Tag Archives: culture

Ponderables of the day

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1. A reader responds to the article, “The blue-state trap,” with a strong personal opinion:

  • Amity, Monday, January 23, 2012 at 8:0011 pm

Articles like this annoy me. The United States has been profoundly divided politically for nearly a quarter of a millennium. We have never not been violently at odds. I mean, red states and blue states used to go to war with each other. Elected representatives fought each other physically in the halls of Congress. [note: pre-U.S. neighbours fought and killed each other during the American Revolutionary War]

Spare us the weepy sad sorrow for the bygone days of halcyon bipartisanship. When were these days of golden unity? They never existed.

And as for the idea of a “missing center,” I can explain the apparent conundrum very easily. The urban centers of America are the center. Some go center-left, most swing center-right. The reason why you all can’t find the common ground that doesn’t consist of going further right is that from here, from where you all are, there is nowhere left to go but further and further right.

The Democratic Party is by any sane application of the terminology a center-right party. The Republican Party is far right — more or less fascist in practice, if not in principle.

The actual American left, such as it is, consists mostly of a small number of miscellaneous Occupy protesters, shivering in the cold.

Oh, and also, spare us the horseshit about homogeneity in liberal enclaves. There are few American cities with more fractured politics than San Francisco.

2. An ode to the Gulag Archipelago – Love, American-style.

3. Aurora forecast.

4. A nod to the new director of UAF’s Geophysical Institute, Robert “Bob” McCoy.  Tell us more about the importance of thermokarst lakes, why dontcha?

5. A nod to Christian Schrader, a geologist from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, who helps find meteorites in the Antarctic.

Word

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So we “cancel” Greek debt with no hope the Greek government/private sectors will ever pay back what they owed?

Hmm…

What does that tell us about the rest of the EU/world?

Warren Buffett can play guitar, for beginners (or is that starters?).

Telling us we’re all just regular people in one way or another.

Okay…

I agree.

However [scratching head while two cats warm my knees and crawl space crickets sprout after a midwinter rain], it’s not us creditors I mull over.

Which reminds me.  Ever wonder why you can buy cold beer and hot chocolate at an outdoor sports event but not hot fermented beverages?  What about warm, spiced beer at the next football or hockey game, huh?

Anyway, debt is the word.

The question.

The answer.

Cyclical crises are perennial and require perennial solutions, don’t they?

Or do they?

Is Bloomberg still taking programming lessons?

Does the Panic of [1819/1837/1873/1893/1907] have any relevance today, despite nomenclature games that this one has to be different because we’re so much more modern in our economic understanding, etc.?

Change is change even when you end up with no pocket change to speak of.

Next, we’ll go from an anonymous Netizen Manifesto to a Netizen Bill of Rights to a group of people declaring themselves members of no country except the virtual/online one in which they elect their nongeographical solar system representatives.

So, yes, let’s cancel Greek debt but at the same time declare Greece is no longer a real country in the old sense.

A tourist attraction, perhaps.

Other than that, its people are free to join the new Netizenry, subject to crowdsourced laws and regulations, few as they are (governed mainly by gravity and other natural laws).

The cats say it’s time for bed and sleep.

I agree.

G’night.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

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from allthingsd:

Terry Gou on the Taipei Zoo

January 19, 2012 at 11:59 pm PT

Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide, and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.

– Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou, who went on to say that he wants to learn from the director of Taipei Zoo regarding how animals should be managed

We, the members of the Committee, totally agree!  😉

A Guinea Pig for Chemistry

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Even behind-the-scenes writers and not-so-fortunate fortunetellers need a break every now and then.

All afternoon, I sat in a chair at the Salon Professional Academy while a friend, Tammie, coloured and cut my hair, changing me from a white-haired guy to a ginger-haired professorial type.

Thanks, Tammie, and to your colleagues, for the fun, friendship and new hairstyle.

Now, back to the story you know will keep you in your seats…

= = =

Thanks to MailPro; Richard, Ray and Julie at Lowe’s; USPS; B&N; Jonathan at Anaheim Chili.

Congrats to the NY Giants.

Balsa Struts and Tissue Paper

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Have you ever created a reason to walk door-to-door, meeting your neighbours, greeting strangers who have internal imagery that defines their perfect center of the universe in domiciles that may or may not define domestic bliss?

In my door-to-door adventures, I asked for Halloween candy; have sold: raffle tickets for junior high school sock hops, desk lamps and other catalog items for Cub/Boy Scout projects, candles and oranges for high school marching band trips, mini-encyclopedias for college spending money; delivered free telephone books; taken survey information for the 2010 U.S. Census.

