Kumbyah, Pakistan Style....last post for 2010

NYT:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A crippling strike by Islamist parties brought Pakistan to a standstill on Friday as thousands of people took to the streets, and forced businesses to close, to head off any change in the country’s blasphemy law, which rights groups say has been used to persecute minorities, especially Christians.

The law was introduced in the 1980s under the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq as part of a policy of promoting Islam to unite this deeply fractious society. Many attempts to revise the law have since been thwarted by the strong opposition of religious forces, which continue to gather strength.
******

Luckily all of my bitching and moaning on this blog has solved the world's problems.

Beat the reaper again... 12+ years with ALS.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

s.

Do we need the Department of Education?

This a verbatim, accurate and complete exchange appearing on a comment board, News Journal (Wilmington, DE, a Gannett property) tonight associated with the headline Tucker Carlson: Michael Vick should have been 'executed'

User Image
captain_sane wrote:
Replying to blackgirlfound:

Replying to captain_sane:

Replying to nottoooldtocare:

Replying to blackgirlfound:

Siht! What's the difference between a dog and a moose?


Do you know anyone who has been arrested and convicted of running moose fighting rings?


Mooses are hunted for food. The dogs were electrocuted. Your comment is racist and singles out Sarah Palin. You know that. Like I said racists on here every day.



Guess what they say about hit dogs hollering loudest is true. I didn't say jack siht about Sarah Palin. I just asked the difference between a dog and a damn moose. They were both killed for sport.


EINSTIEN: Mooses are killed for food! His dogs were torchered. You are clueless.
12/29/2010 8:23:14 PM

Assignment #1: Guess your sex

This is a nativity scene in front of the Chester County (PA) Courthouse erected by the West Chester city Department of Public Works using taxpayer money.



This is a nativity scene in front of a home outside of Chicago, erected by the homeowners.



Use a #2 pencil to underline the statement that best describes what will happen if someone suggests that the nativity scene in the first picture violates the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.

a. The world will end.
b. The Jews will take all our money.
c. Santa will destroy all the adult novelty stores in Rainelle, WV.
d. America will loose the space race to the Russians.

Sometimes, NYT columnists believe common knowledge

Sir:

Frank Rich describes the vanished world and ethos of 1956 "middle class America" depicted in a home movie. He extols 1956 middle class America's quasi-egalitarian values; its "faith in its own unbounded future" and its belief in "shared sacrifice and...lower-case democratic values", apparently in partnership with benign industrial giants like 3M.

He presents a 21st century contrast: "Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands".

Neither derivatives nor Disneyland (nor Scotch Tape) have any significance or societal value beyond their function as lucrative products and profit centers for their inventors. The racially and socially segregated "homogenous" middle class of 1956 may be viewed as a self-serving Scotch Tape repair applied to the American society depicted in Richard Wright's "Native Son", published in 1940.

The Scotch Tape repair failed decades ago.

s.

My ol' feets failed on me then

click here

New York Times
U.S. Rethinks Strategy for the Unthinkable
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: December 15, 2010

Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.

Holy sleeping shit!!

Luckily, the article linked to this offical government publication:


It had real good advice:

Communicating about a high-stress, life-threatening emergency is always a difficult task; however, communicating about a nuclear detonation poses two unique challenges:

1. Many people do not believe that a nuclear detonation is survivable. The sense of futility, fatalism, and hopelessness severely impacts the public’s desire and even ability to absorb information and follow instructions.

2. A nuclear explosion will more than likely destroy or severely disable the communications infrastructure (any mechanism or system used to give or receive information) in the blast damage zones where people need to act quickly and appropriately to protect themselves. Residual power failures and overloaded systems could cause a cascade of communications failures into the surrounding area, including the dangerous fallout zone (DF zone) where fatal levels of fallout must be avoided to save lives.

To successfully address these challenges, a well-planned and prepared approach to both pre-incident preparedness and post-detonation messaging is essential.

The American Electorate Chooses the Best of the Best

NYT, today

Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

We Consider Dance

We are presenting our inaugural bi-weekly podcast tonight. The podcast will be called "Give the Fiddler a Dram". The theme music should tell you where we're coming from, musically, at least.

