all warfare is based on deception, victims everywhere, emily’s white heat
August 30, 2008 at 3:32 pm | In culture, history, literature, photoshop | Leave a CommentI have to agree, Boys will be boys
7. Stay Away from the Beauty Queen attack. I really mean this. For many reasons, it’s a loser. In the most base sense, I’ll remind you that people do in fact, love Beauty Queens. Also, she’s smarter than that, and has already proven she understands how to manipulate her opponents, who think to attack her this way thinking that she won’t have the brain-power to respond. She does, and she will. Also, there’s that whole winger thing of pretending to care about women who are being ‘attacked’ for being women; they do it (sadly) better than many on our side do. While we should recognize that her looks will play a role in the election, we should be very careful to treat her as a corrupt, Republican politician, and nothing about her gender or appearance. Short version: wingers long for and follow with religious conviction, their “Joan of Arcs.” Palin could be one.
The willingness to portray oneself as the pour beleaguered victim even when they have so many advantages (10 houses, 500 shoes) is one of the zealots stock in trade. Look at history and all the underestimated morons that humanity has put in power then had to endure; a tragic mistake to think in terms of having an inherent moral superiority over someone, or think that superiority will lead you to easy victory even as right as you might be in terms of goals. , SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR
I. LAYING PLANS
18. All warfare is based on deception.
20. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder,
and crush him.II. WAGING WAR
19. In war, then, let your great object be victory,
not lengthy campaigns.
You never know who commenters are. So the derisive comments about Palin on some sites that are laden with sexism could be trolls. Otherwise whether it the big name media columnists, blogs or the Obama campaign no one should be mistaken in thinking this is anything other then a war against two worthy adversaries. Just judging from a couple of videos on the net, Palin is media savvy and knows how to use it to her advantage. She has been caught pandering and is currently caught up in a scandal that involved using her political position as means to extract revenge in a personal matter. Hammer her on the issues.
art of war. should have titled it victims everywhere.
Maybe there are too many drugs in the water supply. The Wall Street Journal doing a good review about Emily Dickinson’s friend/editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily’s Ambassador
Higginson (1823-1911) has long been exiled to the underworld of Dead White Males: He was the establishment prude who co-edited Dickinson’s work for publication after she died at age 56 in 1886 — only a handful of her nearly 1,800 poems had been published in her lifetime. He shepherded two volumes of them into print in altered form, grammar and punctuation conventionalized, slant-rhymes rewritten to rhyme. Perhaps Higginson deserves a reprieve. After all, co-editor Mary Todd Loomis was the more avid prettifier (“Let us alter as little as possible,” he scolded her)
This is from a book review by Bill Christophersen of ‘White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’ by Brenda Wineapple. There is an excerpt from the book here. While Dickenson has always had her fans, she has been underestimated by many. Often times assigned to the order of chic writers as in chic flicks. She was too big, too expansive to be assigned to a little corner of the literary world. Christophersenin his introduction,
“Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell.” Who but Emily Dickinson would hijack the meter of the hymnal (“Our God, our help in ages past / And hope for years to come”) to doubt the afterlife? Gnomic and subversive, her poems are shots of triple-distilled whiskey that jolt going down, then radiate, leaving us wide-eyed and slightly fuddled.
Some of her stuff because of the rhymes can go down as quaint Hallmarkish poetry. Hardly relevant in our modern world, but on taking a closer look Dickinson’s work is a “jolt” and sometimes a dark one at that.
curb your blame, seasonal passage, confirmed emergency rooms are not health-care
August 29, 2008 at 4:00 pm | In graphic art, history, photography, progressive, sociology | Leave a CommentYa think, Ending Blame And Criticism In Your Close Relationships
Ending blame and chronic criticism is a task well worth taking on. According to research in marriage and relationship, the #1 slayer of intimacy is blame and chronic criticism. Marital researcher John Gottman calls criticism one of the “Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse” that spells doom in a close relationship (the other three Horsemen are contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal.)
If you can’t do anything about that impulse to let loose on someone direct it outside the circle of trust. That’s what neighbors, politicians and phone solicitors are for. We all probably have some family or friends that are too far gone to just read a column and come to some great epiphany about their relationship so that means counseling.
The perfect intro for this would be, have you ever wondered. Though I never have, but now that I know its kinda somewhat interesting, Where does it come from? – Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.
Its been the standard in dummy text since the 1500s according to this post. Which meant that is was good enough for printing from the Renaissance up to and including some electronic text at web sites that are under construction and for print software examples.
Remember Mr. John Goodman, the McCain policy adviser that said emergency rooms were the same thing as having health-care The American College of Emergency Physicians disagrees,
“We urge the McCain campaign to rethink the reckless suggestion by Mr. Goodman that the tragedy of uninsured patients can be erased by the magic of emergency departments,” said Dr. Lawrence. “Emergency physicians can and do perform miracles every day, but taking on the full-time, medical care for 46 million uninsured Americans is one miracle even we cannot perform. Access to care in the emergency department is no substitute for the comprehensive health care reform policy that should be at the heart of the platform of any presidential campaign.”