In the forty or so years of these face-to-face encounters, I have seen houses full of African violets, mobile homes full of marijuana plants, dog/cat feces all over the floor, spotlessly-clean living rooms (implying there was little in the way of living going on in them), ethnic diversity in areas where homogeneity was most coveted, souvenir dinner plates covering walls, people answering the door in a variety of [un]dress and people being as quiet as they can, refusing to open the door.

Do you know the official history of the spot where you call home, even if it’s a carpark where your Travelers’ caravan sits temporarily?

I am a vagabond of thought patterns, meandering from place to place, committed neither to one thought pattern nor another, aware of the vanity that goes with believing any one thought set is a permanent solution to anything in particular.

I have a childhood drawing with three names on the bottom: Rick Hill, Jeff Garwood and Suzanne Trimble.  I guess the drawing was made sometime between the third and sixth year of primary school.

I know the first person very well, have lost touch with the second person and the third person is about to spend seven months in Germany for reasons unknown to me.

However, these three people well represent the types of people I met in my door-to-door wanderings as a child encouraged to impress himself upon his neighbours to exchange labour credits/money for goods/services.

I painted houses, mowed lawns, raked leaves and helped friends in their newspaper delivery routes to provide myself the economic power to participate in the local marketplace during my teenage years.

I suppose children are still providing these services to put spending money in their pockets and deposits in their bank accounts, a few of them buying stamps, comic books, dolls or other collectibles and/or government savings bonds and company stock for investments.

Broken-balsa-wood-and-torn-tissue-paper windup-rubber-band-powered airplanes sit atop dusty stacks of books around me.

A rusty model rocket launch pad rod sticks up out of shopping bag labeled “CIRCUSWORLD TOY & VIDEO CENTER.”

A telescope points toward the ground.

On a pile next to me rests a wire kitchen strainer once used as a parabolic wireless network signal concentrator/reflector.

These items serve as keys or bookmarks for memory locations inside my body.

The generic brick-and-mortar, vinyl-sided, stacked-box objects we call home serve as memory locations for inhabitants, too.

A cave or a bamboo hut.

An adobe hacienda or stone castle.

We are rarely aware of the network of memory locations within us that are triggered by external objects like our homes and their contents.

Is your home rich with memories, both good and bad?

Or, like some of the sterile environments I observed when going door-to-door, is your home mostly unused, filled with objects about which you have little memory recall, the TV and computer serving more as an extension of your thought set than the furniture and facsimile paintings on the walls?

A fellow blogger posted that her friends find her boring.  It’s a matter of perspective.  How imaginative is the thought set of the blogger?  How rich are her memories of growing up?

The Internet has opened the gates that once allowed only the most persistent, imaginative people to appear in mass media.

Now, everyone with a computing device (computer, tablet or mobile phone) can appear in a one-person off-Broadway autobiographical show — a slice of life with no beginning or end, no plot, no climax, just a character carrying on about whatever it is that character wants to put on display.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité.  E pluribus unum.

On a side note, is it just me or does the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) emblem look like the mask that some of the global protestors have been wearing?:

Billions of dollar bills waiting for their profiles

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Will a billionaire become the next head of the Russian government?  After all, if Putin, the almighty bear who presides like a self-appointed emperour, admits that a woman, albeit the U.S. Secretary of State, got the better of him, then is he capable of governing the largest geopolitical entity on this planet?  Look what happened to his friend, Berlusconi.

Speaking of billions of dollars, have you looked at your U.S. currency lately.  It might be a work of art.

However, Canadians have all the fun in Cuba, though, don’t they?  My hats off to Talin for sharing this story.

The last Cuban cigars I owned I purchased at the Havana House Cigar and Tobacco Merchant in Toronto, Canada.  I brought them into the United States and karma got me — a few months later, some teenagers broke into our house and stole, among a variety of small items, my box of Cubans.

Time to decide — stay with my LiveScribe Echo/Pulse pens or go with something old but new?

BTW, Talin, what’s up with Canada unjoining the Kyoto protocol?  My guess, too much dinero in cutting down boreal forests and pumping…uh, I mean, fracking oil down the middle of the U.S.  Will global warming turn Canada into a swamp once again, with tonnes and tonnes of methane free for those who need natural gas in their ovens and stoves, even if they can’t afford food?

My wife mentioned an actor set off a publicity stunt on a transportation device because his career is about to stall out.  Then, like a journalist interviewing a journalist about a nonevent, the actor turned his publicity stunt into a nonevent.  Beware those who seek attention for attention’s sake [YAWN!].  They quickly drop off the public radar for crying “Wolfgang!” too many times [NOTE: see reference to supposed leader of the UK, Cameron, and his isolationist theories].

