, as was inevitable in such a period of revolution, often the same man did both good and evil. For our great good fortune as a nation, we, the people of the United States as a whole, can now afford to forget the evil, or, at least, to remember it without bitterness, and to fix our eyes with pride only on the good that was accomplished. Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed. Looking back, we are all of us now able to do justice to the valor and the disinterestedness and the love of the right, as to each it was given to see the right, shown both by the men of the North and the men of the South in that contest which was finally decided by the attitude of the West. We can admire the heroic valor, the sincerity, the self-devotion shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray; and our sadness that such men should have to fight one another is tempered by the glad knowledge that ever hereafter their descendants shall be fighting side by side, struggling in peace as well as in war for the uplift of their common country, all alike resolute to raise to the highest pitch of honor and usefulness the nation to which they all belong. As for the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, they deserve honor and recognition such as is paid to no other citizens of the Republic; for to them the republic owes it all; for to them it owes its very existence. It is because of what you and your comrades did in the dark years that we of to-day walk, each of us, head erect, and proud that we belong, not to one of a dozen little squabbling contemptible commonwealths, but to the mightiest nation upon which the sun shines.

I do not speak of this struggle of the past merely from the historic standpoint. Our interest is primarily in the application to-day of the lessons taught by the contest a half a century ago. It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises. It is half melancholy and half amusing to see the way in which well-meaning people gather to do honor to the men who, in company with John Brown, and under the lead of Abraham Lincoln, faced and solved the great problems of the nineteenth century, while, at the same time, these same good people nervously shrink from, or frantically denounce, those who are trying to meet the problems of the twentieth century in the spirit which was accountable for the successful solution of the problems of Lincoln’s time.

Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:

"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."
And again:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln’s. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the working man hear his side.
"Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. . . . Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."
And then comes a thoroughly Lincoln-like sentence:
"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."
It seems to me that, in these words, Lincoln took substantially the attitude that we ought to take; he showed the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights. Above all, in this speech, as in many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us of today. But this wise kindliness and charity never weakened his arm or numbed his heart. We cannot afford weakly to blind ourselves to the actual conflict which faces us today. The issue is joined, and we must fight or fail.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?

Now, this means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business. I do not wish to see the nation forced into the ownership of the railways if it can possibly be avoided, and the only alternative is thoroughgoing and effective legislation, which shall be based on a full knowledge of all the facts, including a physical valuation of property. This physical valuation is not needed, or, at least, is very rarely needed, for fixing rates; but it is needed as the basis of honest capitalization.

We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important scale. I have no doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves. I have no doubt he would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well.

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare. For that purpose the Federal Bureau of Corporations is an agency of first importance. Its powers, and, therefore, its efficiency, as well as that of the Interstate Commerce Commission, should be largely increased. We have a right to expect from the Bureau of Corporations and from the Interstate Commerce Commission a very high grade of public service. We should be as sure of the proper conduct of the interstate railways and the proper management of interstate business as we are now sure of the conduct and management of the national banks, and we should have as effective supervision in one case as in the other. The Hepburn Act, and the amendment to the act in the shape in which it finally passed Congress at the last session, represent a long step in advance, and we must go yet further.

There is a wide-spread belief among our people that, under the methods of making tariffs which have hitherto obtained, the special interests are too influential. Probably this is true of both the big special interests and the little special interests. These methods have put a premium on selfishness, and, naturally, the selfish big interests have gotten more than their smaller, though equally selfish, brothers. The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration. To this end there must be an expert tariff commission, wholly removed from the possibility of political pressure or of improper business influence. Such a commission can find the real difference between cost of production, which is mainly the difference of labor cost here and abroad. As fast as its recommendations are made, I believe in revising one schedule at a time. A general revision of the tariff almost inevitably leads to logrolling and the subordination of the general public interest to local and special interests.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

The people of the United States suffer from periodical financial panics to a degree substantially unknown to the other nations, which approach us in financial strength. There is no reason why we should suffer what they escape. It is of profound importance that our financial system should be promptly investigated, and so thoroughly and effectively revised as to make it certain that hereafter our currency will no longer fail at critical times to meet our needs.

It is hardly necessary to me to repeat that I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guaranty of peace. A word of special warning to my fellow citizens who are as progressive as I hope I am. I want them to keep up their interest in our international affairs; and I want them also continually to remember Uncle Sam’s interests abroad. Justice and fair dealings among nations rest upon principles identical with those which control justice and fair dealing among the individuals of which nations are composed, with the vital exception that each nation must do its own part in international police work. If you get into trouble here, you can call for the police; but if Uncle Sam gets into trouble, he has got to be his own policeman, and I want to see him strong enough to encourage the peaceful aspirations of other people’s in connection with us. I believe in national friendships and heartiest good-will to all nations; but national friendships, like those between men, must be founded on respect as well as on liking, on forbearance as well as upon trust. I should be heartily ashamed of any American who did not try to make the American government act as justly toward the other nations in international relations as he himself would act toward any individual in private relations. I should be heartily ashamed to see us wrong a weaker power, and I should hang my head forever if we tamely suffered wrong from a stronger power.

Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

Moreover, I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude. People forget now that one hundred years ago there were public men of good character who advocated the nation selling its public lands in great quantities, so that the nation could get the most money out of it, and giving it to the men who could cultivate it for their own uses. We took the proper democratic ground that the land should be granted in small sections to the men who were actually to till it and live on it. Now, with the water-power, with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.