One of the defining events in my life came when I was an undergrad at Northwestern University (my advice is to steer clear of the place). John Cage was doing a one week residency in the School of Music. We cut classes and followed him everywhere. He was very open and engaging. We talked continuously for a week about everything from collecting wild mushrooms, Buddhism, ethnomusicology, music theory, dance, art, and sound. I learned that music was sort of a cross between a universe, a religion, and an identity. I closed my mouth, opened my ears, and let the Ghost World engulf me.

Podcast Nr 1
We Consider Dance

Rubberrrrrzzzzz!

I know, I promised, but I couldn't resist making fun of someone the whole world wants to kill over Wikileaks...

Today's Globe and Mail:

Mr. Assange has denied the rape accusation, made by two women who hosted a party for him in Stockholm in August. He has acknowledged having had consensual sex with the complainants. Reports say the sex became non-consensual over disagreements about condom use.

Electronica

The podcasts aren't quite ready yet. Soon, soon...

Here is a collection of electronic compositions absolutely free, as in free beer. You'll need WinRAR to open the archive, and open ears connected to an open mind...as John Cage told me, "There is only music...and silence."

A subwoofer or good headphones would be useful.

Electronica - 2010

Here are the program notes:

I played music most of my life. I can no longer play. I compose. Electronic music is one of the areas I am exploring.

Electronica is a collection of compositions I selected from the past five years of work. I am influenced by the ambient, drone, minimalist, and late 20th century neoclassic schools, but conform to none.

Neurological Disorder
White Ocarina
Enter a Cloverish Silence
Quaker Loops
Spin-Echo
Howl I
Walk Evening
Kaddish for Liviu Librescu, Virginia Tech 2007
Distant Loss
Walk Morning
Elegy for Norma Lane - 2010
I Am the Edison Phongraph

I am making this work freely available, but I am retaining copyright.
Copyright 2010 by SG Senderoff

Image from the Hubble Telescope, NASA

Change

We've changed the blog visual elements, because we've changed the nature of the blog. Recent posts have featured excerpts from news publications illuminated by offensive selections from classic underground comix and nihilistic music from Akron, OH. The objective was to put a humorous perspective on the moronic times in which we live. It's not funny anymore. America is scaring me.

This blog will henceforth feature a biweekly podcast. We will use traditional music as a jumping-off point, and travel to the outer borders of of artistic comprehensibility.

Stay tuned...

Which side CAN you be on?

from a Washington Post blog:

Animal rights activists are up in arms over Palin's treatment of a halibut in the latest episode.

In Defense of Animals has called the footage of Palin clubbing a halibut to death a "snuff film."

Television and the Internet Save Democracy and Stuff

actual exchange on a Washington Post blog comment board concerning DWTS:

I can't understand how Bristol is an example of any child that parents want their teens to listen to. She got knocked up out of wedlock (great parenting Sarah and Todd) and got caught attacking teens on Facebook using vile profanity and homophobic slurs.

Yes, great example you are Bristol. NOT!!!!

I wouldn't put anything past the teabaggers in getting what they want, including voter fraud and using guns to intimidate. This is what our country has come to with the teabaggers and the spineless, greedy, unAmerican Republicans.

Posted by: denise4925 | November 19, 2010 3:33 PM |

I literally hate Sarah Palin.

Posted by: denise4925 | November 19, 2010 3:27 PM |


Denise, you are one retarded c*nt. Too bad your loser party can't win anything unless the conservative base decides it's time ti hit the 'reset' button.

You should be subjected to only the most sever Shariah punishments for taking time out of your day to publicly spew your hatred for someone that you're clearly jealous of.

You too can suck my balls biotch.


Posted by: Personal_Fowl | November 19, 2010 3:41 PM | Report abuse

Post-partisan, Post-racial, Post-cereal

from Bob Herbert's editorial, NYT today

However you want to define the American dream, there is not much of it that’s left anymore. We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. The human suffering in the years required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense. And that suffering will only be made worse if the nation embarks on a misguided crash program of deficit reduction that in the short term will undermine any recovery, and in the long term will make true deficit reduction that much harder to achieve.

