"Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
~~ Plutarch [46?–127 C.E.]
"Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears."
~~ motivational speaker Leslie C. 'Les' Brown
"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
~~ James M. Barrie [1860-1937]
"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
~~ U.C.L.A. coach John R. Wooden [1910-2010]
"Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs."
~~ Farrah Gray
"I would rather die of passion than of boredom."
~~ Vincent van Gogh [1853-90]
"The federal budget deficit isn't the nation's major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn't be our major goal. Our problem is lack of good jobs and sufficient growth, and our goal must be to revive both."
~~ Robert Reich, in 2013
"There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940], in 1927
"There is no such thing as 'away'. When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere."
~~ Annie Leonard
"Courage is contagious."
~~ Julian Assange
"Men go faster these days, but I do not believe [that] they go anywhere better."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
"The [N.S.A.] invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far ... America has no functioning democracy at this moment."
~~ former President Jimmy Carter, in July 2013
"These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”
~~ Woody Allen
“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”
~~ Woody Allen
"Rights only exist when they apply to everyone. When only some people are accorded a so-called 'right', then it is privilege and subjugation."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all."
~~ Neal Gabler, in 2004
"I'm hoping for a return to at least partial sanity someday, but I'm not optimistic."
~~ writer & dog rescuer David Rosenfelt
"As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." (Le Lys Rouge)
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
"Sooner or later we all quote our mothers."
~~ Bern Williams
"When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing: they believe in anything."
~~ often attributed to G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view."
~~ Sophia Loren
"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
~~ Joyce Carol Oates
"Industry pays debts, despair increases them."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper."
~~ biologist E.O. Wilson
"The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying 'The trouble with this country is ...'."
~~ Sinclair Lewis [1885-1951]
"Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories. Ans those that carry us forward are dreams."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
"Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant – it tends to get worse."
~~ journalist Molly Ivins [1944-2007]
"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line."
~~ Lucille Ball [1911-89]
"Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood, as though this will make them go away."
~~ statistician Nate Silver
"A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises."
~~ author Rex Stout [1886-1975]
"The greater the obstacle, the more glory [in] overcoming it."
~~ Molière [1622-73]
"It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course."
~~ Hank Aaron
"If you attack the establishment long enough, they will make you a member of it."
~~ Art Buchwald [1925-2007]
"There must be some narrowness of the soul that compels one to keep secrets."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"When you lavish praise on people, they flourish; criticize and they shrivel up."
~~ Richard Branson
"Had I abided by good advice I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes."
~~ Edna St. Vincent Millay [1892-1950]
"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"If you think [that] going to the moon is hard, try staying at home."
~~ astronaut wife Barbara White Cernan
"Every time [that] I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else."
~~ Blake Edwards [1922-2010]
"A book is a gift [that] you can open again and again."
~~ Garrison Keillor
"You don't have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great."
~~ Zig Ziglar [1926-2012]
"The most effective way to manage change successfully is to create it."
~~ Peter F. Drucker [1909-2005]
"If you have to ask the cost of owning a yacht, you can't afford it."
~~ banker J.P. Morgan [1837-1913]
"Of the many imprisonments possible in this world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate – to be unable to tell another person what you really feel."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
"Rules cannot take the place of character."
~~ Alan Greenspan
"Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before."
~~ Brian Eno
"With knowledge comes more doubt."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]
"No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side."
~~ violinist Jascha Heifetz [1901-87]
"The nearest thing to eternal life [that] we will ever see on this earth is a government program."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
~~ George R.R. Martin
"You've got to work like it's your first day on the job every day."
~~ Nicki Minaj
"We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission, and the babysitter were worth it."
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]
"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Essay #105: No Justice in Florida
The whole system down in Florida is designed to prevent justice.
The trial of Trayvon Martin for his own death was a travesty. The prosecutors failed to do their job, leaving out important evidence and witnesses, and did not object even once to the lies and media manipulation of the defense team. The judge stacked the deck. The all-white cracker jury let the vigilante attacker of 17-year-old Trayvon off 'scott free', because in Florida, vigilante lynchings of Afro-Americans are okay.
Vigilante cop-wannabe George Zimmerman did everything wrong. He shot an unarmed teenager, and then lied about the entire event. Zimmerman was told to stay in the patrol car; there were no bushes for Trayvon to hide in; that was Trayvon screaming for help on the cell phone; Zimmerman hit first by whacking the cell phone out of Trayvon's hand; Zimmerman not only knew about Stand Your Ground, he got an A grade in the class; and Zimmerman lied under oath about the money in the bank.
Well, Trayvon is dead now, and Zimmerman becomes a hero to rednecks and racists in Florida and elsewhere.
(And the Afro-American Florida woman who fired a warning shot into the air to scare off her menacing husband got twenty years in prison.)
