Thai protesters shut down airport

How come we couldn't/didn't do this in protest to Bush and his terrible administration? to the war in Iraq?

Excerpts-
"Flights from Thailand's international airport have been suspended after hundreds of anti-government protesters stormed the building outside Bangkok."

"We will stay until the government steps down. This government is not legitimate," retired university lecturer Sunthorn Kaewlai told the Reuters news agency."

We certainly have changed, as a people, since the founding days of our country -
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Where was I in the run up to the war? Well, I attended one protest. Maybe I should ask how come I couldn't/didn't do that?

Miami judge rules against Florida gay adoption ban

Excerpts below

A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting.

The state presented experts who claimed there was a higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among gay couples, that they were more unstable than heterosexual unions and that the children of gay couples suffer a societal stigma.

Organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association all support permitting same-sex couples to adopt.

"Everywhere in the law where children are affected, the standard must always be what is in the best interest of the child," said Stemberger, an attorney in Orlando. "What is stunning to me is that when it comes to dealing with gays, that standard goes out the window. Children do better with a mother and a father."

If that is true, Stemberger should be campaigning to prevent divorce, which has been proven to be a leading cause of single parenthood. John Stemberger should also campaign to make it illegal for parents to die, another leading cause of single parenthood. Maybe the courts could find single parents and force them into relationships. Maybe give out eHarmony or Match.com accounts to single parents at tax payers' expense.

2 degrees from Condi Rice

It's a strange world. The people pictured from left are Soye Kim, Joshua Klein, Condolezza Rice, Robert Battey and Lawrence Wallace. This quintet plays as often as every other week. You might recognize the woman on the piano. But the man on the left with the violin, Joshua Klein, was lucky enough to have gone to school (Webb and F.C.D.S) with me.

The Electoral College must Die

Texas: 34 electoral votes and 23,904,380 citizens -> 703,070 citizens per electoral vote
Florida: 34 electoral votes and 18,251,243 -> 675,972 citizens per electoral vote
California: 55 electoral votes and 36,553,215 citizens -> 664,604 citizens per electoral vote

at the other end of the spectrum

Wyoming: 3 electoral votes and 522,830 citizens -> 174,277 citizens per electoral vote
District of Columbia: 3 electoral votes and 588,292 citizens -> 196,097 citizens per electoral vote
Vermont: 3 electoral votes and 621, 254 citizens -> 207, 085 citizens per electoral vote

Is this fair? I thought democracy was based on one person, one vote. But by this system a vote in Wyoming is worth roughly 4x that of a vote in Texas and roughly 3.8x that of a vote in California. I ask again - is this fair?

Why do we have the electoral college?

Grant Griffin is a Moron

From an AP article on race threats.

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change."

"If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.

I wish Grant would get deported.

Obama

Obama Obama Obama!!

Oh!!Bama!!

The 3 Phases of Creation

The number 3 rears its beautiful head again.

Improvisation implies a knowledge of relationship between elements and a desire to create something with those elements outside or different from the elements themselves.

Experimentation, the step before improvisation, also implies a knowledge of elements but less of a desire to create something outside of or different from those elements. Experimentation is the use of/ investigation into the elements to discover their possible relationships.

The step before experimentation is exploration - the discovery of the elements themselves.

Borrowing Money

France is borrowing money to shore up its banks.
Italy too. England, the USA, and Germany also.
Iceland has gone under. Guess they didn't borrow soon enough.
Japan and South Korea are also borrowing money.

From whom are all these countries borrowing to stay afloat?

The Saudis? Russia? The Chinese? Kim Jong Il, illin' and chillin' like a villian above the DMZ?

Too little, Too late

Cheney experiences abnormal heart rhythm.

5 Surgeons

Five surgeons from big cities are discussing who makes the best
patients to operate on:

The first surgeon, from New York , says, 'I like to see Accountants on my operating table; because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.'

The second surgeon, from Chicago, responds, 'Yeah, but you should try Electricians! Everything inside them is color coded.'

The third surgeon, from Dallas, says, 'No, I really think Librarians are the best. Everything inside them is in alphabetical order.'

The fourth surgeon, from Los Angeles, chimes in, 'You know, I like construction workers. Those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over.'

But the fifth surgeon, from Washington , DC , shut them all up when he observed,

'You're all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on.
There's no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains, and no spine; plus the head and the butt are interchangeable.

Bush is at fault

I am tired of hearing how Bush is at fault for all of our country's problem.

"Bush's policies, Bush is stoopid, Bush this, Bush that." Blah blah blah.

Yes, I agree Bush has been a terrible president. Anyone with half a luke warm cerebellum knows that. But how did he get there? Is Bush at fault or are all the people who voted for him at fault?

We are letting all those people who put him in office, who gave him the power to do what he has done, letting them off too easy. What about all those people who voted against Kerry because he was a flip-flopper? What about all those people who were so gung-ho for Bush and his accomplished missions?

Those people are the real causes of this deficit, this war, this financial crisis due to deregulation. Those folks got him into office. By blaming all this on Bush, we let ourselves off the hook. It absolves us of the real guilt. We all are at fault for the situation we are in - half of us for voting for him and the other half for not raising enough Hell, for all the shit he has pulled.

p.s.

everything is a Rorschach test

Nicknames for McCain and Palin

How about McCan't and Failin'?

Guess it runs in the family

Neil Bush was the most widely targeted member of the Bush family by the press in the S&L scandal. Neil became director of Silverado Savings and Loan at the age of 30 in 1985. Three years later the institution was belly up at a cost of $1.6 billion to tax payers to bail out.

