Category: interesting

Carmel Point, Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Interesting shot of Michael Phelps managing his breathing.

Where is the rich magnificence
That tender children know and sense;
That drifts our atmospheric thought
Beyond the tightened social knot?

Where is gifted deep intelligence
That leaps our cobbled sense;
Where piercing probes of quickest wit
Can lance the gripping past, be done of it?

Where is the blanket of community
That o’er the womb of opportunity
Our loitered deeds do sprout and climb
To strengthen hearts that brave through time?

Where are these coasts of civil rhyme,
That soothe these dusts that fall in time
That pound remembrance to the heart
To build our peace, our poise in every part?

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“There lies before us if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.” Bertrand Russel

Robert Reich trying to explain trickle up, er, why ‘trickle down’ trickles:

The heart of the matter isn’t the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you’ll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.

…
So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

Comments:
But, see, the rich pay taxes already? 40% of government tax revenue is provided by the top 1% of income earners. We can’t tax higher. It isn’t fair to tax wealth. They’ll move to… and there’ll be no money left in America whatsoever… not even trickles.

Congressional Budget Office:
The top 1% received 57.5% of all capital.

Internal Revenue Service:
The top 1% earned 21.2% of all income.

Government Accountability Office:
72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

Balancing class is a critical task, not a taboo to be ideologically scorned. The top 1% own more than 40% of our wealth!

Story:
The non-partisan group Campaign Money Watch has come up with another startling figure for those who follow the presidential money chase.

According to an analysis performed by the group, McCain’s top fundraisers and aides have collected nearly $1 billion in fees from U.S. companies in the past decade — specifically, $930,949,819.

“The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him.”

John McCain once said “too often the special interest lobbyists with the fattest wallets and best access carry the day when issues of public policy are being decided.”

Comments:
“The problem arises when companies pay operatives to pressure politicians to act in a way contrary to their commitment to their constituents. What eventually happens is influence on politicians becomes a commodity to be bartered and sold to the highest bidder.”

“Because they buy political influence generally at the expense of the electorate.”

“Because in a democracy, policy should be decided by the public good, not by the interests of the tiny majority that can write the biggest checks. (And which then gets even richer on public money, and therefore can write even bigger checks, and so on.)”

“John knows Washington is broken. He broke it.”

Truth is like breathing, Polly.

She said,

“Children always know deceit.”

Thanks. Really. I bounce off stars with human-human like this.

Steven Wright scoured off copyBlogger:

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

Oops.

Stop!
The biggest overhaul of the Endangered Species Act since 1986.

Bush now is stopping federal agencies from “assessing the emissions that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats”.

The changes apply to any project a federal agency would fund, build or authorize that might harm endangered wildlife and their habitat.

Roving for graft? We can be certain there’s a payoff for cronies.

SAD = Stop Assessing Damage

Citizens. Count ’em. Enjoy America.

You’ve been invited to a fancy ball but the only thing you have to wear is an orange wooly jumper. What shoes do you wear?

Huh? Forget that question. Here’s a better question: What is important to you? Relationships. Relationships with real people, people who share themselves, their true selves, with no desire to paint themselves other than they are. Imperfect, but real. I hate fake.

She says,

“The love for our fellow man has to burn like the flame in the Olympic torch, and be carried from place to place until it burns in every heart.”

Dying to protect a pipeline
The definitive piece of evidence about the real goals in Afghanistan arrived a few weeks ago with the announcement that Afghanistan had signed a major deal to build the pipeline the U.S. has wanted all along. If the reports are accurate, the $8 billion pipeline will go through the southern part of the country — and right through Kandahar.

Combine this with a constitution that put enormous powers in the hands of the president and you have a political structure designed to ensure American dominance.

A coin is each side. And on top of that, all of our progress is freedom and free heart. We are this argument of liberty, so grateful for it, to every step and sad ounce of blood, so glad to be here, doing this: America is unfurled, yes she is, attending to these matters.

We herald good and grand and great things, don’t you think?

This precious land, maybe not as writ, maybe crude destiny, maybe not so prized as merely praised, but in every contest we America stand with justice, prove effort, thrill children.

These may not be bleak times.

After his talk at their Las Vegas convention, just one of 14 Disabled American Veterans said they would continue to back McCain.

Major media tries so hard to paint a ‘fair election’, advert revenue from both sides, but what else needs to be carefully reported?

Listen up!!
Christopher Locke says The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank is

an important book, and right on the money,

fascists by any other name would still smell

“Personally, I found the book engaging, hugely informative, and fascinating — the way a 40-car pile up or train derailment is fascinating. Frank makes a valiant attempt to end the book on an upbeat note, but on the whole, the picture he presents is like a case study in political despair.

“The really depressing part is that he seems to have correctly diagnosed the cancer.”

From the book’s description:
It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule.

Depression after birth is no crime, but crime can be avoided with greater compassion and understanding.

FuturePundit noticed: “The interleukin-1 beta that is used to stimulate serotonin in the uterus also travels to the brain and as a side effect causes neurons all over the brain to make too many serotonin transporters.”

