big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
ee cummings
Linda McQuaig talks about inequality and elitism in the US presidential election:
A fundamental problem in the last few decades – both in Canada and the United States – has been the relentless campaign waged by the financial elite to overturn postwar social and economic policies that provided significant gains for the middle and lower classes in the decades following World War II.
The campaign has been phenomenally successful. As a result, the poor have lost ground, while the middle class have barely held their own or made small advances – by working longer hours or having two-income families.
The addiction to the arrogant religion of game theory is over. Now is the time. Profiteering will give way to our prosperity. Now is the time. Our civility returns.
But when it comes down to it, the line at Invesco is 3 miles long. Obama will have 75,000 people cheering tonight.
McCain is trying to counter that with 10,000 people in Ohio tomorrow to announce his VP pick. Only one problem. They can’t even get 10,000:
Tickets are still available for Sen. John McCain’s Friday, Aug. 29, rally at Wright State University’s Nutter Center in Fairborn. – Dayton Daily News
They’re giving away free tickets in several states and plan to bus in supporters.
This is a superb, if challenging, product already at the prototype stage.
I first thought, “Impossible”, but no.
Quote: “The SPEED-VEST is a bicycle safety device and advocacy tool which displays the wearer’s current speed on their back in easy-to-read lighted numerals. It improves rider conspicuity while legitimizing bicycle speeds on the roadway. Originally conceived by Brady Clark and engineered by Mykle Hansen.”
Advocacy tool? Conspicuity? But combined with tiny cameras and flash drives, an entire traffic ‘event’ can be recorded.
Courtspection.
We can say goodbye to centuries too.
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
“I have a dream”, Martin Luther King. Forty five years ago today. Complete text, audio recording and video here.
Maybe, just hopefully, this article is a sign of things to come, when as Jon Stewart says, media will get out of the spin room and write real info: msnbc.com writes a story on hotel hedonism, the world’s worst hotel guests.
1. Amy Winehouse
2. Salvador Dali
3. Britney Spears
4. Axl Rose
5. Mariah Carey
6. Russell Crowe
7. Naomi Campbell
8. George Schultz
9. Mikhail Prokhorov
10. Brandon Davis
11. Nicole Kidman
12. Michael Jackson
13. Johnny Depp
14. 1998 U.S. Men's Hockey team
15. Keith Moon
Very interesting. A story that is both yuicky and enlightening.
BlueAnt Wireless’ new V1 – the first voice-controlled Bluetooth headset.
Sidestep buttons.
Control functions with phrases like “pair me,” “call home,” “call favorite,” “call Goog-411,” and “accept or ignore call.”
It’s beginning!
Soon, voice commands will pipe to the Cloud and through VPN to home/office. I set up a few workshops on this subject in ’84 so I’m glad to see it arrive – proposing tiny in-the-ear radio that were still illegal in the USA at the time.
Now everybody can be prompted, not just media and candidates and quarterbacks.
Next? Retina Monitors in 3D?
Before you die of old age you will spend about the last 15 years of your life getting dumber
That’s living for ya.
They call it a ‘terminal decline phase’. Excuuuse me?
Your ability to compare figures will go before your spatial ability which in turn will go before your verbal ability. But it is all down, down, down until your whole body crashes.
The start of the decline is different for various cognitive abilities.
- Perceptual speed, which measures how quickly people can compare figures, begins declining nearly 15 years before death.
- Spatial ability starts declining nearly eight years before death.
- And verbal ability starts declining about six-and-a-half years before death.
TIME published a short article based on an insider to Russian politics:
Russia’s leaders see a big distinction between the U.S. and Europe, and will be careful to make that clear. “We know there is a huge difference between the E.U. and the U.S.,” he says. “We know that the Bush administration is working for the election of John McCain. The real order to kill South Ossetians came from Dick Cheney. If Obama [becomes] President and investigates how the Iraq war started, Dick Cheney would be imprisoned. The Neocons believe Obama is a weak politician and they will stop him by any means.