I have spoken elsewhere also of the great task which lies before the farmers of the country to get for themselves and their wives and children not only the benefits of better farming, but also those of better business methods and better conditions of life on the farm. The burden of this great task will fall, as it should, mainly upon the great organizations of the farmers themselves. I am glad it will, for I believe they are all well able to handle it. In particular, there are strong reasons why the Departments of Agriculture of the various states, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the agricultural colleges and experiment stations should extend their work to cover all phases of farm life, instead of limiting themselves, as they have far too often limited themselves in the past, solely to the question of the production of crops. And now a special word to the farmer. I want to see him make the farm as fine a farm as it can be made; and let him remember to see that the improvement goes on indoors as well as out; let him remember that the farmer’s wife should have her share of thought and attention just as much as the farmer himself.

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

But I think we may go still further. The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them. We need comprehensive workman’s compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we need in our common schools not merely education in book-learning, but also practical training for daily life and work. We need to enforce better sanitary conditions for our workers and to extend the use of safety appliances for workers in industry and commerce, both within and between the States. Also, friends, in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers. If I could ask but one thing of my fellow countrymen, my request would be that, whenever they go in for reform, they remember the two sides, and that they always exact justice from one side as much as from the other. I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before election, to say a word about lawless mob-violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench or editor of a great paper, or wealthy and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob-violence, but whose eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption of business on a gigantic scale. Also, remember what I said about excess in reformer and reactionary alike. If the reactionary man, who thinks of nothing but the rights of property, could have his way, he would bring about a revolution; and one of my chief fears in connection with progress comes because I do not want to see our people, for lack of proper leadership, compelled to follow men whose intentions are excellent, but whose eyes are a little too wild to make it really safe to trust them. Here in Kansas there is one paper which habitually denounces me as the tool of Wall Street, and at the same time frantically repudiates the statement that I am a Socialist on the ground that that is an unwarranted slander of the Socialists.

National efficiency has many factors. It is a necessary result of the principle of conservation widely applied. In the end, it will determine our failure or success as a nation. National efficiency has to do, not only with natural resources and with men, but it is equally concerned with institutions. The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions. It is a misfortune when the national legislature fails to do its duty in providing a national remedy, so that the only national activity is the purely negative activity of the judiciary in forbidding the State to exercise power in the premises.

I do not ask for the over centralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism where we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike. The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the National Government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the National Government.

The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.

I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally, and in the long run, the ends are the same; but whenever the alternative must be faced, I am for men and not for property, as you were in the Civil War. I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below human character. Again, I do not have any sympathy with the reformer who says he does not care for dividends. Of course, economic welfare is necessary, for a man must pull his own weight and be able to support his family. I know well that the reformers must not bring upon the people economic ruin, or the reforms themselves will go down in the ruin. But we must be ready to face temporary disaster, whether or not brought on by those who will war against us to the knife. Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.

If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people whose servants they are. More direct action by the people in their own affairs under proper safeguards is vitally necessary. The direct primary is a step in this direction, if it is associated with a corrupt-services act effective to prevent the advantage of the man willing recklessly and unscrupulously to spend money over his more honest competitor. It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well. Political action must be made simpler, easier, and freer from confusion for every citizen. I believe that the prompt removal of unfaithful or incompetent public servants should be made easy and sure in whatever way experience shall show to be most expedient in any given class of cases.

One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests. I believe that every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations; and a similar provision could not fail to be useful within the States.

The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs,-but, first of all, sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well,-just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success. We must have-I believe we have already-a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent. Let me again illustrate by a reference to the Grand Army. You could not have won simply as a disorderly and disorganized mob. You needed generals; you needed careful administration of the most advanced type; and a good commissary-the cracker line. You well remember that success was necessary in many different lines in order to bring about general success. You had to have the administration at Washington good, just as you had to have the administration in the field; and you had to have the work of the generals good. You could not have triumphed without the administration and leadership; but it would all have been worthless if the average soldier had not had the right stuff in him. He had to have the right stuff in him, or you could not get it out of him. In the last analysis, therefore, vitally necessary though it was to have the right kind of organization and the right kind of generalship, it was even more vitally necessary that the average soldier should have the fighting edge, the right character. So it is in our civil life. No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation. That is imperative; but it must be an addition to, and not a substitute for, the qualities that make us good citizens. In the last analysis, the most important elements in any man’s career must be the sum of those qualities which, in the aggregate, we speak of as character. If he has not got it, then no law that the wit of man can devise, no administration of the law by the boldest and strongest executive, will avail to help him. We must have the right kind of character-character that makes a man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, and a good husband-that makes a man a good neighbor. You must have that, and, then, in addition, you must have the kind of law and the kind of administration of the law which will give to those qualities in the private citizen the best possible chance for development. The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