The basic actions of Neil Bush in the S&L scandal are as follows:

Neil received a $100,000 "loan" from Ken Good, of Good International, with no obligation to pay any of the money back.
Good was a large shareholder in JNB Explorations, Neil Bush's oil-exploration company.
Neil failed to disclose this conflict-of-interest when loans were given to Good from Silverado, because the money was to be used in joint venture with his own JNB. This was in essence giving himself a loan from Silverado through a third party.
Neil then helped Silverado S&L approve Good International for a $900,000 line of credit.
Good defaulted on a total $32 million in loans from Silverado.
During this time Neil Bush did not disclose that $3 million of the $32 million that Good was defaulting on was actually for investment in JNB, his own company.
Good subsequently raised Bush's JNB salary from $75,000 to $125,000 and granted him a $22,500 bonus.
Neil Bush maintained that he did not see how this constituted a conflict of interest.
Neil approved $106 million in Silverado loans to another JNB investor, Bill Walters.
Neil also never formally disclosed his relationship with Walters and Walters also defaulted on his loans, all $106 million of them.
Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case and ended up paying $50,000 to settle out of court. The chief of Silverado S&L was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (Keep in mind that you can get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)
Today Neil Bush is working on closing a deal in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, to sell a software package to schools with his startup company Ignite.

Trifecta!

Walking from the U2 line to the U8 line in Alexanderplatz. Saw a blond in a Rage against the Machine t-shirt.

She had a tramp stamp, a coin slot and a muffin top.

the Trifecta!

Long live the Free Market ! (unless it hurts the wealthy)

Democrats maybe donkeys, but Republicans are dumbasses.

Free Market! Free Market! Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!

Oh shit!

Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money!

Live by the free market, die by the free market, no?

Isn't the bank bailout basically socialism?

Why doesn't the federal government bail me out when I make bad business decisions?

touch

interesting site about touch.

Liberal vs. Conservative

An interesting TED talk about Liberals and Conservatives.

Race and Our Place in It

Is it an any wonder the USA has so many racial issues? We can't even get the terms to identify each other right.

There are black people and white people. A color scheme, yes?

Okay, fine, but then to call an Asian person yellow is derogatory and to call a Native American person red is also offensive. But to describe someone as having olive colored skin is okay. Which kind of olive anyways - Kalamata or Graber's? Nabali or Manzanillo? Mission or Pecholine?

Oriental is out and Occidental (its correspondent term) was never in.

To call a person a European is fine, but to call someone Oriental is frowned up. European cars and Oriental rugs, just fine. Granted no one under 75 calls Asia the Orient, but still...
And European styling? What the @#$@! is that? Italy and Sweden...same style?

Caucasian, or European. Are we using continents or mountain ranges to define ourselves? Hitler tried Aryan, but he probably would have put the real Aryans in his camps.

Are we using colors or names of countries, continents or geographical features? How about all of the above?

And then there's hyphenating. Do we do it from the part of the world our ancestors came from? or just the country? Am I a European-American? Or a Northern-European American? Or an American of European descent? Or to be people first, a person living in American of European descent.

I think this inability for us to pick one spectrum of label ourselves is related to the affirmative action debate, also to the individual vs. group debate. What scale do we use to evaluate applicants for schools, jobs, contracts? When do we say that everyone is finally on the same playing field?

Who knows?
I certainly don't.
I just know that I am a white Caucasian Occidental Polish-Czech-German-Irish-English-Scotch American.

Carbon Footprint of music

As I write this post, I am listening to the melodius musical styling of Miles Davis et al. on Pandora.com. If you don't know Pandora, get to know her!! Type in a musicians name, or a band or a song and the algorithm or small elves or whatever picks other songs to play based upon your voting yeah or nay on other songs.

But I digress...

As I sit here and listen to this music, I wonder about the environmental impact of listening to music on the internet. Does it take more juice than listening to a cd of the same music? How does that compare to a turntable? If all music in the future is only digital and no physical LPs or CDs are made, would that offset all the energy needed to run my computer, wireless router, DSL system and computers at Pandora's end? No need to drive to a store to buy a plastic disc to then drive back home and stick into my computer to then rip and store on a harddrive that has to be on and using juice if I want to listen to the music.

Maybe the best way, least impactful method of listening to music would be just to make my own music on non electrified equipment...

the true history [is] lost

From "John Adams" the HBO miniseries

"It is very bad history"

"Do not let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license."

"I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost."

Was Tom Hooper, the director of this series, also talking about his own work, this miniseries on John Adams. A visual experience based upon a written experience, the book John Adams by David McCullough. How much has this series deluded our posterity with fictions? How much of what we witnessed in the series actually happened?

What scares me is that in a few years, and maybe this is already happening, films & movies such as these will be shown in classrooms as fact. Easier to watch a movie than to read a book.

The second quote above also relates to art making. I would postulate that art, especially dance is deluded with too many fictions under the guise of poetical license. Too often choreographers are vague about what the point of their work is. Hiding under the guise of poetical license is one thing that brings dance down in terms of being taken seriously, removing it out of the entertainment world.

Too often dance makers bow too quickly to their own aesthetic to make something that is palatable to the audience, rather than following their curiosity to its end - wanting more to please than to challenge. Dance is still stuck in the world of dancing for the court, trying to please the king. Instead of now it is the audience and the grant panels. What logics are hip now? What tools are hip now? What aesthetics are hip now? The true idea of the choreographer gets lost. The work gets lost in poetical and graphical license.

Not many choreographers are accused of being great intellects. Playwrights, composers, yes. But not choreographers.

Why is that?

( I think it has something to with that horrible quote which has been destroying dance ever since whoever said it - "Dance expresses what words cannot" or some such nonsense like that)