The trial of Trayvon is over, and he was found guilty in absentia.
Not much you can do, they say. True. Except to live by the premises “Battling ignorance and apathy and magical thinking is a full-time job” and “The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual”.
So I got creative, in my small way. Part of my websites include Travel & Business Links, by state, which began during my five cross-country trips for Landmark Education's year-long T.M.L.P course and the nine trips to move myself from California to New Mexico, back in 2004-2005.
Yesterday I changed the Florida Travel Page to the State of Florida Page of Shame, and will probably leave it there for a long time - who knows, progressive activists & politicians might eventually restore justice in Florida. It could happen. Maybe. Someday.
What the white crackers of Florida misunderstand is the universal principle that everyone has the same rights, that the crackers only have precisely the same rights as racial minorities and women and immigrants and old people and children do.
Nothing is a right unless it applies to everyone.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The trial of Trayvon Martin for his own death was a travesty. The prosecutors failed to do their job, leaving out important evidence and witnesses, and did not object even once to the lies and media manipulation of the defense team. The judge stacked the deck. The all-white cracker jury let the vigilante attacker of 17-year-old Trayvon off 'scott free', because in Florida, vigilante lynchings of Afro-Americans are okay.
Vigilante cop-wannabe George Zimmerman did everything wrong. He shot an unarmed teenager, and then lied about the entire event. Zimmerman was told to stay in the patrol car; there were no bushes for Trayvon to hide in; that was Trayvon screaming for help on the cell phone; Zimmerman hit first by whacking the cell phone out of Trayvon's hand; Zimmerman not only knew about Stand Your Ground, he got an A grade in the class; and Zimmerman lied under oath about the money in the bank.
Well, Trayvon is dead now, and Zimmerman becomes a hero to rednecks and racists in Florida and elsewhere.
(And the Afro-American Florida woman who fired a warning shot into the air to scare off her menacing husband got twenty years in prison.)
The trial of Trayvon is over, and he was found guilty in absentia.
Not much you can do, they say. True. Except to live by the premises “Battling ignorance and apathy and magical thinking is a full-time job” and “The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual”.
So I got creative, in my small way. Part of my websites include Travel & Business Links, by state, which began during my five cross-country trips for Landmark Education's year-long T.M.L.P course and the nine trips to move myself from California to New Mexico, back in 2004-2005.
Yesterday I changed the Florida Travel Page to the State of Florida Page of Shame, and will probably leave it there for a long time - who knows, progressive activists & politicians might eventually restore justice in Florida. It could happen. Maybe. Someday.
What the white crackers of Florida misunderstand is the universal principle that everyone has the same rights, that the crackers only have precisely the same rights as racial minorities and women and immigrants and old people and children do.
Nothing is a right unless it applies to everyone.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
July 2013 News factoids
Browser Statistics for May 2013
I had occasion to check out current browser popularity, and found that: Google's Chrome has 52.9% of the market (up from 48.4% in January); Firefox is second with 27.7% (down from 30.2% in January); Microsoft's Internet Explorer is third with 12.6% (down from 14.3% in January); with Safari at 4.0% and Opera at 1.6%.
"Climate change and extreme weather already are causing disruptions in the U.S. energy supply that are likely to worsen as more intense storms, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts occur." Scientists also say that water is the key factor: not enough during a drought and too much during flooding.
~~ per Department of Energy Special Report released in July 2013 and Associated Press
"Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average S.N.A.P. [food stamp] benefit?”
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist
U.S. worker compensation posted its biggest drop since 1947 during the first quarter of 2013. (The year 1947 is when the Labor Department began tracking the statistic.) The Bureau of Labor Statistics released data showing a 3.8 percent drop in the recent first quarter.
===============================
HA! NOT REPORTED IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PRESS
"America has no functioning democracy at this moment." ~~ verbatim quote from former President Jimmy Carter, at the Atlantic Bridge {Atlantik Bruecke} meeting on Tuesday 16 July 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia
He noted in an earlier interview with C.N.N. that the recent N.S.A. leaks were a warning that "the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far".Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
I had occasion to check out current browser popularity, and found that: Google's Chrome has 52.9% of the market (up from 48.4% in January); Firefox is second with 27.7% (down from 30.2% in January); Microsoft's Internet Explorer is third with 12.6% (down from 14.3% in January); with Safari at 4.0% and Opera at 1.6%.
"Climate change and extreme weather already are causing disruptions in the U.S. energy supply that are likely to worsen as more intense storms, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts occur." Scientists also say that water is the key factor: not enough during a drought and too much during flooding.
~~ per Department of Energy Special Report released in July 2013 and Associated Press
"Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average S.N.A.P. [food stamp] benefit?”