On Wasting Deer

2011-02-04T07:14:00.000-08:00

This morning's news carried a story on new research of how the version of CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) in White Tailed Deer, could "jump" the specie barrier to humans (not probable at this point, but possible). I would like to write a few words on the ultimate "why" of the deer CWD problem.
That problem is inefficient predation.
Human's are the main predator of the White Tail, but their method is biologically inefficient. What i mean by efficient in this context is hunting that selects for the injured, sick, old, slow etc. Efficient hunting makes for healthier, fitter prey.
Certainly on our ancestral landscape we where efficient hunters during alot of our history, and the Kalahari Bushmen still do it the old fashioned way (Google around on Kalahari Bushmen persistence hunting ).
The traditional top predator of the White Tail Deer was of course, the Wolf. Wolf and their prey co-evolved. Wolves can read by scent and sight the slightest signs of which deer in a group has an injury or sickness, therefore, is easier to take down. In a sense they are the ultimate meat inspector for deer. The predator prey relationship is all about energetics. From a wolf's instinctual "point of view", what food can i get with the least expenditure of energy?
We use projectile weapons of various types. This, and all the bait piles, cameras etc. creates a "hunt" wherein being able to pick out the biologically "easy" deer irrelevant. So, why should we be suprised, or concerned about the rise of CWD? We have created a White Tail population which is the perfect home for disease growth. There are lots of them, mostly not as "fit" as their ancestors, and they tend to clump together more during rest periods due to our control of the landscape. Duh? Ya Think?
So what can we do? Probably nothing.
Obviously the easy, direct way is to make sure there are alot more wolves. Unpaid meat inspectors that do not need labs to spot and take out the sick. But our antipathy towards non-human top predators will probably make that not likely.
A long term solution (it would take along time to get to efficiency)
So if we wanna be the top deer predator, we have change, if we want to be efficient. No seasons, no bag limits. Year around hunting. No traps, bait piles, cameras etc. And most importantly, no projectile weapons. Handheld weapons only. Think of it as a well, a sport. Knives, clubs, spears etc. Run them down. Fitter deer, fitter hunters. Hunt, not harvest.
After many, many years, perhaps we would regain the sight hunting of our ancestors, or at least that of the Kalahari Bushmen.

Frugality

2011-02-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

The new Governor of Wisconsin apparently has a fondness for the word "frugality". Interesting word that. It has a particular "political" meaning in our country, that few are aware of. As any legitimate constitutional scholar can attest, perhaps the most important single text studied by our founders, was The Spirit of Laws by Charles de Montesquieu. It was the equavalient of a non-fiction "best seller" in the colonies, and later the early U.S.

What the word frugal, in the public sense (republic-respublica-the public thing), is very different than how most use the word now.
Full text site and cite:
http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol-02.htm
de Secondat, Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. 2 vols. Originally published anonymously. 1748; Crowder, Wark, and Payne, 1777. Spirit of the Laws Online posting. constitution.org. Trans. Thomas Nugent (1750). Rev. J. V. Prichard. ("Based on a public domain edition published in 1914 by G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London. Rendered into HTML and text by Jon Roland of The Constitution Society.") Accessed May 16, 2007.
Excerpt:
"What is meant by a Love of the Republic in a Democracy.
A love of the republic in a democracy is a love of the democracy; as the latter is that of equality.
A love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality. Since every individual ought here to enjoy the same happiness and the same advantages, they should consequently taste the same pleasures and form the same hopes, which cannot be expected but from a general frugality.
The love of equality in a democracy limits ambition to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to our country than the rest of our fellow-citizens. They cannot all render her equal services, but they all ought to serve her with equal alacrity. At our coming into the world, we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
Hence distinctions here arise from the principle of equality, even when it seems to be removed by signal services or superior abilities.

The love of frugality limits the desire of having to the study of procuring necessaries to our family, and superfluities to our country. Riches give a power which a citizen cannot use for himself, for then he would be no longer equal. They likewise procure pleasures which he ought not to enjoy, because these would be also repugnant to the equality.
Thus well-regulated democracies, by establishing domestic frugality, made way at the same time for public expenses, as was the case at Rome and Athens, when magnificence and profusion arose from the very fund of frugality. And as religion commands us to have pure and unspotted hands when we make our offerings to the gods, the laws required a frugality of life to enable them to be liberal to our country.
The good sense and happiness of individuals depend greatly upon the mediocrity of their abilities and fortunes. Therefore, as a republic, where the laws have placed many in a middling station, is composed of wise men, it will be wisely governed; as it is composed of happy men, it will be extremely happy."
I have extracted the key sections about "republics" of this book. iIt is currently a 19 page or so Word file.
Email me if you want a copy.

Very Cute

2011-01-31T11:44:00.001-08:00

Carbon foot print
http://scienceblogs.com/deanscorner/2011/01/unique_global_carbon_footprint.php

Best article on powerpoint I have read

2011-01-31T09:44:00.001-08:00

Absolute Powerpoint
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/05/28/010528fa_fact_parker?printable=true

First Chimpanzee Press Conference

2011-01-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

"...and there were more than a few times—usually after being shot with a tranquillizer dart and then waking up hours later with excruciatingly painful bleeding stitch holes in my neck and chest regions—when I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. But I guess it was, because here we are today, in this beautiful conference room at the Sheraton."
Read the masterpiece:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/06/050606sh_shouts

NYT U.S. Constitution tool

2011-01-06T05:24:00.001-08:00

http://documents.nytimes.com/annotated-constitution?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

A serious oldy

2010-12-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

I ran into a video by Natalie Merchant's of her song, Candy Everybody Wants
http://www.mtvmusic.com/artist/10,000_maniacs/videos/58362/candy_everybody_wants
I thought of another song that is in style very different, yet covers similar terrain.
The song, American Metaphysical Circus by the group
The United States of America (1968)
Sound file:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE1DDR-oATM
Lyrics:
At precisely eight-o-fiveDoctor Frederick von Meier
Will attempt his famous dive
Through a solid sheet of luminescent fire.
In the center of the ring
They are torturing a bear
And although he cannot sing
They can make him whistle Londondderry Air

And the price is right,
The cost of one admission is your mind

We shall shortly institute
A synopticon of fear
While it's painful, it will suit
Many customers whose appetities are queer

Or for those who wish to pay
There are children you can bleed
In a most peculiar way
We can give you all the instruments you'll need

And the price is right,
The cost of one admission is your mind
If you're harder yet to serve
We have most delightful dreams;
Our recorders will preserve
The intensity and passion of your screams.

