discoveries from the internets and some stuff I wrote too
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recent quotes i like
"Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." - ? | | | | | | |
"If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice. " - shane claiborne | | | | | | |
"If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." --George Orwell ||||||
"On Facebook, no one can hear you scream." - I dont know ||||||
"The reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it." - Machiavelli ||||||
Chest of Drawers
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This chest of drawers is to replace the cheap stand (with no storage) that
was previously holding up our parrot's travel cage. She only lives with us
a few...
An important message from Consumer Reports
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This is our last post on Consumerist.com. We’re deeply proud of all the
work we’ve done on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by
secretive ...
It Is Accomplished
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As Gandhi never quite said, First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they attack you. Then you win. I remember one of the first TV debates
I had...
My Milk Toof Travel Update
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*Dear International readers from Southeast France!*
ickle, Lardee & myself will be traveling around the southeast of France
area from 06/02-06/20. If anyo...
Saint Francis of Assisi
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… everyone who follows Christ receives true peace, the peace that Christ
alone can give, a peace which the world cannot give. Many people, when they
think ...
X-Factor Auditions, Part Two: The registration...
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Kind of creepy to be walking around White Plains at 4:30 in the morning. No
lights on, no cars, no people. I felt like I was in a zombie movie. And,
really...
Jason, your insights are wonderful and I am glad to see you here on Huff. My only thought to add is that it would be interesting to here your advice for someone who was not seeking to eventually be a CEO, regional office manager, even a basic secretary... All statements that advise caution as to how and where and when to post information to the internet should be taken very seriously! You must be aware (for some it is perhaps too late?) that anything and everything you ever post(ed) to the internet can be found. For the relative newbie - anyone who entered the internet era after, say, 2000 - this should be re-iterated again and again. What might be interesting to see would be two different followups.
1: What should the person who already made all of these erroneous statement online do now if they do not wish them to become known.
2: What is the best route for the person who has chosen a non-traditional career to promote their interests. The Artist? The career sex worker (they do exist - and they retire before 40... :) The cirque du soliel performer - what-have-you, who wants to specifically promote the fact that they are "out there?" One instance comes to mind - Andy Warhol. What would be the best way to promote himself online? I appreciate your article and and agree with it, but I wanted to raise another scenario or two for your consideration :)
Celebrity Buzz I love to hate Hasselbeck. It's like Jesse Ventura bobs her in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, then rubs her nose in her business a bit. Maybe this time she'll learn.
Here is an unofficial proposal I have been working on for a bicycle network utilizing existing paths, proposed new paths and bicycle lanes that would be relatively easy and inexpensive to construct covering areas of Woodbury and West Deptford, NJ. By adding approximately 1.6 miles of new bike path and between 2 and 3 miles of bike lanes the total uninterrupted bike network would equal approximately 7.5 miles, be in close proximity to a number of facilities and within 1 mile of the majority of residents of both municipalities.
You can zoom in for much more detail or zoom out if you are unfamiliar with the general area. To zoom in and out or to navigate around the map use the arrows and plus or minus signs at the top left of the map.
Details that become apparent as you zoom in include:type of path, services and institutions that would be served and recreational and educational opportunities denoted by assorted icons explained in greater detail below:
type of path
pre-existing bicycle paths = green
proposed simple paved paths = yellow
proposed path elements that may involve some cost or engineering attention = red
proposed bicycle lanes on existing road surfaces = blue
possible extensions that might make additional funding possible = pink (specifically linking the network to the Red Bank State Park {additional state funding} and a nearby complex of County and State Offices {additional state and county funding}.
services and institutions that would be served including
Riverwinds Sports, art and entertainment Complex and Golf Club
West Deptford Municipal Complex and Court
West Deptford Public Library
West Deptford High School
Woodbury High school
Underwood Memorial Hospital
Gloucester County Courthouse, County Seat and Family Court
recreational and educational opportunities denoted by assorted icons
Tree - natural area
Flower - indigenous flora
Ladybug - various wildlife
Football - sports facilities
Guitar - music arts and cultural facilities
Book - educational facilities
Footprints - hiking opportunities
By utilizing existing open public space and taking advantage of roads that would be relatively easy to incorporate bike lanes into the plan eliminates most of not all issues of eminent domain and most more complex engineering issues (the underpass along Woodbury Creek beneath I295 and Crown Point Roads would require some cost and moderate engineering issues but would allow a far greater area to be incorporated into the network while maximizing rider safety and enjoyment.) The exact path from the existing short trail in Woodbury in the vicinity of the High School, sports and health care facilities north to the Crown Point road area would best be determined by siting the route along those portions that would require the least among of environmental research and alteration and by choosing higher ground when needed to avoid bridges or boardwalks of any kind.