We have neither the will nor the common sense to either raise taxes to pay for the wars, or stop fighting them. We’ve become a hapless, can’t-do society, and it’s, frankly, embarrassing. Public figures talk endlessly about “transformative changes” in public education, but the years go by and we see no such thing. Politicians across the spectrum insist that they are all about job creation while the employment situation in the real world remains beyond pathetic.

All we are good at is bulldozing money to the very wealthy. No wonder the country is in such a deep slide.

The Devil is Real

I will admit this is a cheap shot, but this appeared in the NYT today:

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”

With so few priests who perform exorcisms, and the stigma around it, exorcists are not eager to be identified. Efforts to interview them on Friday were unsuccessful.

A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614.

The day after the election

Logo, The Warren Group, political advisors to unsuccessful South Carolina Democratic senatorial candidate Alvin Greene:

"Turn to the Left and Laugh/Turn to the Right and Laugh"
The Warren Group and its network of professional comedians will help politicians make their point with humor.

NYT, yesterday:

“Tonight there’s a Tea Party tidal wave, and we’re sending a message to them,” Mr. Paul said, facing a cheering throng in Bowling Green, Ky. To many in the movement, the singular goal now is to stop an expanding government in its tracks, to “hold the line at all hazards,” as Jennifer Stefano, a Tea Party leader in Pennsylvania, put it.

The movement is animated by a belief that the entire political system has become disconnected from the practical needs and values of Americans, suggesting that its voting power stemmed as much from a populist sense of outrage in a tough economic moment as it did from ideology. What many of its adherents want as much as anything is for the two parties to come together to solve problems.

That sometimes conflicting mandate was neatly captured by two interviews in Searchlight, Nev., hometown of Harry Reid, who as the leader of the Senate Democratic majority became the Tea Party’s biggest target. “I want to see gridlock,” said Ronald Hanvey, who supported Sharron Angle Mr. Reid’s opponent. “I don’t want to see any more laws.” A few months earlier on nearly the same spot, Jeff Church, arriving at a Tea Party rally against Mr. Reid, complained equally about the state’s Republican senator, John Ensign, and yearned for bipartisanship. “Why can’t they get along and make some common-sense solutions?” Mr. Church asked.

******

Every thirty years or so, a significant portion of the American public becomes unhinged. The clinical term is "goes batshit". Another description for this phenomenon was voiced by my Grandma Ida; the literal translation from Yiddish is better than a literary translation. It goes: When the putz stands up, the brains go into the dirt.

The circumstances that bring about a parade of batshit amerikans led by Richard Crainium (a meme devised by a lifelong friend ten years before the concept was re-discovered and popularized by Dawkins) are varied.

Below is an amerikan periodic table of batshitocratic sociopolitical effluvia:

1860s Civil War
1890s Gilded Age
1920s 1st Red Scare (Palmer)
1950s 2nd Red Scare (HUAC, McCarthy)
1980s Reganism
2010s Tea Party

My family has a bad habit of getting caught in the gears of these upheavals.

Grandpa Harry was beaten up in 1919 by a group of Palmer's Raiders while he chaired a meeting of the Benevolent Association of Laundrymen of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. The Feds thought the Laundrymen were a front for the Union of Russian Workers. Indeed, they were a front, but Grandpa Harry was aligned with Meyer Lansky. The word on the street was not to whack a federal employee. Grandpa Harry must've been pissed.


My father worked at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in the early 1950s. He was hauled, along with NBS Director Edward Condon, in front of HUAC, declared a Communist and security risk, and shown the door. Although my father was a Stalinist, he was relatively harmless. Much to my surprise, I recently found a picture of him in the wartime Met Lab Graphite Research Group. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He's in the first row, far right (not left).


I emerged from the Precambrian ooze of graduate school into civilized society in the early 1980s. I became associated with a subculture so far below the radar, the reference point used to explain it to civilians goes back to early 18th century Appalachia. I'm flailing away on the banjo-uke in the Ghost World. I may be able to avoid the current Tourette-like spasm.

The Sunday before the election

I actually live in Delaware...