For we only aim to please;
It's our customers who gain
As their appetities increase
They must come to us for pleasure and for pain.

And the price is right,
The cost of one admission is your mind.

Climate Ark: Modeling and Data Links

2010-12-27T09:18:00.001-08:00

A fun site. Plenty of interactive features with climate models, data, etc.
http://www.climateark.org/links/Science_and_Research/Modeling_and_Data/

Aves Noir

2010-12-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.avesnoir.com/

Ants and fluids

2010-12-22T06:13:00.001-08:00

Video.
http://brightcove.newscientist.com/services/player/bcpid2227271001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAADqBmN8~,Yo4S_rZKGX0rYg6XsV7i3F9IB8jNBoiY&bctid=686050967001

The birth of the Tea Party

2010-12-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

Irony. An MSNBC broadcast of some grifters, i.e. the floor of the Chicago Commodities Exchange.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcvSjKCU_Zo&feature=related

Simple, direct, accurate

2010-12-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

"An Irishman abroad tells it like it is"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

2010-12-04T07:13:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Senator Bird has a succesor?
Pretty much sums it up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OtB298fHY

The Christian Variants

2010-12-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

Icon depicting the First Council of Nicaea
I can pretty easily tell the difference between Catholic & Protestant belief systems, but at a finer grain level, when checking things on the Protestant side especially , its gets kinda hairy for me. Here is a helpful resource on that score. http://www.creeds.net/

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

Hanging the Mistletoe by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Mōdraniht & Yule

“Again we have produced Yule-being's feast, the mead of poetry, our rulers' eulogy,
like a bridge of masonry.” Anon.

Light the bonfires!

Sing the sagas!

Drink sweet ale!

Aset (Isis) Nursing Heru (Horus)

Antiquité égyptienne du musée du Louvre

Aset
Queen of Heaven, Mother of Horus,

Mother of the Gods, Great Lady of Magic
Mistress of the House of Life,
She Who Knows How To Make Right Use of the Heart
She Who Knows the Orphan
She who knows the Widow Spider
She Who Seeks Justice for the Poor
She Who Seeks Shelter for the Weak
She who Seeks the Righteousness in Her People

The birth of Horus was celebrated on the day in the
ancient Egyptian calendar that was the same day as
Decemberus 25 in the Roman calendar

"Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment;

Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.

Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters.

Who maketh the clouds his chariot;

Who walketh on the wings of the wind;

Who maketh winds his messengers

Flames of fire his ministers"

From the Hymn to Aten by Pharaoh Akhenaten
as recorded in tomb of Ay in Amarna; and the later Psalm 104.

chag chanukkah sameach ve-shana tova

Mosaic of Sol in Mausoleum M Christ-Sol (Christ as the Sun/Apollo).Mausoleum of the Julli. Mid-3rd century C.E. Rome

Felix Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

( Happy day of the birth of the unconquered sun )

Refers to Decemberus 25th, the date of the solstice in the Roman calendar, during the holiday of Saturnalia.

matunda ya kwanza(First fruits of the harvest)

The Eternal Question
Xmas, or Christmas? or, Putting the X back in Christmas
X-as-chi was associated with Christ long before X-as-cross could be, since the cross as a Christian symbol developed later.
The Greek letter Chi Χ stood for "Christ" in the ancient Greek acrostic ΙΧΘΥΣ.
While some see the spelling of Christmas as Xmas a threat, others see it as a way to honor Christian martyrs. The use of X as an abbreviation for "cross" in modern abbreviated writing (e.g. "Kings X" for "Kings Cross") may have reinforced this assumption.
In ancient Christian art χ and χρ are abbreviations for Christ's name.
In many manuscripts of the New Testament and icons, X is an abbreviation for Christos, as is XC (the first and last letters in Greek, using the lunate sigma); compare IC for Jesus in Greek.
The Oxford English Dictionary documents the use of this abbreviation back to 1551, 50 years before the first English colonists came to North America and 60 years before the King James Version of the Bible was completed. At the same time, Xian and Xianity were in frequent use as abbreviations of "Christian" and "Christianity"; and nowadays still are sometimes so used, but much less than "Xmas".
Almost forgot, the "mas" part. Debate on this one. Some say it is from the latin "missa", (to send forth). Others say it is from the Anglo-saxon/Germanic "Mas" (festival or celebration).

Another holiday passes...

2010-11-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

WILMINGTON, DE— "The nation looked on in reverence Friday as 20,000 citizens were decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive in the name of Corporate America, continuing the age-old annual rite to ensure bounteous profits in the coming fiscal year...."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/20000-sacrificed-in-annual-blood-offering-to-corpo,18542/

It Was a Toasty, Stormy October

2010-11-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

At Climate Central:
"What makes all of this — and especially the U.S. temperatures — so significant is that we’re now under the influence of the cool Pacific ocean and atmospheric cycle known as La Niña. La Niña, which appears every five to seven years on average, tends to lower global temperatures by about a tenth of a degree C from what they would otherwise have been."
http://www.climatecentral.org/breaking/blog/it_was_a_toasty_stormy_october/

California Saga

2010-11-16T14:31:00.001-08:00

Ah, one of my favorite Beach Boys songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4BiHBwQlg8

Carl Sagan's Last TV Interview

2010-11-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

"Carl Sagan gave his last interview with Charlie rose on May 27th 1996. He discussed pseudo-science, religion, unfounded claims, his personal love affair with science and his struggle with myelodysplasia as well as other elements of his last book: The Demon-Haunted World."
In three parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jod7v-m573k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDKSZO-aACk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxeN6Wf7mbU&feature=related

Chris Hedges hew book on the failure American liberalism

2010-11-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

NPR interview with Chris Hedges:
"In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131166027

A couple more things from G' Kar

2010-11-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

G' Kar was a character in the television series, Babylon V.
"If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often, we assume that the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search - who does not bring a lantern - sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light... pure and unblemished... not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume that we are the center of the universe - God looks astonishingly like we do - or we turn to look at our shadow and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose, which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and in all its flaws; and in so doing, better understand the world around us. "

"There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities; it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain."