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist
U.S. worker compensation posted its biggest drop since 1947 during the first quarter of 2013. (The year 1947 is when the Labor Department began tracking the statistic.) The Bureau of Labor Statistics released data showing a 3.8 percent drop in the recent first quarter.
===============================
HA! NOT REPORTED IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PRESS
"America has no functioning democracy at this moment." ~~ verbatim quote from former President Jimmy Carter, at the Atlantic Bridge {Atlantik Bruecke} meeting on Tuesday 16 July 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia
He noted in an earlier interview with C.N.N. that the recent N.S.A. leaks were a warning that "the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far".
Monday, July 15, 2013
July 2013 Quotations (60)
"The purpose of mortality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"For many Americans, the end of the world is already here."
~~ Aaron Thier, in 2013
"Some succeed because they are destined to; most succeed because they are determined to."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
"Words, like bread, are sacred."
~~ Rudolfo Anaya
"Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." {Often quoted as the shorter "Action from principle ... is essentially revolutionary."}
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Theology is simply the part of religion that requires brains."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"How many people does it take to change a searchlight bulb?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright
"Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence."
~~ rock star Jim Morrison [1943-71]
"We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay."
~~ cartoonist Lynda Barry
"When the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters."
~~ theologian Nathaniel Emmons [1745-1840]
"Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it."
~~ Gloria Steinem
"Happiness and confidence are the greatest things [that] you can wear."
~~ Taylor Swift
"Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business."
~~ Dave Barry
"Be alone – that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
~~ Nikola Tesla [1856-1943]
"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan
"There are no right answers to wrong questions."
~~ Ursula K. Le Guin
"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation."
~~ author Helen Hunt Jackson [1830-85]
"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Conservatives are those who worship dead radicals."
~~ William Rehnquist [1924-2005], U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"Often things [that] you think are just beginning are coming to an end."
~~ John Dos Passos [1896-1970]
"We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Some tunnels just happen to be longer than others."
~~ author Ada Adams
"What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."
~~ George Eastman [1854-1932], founder of Eastman Kodak Co.
"The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."
~~ Bette Reese
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those that spring from any other cause.”
~~ George Washington [1732-99]
"When a religion is good, I conceive [that] it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Character is simply habit long continued."
~~ Plutarch [46?–127 C.E.]
"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."
~~ physicist John A. Wheeler [1911-2008]
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."
~~ Jacques Barzun [1907-2012]
"The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"The truth stalks us like bad credit."
~~ Ta-nehisi Coates
"Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball underwater."
~~ Karen Duffy
"The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."
~~ Viscountess Nancy Astor [1879-1964]
"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong."
~~ journalist Robert Kuttner
"When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."
~~ food show host Anthony Bourdain
"A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"A loser says that's the way [that] it's always been done. A winner says [that] there ought to be a better way."
~~ columnist Sydney J. Harris [1917-86]
"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed'."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"A good half of the art of living is resilience."
~~ Alain de Botton of Switzerland
"A friend to all is a friend to none."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
~~ writer Sylvia Plath [1932-63]
"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as a good burglar."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"The definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac."
~~ David Mamet
"The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"The size of a planet doesn't strike until you start looking for something."
~~ David Sedaris
"If a woman never lets herself go, how will she know how far she might have got?"
~~ Germaine Greer
"Action is the antidote to despair."
~~ singer-songwriter Joan Baez
"As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"We do not know what to do with this short life, but we want another which will be eternal."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"For many Americans, the end of the world is already here."
~~ Aaron Thier, in 2013
"Some succeed because they are destined to; most succeed because they are determined to."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
"Words, like bread, are sacred."
~~ Rudolfo Anaya
"Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." {Often quoted as the shorter "Action from principle ... is essentially revolutionary."}
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Theology is simply the part of religion that requires brains."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"How many people does it take to change a searchlight bulb?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright
"Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence."
~~ rock star Jim Morrison [1943-71]
"We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay."
~~ cartoonist Lynda Barry
"When the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters."
~~ theologian Nathaniel Emmons [1745-1840]
"Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it."
~~ Gloria Steinem
"Happiness and confidence are the greatest things [that] you can wear."
~~ Taylor Swift
"Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business."
~~ Dave Barry
"Be alone – that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
~~ Nikola Tesla [1856-1943]
"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan
"There are no right answers to wrong questions."
~~ Ursula K. Le Guin
"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation."
~~ author Helen Hunt Jackson [1830-85]
"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Conservatives are those who worship dead radicals."
~~ William Rehnquist [1924-2005], U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"Often things [that] you think are just beginning are coming to an end."
~~ John Dos Passos [1896-1970]
"We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Some tunnels just happen to be longer than others."
~~ author Ada Adams
"What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."
~~ George Eastman [1854-1932], founder of Eastman Kodak Co.
"The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]
"If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."
~~ Bette Reese
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those that spring from any other cause.”
