inkbluesky

Two ways to combine  your creativity with social consciousness, Film Your Issue - directing the future - deadline is May 15, 2007 so you still have a few weeks. Then if still photography is more your style these folks will even send 150 people a camera, A Million Little Pictures

We’re sending out disposable cameras to 150 people who are shooting the whole roll based on the theme of “open” and then we are going to plaster our gallery walls with them. Want a camera?

egret sunset 1280×1024 

Dealing with guns 

    1. Unless you have invested the time and money to be well trained in the defensive use of a handgun, don’t carry one.

2. Unless you are willing to spend the money and time to go to the range and fire your weapon at least monthly and at least a box of ammo at that time, don’t carry one.

The Virginia Tech shootings have had the very predictable effect of bringing up the issue of handguns again. I own one and have have nothing against guns per se. There might be a problem if as some right-wing pundits have suggested that we turn college campuses or society at large into the O.K. Corral. If it were up to me I’d give them their wish for a few months. Have everyone pack some heat and wear flak vests all day every day. I could handle it, but I don’t think they could - The Ideological Animal

They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

As the rest of the story at Making Light makes clear guns do not create a stable atmosphere. Unless you think hyper-authority combined with fear equals stability. It creates exactly the kind of thing that conservatives have difficulty dealing with - anxiety and unpredictability. Then add in that if everyone carries a holstered weapon it makes the possibility of distinguishing between the innocent and potential shooters even more difficult.  Seeing that conservatives are quick tempered and easily goaded it doesn’t take much in the way of psychic powers to know who will be gunning down the first innocent bystander who was just reaching for their cell phone.

Speaking of psychics the Amazing Randi lets us in on some of the tricks they use, The Devious Art of Improvising, Lesson One

In one early test of telepathy, in 1882, pseudo-psychic G.A. Smith and his accomplice, Douglas Blackburn, were able to fool researchers of the Society for Psychical Research. In a later confession, Blackburn described how they had to think fast and frequently invent new ways of faking telepathy demonstrations.