Sent by friend, found on web

2010-11-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Great Divide

2010-11-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

"THE tea-party onslaught, as it turns out, stopped at the Colorado River. To the north and west of it, in Nevada and above all in California, every single conventional wisdom, every "narrative", peddled by pundits this year proved irrelevant."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/mid-term_elections_2
and
"Voters rejected a controversial proposal to suspend California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law Tuesday, showing their support for the state's efforts to lead the nation in confronting climate change."

San Francisco Chronicle:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgif=/c/a/2010/11/03/MNGN1G2HVN.DTL&feed=rss.news

At least we know what Carl Rove has been up to.

2010-11-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

"Barack Obama pushed them together. Old habits and secretive instincts nearly kept them apart. But in the end, a cadre of big-money Republican outside groups worked together to spend millions to take down the Democratic House majority, carefully coordinating their ad buys and political messages through a series of regular meetings and phone calls aimed at picking off selected Democrats. The groups – including familiar names like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads – shared their target lists and TV-time data to ensure vulnerable Democrats got the full brunt of GOP spending."
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=12A84851-9F18-52C6-9A295CB5B0C38371

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." -- Mark Twain

2010-11-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Shades of German federal election, 1930?
http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/kpally/nationwide-poll-the-success-of-gop-depends-on-its

The origin of the word "idiot"

2010-11-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

"An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private--as opposed to public--affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education."
Wikipedia article re Athenian democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_(Athenian_democracy)

"People who customarily refer to themselves as taxpayers are not even remotely related to democratic citizens. Yet this is precisely the word that now regularly holds the place which in a true democracy would be occupied by 'citizens.' Taxpayers bear a dual relationship to government, neither half of which has anything at all to do with democracy. Taxpayers pay tribute to the government, and they receive services from it. So does every subject of a totalitarian regime. What taxpayers do not do, and what people who call themselves taxpayers have long since stopped even imagining themselves doing, is governing. In a democracy, by the very meaning of the word, the people govern."
Quoted in citation above, from Daniel Kemmis's The Good City and the Good Life.

John Stewart's speach at Rally for Sanity 10/30/2010

2010-11-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXmbzLI3pnk

We are One

2010-11-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have been slowly re-watching the series Babylon V on Netflix.
The episode watched last night included an inter-governmental body passing the follow, which i have found inspirational.

ISA Statement of Principles

The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn, or Human, or Centauri, or Gaim or Minbari
It speaks in the language of hope
It speaks in the language of trust
It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion
It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul.

But always it is the same voice
It is the voice of our ancestors, speaking through us, And the voice of our inheritors, waiting to be born
It is the small, still voice that says We are one No matter the blood No matter the skin No matter the world No matter the star:
We are one
No matter the pain
No matter the darkness
No matter the loss
No matter the fear
We are one

Here, gathered together in common cause, we agree to recognize the singular truth and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another
Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us and each voice lost diminishes us.
We are the voice of the Universe, the soul of creation, the fire that will light the way to a better future.
We are one.

From Bleu

2010-10-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

A musical piece from what may be my favorite film, Bleu.

Song For the Unification of Europe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6ON3iA_boQ&feature=related

The lyrics are in Greek, from 1 Corinthians 13
http://www.xs4all.nl/~beren/unieuro.html

A radical pessimist's view

2010-10-12T13:11:00.000-07:00

Hey, you say "pessimism" like it is something bad, hey...
http://www.nextnature.net/2010/10/douglas-coupland-a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/#more-11023

The Onion's take on the Nobel award this year in medicine.

2010-10-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Funny, first thing i thought of too...but in less colorful words :)

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nobel-prize-awarded-to-man-who-helped-humans-have,18219/

I just realized....

2010-10-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

That not only is "Intelligent Design" not a scientific concept, it is also just plain bad writing. It is another name for Deus ex machina! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina

Sex & War

2010-09-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Via Ask a Scientist, via ForaTV.
http://fora.tv/2009/03/24/Ask_a_Scientist_Sex_and_War#fullprogram

Goldilocks Planet?

2010-09-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

And a close neighbor to boot. Gliese 581g http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_g
Goldilocks Planet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_planet

A note for the perplexed.

2010-09-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

Of late I have noticed a rise (again :( of confusion about the word "God". That confusion being that when the a Non-English word is used by a believer in one of the Abrahamic faiths, many Americans apparently think the word refers to some other thing than their "god". So, here are the words for "God" in a number of the languages wherein you will find Christians, Mormons, Muslims and Jews.. If any of those say the relevant word, they all mean the same thing:
http://chestofbooks.com/reference/Bepler-Handy-Manual-Of-Knowledge/The-Name-Of-God-In-Different-Languages.html

A few examples from the above link:

Arabic....................Allah
Chinese..................Prussa
Hebrew...........Elohim, Eloha
Japanese................Goezur
Latin.....................Deus
Persian (Iranian).....Sire
Polish.....................Bog
Russian...................Bojh
Slav....................Buch
Syriac....................Allah
Turkish..................Allah

The Talibanization of America?