Schmidt's brewery transformed Unlike most real estate developers, Bart Blatstein is a seat-of-the-pants sort of guy. If he comes up with a really cool idea in the middle of the night - Hey! Let's re-create Rome's Piazza Navona in Philadelphia! - he runs with it.
Here the SPECTACLE is captured and made to expose itself (if even for a brief moment) by turning its most beloved mystifying commodity, the computer, back onto itself to the benefit of language. It slowly dies a dramatic death of Lettristic convulsions.
SPECTACLE
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all its particular manifestations - news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment - the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.
The spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: "What appears is good, what is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.
The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all "having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.
POETRY
The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseparable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Words work - on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves "informationist"; they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in a relation analogous to that which proletarians have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.
Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itself as an imposture and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are being manifested; electronic music could be seen as an attempt (obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral "communication," in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all separate power. Real communication dissolves the state.
Power lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing, it coopts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful "information." Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life?
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Tuesday to prohibit credit card companies from arbitrarily raising a person's interest rate and charging many of the exorbitant fees that have become customary _ and crippling _ to cash-strapped consumers.
The overwhelming bipartisan vote of 90-5 was lawmakers' way of telling Americans that they haven't been forgotten amid a recession that has left hundreds of thousands jobless or facing foreclosure.
With the House on track to endorse the measure by week's end, President Barack Obama could see a bill on his desk by the end of the week.
"We've got too many hard-working families in Massachusetts struggling to keep their heads above water, and the last thing they need is to get whacked with unfair credit card fees," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
If enacted into law as expected, the credit card industry would have nine months to change the way it does business: Lenders would have to post their credit card agreements on the Internet and let customers pay their bills online or by phone for free. They'd also have to give consumers a chance to spare themselves from over-the-limit fees and provide 45 days notice and an explanation before interest rates are increased.
Some of these reforms are already on track to take effect in July 2010, under new rules by the Federal Reserve. But the Senate bill would put the changes into law and go further in restricting the types of bank fees and who can get a card.
For example, the Senate bill requires anyone under 21 seeking a credit card to prove first that they can repay the money or that a parent or guardian is willing to pay off their debt if they default.
one of 750,000 teen pregnancies per year. the other question no one wants to talk about is that since humans become capable of reproducing (and very much encouraged by their own bodies just try to remember what it felt like when you were 16!) is there the possibility that our biology is trying to tell us something? In our current society it is easiest to be a mom or a dad when one is in their late 20s or 30s but maybe that is a disorder of society and not a disorder of our own genetic and biological imperatives? if one wanted to be "totally traditional" males and females would be married by 16. This is part of the problem concerning the stance of the conservatives regarding sex and teenage pregnancy. It seems to be a matter of just how traditional and how conservative you might want to be... conservative 1970, 1950, 1930, 1850, 1700, 1200 a.d.? My problem with the entire "conservative movement" is that it is entirely retroactive - a desire to return to some ancient golden age that obviously never existed, apart, maybe, from the garden of Eden? I want to look forward and i want to look towards the future as a positive possibility and I only find this in one American party right now. The simple slogan of "Hope" works for the democrats but not for the republicans because the democrats offer hope for the future, rather than a simple dragging of feet in resistance to the past. Please feel free to contradict! I love discussions!
so she is the poster child of absitinence now, but wasn't a minute ago...
there are two options here in our modern American society and i think they are both inherently at odds - A: remain a virgin until you are 25-35 or practice saf(er) sex before then. These are the two realistic options we currently have, for whatever reasons, so we need to pick one as realistic and one as not...
here is another question that gets at the bottom of things: do you think either of these women are old enough or experienced enough to be speaking on this subject? your answer to that question probably will determine you answer to all the other questions raised...