And that actress who insists on baring it all — can you not find a good acting gig?  Surely, there’s a production company that wants to see you performing as another set of twins, grown up and mature, this time.

Anyway, if a billionaire can lead Russia, is there hope for other countries, too?

For instance, at a meeting of the Committee last night, one of the members said, “Let’s have a show of hands of who wants to see Assad’s head on a pike in the middle of an angry Syrian crowd?  Just what I thought.”  TV appearances buy you nothing except contempt, Mr. Bashar al-Assad.  There is no forgiveness for you here.  May God have mercy on your soul.

= = =

Thanks to Dominique at Target, Ashley at Coldstone and Haley N at Longhorn.

Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About

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What is Julia the Thanksgiving Girl or Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist doing right now?

What about John in the checkout line or Michelle in the deli at Publix?

Terrence or Mildred of Comcast, what does either one do on the weekend?

Or KK at Carson’s Grille?

Imagine a small fleet of crafts heading toward a distant habitable planet, sending and receiving reports along the journey, landing 1,000 years from now, funded by private individuals and companies on Earth that no longer exist in 3011.

What if government as we know it anywhere on Earth right now is no longer tenable in the near or distant future?

Would you trust the backers of a privately-funded, online voting or vote-matching system?

Shouldn’t our new system of cooperating with one another (what we commonly call politics or government) be more, not less, transparent?

Many business people are used to meeting in private, negotiating and signing nondisclosure agreements or other documents that prevent the average person on the street from seeing the details of average business transactions.

We call it competition, trade secrets, intellectual property and similar terms that ensure protection of privacy.

Government is that odd amalgam of public and private interfaces, where sole-source contracts and competing bids go up against marketing and advertisement campaigns.

If two ideas are competing against one another for limited resources, which of the ideas’ weak points or strengths is more important than the other’s?

I can talk about free, live, open source software (FLOSS) because there’s enough profitmaking available and excess resources for such a concept in small to medium markets.

What about on a global scale?

After all, a gaboodle of mobile phones contain Android, which contains a core, or kernel, of Linux code.

In our newly-connected global economy, which operates by and large as a supergossip network, where much of what we say to each other is superfluous but informational, we have created a citizenry that lives and loves outside the bounds of geographically-based political entities.

[Cue several paragraphs of historical comparisons to previous interconnected civilisations]

Are you interested in the status quo — government as it is and has been — or something new, something that develops from grassroot efforts, where we seamlessly become part of the Internet of Things, and transparency is commonplace but there’s room to respect the needs of profitmaking and intellectual/personal property rights?

I grew up playing board games called “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Life,” and other cultural teaching tools centered on competition.  I didn’t play boards games that directly taught cooperation.  Instead, collusion of players ganging up on another was the indirect lesson I learned when one player was dominating and the others didn’t want that player to win.

It was in team sports and partner-based card games that I learned to cooperate with others in order to win against a respected opponent.

What are we teaching each other and our children about the future?

Take nothing for granted, granite included

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If I knew that our solar system was packed with living things (at least in the way we choose to define the term “living”), would I feel as compelled as I do to encourage us to devote xx.xx% of our resources toward populating the cosmos with living things from Earth?

The WordPress front page displayed a link to a blog entry titled, “Off the Couch and Into the Streets.”  Rarely do I feel compelled to comment on a blog entry but I added one to Coleen’s:

Your blog entry popped up on the front page of WordPress, and the title “Off the couch and into the streets” caught my attention because I’m looking for a fun way to lose some extra weight. Thus, my expectations were different than you might have expected when you wrote this blog entry.

The Occupy [your locale] movement, Arab Spring, and any/all protestations against the common/established social structure are perennial, which usually fall under the label “counterculture.” I encourage you to feel and act differently, supporting your subcultural beliefs no matter how much you may feel crushed/oppressed by the common culture under which you live and socialise.

Having grown up during the 1960s global counterculture movement, my perspective, as a child at the tailend of the Baby Boomer generation, has taught and continues to teach me that those who protest will encourage others to act in less obvious, newsworthy manners, to effect longterm change.

I’m glad you have a job which gave you the flexibility and courage to join those who wanted to voice their displeasure with the current state of our common culture [one] day on the streets of Denver. Hopefully, through your job and with your friends, you can be the change you want to see today and into the future.

How do we express ourselves daily?  In other words, do we carefully consider the words we use in social exchanges?

Saying I am the “99%” or I am the “1%” or any other label automatically establishes an artificial barrier.