2010-09-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

by Mosharraf Zaidi. Foreign Policy magazine, September 10, 2010.

"In Pakistan, "Talibanization" is a label used to describe regressive and parochial conservatism, not just the political ascendancy of Mullah Omar and his extremist disciples. ...So when we try to explain ... the ideological kith and kin of opponents of the Park51 project -- including the fringe element of folks like Terry Jones and his flock at the Dove World Outreach Center -- we try to explain what is happening in America, we simply say that a great country is going through a kind of Talibanization -- led by mullahs like Newt Gingrich, Pamela Geller, and the occasional Terry Jones."
Read the article:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/10/the_talibanization_of_america?page=full

About the origin of the phrase "American Taliban":
http://fora.tv/2010/09/10/Markos_Moulitsas_American_Taliban#Does_the_Term_American_Taliban_Go_Too_Far

Be there reminded....

2010-09-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

And you and I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fi-sUOM8io

Not Hunter Thompson, but Rolling Stone still "has a pair"

2010-09-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

Tea & Crackers
By Matt Taibbi

Sep 28, 2010
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

One of our pre-scientific ideologies*

2010-09-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

Fascism: an authoritarian ideology . Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives and values. ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Fascism Portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Fascism

*Actually, all ideologies are pre-scientific

Sorting Out "Tea Party" (2010)

2010-09-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Agora makes it to DVD in the United States!

2010-09-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

Agora, the first movie centered on Hypathia of Alexandria will be available on DVD in late October in the United States.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-xH0lHUs9c

Wedge to America

2010-09-25T05:45:00.000-07:00

Contract on America Two?
Full text:
http://pledge.gop.gov/resources/library/documents/pledge/a-pledge-to-america.pdf

Niall Ferguson re the U.S. economy and balance of power

2010-09-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

Via Australian Broadcasting Company & FORAtv.http://fora.tv/2010/07/28/Niall_Ferguson_Empires_on_the_Edge_of_Chaos#chapter_01

and a bonus:
The Red Hot Chilli Pipers

Quite a film.

2010-09-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching a movie called "The Civilization of Maxwell Bright". It was excellent. Do not let the first 1/3 of the movie keep you from finishing it. The film travels through quite a transformation during its course.

Radio Dinner

2010-09-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

National Lampoon's Radio Dinner in streaming audio!
http://www.archive.org/details/national_lampoon_0848

The original tea party

2010-09-20T07:29:00.000-07:00

From Tax Analysts:
http://taxhistory.tax.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/1BB0C8F894BB490B852577020083A6F6?OpenDocument

Another word from the Edge

2010-09-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

Results on Edge from The New Science of Morality Conference, Washington, CT, June 20-22, 2010 http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge327.html

An online book by E. O. Wilson

2010-09-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

Edward 0. Wilson, SUCCESS AND DOMINANCE IN ECOSYSTEMS: THE CASE OF THE SOCIAL INSECTS (1987)

http://www.int-res.com/articles/eebooks/eebook02.pdf

For your reading pleasure

2010-09-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

For those of you who prefer your information straight, un-touched by pundits, miscreants, and other incurious bastards; The links to the lower left now include:

The U.S. Consitution

The Bill of Rights

Madison's notes's from the convention

Farrand's records of the convention

The complete writings of Thomas Paine

The LOC collection of the papers of Thomas Jefferson

Kevin Phillips

2010-09-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

A 2004 interview with Kevin Phillips about his 2004 book, Wealth & Democracy.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_phillips.html

"Mere foreplay?

2010-09-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

Church plans Quran-burning event
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-29/us/florida.burn.quran.day_1_american-muslims-religion-cair-spokesman-ibrahim-hooper?_s=PM:US

"That was mere foreplay. Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people." Henrich Heine (1821)

From Wikipedia:
"In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany, Heine wrote in his work The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany:
Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals....Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."

Sand Animation?

2010-09-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo&feature=player_embedded#!

Mass Extinctions Change the Rules of Evolution?

2010-09-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

At WIRED:
"A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution’s existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life’s preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths...."
Read More at
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/mass-extinction-dynamics/#ixzz0yPEf53hdhttp://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/mass-extinction-dynamics/

Re the "ground zero mosque" controversy.

2010-08-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

An element of dark humor I guess. Feisal Abdul Rauf is an American citizen and a Sufi Imam. He has been the primary advocate for the Cordoba Initiative's building of an Islamic cultural center a few blocks from "ground zero" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park51 .
The Sufi's are considered by Al Queda as enemy #1.
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/08/22/gps.fareeds.take.sufism.cnn

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/jihadists-v-sufis

Hey, is there any news about the game in that kipus?

2010-08-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

Story in NYT about the Tawantinsuyu's (Inka Empire) unique 3 dimensional document objects, known as Khipus.
Way cool...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/americas/17peru.html?ref=science
OK, I cannot resist, these must WEAVE interesting tales.

Glad Tidings

2010-08-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

Shout! Factory an entertainment company, has just released Max Headroom (the ABC series) on DVD.

Speaking of Brave New World

2010-08-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

Ridley Scott. His two current projects will apparently be in his recent stream of movies-really-about-now but set elsewhen.
Brave New World, by Huxley.
The Forever War, by Haldeman.
Perhaps both in 2011!

Just sticking this here so i can read it.

2010-08-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, .... on the inhabitants of West-India...With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them.