The main idea is to create imitations of the Cold War between Russia and the West… We know that [to show Obama up] Neocons will carry out another provocation against Russia probably in Ukraine and we are ready for this.
“Russia’s interests coincide closely with the E.U. The E.U. is not interested in civil war in Ukraine… Russia will be very careful and not touch the pipelines because they influence many countries. Russia will be quite moderate on this issue. The most important issue is protecting human life, not pipelines. Pipeline politics is the tactic of the Neocons.”
That events in Georgia are timed for our election is being picked up by media in Europe as well:
Georgian crisis is US ploy
Putin says conflict planned to create neo-cold war climate that would boost John McCain.
Here’s seasoned journalists alone with John McCain. The title of this revealing article is
McCain’s Prickly TIME Interview
But with the press focused on Obama, McCain got attention only when he slipped up during one of his patented freewheeling encounters with reporters. And so in July, the campaign decided to clamp down on the candidate.
There is not a full man here.
Were he here to tear down another George!
Thomas Jefferson:
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds… we will have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers…
And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]… ’til the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery… And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Here’s an unusually emotional article you’ll likely not see.
It’s written in the Daily Mail by J Randy Taraborrelli, who says, “As a journalist who has reported more on Jackson in the past 30 years than anyone else – including having written three best-selling books about him – I can’t help but be deeply saddened by the way his life has turned out.
…
From the time he was a teenager, Michael Jackson believed he would sell more records than anyone else – and, of course, he did.
He also knew he would have the biggest-grossing concert tours in history. But all of that is now in the past.
Today, he spends his time wandering around Las Vegas…”
The Mail hired an expert to make a graphic of what Michael Jackson should really look like.
“I can’t believe that, as reporters, you would walk into a ‘spin room’,” he said, amazed at the journalists’ willingness to swallow the bullshit that the campaign and candidates spoon feed them.
“How can you keep talking to people who are lying to you?” he asked.
“This loveless marriage [between reporters and politicians] has to be unconsummated.”
One, Two.
Not on mainstream media.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv0smG7ptcM&hl=en&fs=1]
[read like old beat coffee house free verse]
I will be happy soon.
Our complex Eisenhower era of Military and Industry build mistake and doom, minor men, that have made abundant things costly and rare, in governments of whine and pride, a lament of the angry, an error of fraud, killing the common to lift the elite, killing and killing, and injures our great community for little men of privilege, a lobby of indemnity, ingenious magicians of public honey, vulgar braggarts in a loud veneer of media too timid to reveal our democracy is not an agriculture of votes but the water of our future.
The strong are acutely quiet.
As seeds spike their dark inch, as leaves pull to light, as life is mighty and honor is our bounty, as even roses know, we too will one day bloom.
[hey cat, dig it]
Canada’s online newspaper The Tyee says, “It’s times like this that a statement of optimism, in itself, can be a gutsy move.”
Toronto-born writer Cory Doctorow — who says he is probably a distant relative of novelist E.L. Doctorow — makes such a statement in Little Brother, a young adult novel about San Francisco hacker kids taking on the Department of Homeland Security. Little Brother is Doctorow’s first young adult publication, and like most of Doctorow’s fiction, the complete text is available for legal free download at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/.
Somewhere between Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Anarchist’s Cookbook, Little Brother is a coming-of-age story, a how-to manual and a call to arms for technically smart, self-reliant Millennial kids to get radicalized and become a movement, opposed to the fear-based politics of the post-9-11 era.
“Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are. John McCain voted with George Bush 90% of the time.” – Sylvestre Reyes (TX), Congressional Hispanic Caucus
So please join me in welcoming an impassioned public servant, a loving daughter, wife and mother, my little sister and our nation’s next first lady: Michele Obama.
Camille speaks of her daughter’s arrest by a suppressive government:
“My exhausted daughter, with hundreds of others, tried to sleep that first night …on the chemical-covered oily, cold cement floor of these pens, without food or water, without being read her rights, without being offered a chance to post bail, without seeing a judge although the National Lawyers Guild offered to represent them pro bono, without being charged or told why she was arrested and handcuffed and taken there, without being allowed to make a call to a lawyer or friend or parent or anyone — all cell phones were confiscated as “terrorist weapons.” Her purse was taken. She had nothing but the clothes on her back.