News Journal (Wilmington, DE) today:

The two men stalked back and forth, like zoo animals glaring at each other from separate cages.

The edge of a concrete curb served as their fence. As they paced, they traded insults across the divide.

“You are a piece of American trash,” shouted Ryan Stevenson, holding a megaphone in one hand and a homemade “Just say no to Christine O” poster in the other. “Did you brush your teeth this morning? They have plaque on them. I can smell your breath from here.” Across from him, the man with a Christine O’Donnell yard sign, who would not give his name, responded: “Too bad Obamacare won’t help me. I’ll be paying for your health care so you can get all the diseases you want. Tell your African president to go back to Kenya where he came from.” For close to 10 minutes, the two shouted at each other from close range.

hmmmmmm......

and this is from the AP, about a California law whose constitutionality will be determined by Thomas, Scalia, and their colleagues on the supreme court:

California's measure would have regulated video games more like pornography than movies, prohibiting the sale or rental of games that give players the option of "killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being" to anyone under the age of 18. Only retailers would be punished with fines of up to $1,000 for each infraction.

hmmmmmmm.......

and this note under an AP photograph:

AP Oct. 29: Rhode Island Democrat gubernatorial Frank Caprio, left, told President Obama to 'really shove it' after the president declined to endorse him.

hmmmmmmmmmmmm........

I believe that amerikan "democracy" has been transformed by its commercial entities and a significant number of its brain/eggplant transplanted citizens into a sociopolitical system previously unseen on earth; a"colostomybagoacracy" (ed.note: a colostomy bag is used to collect shit from bypassed intestines). I am keeping my office scruplously clean to avoid the demoralizing, mocking laughter of bacteria.

What Depression?

click here

AP, today

SCRANTON, PA. — Work crews have leveled a half-dozen vacant homeless encampments in northeastern Pennsylvania.

City and Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority workers used bulldozers and heavy equipment to raze the structures near the railroad tracks along the Lackawanna River in Scranton.

The homeless were told to leave the sites last month. Scranton police Chief Dan Duffy told The Times-Tribune the crackdown was the result of safety concerns.

The residents were given information about city services for the homeless and given time to clear out. Four holdouts were cited for defiant trespass last week but no one was at the camps when workers came to demolish them Tuesday.

...Dammit, all the "homeless" had names...

Separation of church and state

News Journal (Wilmington DE) today:

When asked at an event earlier this month, Christine O’Donnell told a group of Republicans that her faith plays no role in her political views (video below.)

But in an interview last week with the Christian Broadcast Network, the group behind Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, O’Donnell strayed from her usual refusal to talk faith and told David Brody, “God is the reason that I’m running.”

O’Donnell said God called her to run again this year and that prayer plays a large role in her campaign. She said in 2006 that she heard the “audible voice of God” during the primary and felt called by God to run then.

“The day that we saw a spike in the polls was a day that some people had a prayer meeting for me that morning for this campaign so I believe that prayer plays a direct role in this campaign and I always ask please pray for the campaign; please pray for our staff; please pray specifically that the eyes of the voters be opened,” she told Brody.

The culture war that ate humanity

NYT today:

The Parents Television Council spent most of the last decade as a conservative superstar in the culture wars.

But the organization now finds itself damaged, defanged by court challenges to the F.C.C.’s hard-line position, by its own dwindling finances and by internal troubles that resulted in its accusing a former senior employee of extortion. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry — once so afraid of the council’s wrath that Fox blurred the naked behind of an animated character — is pushing the boundaries of taste with renewed intensity.

Forget cartoon nudity. One of CBS’s new fall sitcoms is called “$#*! My Dad Says” (ed. note: "$#*!"="shit") A catchy song with a highly vulgar title and chorus by the Warner Music Group singer Cee Lo Green (ed. note: "Fuck You!"; The Smeezingtons, c. 2010 Warner Music) has burned up the Web. Miley Cyrus, the 17-year-old Disney star, writhes on a bed in black underwear in her new music video (ed. note: “Who Owns My Heart”).

Boobs on the Supreme Court

Mo Dowd's editorial in the Times today:

And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.

Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.

If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.

In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.