By Bartholomew de las Casas, "a Bishop there and Eye-Witness of most of these Barbarous Cruelties"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20321/20321-8.txt

Speaking of Culture...

2010-08-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Want share one of my favorite passages:

SPEECH OF THE CORINTHIANS, Congress of the Peloponnesian Confederacy at Sparta 432 BC. As recounted by Thucydides.

A Description of Athenian character.

“Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release.

Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind. They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.

Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.”

Brave New World or 1984?

2010-08-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

I had always thought my own culture tended more towards Brave New World, than 1984. I was reading on Wikipedia (searching for the Shakespeare source of the title), about one of my favorite dystopian novels Brave New World, where i found this:

"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. ( A really good book BTW -this blogger)
He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History":
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught."
Reference:
Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History, Christopher Hitchens (1998)http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/readings/hitchens_goodbye.pdf

Argumentum ad ignorantiam

2010-08-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

"An argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance, is an informal logical fallacy that asserts a proposition to be either true or false merely because it has not been proven or disproven."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

A good background video for observing the U.S.A. "culture wars".

2010-08-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

Elliott Sober: Darwin & Intelligent Design

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://fora.tv/2010/04/22/Elliott_Sober_Darwin_and_Intelligent_Design#fullprogram

OK...A few more

2010-08-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Some of my favorite Newman songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm3upGgRsRQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nGw_vAnqPI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jiLL2d-alc

And i guess, other things in these parts, don't change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGO42gvCSPI
And a treat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXsWH5nqPAE&feature=related

Louisiana 1927

2010-08-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

The other night i watched the documentary about Huey Long done by Ken Burns.
During the end credits, you hear Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, one of my favorite songs of his. Wanted to to here it again this a.m., and found this. From the BBC Four Sessions (2008).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9HgMo-Pdg
Enjoy.

The Muffs

2010-08-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

Thank you for pointing them out Joel.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22the+muffs%22&aq=f

Top This, "Onion"

2010-08-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

From an AP story 08/05/2010
"Intoxicated and pregnant, a La Crosse woman is accused of trying to hold up a Taco John's with a hammer. Police say the 38-year-old woman told the cashier Tuesday night -- "I want a soft shell and this is a stickup..."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-intoxicatedtacost,0,2981626.story

Gilmore & Bowie

2010-08-05T05:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQgc-CXdKQQ

"Culture is humankind’s biological strategy"

2010-07-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

Quite right...

Edge.org conference, posted today.
THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge323.html

Baba Brinkman

2010-07-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the video link Brandon.

Brinkman's site;
http://www.babasword.com/

Video example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM9nNa84U24&feature=related

A Giant Crosses the Bar

2010-07-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

Daniel Shorr died today, at age 93. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128565997

2010-07-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Never mind the lobotomized, negligent short-termism of it all, as if a one-time windfall could ever fund an annual expenditure. What had government become these days but the poorly advertised fire sale of the public interest."

From Union Atlantic by Adam Hasleff.
(currently reading...)

How cool is this; Carl Linnaeus invented the index card!

2010-07-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.htm

ZOWIE

2010-07-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMoKcsN8wM8&feature=player_embedded
Thanks Dori.

Finally found a copy of January...

2010-07-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

Finally found a CD copy of Bill Camplin's January. This was one of the favorite albums of my "youth".

"angered by your words
But suffering to you cause
Elected men are reminding me
Of your obvious flaws"
From the song If its in your mind

Video clip of the title cut, but performed recently by Bill:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10YpklICbx4

A New Twist on the Quest for Eternal Life

2010-07-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

Terasem Movement Foundation, Inc.

From it's website:
"The common purpose of all of the Terasem Movement Foundation’s (TMF) projects is to investigate the Terasem Hypotheses which state that -
(1) a conscious analog of a person may be created by combining sufficiently detailed data about the person (a "mindfile") using future consciousness software ("mindware"),
and
(2) that such a conscious analog can be downloaded into a biological or nanotechnological body to provide life experiences comparable to those of a typically birthed human.
We call this event Transferred Consciousness (TC). If even the first part of the two Terasem Hypotheses is shown to be true, the conscious analogs will be independent persons with rights and obligations dependent upon their capabilities."
http://www.terasemmovementfoundation.com/index.php
LifeNaut "...allows anyone to create an avatar and a rich digital backup of their life - a web-based storage space for organizing and preserving critical info. http://lifenaut.com/
And,
check this out;
Interview with Bina 48 about, what is like to be a robot? http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035233/interview-with-a-robot.html

Thomas Jefferson's Last Letter

2010-07-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman

Monticello, June 24, 1826

"Respected Sir,
The kind invitation I receive from you, on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

I will ask permission here to express the pleasure with which I should have met my ancient neighbors of the city of Washington and its vicinities, with whom I passed so many years of a pleasing social intercourse; an intercourse which so much relieved the anxieties of the public cares, and left impressions so deeply engraved in my affections, as never to be forgotten. With my regret that ill health forbids me the gratification of an acceptance, be pleased to receive for yourself, and those for whom you write, the assurance of my highest respect and friendly attachments."
Th. Jefferson

Independence Day

2010-07-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

Standard of the First Regiment of the Continental Line of The United States of America. Formerly Thompson’s Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion. Formed in response to the Battle of Lexington/Concord. The latin words Domari Nolo mean, “I will not be subjugated”.

