Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
1728 The Purge Is On
1657 Morning Rituals
0803 CT Election Results Page
When I teach meditation, this is a huge problem for many students.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from early GRRRL by Marge Piercy.
The Summer Invasion, And The Fall
If something moves beautifully
through the grass it must be
bought in a package,
raped, or shot.
From The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, Poems Of The Middle Seventies.
My Soundtrack: The Worst Taste In Music by The Radio Dept. on WOXY.
If you Google the phrase Vote No Casinos, you get more than 19,000 hits. The fascinating thing is that most of the sites that come up are for o*n*l*i*n*e g*a*m*b*l*i*n*g. (I’d link but I don’t need their spiders crawling all over me.) It makes sense, the more real casinos there are the less likely that gamblers will click and lose at home.
The committee is led by the Republican troika that defeated the gambling lobby the last time around.
From the Vote No Casinos Comittee:
Vote NO Casinos Committee Formed
CLEVELAND, July 27 /PRNewswire/ — Statewide leaders committed to defeating the Learn and Earn Casino Gambling Amendment today formally filed the Vote NO Casinos committee with the Ohio Secretary of State.
The Vote NO Casinos committee is co-chaired by Ohio Auditor of State Betty Montgomery and David Zanotti, President & CEO of the Ohio Roundtable, a non- profit independent public policy organization. Montgomery and Zanotti along with then Governor George Voinovich helped lead the successful campaign to defeat casino gambling in 1996. Senator Voinovich will also be working with the committee to defeat the Learn and Earn Casino amendment.
The committee secretary is John Adams of Sandusky, Ohio. Mr. Adams helped lead the opposition to the 1990 casino campaign. Mr. Don McTigue, of Columbus, will serve as chief legal counsel to the committee.
For interviews contact:
State Auditor Betty Montgomery at 614-644-1111
The Ohio Roundtable at 1-800-522-VOTE
Issued by Vote NO Casinos, 3121 Bay Landing Dr., Bay Village, OH 44145, John Adams, Secretary.
Strangely enough, there’s no website yet. I’m going to contact the comittee and in the interest of bi-partisan sanity, offers my services in any way I can to help it defeat the Lie And Equivocation Amendment.
In the Islamist world children are indoctrinated in madrassas. In these schools boys learn what it means to become a martyr and earn their 72 virgins. Here the Christianists aren’t quite so sexist. Boys and girls get to attend Jesus Camps. The goal? To train a generation of good Christainsts willing to die for Jesus.
Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have captured on such camp in their documentary Jesus Camps. David Byrne reviewed the film on his blog.
The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an “army” to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie.
(Pat Robertson needs to get the word out on this last one.)
Byrne continues:
There were some perfect sound bites – at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus – the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we”re not like them” – but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We”re right.”
People who put being right above reason are the most dangerous people on the planet.
My Soundtrack: In The Morning by Junior Boys on WOXY.
More than a decade ago I read Andrew Weil’s Eight Weeks To Optimum Health. One of the pieces that stuck with me was Weil’s concept of a news fast: to avoid all broadcast and print news for three days. I tried it and found myself calmer, more focused and less anxious. This is not the same as sticking your head in the sand.
People who know me consider me to be reasonably well informed about human events. But when we’re not bombarded by idiocy such as this, we have to lead quieter lives.
How much do we worry about things we can do nothing about?
That is why I find myself intrigued by Scott Stantis’ idea of a gadget fast. I admit that it would be easier for me than most since I don’t own either a television or a cell phone. Since I have to send my laptop in for repair soon (the keyboard is going) I may try this since I won’t have the computer around to tempt me.
My Soundtrack: The Freest Man by Tilly And The Wall on WOXY.
Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from early GRRRL by Marge Piercy.
Five Thousand Miles
There you sleep and here
I walk wakeful and every day
is a calendar square like a prison yard
to pace. Every day is laid on
me and torn off like a bandage
on a slow dripping wound.
I burn with need
of you deep inside like a coal
mine that has caught fire
and smolders deep in the rock
away from the healing touch
of the rain.
From The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, Poems Of The Middle Seventies.
My Soundtrack: Seven Days by Frank Black on WOXY.
Can it be any wonder that after watching mind numbing hours of drivel like this that Americans operate in a twilight zone? After a 16-month investigation costing us nearly $1 billion (Ken Starr spent $40 million) found that Iraq dismantled its weapons of mass destruction in 1991, there remains a near majority of Americans who don’t get it.
From The Associated Press:
Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.
People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.
What part of there weren’t any don’t they get?
[Update — 0805 — I spoke with a couple of the advance people this morning and the bus is due to arrive at about 1030.]
[Update — 0746 — MoveOn has climbed on the bus and in addition to Ohio senatorial candidate Brown, Ben Brandzel, founder and project director for MoveOn Student Action will be at the Cleveland stop.]
The Wake-Up Wal Mart Road Show pulls into Cleveland today, Monday at noon. U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown (D-13) will speak at Dave’s Supermarket, 2700 Carroll Avenue in Ohio City. I’ll be hand to greet the bus and spend some time with the road crew. If you miss the noon event, try to catch the bus in Elyria at 6 p.m.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut.
We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you”d read a story — just a very simple one — about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn”t that make you want to cry?
Don”t you know how that little girl feels And you”d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn”t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here”s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven”t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.
The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it”s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits.
Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there”s the information highway. We don”t need the circuits anymore than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone”s face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face. p. 132-4
Note: there are actually 14 punctuation marks used in modern English. They are, in no particular order: the apostrophe, the comma, the semi-colon, the colon, the quotation mark, the hyphen, the dash, the virgule, the parenthesis, the bracket, the ellipse, the period, the question a mark and the exclamation mark.
My Soundtrack: Decent Days And Nights by The Futureheads on WOXY.
Aish Ha Torah is a conservative religious educational organization responsible, in part, for many of the settlers on the West Bank. I’ve studied with its rabbis and, while sometimes disagreeing with them, found them intelligent and unusually reasonable. This two-minute video clearly makes the case against several of the myths lies.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
These are four stories recommended in A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut:
Occurrence At Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce. p. 7
Democracy In America by Alexis de Tocqueville. p. 8
The Mask Of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley. p. 99
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. p. 111
The first U.S. president to broker a successful peace agreement between Israel and one of its neighbor thinks that President George Bush has pursued an “erroneous policy” that has fostered violence in the Middle East. Speaking in Michigan at a political fund raiser for his son Jack, President Jimmy Carter said the U.S.:
…should work for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah and the world community should concentrate on a long-term solution.
He is uncertain whether Bush can accomplish a cease-fire.spoke in Michigan.
It depends on whether world opinion is strong enough to get the administration to change its erroneous policy, which has been to encourage the continuation of attacks on both sides.
I don’t agree with President Carter, who my regular readers know is a personal hero. President Bush is doing little, if anything to stop the fighting, but I don’t equate that to encouraging the attacks.
Yes, the world community should concentrate on long-term solutions, but the first step must be for the agressor, in this case Hezbollah, to immediately stop its attacks and disarm as called for by United Nations resolution 1559.
If the demoratically elected government of Lebanon can’t police it’s own population, then Israel is justified in doing it for them to stop the deliberate targeting of civilian population centers within Israel’s borders and the purposeful murder of Israeli civilians.
My Soundtrack: Bonemarrow by Mellowdrone on WOXY.
Exxon thought it was being slick, but it took only a few hours for people to trace back the slime trail from Al Gore’s Penguin Army to the flack shack called DCI to its client, Exxon/Mobil. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth must be catching on if the Petro-Chemical giant is flailing about with such lame attempts to discredit it.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
New words I learned while reading Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild.
Arabia Felix — in ancient geography, the comparatively fertile region in southwestern and southern Arabia (in present-day Asir and Yemen), a region that contrasted with Arabia Deserta in barren central and northern Arabia and with Arabia Petraea (Stony Arabia) in northwestern Arabia, which came under the suzerainty of imperial Rome.
Hermeticism — A system of ideas based on hermetic teachings. Hermetic: of or relating to the Gnostic writings or teachings arising in the first three centuries A.D. and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; also relating to or characterized by occultism or abstruseness. And, from the belief that Hermes Trismegistus invented a magic seal to keep vessels airtight.
Entrepôt: an intermediary center of trade and transshipment.
Encheiresis: A Greek word meaning manifestation or development.
Opprobrium: disgrace; infamy; reproach mingled with contempt.
My Soundtrack: Caring Is Creepy by The Shins on WOXY.
The response to offense speech must not be censorship. The response to offense speech must be more speech. Yesterday blogger Jane Hamsher posted a photoshopped picture of Senator Joseph Lieberman in black face. Lieberman was righteously indignant and demanded that his primary opponent denounce the image.
Hamsher yanked the image at the request of Lieberman’s opponent: Ned Lamont.
The important thing here is not that Hamsher deleted the image, but why she deleted it. She was OK with offending Lieberman and his supporters. She knew that they would be offended when she first saw the image. And anyone who thinks she had an epiphany and realized it was a bad thing to offend those people believes that we found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Hamsher deleted the offending image because its negatives far out-weighed any positives for her candidate.
She made a political decision based upon her agenda and her goals, and I think that’s fine. That’s not-self censorship. That’s enlightened self-interest.
Then there is the matter of Mark Fiore’s Smarty Bombsalot.
I’m offended by what Fiore says in this latest animation, but I’m not about to demand he take it down. The American Nazis did have a right to march in Skokie, Illinois. And counter demonstrators have a right to march right along side them.
I had a brief exchange a few months ago over another animation he did about Jack Abramoff and his Borsalino. I wrote Fiore that time because I thought he was unaware of the significance of the image he chose to use. My purpose that time was to educate, not demand censorship.
So what did Fiore say that I don’t like? In the first panel of the animation the caption asks:
What do you do when a militant Islamic Group lobs rockets into your country and grabs a few of your soldiers?
Let’s stop right there. If you are the United States or any other sovereign nation, the answer is:
You ramp up your military forces and kicked the living shit out of them.
But if you’re the sovereign nation of Israel, in Fiore’s world, you’re not suppossed to do that.
How whack is that?
Bill Mahr said it very well yesterday:
As I watch so much of the world ask Israel for restraint in a way no other country would (Can you imagine what Bush would do if a terrorist organization took over Canada and was lobbing missiles into Montana, Maine and Illinois?) — and, by the way, does anyone ever ask Hezbollah for restraint. you know, like, please stop firing your rockets aimed PURPOSEFULLY at civilians? — it strikes me that the world IS Mel Gibson.
Most of the time, the anti-semitism is under control, but that demon lives inside and when the moon is full, or there’s been enough alcohol consumed, or Israel is forced to kill people in its own defense, then it comes out.
And I’ll say it again. Robert Goldberg still has nothing to apologize for.
My Soundtrack: Alternate Ending by Staggering Statistics on WOXY.
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