~~ George Washington [1732-99]
"When a religion is good, I conceive [that] it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Character is simply habit long continued."
~~ Plutarch [46?–127 C.E.]
"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."
~~ physicist John A. Wheeler [1911-2008]
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."
~~ Jacques Barzun [1907-2012]
"The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"The truth stalks us like bad credit."
~~ Ta-nehisi Coates
"Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball underwater."
~~ Karen Duffy
"The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."
~~ Viscountess Nancy Astor [1879-1964]
"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
"What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong."
~~ journalist Robert Kuttner
"When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."
~~ food show host Anthony Bourdain
"A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"A loser says that's the way [that] it's always been done. A winner says [that] there ought to be a better way."
~~ columnist Sydney J. Harris [1917-86]
"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed'."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]
"A good half of the art of living is resilience."
~~ Alain de Botton of Switzerland
"A friend to all is a friend to none."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
~~ writer Sylvia Plath [1932-63]
"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as a good burglar."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
"The definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac."
~~ David Mamet
"The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"The size of a planet doesn't strike until you start looking for something."
~~ David Sedaris
"If a woman never lets herself go, how will she know how far she might have got?"
~~ Germaine Greer
"Action is the antidote to despair."
~~ singer-songwriter Joan Baez
"As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"We do not know what to do with this short life, but we want another which will be eternal."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Friday, June 28, 2013
May-June 2013 News Factoids
Broadcast television 'up front' ad sales for 2013 are expected to hold steady at $9.75 billion, while cable network ad sales are expected to surpass broadcast TV with $10 billion in sales. == per AdWeek, April 2013
check out the Ultimate Top Ten (mostly funny) Lists website.
Employer-offered healthcare coverage has dropped steadily since 2000; the data for 2011 shows only 52 percent of employees covered. In the same time frame, the average premium for an average employee doubled.
== per Bloomberg
Lots of workers and consumers are behind the "Boycott Wal-Mart!!" movement; second option is to use the phrase "Boycott WongMart!!".
The word 'drone' is now a verb.
Inventors Rossi & Focardi are letting other scientists perform tightly-controlled testing of an Energy Catalyzer that produces energy by COLD FUSION: click here
A key paragraph of Google's rules & regs page was changed on May 27th
== per Search Engine Land
OLD TEXT: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
NEW TEXT: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.
This really changes the way your website shows up in search results!
HORRORS!: Of the 400 top-selling books of 2012, E.L. James ('Fifty Shades of Grey') and Suzanne Collins ('Hunger Games') accounted for 25% of all sales.
== per Forbes
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
check out the Ultimate Top Ten (mostly funny) Lists website.
Employer-offered healthcare coverage has dropped steadily since 2000; the data for 2011 shows only 52 percent of employees covered. In the same time frame, the average premium for an average employee doubled.
== per Bloomberg
Lots of workers and consumers are behind the "Boycott Wal-Mart!!" movement; second option is to use the phrase "Boycott WongMart!!".
The word 'drone' is now a verb.
Inventors Rossi & Focardi are letting other scientists perform tightly-controlled testing of an Energy Catalyzer that produces energy by COLD FUSION: click here
A key paragraph of Google's rules & regs page was changed on May 27th
== per Search Engine Land
OLD TEXT: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
NEW TEXT: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.
This really changes the way your website shows up in search results!
HORRORS!: Of the 400 top-selling books of 2012, E.L. James ('Fifty Shades of Grey') and Suzanne Collins ('Hunger Games') accounted for 25% of all sales.
== per Forbes
Friday, May 31, 2013
May 2013 Quotations
“People always say things like, Oh, well, he was suffering so much that he was better off dying. But that’s not true. You’re always better off living.”
~~ Dashiell Hammett [1894-1961]
“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever."
~~ Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe [1930-2013]
“There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.”
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]
“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.”
~~ wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein [1879-1955] {appeared in the 1990s}
"He who fears [that] he shall suffer already suffers what he fears."
~~ Montaigne [1533-92]
"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"Some things are just too coincidental to be a coincidence."
~~ Yogi Berra
"Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention."
~~ Amy Tan
"What experience & history teach us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
~~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770-1831]
"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
~~ Baruch Spinoza [1632-77]
"The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure [that] anyone has, is his personal dignity."
~~ baseball great Jackie Robinson [1919-72]
"Until conservatives admit [that] their deepest beliefs regarding taxes and deregulation were, at minimum, severely challenged by the failures of the [George W.] Bush presidency, they are going to have a hard time convincing anyone that they know how to run a country."
~~ freelance columnist Bill Scher
"Man will become better when we have shown him to himself as he is."
~~ Anton Checkov [1860-1904]
“To paraphrase the Christian Bible (Matthew 16): For what is a man profited if he shall make beaucoup bucks while transforming the planet into a cesspool.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
“Socializing with alcohol is fun and we should not pretend otherwise.”