About 1973, I had a state of the art Texas Instruments SR51A hand-held scientific calculator. As part of an ongoing research project that has resulted in the discovery of notably stupid, nihilistic capabilities of personal computing devices, I found a sequence of digits when divided by zero and rotated by 180 degrees by repositioning the calculator flashed

b00bS

until the battery of the calculator fully discharged.

The State of the Union

AP, today

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, on Tuesday appeared to question whether the First Amendment to the Constitution imposes a separation between church and state.

In a debate at the Widener University Law School, Ms. O’Donnell interrupted her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, as he argued that the Constitution does not allow public schools to teach religious doctrine.

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” Ms. O’Donnell asked him, according to audio posted on the Web site of WDEL 1150 AM radio, which co-sponsored the debate.

The audience at the law school can be heard to break out in laughter. But Ms. O’Donnell refuses to be dissuaded, and pushes forward.

“Let me just clarify. You are telling me that the separation of church and state is in the First Amendment,” she says.

When Mr. Coons offers a shorthand of the relevant section, saying, “government shall make no establishment of religion,” Ms. O’Donnell replies, “That’s in the First Amendment?”

Sociology

I studied History, Urban Sociology and English outside my Chemistry major at Northwestern. While History and English were presented as placid areas of study, my Chicago location guaranteed real fireworks in my Urban Sociology classes. It was the early 70s, post-Moynihan report, but pre-William Julius Wilson. We read Banfield's "The Unheavenly City Revisited", Jencks' "Inequality", as well as early work by criminologist James Q. Wilson (?!); "City Politics" (with Banfield), "Varieties of Police Behavior", and papers that became "Thinking About Crime". Back then, I was a Classical Marxist (Marx-Engels), having rejected my father's Soviet-styled Leninism/Stalinism. I found much of the material humorous and misguided. I imagined bearded professors dressed in ostentatious 19th century millitary parade regalia marching spastically in all directions on a football field before 50,000 screaming Big 10 fans. The professors are carrying enormous Sousaphones, emitting a cacophony of blatts and gurgles akin to a herd of dyspeptic elephants who snorted too much coke. They collide with each other and redouble their efforts.

As a chemist, I discovered that there was no mechanistic relationship between hypothesis and theory in Sociology. (bear with me) In Organic Chemistry, a hypothesis is validated as consistent with bedrock stereoelectronic/structural theory by "watching" the electrons and noting where the atoms end up. There a few simple rules: electrons don't like to bump heads and don't dig crowds; nothing happens if it takes too much energy or effort, and the final products like to be relaxed, mellow, almost soporific. That's called "formulating a plausible reaction mechanism." Sociology is devoid of this.


Today in the Times (‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback)

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture [rrrrriiiiinnnnnggggg: THEORY].
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others, researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference [buzzzz: HYPOTHESIS] , Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

Now if I had a moral cynicismometer with a disorder detector, maybe we could put this puppy to bed and publish in PNAS.....

Da financial industry (3)

NYT today
Stevie and Grandpa Harry read the newspaper

“Mozilo’s record penalty is the fitting outcome for a corporate executive who deliberately disregarded his duties to investors by concealing what he saw from inside the executive suite – a looming disaster in which Countrywide was buckling under the weight of increasing risky mortgage underwriting, mounting defaults and delinquencies, and a deteriorating business model.” (What does that mean, Stevie? Well, It means that Mr Mozillo doesn't have to pay back the money he borrowed....No, it's not fair....If I lent him money? I'd just ask him nicely, and he'd give my money back....Ida, don't talk that way around your grandson!!! What Stevie?...what does "find him in a swamp in Canarsie with no hands and his balls jammed down his throat" mean?)

Help me...I can't think of anything funny

From today's Washington Post:

A GOP nominee for the House of Representatives drew sharp criticism from Holocaust survivors Saturday for having participated in a Nazi reenactment group devoted to a Waffen SS division, and Democrats seized on the Ohio businessman's activities as the latest indication that the Republican Party is backing fringe candidates.