Reminds me of taking the Myers-Briggs personality profile test as a requirement of working in a certain department at a company full of a variety of personality types, including conformists and nonconformists.  After taking the test and, with another person who had gotten the same personality profile, saying that the test results were bogus, was informed that those who received that particular personality profile were prone to say the test results were bogus.

I feel the same way about the Occupy movement.  The participants brag about how diverse and unlabelable they are — yet, they quickly chant about the “99%” and the “1%” without blinking a self-conscious inner eye.

Another commenter said, “It’s like telling a child “You just like to argue” and the child keeps saying “Nuh uh!”.”  The same goes for those who are being labeled by the diverse Occupy movement participants.

To be frank, when I hear the Occupy movement chants through mass media soundbites, all I can think is, “Well, what if I’m one of the 1%?  So what?  Didn’t I earn my place in this financial position by saving (using the old adage of “pay yourself first”) and spending wisely?  Sure, some of my Nike shoes or my wife’s Kathy Lee Gifford designer clothes were made using kids paid ‘slave wages’ but I stopped buying those items after I found out about their manufacturing sources.  The University of Oregon and Stanford University, home to some students who have protested, didn’t refuse Phil Knight’s donations nor did the students refuse to attend those universities.  Regis Philbin, a person apparently beloved by many, didn’t stop being Kathy Lee Gifford’s friend.  I don’t have all the time in the world to investigate the raw material source and manufacturing location of every item I buy but will make reasonable changes when I find out.  Some parts of me are just as susceptible to instant gratification and buyer remorse as anyone else in the 1% or 99% (i.e., all seven billion of us).”

That’s why using or not using labels is important to me.  Also why I lump us all together into the label of “seven billion of us.”  We’re in this thing as one.  One planet, one global infrastructure, one solar ecosystem.

How do we train ourselves and one another to seek rewarding goals that limit destructive and detrimental effects on others, regardless of our entrenched differences?

This time of year, I look out the window and bare trees expose the view of row after row of shingled suburban rooftops.

The mortgage on my house has been paid off.  The majority of mortgages for the rooftops out there are probably still being paid for.

Shall I blame or thank the finance/banking industry for suburban sprawl that makes my skin crawl?

Shall I adjust my view to show myself the people occupying those suburban boxes are paying taxes that support the roads that allow me to drive to unoccupied parks and forests set aside for my enjoyment via local/state/national proclamation and financial support?

If, as one person said, the rich have enough money to pay for half the population to control/kill the other half, where does that put me?

Well, I know where it puts where I want to be.  I want to be one of the rich and when I get there, I don’t want to have to redistribute my wealth unnecessarily.  I admit I like having the total population of my species at my control.  I want to be Phil Knight and say, “Yeah, so what if my products have been made in sweat shops?  My personally-directed donations are creating a whole new crop of those who will rule from the top”.  If I’m going to be labeled as part of the 1%, I want to be Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Pierre Omidyar or Vladimir Putin, not a homeless person as part of the poorest 1%.

Tiny leaves float through the air outside the window.  A woodpecker hops up and down tree limbs, presumably looking for hidden insects to munch upon.

Both public and private money has given me the time to sit here and make these comments.  It’ll take 100% of us to improve our conditions, if we so choose.

Yes, our global economy is not perfect and never will be perfect.  It displays characteristics of both an open and a closed-loop system, subject to the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Can we show how unselfish we are and share our wealth, of knowledge and financial gains, accordingly, while some of us compete against each other in the chess game of life to make things better for our descendants?

Live happily in the fact that today’s 1% will not be tomorrow’s 1% nor will today’s 99% be tomorrow’s.

If you don’t like what’s going on, take the opportunity to change it.  If you don’t like accumulating massive debt to pay for a college education, find a company that’ll hire you for your current skills/talents despite the lack of a diploma.  I did.  But I eventually got around to completing a bachelor’s degree just to prove I can (and got my company to foot the bill – hey, I wasn’t born yesterday – which set me up for a career ladder promotion that wasn’t interesting to me, but that’s another story).

Nothing is set in stone, except perhaps your date of death, and even that fades with time and exposure to the elements.

Think the members of the U.S. Congress who sit on a supercommittee can cut over $1T from the U.S. government budget and make everyone happy?  Wanna make a bet?

If it was me, I’d spread the cuts proportionally to those who are expected NOT to vote in the next election.  Hey, it’s only fair, is it not?  The U.S. is a democratic republic where lawful citizens have the right to participate in electing legislative, executive and some judicial representatives.  Those who choose not to participate, or vote, get less of the government pie to eat – isn’t that one of the tales we learned in kindergarten?

We’ll see what we see when the time comes…