~~ blogger Suzy Dean
"Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster."
~~ Elizabeth Murdoch {Freud}
"It's the Twentieth Century . . . no more miracles."
~~ Clifford Odets [1906-63], in stageplay "Golden Boy" 1937
"Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet."
~~ Roger Miller [1936-92]
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
"It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
"Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
"The best things in life aren't 'things' at all."
~~ Jim Owen
"All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time."
~~ Edward Albee
"You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at."
~~ Tina Fey
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
“If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.”
~~ Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck [1902-79]
“I always find that when I do something I like, from the heart, then it works.”
~~ Harvey Weinstein
"In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty."
~~ President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 2013
“All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are mova+ble, and those that move.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"No one wants advice – only corroboration."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"Sometimes integrity is the subtlest and most effective strategy of all."
~~ Supreme Court Justice John Marshall [1755-1835]
"The earth has music for those who listen."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]
"Oratory [is] the art of making deep noises from the chest sound like important messages from the brain."
~~ composer H.I. Phillips
"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
"There will come a time when you believe [that] everything is finished. That will be the beginning." ~~ Louis L'Amour [1908-88]
"You can't lead from the crowd."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]
"It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."
~~ Cormac McCarthy
"Silence is argument carried on by other means."
~~ Ernesto 'Che' Guevara [1928-67]
"The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off."
~~ coach Abe Lemons [1922-2002]
"The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie."
~~ choreographer Agnes de Mille [1905-93]
"Political correctness is tyranny with manners."
~~ Charlton Heston [1923-2008]
"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."
~~ Henry Miller [1891-1980]
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those [that] we tell ourselves."
~~ V.S. Naipaul
"There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]
"We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story."
~~ Mary McCarthy [1912-89]
"Sophistication is upscale conformity."
~~ poet James Richardson
"What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"Taking on a pet is a contract with sorrow."
~~ Carol Anshaw
"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder."
~~ historian Arnold J. Toynbee [1889-1975]
"The two most important days in your life are the day [that] you are born and the day [that] you find out why."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."
~~ journalist Walter Bagehot [1826-77]
"Friendship is born at the moment [that] one person says to another: What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
~~ C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
"Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]
"Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather. He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop."
~~ journalist Alfred Polgar [1873-1955]
"It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."
~~ Zelda Fitzgerald [1900-48]
"Obstacles are those frightful things [that] you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]
"The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Dashiell Hammett [1894-1961]
“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever."
~~ Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe [1930-2013]
“There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.”
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]
“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.”
~~ wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein [1879-1955] {appeared in the 1990s}
"He who fears [that] he shall suffer already suffers what he fears."
~~ Montaigne [1533-92]
"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]
"Some things are just too coincidental to be a coincidence."
~~ Yogi Berra
"Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention."
~~ Amy Tan
"What experience & history teach us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
~~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770-1831]
"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
~~ Baruch Spinoza [1632-77]
"The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure [that] anyone has, is his personal dignity."
~~ baseball great Jackie Robinson [1919-72]
"Until conservatives admit [that] their deepest beliefs regarding taxes and deregulation were, at minimum, severely challenged by the failures of the [George W.] Bush presidency, they are going to have a hard time convincing anyone that they know how to run a country."
~~ freelance columnist Bill Scher
"Man will become better when we have shown him to himself as he is."
~~ Anton Checkov [1860-1904]
“To paraphrase the Christian Bible (Matthew 16): For what is a man profited if he shall make beaucoup bucks while transforming the planet into a cesspool.”
~~ G.E. Nordell
“Socializing with alcohol is fun and we should not pretend otherwise.”
~~ blogger Suzy Dean
"Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster."
~~ Elizabeth Murdoch {Freud}
"It's the Twentieth Century . . . no more miracles."
~~ Clifford Odets [1906-63], in stageplay "Golden Boy" 1937
"Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet."
~~ Roger Miller [1936-92]
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
"It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
"Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
"The best things in life aren't 'things' at all."
~~ Jim Owen
"All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time."
~~ Edward Albee
"You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at."
~~ Tina Fey
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
“If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.”
~~ Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck [1902-79]
“I always find that when I do something I like, from the heart, then it works.”
~~ Harvey Weinstein
"In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty."
~~ President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 2013
“All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are mova+ble, and those that move.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"No one wants advice – only corroboration."
~~ John Steinbeck [1902-68]
"Sometimes integrity is the subtlest and most effective strategy of all."
~~ Supreme Court Justice John Marshall [1755-1835]
"The earth has music for those who listen."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]
"Oratory [is] the art of making deep noises from the chest sound like important messages from the brain."
~~ composer H.I. Phillips
"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
"There will come a time when you believe [that] everything is finished. That will be the beginning." ~~ Louis L'Amour [1908-88]
"You can't lead from the crowd."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]
"It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."