The Atlantic magazine reported Friday that Rich Iott, a member of the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program, participated in the reenactment group for several years starting in 2003. Iott told the Atlantic he joined the group with his son as "a father-son bonding thing" and left three years ago after his son lost interest.

Da financial industry (2)

There was a description of another Ponzi investment scheme in the Times today...time for another imaginary lesson from my Grandpa Harry...


Mr. Cook was telling potential investors that he was producing monthly returns of one-half to 1 percent, month after month, without a loss, over a period that included one of the worst investment markets in modern times. (Stevie, something's wrong there. Your Uncle Meyer and I can do that, but, uhhhh, we're in a different type of business.) Mr. Cook claimed to be generating those profits by performing so-called carry trades that allowed him to game the differences on currency yields in various countries. (Ha Ha, Stevie! That's funny! When I was your age, we used to get a loan in rubles, and pay it back in zloty...that's childrens's games...we even used Hanukkah gelt!) Next, he said, he used interest-free loans (Stevie, listen, this very important, When Grandpa lends money, everybody pays him back, and the interest shows what a mensch he was to lend you the money...the vig, I mean interest, is very important!) to set up a mirror-image trading position, creating a perfectly hedged transaction that, he said, produced guaranteed profits (...smoke and mirror-images....nothing, Stevie...Grandpa was just talking to himself). The free money, he said, came from a bank in Jordan, which, because of Shariah Islamic law, was not allowed to charge interest. (Don't play with those Ayyrab kids down the hall! Stevie, did Mr. Cook take your money? That's OK, Grandpa Harry will make everything right. Uhhhh, Stevie, did you put your baseball bat away in the closet like Grandma Ida said? I'll be back before dinner...sure, we'll play chess!)

snarky

Maureen "Mo" Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial columnist for the New York Times. I don't tend to read her columns; she has been described as a "snarky" liberal, with which I have no problem (snarky? I guess if you give wide media coverage to Paris Hilton and Mittel-Amerika puts Oprah Winfrey in charge of the reading list, expressions like this creep into the language), but Mo's writing strikes me as if she is unaware that American literature existed before 1966. Nevertheless, her description of a Get Motivated! seminar is interesting:

"The second time the beach ball hit me on the head, I started feeling motivated.

"Not to become an instant millionaire with the help of Jesus and some cheesy business evangelists. Rather, I felt motivated to flee the 9-hour, $9.95 Get Motivated! seminar at the Verizon Center, which had devolved into a faux beach party with DJs playing ’80s music and audience members tossing around plastic beach balls and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Van Halen’s “Jump.”

"But I stayed in the church of capitalism, determined to hear what wisdom headliners Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Dan Rather, Steve Forbes and Terry Bradshaw would dispense."

This is the Get Motivated website:

http://www.getmotivated.com/

"The GET MOTIVATED Seminar is an action-packed, fun-filled, explosive, exciting, inspiring, skill-building business event that is world famous for its mega-watt superstar speakers and spectacular stage production. This blockbuster one-day seminar will give you proven strategies to sharpen your business skills, ignite your motivation, accelerate your effectiveness and increase your income!

"Only the BEST of the BEST appear on our stage! Dazzling pyrotechnics, live music and stunning special effects set the stage for our superstar speakers who deliver riveting presentations packed with cutting-edge skills for success.

"The GET MOTIVATED Seminar will give you and your team the latest and greatest information in the arenas of time management, leadership, goal achievement, sales training, negotiation, finances, investing, relationships, health, spiritual success, business strategies, motivation, communication skills and much more!"

Has the American educational system produced a generation of people who would be hard pressed to compete with sponges and coral?

What if you just want to take a shit and watch teevee?

Tyler Clementi, Musician

Goddammit, I'm angry.

This appeared in the Times today:

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Mr. Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman, is thought to have jumped off the George Washington Bridge.