McConfused has sent Mr. Goodman to the woodshed, but the fact remains that McCain’s heath-care policies remain based on Goodman’s advice.
measuring threats, avalanche, scarecrow records and scary think tanks
August 28, 2008 at 2:19 pm | In culture, economic, photography, photoshop, progressive, sociology | 1 CommentTeens making poor choices when it comes to riding in vehicles
In the first ever direct comparison of the differences between driver and passenger seat belt use for a nationally representative teen population, the Meharry researchers found that 59% of teens always buckled up in the driver seat but only 42% always wore seat belts as passengers. Even more sobering, only 38% of all teens reported always buckling up as both drivers and passengers.
Meharry Medical College sites an annual fatality rate among teens due to traffic accidents at 5000 ( the Center for Disease Control sites 4544 in 2005 so the stats might be rounded). That would mean that from 09-11-01 until 09-11-08 a total of 35,000 Americans have died just from accidents compared to 3,000 people that were murdered on 09-11-01 by terrorists. if this means that Iraq is safer then American highways, as similar comparisons and conclusions have been made, then why all the fuse over a little war. If Iraq is that safe we can also conculde there is little reason to be there, certainly in terms of saving the lives of U.S. citizens our resources would be better put to use in vehicle safety education and enforcment of current laws. Now we need to figure out how not to look like bizarro control freaks when we tell our passengers to buckle the hell up.
HOSCHTON — This small northeastern Georgia town’s population boom is frightening. In a bid to break a world record for scarecrows and scare up some fun for the fall season, thousands of straw-stuffed newcomers are creeping across town.
The current scarecrow record is held by the Cincinnati Horticultural Society’s Cincinnati Flower and Farm Fest with 3,311. As strange as some of them look, the scarecrows, not the residents, at least they’re not making stuffed circus clowns which are really scary.
Something else that’s scary, McCain Advisor: There are no uninsured Americans
But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
M. Goodman, George Orwell’s ghost is on the line and wants to speak to you. Hospitals generally bill patients whether they have insurance or not. Most people work out some kind of repayment plan. Since the vast majority of Americans are not as he assumes irresponsible scofflaws, that hospital bill becomes part of their financial burden and their worries. I’m sure that a master of doublespeak like Mr. Goodman could never be convinced otherwise, but waiting until you’re so ill that you can’t take it anymore, then go to an emergency room in no way constitutes health-care. Health-care is the answer to what McCain and that “think tank” would consider a riddle; how do we reduce emergency room visits and actually bring down our national health-care cost while also improving the quailty of life for millions of Americans. I’m not brillant, but even i find the phrase conservatiive think tank an oxymoron.
pharmaceuticals on tap, shadow games, cars are freedom?
August 27, 2008 at 3:51 pm | In culture, movies, photography, photoshop, science | Leave a Comment
A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The trace amounts – measured in parts per million – include everything you can think of from anti-depressants to barbiturates to ibuprofen and birth control pills. The AP contacted one group of California water suppliers and were told that they don’t regularly release information about drug contamination because the public “doesn’t know how to interpret the information”. Don’t tell the peasants that the alien craft have landed they might start asking questions. There probably is no reason, short term anyway to be upset. The medical consequences in these minute amounts probably would have little consequence. Long term is another matter. Drugs can collect over time in organs such as the liver and kidneys. The no one knows how the interaction of so many drugs, even trace amounts might affect someone over their lifetime. Bottled water is not an alternative, because they only test for known toxins, not pharmaceuticals. Better living through chemistry might have become non-optional.
I this review of Jacques Tati’s Trafic, It just might make you love your car again Nathan Heller writes,
It’s a cartoonish sendup of the auto industry’s chief selling point—the idea that car ownership makes our lives faster, freer, and more cost-effective. And it’s generally thought to show that Tati, like Godard, was channeling the ennui of his era, spurning car culture and longing for the days when everyone rode bicycles and boated on the Loire. This is a misinterpretation. In fact, Trafic is a movie about finding life and freedom through cars. Tati’s goal was to scrub away banality and revive the American-style thrills that had once drawn France to the road. Video clips at link.
I don’t hate cars now, but I used to love them. A fact that is a real testament to the power and influence of the myths of modern culture. Maybe your parents would talk about the expense and responsibility, but those concerns were vastly over shadowed by the commercials, movies, books and magazines that extolled the freedom and adventure to be had behind the wheel of your own car. Reality has a way of clarifying myths. Car payments didn’t set me free, the endless maintenance didn’t do much for my freedom, the breakdowns nearly ruined my academic life. Car problems and having the right model hurt and helped my personal life. Gas was always money that i felt would have been better off earning interest. I learned that cars are the ball and chain you have to carry for some relative amount of freedom. There is something Faustian about them. If your boss is an assclown from the Plantation school of management your car payments along with the insurance are part of what keeps you from telling him/her where they can stick their “attitude” problems. As the years go by you might forget for hours at a time that your car owns you.
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