~~ Cormac McCarthy
"Silence is argument carried on by other means."
~~ Ernesto 'Che' Guevara [1928-67]
"The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off."
~~ coach Abe Lemons [1922-2002]
"The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie."
~~ choreographer Agnes de Mille [1905-93]
"Political correctness is tyranny with manners."
~~ Charlton Heston [1923-2008]
"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."
~~ Henry Miller [1891-1980]
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those [that] we tell ourselves."
~~ V.S. Naipaul
"There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]
"We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story."
~~ Mary McCarthy [1912-89]
"Sophistication is upscale conformity."
~~ poet James Richardson
"What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
"Taking on a pet is a contract with sorrow."
~~ Carol Anshaw
"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder."
~~ historian Arnold J. Toynbee [1889-1975]
"The two most important days in your life are the day [that] you are born and the day [that] you find out why."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."
~~ journalist Walter Bagehot [1826-77]
"Friendship is born at the moment [that] one person says to another: What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
~~ C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
"Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]
"Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather. He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop."
~~ journalist Alfred Polgar [1873-1955]
"It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."
~~ Zelda Fitzgerald [1900-48]
"Obstacles are those frightful things [that] you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]
"The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Essay #104: No Water For You
The battle to halt global warming, aka ‘climate change’, is over.
We lost.
The Republitard fascists and the One Percent (the Oligarchy) have and continue to work hard to ensure that the trajectory of civilization is pointed toward the extinction of homo sapiens in thirty years or so. This is essentially species suicide thru intentional inaction.
* * * * * * * * Eco-journalist Bill McKibben learned from climate scientists that there was a ‘tipping point’, a point of no return, that a level of carbon dioxide (CO2) at 350 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere was the maximum safe level; above that the ‘greenhouse effect’ would afterward operate on autopilot, the planet and the biosphere would from there simply get warmer all on its own. The number back in 2007 was 385 ppm of carbon dioxide. So McKibben founded 350.org to build grassroots awareness of the problem; the group held major marches and demonstrations in 2009 and 2010 and 2012, but the average citizen heard little news about those efforts. The fascists spent millions on propaganda in recent elections, Oklahoma Sen. Inhofe calls climate change a hoax, and the Kyoto Agreement remains unsigned by the United States.
The wheels of government spin merrily while the planet heats up.
Think not? News this month from Hawai’i is that atmospheric scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory have been recording levels of 400 ppm of carbon dioxide. The 11,000 foot elevation and the distance from both Honolulu and Hilo (and everywhere else) makes measurements taken there ‘clean’. The first measurements taken there were around 316 ppm in 1958; readings rose to 385 in 2007, an increase (ballpark) of 70 points in 30 years or 2.3 points average; the increase since 2007 is 15 points, which is 3.0 points per year. Seems like not much, but the rate of increase has gone up by 25 percent. If your paycheck went up 25 percent, that would be good news; such a rate of increase for this factor of climate change is very bad news.
Greenhouse gases are increasing ever faster and are unlikely to be reversed. Warmer. Then warmer.
* * * * * * * * In other news, New Mexico is experiencing ‘severe’ drought in 90% of the state, ‘extreme’ drought in 50%, and ‘exceptional’ drought in 4.3%, which is the eighth worst. The Great Drought is obvious everywhere in the state. Elephant Butte Reservoir is at its lowest level since the dam was completed in 1916. The site is built to hold 2 million acre feet of water; the content at present is 223,000 acre feet – or 11 percent of capacity.
So no water is leaving Elephant Butte southward.
The farmers in Hatch Valley realize the situation, and most are planning to plant NO ‘famous Hatch chili’ crop this year. (Well, maybe a few with deep wells will give it a try.) And I heard that farmers in Valencia County will plant only two alfalfa crops this year, instead of three.
The available water in the Rio Grande River is far below New Mexico’s long-ago negotiated allotment, so no water is leaving New Mexico across the state line to Texas, either. Texas has already filed suit with the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is simple lawyerly due diligence (“We tried!”) – if they win the case, where is any water coming from?
* * * * * * * * I was in the U.S. Air Force in the late 1960s, based in Las Vegas, Nevada with temporary assignments to VietNam, and Thailand, and other places. The people of Thailand, especially those ‘up country’ (north of Bangkok) are quite friendly to Europeans, and I took the opportunity to ‘go native’ and paid the weekly rent for a girl there named Vilai and spent nights and weekends off the airbase when I could get away from teaching computer analysis to master sergeants. I was there six weeks or so and truly experienced elements of the local lifestyle, which goes back hundreds of years.