In the summer of 2005 two Cambridge University neuroscientists set up shop on a midsize trading floor in the City of London. For a little more than a week they took saliva samples twice a day from 17 male traders who specialized in German interest rate futures, and measured the daily fluctuations in their testosterone and cortisol levels. (Excess cortisol, produced by the adrenal cortex, tends to indicate heightened stress levels.)
The neuroscientists, John Coates and Joe Herbert, discovered what even those of us with only cursory backgrounds in brain chemistry might have guessed. On days when the traders did well, their testosterone levels rose. On days characterized by market volatility and uncertainty, cortisol production spiked.
Sure, any guy knows what it is like to feel your testosterone surging after accomplishing such manly feats as hitting a home run, bringing down a woolly mammoth with your handmade spear, kissing an attractive woman or writing a really killer blog post
The Führer Returns to Berlin, This Time Saluted Only by Laughs
This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.
Eight years after conquering Broadway and then much of the rest of the world (it just invaded Moscow), the show rolled into town on Sunday night. It’s booked for a two-month run at the Admiralspalast, where Adolf himself liked to take an occasional break from invading Poland and France to enjoy light operettas from the Führer’s box.
The crowd for the premiere seemed pleased. It wasn’t your typical Broadway musical audience, to judge from the number of smart-looking young people with interesting haircuts. A “lively counterpoint to Hollywood productions like ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Defiance,’ with their impeccable Resistance heroes and clichés,” decided the reviewer for Spiegel Online.
“The New York triumph was repeated in Berlin,” concluded the newspaper Tagesspiegel.
“Celebrated effusively by Berlin standards,” observed Stern magazine, the production nevertheless caused some theatergoers to wonder “whether it was really necessary to have so much Nazi paraphernalia onstage.” That’s not to mention the little Nazi flags with pretzels in lieu of swastikas that were handed out to everybody in the audience (including a troop of dirndled transvestites who waved them around like lost cheerleaders).
“Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?” The Berliner Morgenpost worried needlessly a few days earlier.
“People in Tel Aviv laughed,” answered The Berliner Zeitung
they really wonder why people have begun to despise the airlines and why their profits are dropping?!
As 61-year-old Belgian interpreter Nicola Cantisani, who is blind, sat for two hours waiting in the Brussels-bound U.S. Airways jet on the tarmac at Philadephia airport in early April, he wondered why no one was telling passengers about the reasons for the take-off delay. When he requested a glass of water he was shooed away by the crew. When he tried to ask the captain exactly why there was a delay, Cantisani was asked to disembark.
When he refused to do so, he was dragged off the plane by three police officers, pinned into a wheelchair, held by the throat, lost the cane he uses to navigate, held at the airport for five hours without food, water, or access to any phone, moved to a 6' x 7' police cell at 3 a.m., questioned by a psychiatrist, and detained for 16 hours. And it was only at the end of this ordeal that the police finally believed he wasn't faking his blindness.
He has no plans ever to return to Philadelphia and, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, he remains "'beside himself' about the flight procedures, the crew and the officers who handled him."
But instead of receiving an apology from U.S. Airways and the Philly P.D., Cantisani is facing charges for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. It would appear that U.S. Airways still hasn't learned a thing from Southwest and needs to retrain its crews until they understand the difference between a true "security risk" and a frustrated passenger.
Voyij Finds Best Deals for Travelers with an Open Calendar
(some)times, you just want to get out of Dodge as cheap and quick as possible. Voyij can help with the latter.
Tell Yoyij where you want to leave from and give it a rough time frame to work with. You can also search destinations and departure dates in a truly wide-open style if you're adventurous, or narrow it with parameters like "next weekend" or "June". Once Voyij has the basics, it searches for the best prices for airfare, hotel accommodations, and vacation package deals and brings them back. From there, you can refine the deal search and your whimsical mini-vacation with various filters, as seen in the screenshot above.
PMS Buddy is a website with a cute slogan and a simple goal. The slogan, "saving relationships, one month at a time!" refers to PMS Buddy's only function: to remind you when significant women in your life might be experiencing PMS.