America’s First Patriotic Song
The Liberty Song is an American Revolutionary War song composed by patriot John Dickinson, the author of famous political tract, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. The song is set to the tune of "Heart of Oak," the anthem of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, and was first published in the Boston Gazette in July 1768. Dickinson's fourth verse is the first appearance of the phrase, "united we stand, divided we fall." This was sung at public gatherings from its time of publication into the early 19th century.
Lyrics:
Come, join hand in hand, brave Americans all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty's call;
No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,
Or stain with dishonor America's name.
Chorus:
In Freedom we're born
and in Freedom we'll live.
Our purses are ready. Steady, friends, steady;
Not as slaves, but as Freemen our money we'll give.
Our worthy forefathers, let's give them a cheer,

To climates unknown did courageously steer;
Thro' oceans to deserts for Freedom they came,
And dying, bequeath'd us their freedom and fame.

(Chorus)

The tree their own hands had to Liberty rear'd,
They lived to behold growing strong and revered;
With transport they cried, Now our wishes we gain,
For our children shall gather the fruits of our pain.
(Chorus)
Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed
For heaven approves of each generous deed.
Definitions
Word use changes over time.
Liberty: The right(s) of citizens in a republic.
Tyrannous: An act of the sovereign outside the bounds of law, both statutory and natural.
Freedom: The Enlightenment view of “natural rights”, those rights in the very laws of nature, discernable by the application of reason and science.
Purse: Personal funds “Give”: to “pay” a tax properly made law. It is considered a voluntary, patriotic act in a republic.
Slave: A person who pays a tax imposed by a legislative body they could not vote for a representative in.”
Freemen: Not an indentured servant, and also able to vote for a representative in the body that taxes you.
Transport: A criminal sentence in British law. Sent to the colonies (how many British colonist first got here). When we revolted, they started sentencing them to Australia.
heaven: (uncapitalized) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

Fort Moultrie Flag

The Declaration of Independence

Video. Read by some folks you may recognize: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyttEu_NLU

National Public Radio's reading on Morning Edition. An July 4th tradition: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106168024

Full text:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

And, last but certainly not least...To be sung with mug of Pusser's Rum Grog, and a glass of Maderia

A video of Stan Rogers performing Barret's Privateers.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-PQbdmQRwc

Cultural Universals

2010-06-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

Fun area of study.
If a behavior is present across a whole specie, it is probably safe to assume its origin (but not the expression) is in the genotype?

I am currently reading The Evolution of Childhood by Melvin Connor, which has some cool lists of these universals.

Overview:
Cultural Universals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
Behavioral Modernity:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

belief and pattern recognition

2010-06-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

On TED, about "belief"

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-06-15&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Frank Sinatra would be proud...

2010-06-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

I watched Michael Moore's latest, "Capitalism: A Love Story" this last weekend.
For me, the neatest thing in it was at the beginning of the credits. There you will hear Tony Babino's lounge style rendition of L' Internationale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP4l_PeBMyk

A rant by Chris Hedges on the result of one of our socially obligate boundary conditions

2010-05-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bp_and_the_little_eichmanns_20100517/

Happy Towel Day

2010-05-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

“Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Douglas Adams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day

Some music

2010-05-15T10:20:00.001-07:00

I am impressed by two musical artist that are new to me. One is hardly known, the other is a megastar currently that i finally got around to listening to.

The hardly known one (at least in the U.S.) is Florence & The Machine (aka Florence Welch & her collaborators). She strikes me as kind of like Kate Bush meets Sinead O' Conner meets Grace Slick, (with just a dash of Chrissy Hyde).
I CD out; Lungs.
Three videos:
Dog Days Are Over http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOyfLBYtuU
Two versions of Kiss with a Fist
"Official"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SmxVCM39j4
An acoustic/bar version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENvihwd2bLs&feature=fvst

About two months ago i was prompted by an interview piece on TV to go on YouTube to see Lady Gaga. If you are an oldster like I, you probably heard some of "political" music back in the 1960's through the Punk and then Springsteen and the new "Americana" artists of the present.
Well, in a genre not known for political insight, (Post-rap/post-hiphop/Commercial electro-dance) you find Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known as Lady GaGa.
Her "personna" is kind of like Martha Stewart (re business/branding accume) David Bowie meets Madonna, meets Michael Jackson (when at his peak). And then, have that personna attack modern consumer/fame/cult of the celebrity culture. The attack is so complete, that many may not see it as an attack. Talk about laughing all the way to the bank... Think of a 24 year old musical version of a mean Andy Warhol.
I also think she may be the first pop artist, that the best way to experience them, is via the heavily produced, controlled "music video".
First example is the video of Telephone. She says it is about the social & electronic communication pressures on the youth now, expressed in an overall look at American culture. All three are from the CD, Fame Monster.
This ain't your dad's Woody Guthrie...and yes, that is the truck from Kill Bill.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY
Two previous salvos:
Bad Romance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I
Paparazzi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgKrzdaDQMw&feature=fvsr

New Arizona Immigration Law

2010-05-04T04:39:00.001-07:00

Interesting.
"Sinclair Lewis aptly predicted in It Can't Happen Here that if fascism came to America it would come wrapped in the flag and whistling The Star Spangled Banner." Harrison Evans Salisbury
Full text:
http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf
The comparison to the Nuremberg Laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws by its opponents is hyperbole. But it is in their "spirit".
Nativism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_(politics)
Producerism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producerism
It will be interesting to see if the producerist view turns into our own version of fascism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism or not.
Oh yah, online copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935)
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html Not to be confused with the Frank Zappa song of the same name.
"...Who could imagine
That they would freak out in the suburbs!
(No no no no no no no no no no)
Man you guys are really safe
(Everything's cool)
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
And they thought it couldn't happen here
(duh duh duh)..."