The bungalow where I stayed was on eight-foot log stilts; there were two rows of housing on a berm between and above the rice paddies, with a foot and bicycle path down the middle. We slept inside mosquito netting, and Vilai cooked or we went out. There was electricity but no television; I read a lot. The back porch (facing the paddy) was fenced to about three feet high, with one section for the kitchen and the other for the bath. The stilts were strong enough to support a large ceramic water cistern, about four feet in diameter and maybe three feet high. The way that things worked there, each resident had to be home between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to turn the faucet on to replenish the cistern, and to turn it off when full. Some days no water came out. There were severe penalties for anybody who turned the faucet on and then left the place unattended.
I learned to take a bath ‘native style’, by first soaping up (bent low because the fence was designed for shorter people) and then using a tin bowl to rinse the soap off. Not a bad experience in a tropical country (Thailand’s latitude matches that of Central America), but I really do appreciate and prefer a hot shower.
* * * * * * * What is going to happen here in New Mexico?
First, Albuquerque and other towns and cities will outlaw watering of gardens and lawns and filling of swimming pools, even wading pools. I am surprised that restaurants have not already stopped serving water except by request; it will eventually happen, and they may even begin charging for water like any other beverage.
Next will probably be shutdown of car washes.
As water becomes scarcer, prices will go up, either at the grocery or c-store or on your monthly water bill. And you better have a large bag of quarters on hand if you wash clothes at the laundromat (or apartment building equivalent).
Water is a finite resource and a commodity, and the price of each form of water could very well double in the next two years.
One hopes that the bureaucrats in each New Mexico city or water district are smart enough to set delivery hours of rationed water to match the American lifestyle – how about 6 to 9 in the morning and 5 to 9 in the evening?
Good idea to start shopping for that in-home water cistern. Ceramic ones can be found at floral nurseries, the plastic barrel kind at nurseries and at construction and industrial supply stores. Get yours before the price goes up.
Need a job? Ask a Republican why they do nothing about the situation.
Well gone dry? Ask a Republican why they continue to prevent every solution to overcome climate change.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
We lost.
The Republitard fascists and the One Percent (the Oligarchy) have and continue to work hard to ensure that the trajectory of civilization is pointed toward the extinction of homo sapiens in thirty years or so. This is essentially species suicide thru intentional inaction.
The wheels of government spin merrily while the planet heats up.
Think not? News this month from Hawai’i is that atmospheric scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory have been recording levels of 400 ppm of carbon dioxide. The 11,000 foot elevation and the distance from both Honolulu and Hilo (and everywhere else) makes measurements taken there ‘clean’. The first measurements taken there were around 316 ppm in 1958; readings rose to 385 in 2007, an increase (ballpark) of 70 points in 30 years or 2.3 points average; the increase since 2007 is 15 points, which is 3.0 points per year. Seems like not much, but the rate of increase has gone up by 25 percent. If your paycheck went up 25 percent, that would be good news; such a rate of increase for this factor of climate change is very bad news.
Greenhouse gases are increasing ever faster and are unlikely to be reversed. Warmer. Then warmer.
So no water is leaving Elephant Butte southward.
The farmers in Hatch Valley realize the situation, and most are planning to plant NO ‘famous Hatch chili’ crop this year. (Well, maybe a few with deep wells will give it a try.) And I heard that farmers in Valencia County will plant only two alfalfa crops this year, instead of three.
The available water in the Rio Grande River is far below New Mexico’s long-ago negotiated allotment, so no water is leaving New Mexico across the state line to Texas, either. Texas has already filed suit with the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is simple lawyerly due diligence (“We tried!”) – if they win the case, where is any water coming from?
The bungalow where I stayed was on eight-foot log stilts; there were two rows of housing on a berm between and above the rice paddies, with a foot and bicycle path down the middle. We slept inside mosquito netting, and Vilai cooked or we went out. There was electricity but no television; I read a lot. The back porch (facing the paddy) was fenced to about three feet high, with one section for the kitchen and the other for the bath. The stilts were strong enough to support a large ceramic water cistern, about four feet in diameter and maybe three feet high. The way that things worked there, each resident had to be home between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to turn the faucet on to replenish the cistern, and to turn it off when full. Some days no water came out. There were severe penalties for anybody who turned the faucet on and then left the place unattended.
I learned to take a bath ‘native style’, by first soaping up (bent low because the fence was designed for shorter people) and then using a tin bowl to rinse the soap off. Not a bad experience in a tropical country (Thailand’s latitude matches that of Central America), but I really do appreciate and prefer a hot shower.
First, Albuquerque and other towns and cities will outlaw watering of gardens and lawns and filling of swimming pools, even wading pools. I am surprised that restaurants have not already stopped serving water except by request; it will eventually happen, and they may even begin charging for water like any other beverage.
Next will probably be shutdown of car washes.
As water becomes scarcer, prices will go up, either at the grocery or c-store or on your monthly water bill. And you better have a large bag of quarters on hand if you wash clothes at the laundromat (or apartment building equivalent).