Meanwhile…ordinary criminals arrested that same day in NYC for burglary, rape and heinous crimes were processed by the courts in less than 10 hours. My daughter, who had committed no crime, was incarcerated for three days incommunicado. People suffered chemical burns, bug bites, overcrowding and medical problems because their medicine was confiscated. A pregnant woman sat crying on the floor in the oil.
Here’s a picture with memory.
Police try to stop Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement from speaking at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, 1964. Note: The ‘protesters’ seem to be comfortably seated.
In 2008, protests are quashed. Sometimes, the message of the demonstrations are leaked, but generally the issues are deadened and put into walled off compounds.
DENVER, Aug. 27 (UPI) — A press freedom organization is accusing Denver police of roughing up journalists covering a protest at the Democratic National Convention. Reporters Without Borders says it is unclear what prompted police to step up their level of force during a demonstration that began outside the Pepsi Center on the opening night of the convention.
And here’s a clip from 2008.
Police Trap Peaceful Protesters in Denver by Davin Hutchins on Aug 25.
“A calm political protest quickly turned chaotic as anxious Denver police surrounded protestors peacefully marching toward the Democratic National Convention Center.
“After trapping the crowd between two buildings, hundreds of officers used pepper spray, batons and unwarranted aggression.
“After being surrounded for 20 minutes, two ANP producers managed to escape after recording the whole affair.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoAVce-Rc2c&hl=en&fs=1]
Eisenhower resigns the Republican Party.
I have decided I can no longer be a registered Republican.
For the first time in my life I announced my support for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, in February of this year.
My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucusus, and this has undermined U.S. national security.
At the same time, the McCain camp appears to be comfortable with running an unworthy Karl Rove–style political campaign. Will the McCain operation, and its sponsors, do anything to win?
Hijacked by a relatively small few, the GOP of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower’s party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after. In my grandparents’ time, the thrust of the party was rooted in: a respect for the constitution; the defense of civil liberties; a commitment to fiscal responsibility; the pursuit and stewardship of America’s interests abroad; the use of multilateral international engagement and “soft power”; the advancement of civil rights; investment in infrastructure; environmental stewardship; the promotion of science and its discoveries; and a philosophical approach focused squarely on the future.
And now, as the party threatens to trivialize what promised to be a serious debate on our future direction, it will alienate many young people who might have come into party ranks.
It was not easy taking this step, since politics, like religion, is something learned on the knee of one’s parents and grandparents. And like anything else inherited, it is imbedded in one’s own identity. This makes leaving even harder.
But there will be some joy for me in my new status since I will be able to speak for myself, and not as a member of a party that has, sadly, lost its way.
Reflections on Leaving the Party
by Susan Eisenhower
08.21.2008
[click picture for source]
Eurythmics and others produced a strong delightful song for Obama.
American Prayer – Dave Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg, Cyndi Lauper, Barry Manilow, Joan Baez, Macy Gray and Joss Stone.
On iTunes as well as the Dave Stewart Songbook. Flash site at My American Prayer.
Here’s Dave Stewart’s Official Version, where he says,
When I set out to make a video for the new version of this song, I wanted to honor all of those millions of people, especially young people, who are, for the first time, feeling empowered to voice their beliefs. I wanted to capture how Obama’s message of change has echoed across the broad fabric of what is America.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BLKV7L8OU&color1=11645361&color2=13619151&hl=en&fs=1]
Yanko Design has found the Chrono-Shredder.
“There’s no on or off button. As minutes pass, a continuous roll of time is shredded until you end up with a big pile of paper by the New Year.”
[Designer, Susanna Hertrich. Tip to j-walk]
The New Republic offers background on the McCain marriage:
As Cindy McCain faithfully shadows her husband in his quest for the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that she was once the senior member of their partnership.