When the fetus and placenta are gone, blood continues flowing from the mother’s uterine artery until platelets move in to stop it, Dr. Prasad explains. Serotonin levels begin to rise and interact with receptors on the smooth muscle of the uterus. This stimulates production of interleukin-1 beta which the MCG researchers found regulates expression of serotonin-hoarding transporters. Interleukin-1 beta gets in the mother’s bloodstream, crosses the blood brain barrier and creates more serotonin transporters on the neurons when they are not needed.

There’s so much we don’t know. British researchers have discovered a mental bonus — children who are breast-fed seem to cope with stress and anxiety more effectively when they reach school age. Perhaps the mother’s serotonin transmitters are shared or regulated while breast feeding….

ScienceBlog:
Parkinson’s disease and drug addiction are polar opposite diseases, but both depend upon dopamine. Parkinson’s patients don’t have enough of it; drug addicts get too much of it.

“This could be what underlies addiction,” says Northwestern University.

“Dopamine normally helps you adjust the pressure on the brake and gas pedals. It helps you learn that when you see a red light at an intersection, you brake and when the green light comes on, you take your foot off the brake and depress the gas pedal to go.

“…a healthy brain balances the urge to do something and the urge to stop….”

“Parkinson’s disease patients, who have lost the neurons that release dopamine, have their foot perpetually stuck on the brake.”

… but dopamine released by drugs leads to abnormal ‘go’ circuits and weak ‘stop’ circuits, resulting in an uncontrollable drive to ‘go’ and seek drugs.

“What was that ceremony about?”

Are the conflicts between man and nature resolved? asks NBC. Oh, not with China, insists NBC.

But resolved by any oligarch?

Is there a people message to people?

May we trust vision?

Is there us ahead?

What’s new?

My heart fell to rise a thousand.
Not today, never without it,
Wonder is enough.

Solzhenitsyn.

Thinking.

‘I Am Not Afraid of Death’

Conversation, 2007

The pieces in the news focus on an Edwards stripped bare, oh shame oh shame, but Edwards has importantly also said, “In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.”

What did Shakespeare write, to plagiarize the NYTimes?

Every inch… stiff of joints and shaky of balance, this Lear stumbles, struts, punches, crawls and soars through the dusk before death, losing and finding and losing himself anew at every turn in the road to oblivion.

Aggrandizement will never cease to surprise and, at the same time, to feel absolutely inevitable. Someday soon I hope we find they are men and might be able, but we fail to know how to measure men.

If John Edwards’ political career is done, why isn’t John McCain’s?

John McCain had a well-documented affair betraying his first wife with his current wife.

He has admitted in his books that he ran around with several different women….

“While still married to his first wife, McCain left her for a younger, richer woman.”

PollyArtist asks, “And isn’t she the good little Stepford wife!?

“I have to wonder why, with all her millions she is willing to be so subservient to such a bum. What more secrets is she hiding?”

The Greek would know a man but we will not.

Gods inside, gods outside,
Gods above, gods below,
Gods oceanward, gods landward,
Gods incarnate, gods not incarnate,
Gods punishing sins, gods pardoning sins,
Gods devouring men, gods slaying warriors,
Gods saving men,
Gods of darkness and light, gods of the ten skies,

Can the gods all be counted?
The gods cannot all be counted!

The British Museum offers an online exhibit of the Pacific Islanders from the 1760 to 1800s period of first contact.

For the inhabitants of the Polynesian islands in the eastern Pacific, the gods were always present in the world. But, while their powers could be life-enhancing, they were also potentially dangerous and had to be contained. Godly power was controlled by means of the concept of tapu, from which the word taboo is derived.

A disposition of dislike and distrust.

A state of dog-eat-dog; not governance but inheritance and embezzlement.

A seizure of power worth nothing but its unsuccessful end.

Naughton points to analysis of Barack Obama’s ancestry at The Irish Times as Ancestry.co.uk has rooted out Obama’s roots.

His third great grandfather was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States in 1850.

BARACK OBAMA had a distant Irish cousin who went on to become provost of Trinity College and later bishop of Ossory, new research shows.

It has also been revealed that an Irish ancestor opposed political corruption in Dublin.

The Democratic nominee for the US presidential election is directly descended from the Kearneys of Shinrone and Moneygall, Co Offaly, the research has revealed.

His ancestry had already been traced back to a shoemaker in Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border. Further research shows a Tipperary connection…

He joins other Irish Commander in Chief: Ronald Reagan’s great-grandfather, Michael O’Regan, and John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy.

World Travelers Unite! Bring these to market.

Kyle Lawson is the winner of Gizmodo’s Eureka Contest for her eyeglasses that automatically translate.

Sex, Science and Stem Cells:
Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason
by Congresswoman Diana DeGette

Why wait so long into the Bush administration to take a stand against its policies—and those of the right wing?

It’s really been about 14 years of this right wing escapade—ever since the Republicans took control of Congress—but it has spiraled out of control under the Bush administration.

A lot of the policies were started under the Republican leadership of the House, like some of the abstinence-only sex education. But then, under the Bush administration, these policies have gone to a whole new level because they have been the focus of a lot of the Bush administration’s efforts toward sex and reproduction.

One of the reasons the book is coming out right now is targeted at the fall 2008 elections to try to say to voters, “When you’re looking at who to vote for this year, be it president or members of Congress, you really need to think about science when drafting public policy.”

“I think President Bush was frankly unconcerned about what the public will was. He had a personal religious view and he felt strongly about that. So, he just stubbornly blazed ahead.”