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

````````

Damn right he was a musician. A fine one. The universe is made up of three things; time, matter and energy. When they interact, you get music.

Universe without end...

There comes a point in every musician's life when you learn that music and your life are one in the same...forever.

As we read in Spoon River,

THE EARTH keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.

Don't worry Tyler, you're immortal.

and we VOTE, too

today in the Times..

Carrying a Flag for Mixed Martial Arts

Mr. St-Pierre has a rabid following among testosterone-fueled, under-35 head-banger types who, in another era, rallied around Hulk Hogan.

The sport has shed some of the stigma that led Senator John McCain to once dismiss it as “human cockfighting.” Years after banning some of its more overtly prison-brawl maneuvers, like groin-kicking and hair-pulling, mixed martial arts is growing in respectability and giving boxing a run for its money. Last year, the Ultimate Fighting Championship — the sport’s most visible promotion company — tallied nearly eight million pay-per-view purchases, a record by any company, including any provider of boxing or professional wrestling, said Dave Meltzer, who tracks such figures for his newsletter, Wrestling Observer, and for Yahoo! Sports.

Delaware Republicans Vote "No" on Masturbation

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Homo Sapiens Number 1!!! Go Team!!!

This is what happens when you mix politics and religion.

Kashmir today in the Times.

You still want public school prayer?

In honor of this past week

If you think amerika is coming to an end, well, it was already falling apart years ago.

click here, then read the text

#10. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter to the National Endowment for the Arts be printed in the RECORD.

#11. There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, May 18, 1989

Mr. Hugh Southern, Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC

#12. Dear Mr. Southern: We recently learned of the Endowment's support for a so-called "work of art" by Andres Serrano entitled "Piss Christ." We write to express our outrage and to suggest in the strongest terms that the procedures used by the Endowment to award and support artists be reformed.

Sincerely,

#18. Alfonse D'Amato, Bob Kerrey, Warren R. Rudman, Rudy Boschwitz, Dennis Deconcini, Pete Wilson, Bob Dole, Chuck Grassley, James A. McClure, John Heinz, Wendell Ford, Howell Heflin, Harry Reid, Richard Shelby, John W. Warner, Larry Pressler, Conrad Burns, Tom Harkins, Trend Lott, Jesse Helms, John McCain, Arlen Specter, Steve Symms.

19. Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, the Senator from New York is absolutely correct in his indignation and in his description of the blasphemy of the so-called artwork. I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.

#20. Let us examine exactly what this bird did to get $15,000 of the taxpayers' money through the so-called National Endowment for the Arts. If they have no more judgment than that, it ought to be abolished and all funds returned to the taxpayer. What this Serrano fellow did, he filled a bottle with his own urine and then stuck a crucifix down there - Jesus Christ on a cross. He set it up on a table and took a picture of it.

#21. For that, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him $15,000, to honor him as an artist.

#27. Horsefeathers. If we have sunk so low in this country as to tolerate and condone this sort of thing, then we become a part of it.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

5. Serrano's work "Piss Christ" can be found on-line by Googling. (You are not required to look at the work. Please do not look if you believe it might be offensive or upsetting to you.) Which arguments that "Piss Christ" should be considered "art" are most compelling? Which arguments that "Piss Christ" should not be considered "art" are most compelling?

Wide range of concerns

The range of sentiment expressed in today's NYT editorial page is staggering. Poet T S Eliot referred to the end of the world as a bang or wimper, but I'm not sure either sound is appropriate in our age of post-cognitive thought.

Comment on Frank Rich's column:
I am a 35 year old man who had an interesting set of perspective shifts from 2001-2002. I started 2001 a Republican; I ended 2002 a vocal anti- Bush anti-war Democrat. And now I'm not sure I even want to be an American anymore. I speak for many of my friends.

Third lead editorial:
In Search of a Bedbug Solution
Government and industry need to expedite the search for better solutions to bedbugs.

Old School

Look, let's get something straight. Today's Glenn Beck rally could have been planned by a committee at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's dystopian 1984. The people in attendance are not being duped by a right-wing entertainer. They support this shit.

It's time to get strident. Hey, Republicans, theo-facists, crypto-racists, apatheticoids, and other Ayn Rand adherent-morons:

FUCK YOU

News highlights today

News highlights today:

1.
Back when Heidi Montag and Lauren Conrad were living the life in the Hollywood Hills, LC warned her then best friend that Spencer Pratt was "a sucky person." Not until now has Montag finally agreed.

"@LaurenConrad you were right! Spencer is soooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo sucky!!!" she tweeted Lauren on Sunday.

Conrad has yet to reply, but she developed a growing dislike for Spencer years ago during the filming of "The Hills." She tried to convince Montag of his not-so-nice ways but was left in the dust when Montag moved in with Spencer, ultimately severing their friendship.

The tweet is likely a response to Pratt's recent media storm against his soon-to-be ex-wife. TMZ has reported that Pratt has threatened to release a sex tape if the blonde starlet doesn't do another reality show with him.

2.
AMSTERDAM, Aug 23 (Reuters) - A giant chestnut tree that comforted Dutch diarist Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic during World War Two collapsed in heavy wind and rain on Monday.

I guess that about covers it.

Occupational Hazard

This appeared in the Times today:

Wal-Mart Fighting $7,000 Fine in Trampling Case
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 6, 2010

Wal-Mart Stores has spent a year and more than a million dollars in legal fees battling a $7,000 fine that federal safety officials assessed after shoppers trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death at a store on Long Island on the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

The mystery, federal officials say, is why Wal-Mart is fighting so hard against such a modest fine.

It is not as if Wal-Mart has not already taken action to address any missteps and prevent another such accident. Three weeks before the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration ordered the fine, Wal-Mart, seeking to avoid criminal charges, reached a settlement with the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney that called for the company to adopt new crowd management techniques in all 92 of its stores in New York State. At the time, Wal-Mart also agreed to create a $400,000 fund for customers injured in the stampede and to donate $1.5 million to various community programs in Nassau County.

More recently, the company announced improved crowd-control policies for all its United States stores to try to prevent such an accident from happening again.

But in fighting the federal fine, Wal-Mart is arguing that the government is improperly trying to define “crowd trampling” as an occupational hazard that retailers must take action to prevent.

More technology

I can still play the clarinet, piano, and compose. This is study nr. 1 of "Three Studies on American Folksongs" If you play the Vaughn Williams "Four Studies", you'll see the hook...

click here

Technology!

same speech with my new voice...

click here

Remarks, ALS Hope Foundation Concert, 6/5/10

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to you again. Indeed, I have been blessed with the gift of time, and tonight, I would like to speak about the future. You may think that people living with ALS don't think about the future. In fact, we are sometimes told at the early stages of the disease "to live like there is no tomorrow." I vehemently disagree. If you live like there is no tomorrow, that means you are selfish and have no hope. ALS is a terrible disease with no cure. But the damage it causes to individuals, loved ones, care givers, and communities can be healed, and hope can be substituted for hopelessness. But it takes a unique organization like the ALS Hope Foundation to bring this light to people living with ALS, and it takes your support. We are infinitely grateful for your help.

So, what about the future?

When will we cure ALS? As a scientist, I can be sure the time will come sooner than any of us can imagine. Last year, I served on a scientific peer review panel for the department of defense ALS research program. We evaluated research proposals from some of the best research groups in the country, if not the world. Millions of dollars were going to be awarded to researchers based on our recommendations. I read every proposal. I was excited and amazed. They're finding out things about this disease that were not even imagined two years ago. We are on the right track. By the time your children get to be my age, and I am not that old, ALS will be history. The ALS hope foundation supports this type of research. It is happening just a few blocks away from here. Cooperation and collaboration is occurring between research groups right here in Philadelphia, again promoted by the efforts of the hope foundation and your support.

What about things that will affect the lives of people living with ALS right now? The hope foundation clinic is a pioneer in clinical research. The lives of people living with ALS are being extended and lives are being made more rich and meaningful with new technology that was just a dream ten years ago. The hope foundation brain computer interface research program has taught me how to spell my name using only my brain waves. What will come next? That will be determined by your support and the skill of the foundation researchers, which I assure you is world class.

But what does the future have to do with the music I composed for you tonight? The music is based on old traditional American folk songs. When a musician does anything with folk music, he is taking something from the past that he considers important and beautiful, and makes it his own, with the intention of preserving it for the future. Without the help of the hope foundation and your generous support, I would no longer be a musician, and my friends and I, who live with ALS, would have no reason to look to the future.