Water is a finite resource and a commodity, and the price of each form of water could very well double in the next two years.
One hopes that the bureaucrats in each New Mexico city or water district are smart enough to set delivery hours of rationed water to match the American lifestyle – how about 6 to 9 in the morning and 5 to 9 in the evening?
Good idea to start shopping for that in-home water cistern. Ceramic ones can be found at floral nurseries, the plastic barrel kind at nurseries and at construction and industrial supply stores. Get yours before the price goes up.
Need a job? Ask a Republican why they do nothing about the situation.
Well gone dry? Ask a Republican why they continue to prevent every solution to overcome climate change.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Five REAL Scandals
Journalist Bill Scher has described 'Five Real Scandals Republicans Might Want To Address' over at the Campaign For America's Future Blog, which are:
1. Carbon dioxide atmospheric levels hovering around 400 parts per million.
2. America's crumbling infrastructure needs $3.6 trillion just to reach a 'state of good repair'.
3. The top 1 percent in America holds 35 percent of the nation’s wealth (although the New York Times has long used the figure 65%).
4. More than 4 million Americans have been jobless for more than half a year.
5. Forty percent of America’s children aged between 3 and 5 are not enrolled in any sort of preschool.
To which I would add the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (caused by Republican cancellation of free condom programs), pollution by fracking, banging on the war drums for intervention in Syria, the sequester charade, and coming food shortages from the national drought.
The Republicans present no solution for any of these problems, which is the larger scandal. Troglodyte Republicans continue to propose 'free market' healthcare (their 'get well or die!' policy), eliminating the minimum wage (a return to feudalism), privatization of everything, including Social Security and education (abject fascism), and 'austerity for workers (only), unregulated extortionist monopolies, and a tax free aristocracy' replacing capitalism – any objective observer can see that these solve nothing.
Again, I say: “If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
1. Carbon dioxide atmospheric levels hovering around 400 parts per million.
2. America's crumbling infrastructure needs $3.6 trillion just to reach a 'state of good repair'.
3. The top 1 percent in America holds 35 percent of the nation’s wealth (although the New York Times has long used the figure 65%).
4. More than 4 million Americans have been jobless for more than half a year.
5. Forty percent of America’s children aged between 3 and 5 are not enrolled in any sort of preschool.
To which I would add the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (caused by Republican cancellation of free condom programs), pollution by fracking, banging on the war drums for intervention in Syria, the sequester charade, and coming food shortages from the national drought.
The Republicans present no solution for any of these problems, which is the larger scandal. Troglodyte Republicans continue to propose 'free market' healthcare (their 'get well or die!' policy), eliminating the minimum wage (a return to feudalism), privatization of everything, including Social Security and education (abject fascism), and 'austerity for workers (only), unregulated extortionist monopolies, and a tax free aristocracy' replacing capitalism – any objective observer can see that these solve nothing.
Again, I say: “If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Recipe of the Month: Cornbread Dressing
Step 1: Prepare a package of store brand cornbread dressing mix per instructions on box: Boil water in saucepan, add butter, add dry mix from package. Stir. Turn off flame and cover; let sit for five minutes.
The store-brand packages display 'six servings per container', but this is a decent cheap meal for two, or 'serve half now and cover remainder for tomorrow'.
Well, many of you are probably wondering 'Recipe? What the hell?'.
So here is the special recipe function:
OPTION 1: Drain and add 5-ounce can of turkey or chicken meat, after the dry mix.
OPTION 2: Add a package of Buddig™ (or equivalent) turkey deli meat (chopped), also after the dry mix.
OPTION 3: Add half a package (Mariani™ brand is 5 ounces) of sweetened dried cranberries, as the third ingredient, before the dry mix.
For more, similar (past and future) recipes visit The Working Minds Cookbook
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The store-brand packages display 'six servings per container', but this is a decent cheap meal for two, or 'serve half now and cover remainder for tomorrow'.
Well, many of you are probably wondering 'Recipe? What the hell?'.
So here is the special recipe function:
OPTION 1: Drain and add 5-ounce can of turkey or chicken meat, after the dry mix.
OPTION 2: Add a package of Buddig™ (or equivalent) turkey deli meat (chopped), also after the dry mix.
OPTION 3: Add half a package (Mariani™ brand is 5 ounces) of sweetened dried cranberries, as the third ingredient, before the dry mix.
For more, similar (past and future) recipes visit The Working Minds Cookbook
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
April 2013 Quotations
"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and [to] hide it at the same time."
~~ Thornton Wilder [1897-1975]
"Why can't I say 'What needs doing?' and then go do it?"
~~ filmmaker Sara Lamm
"I may be dumb but I'm not stupid."
~~ wrongly attributed to football player & announcer Terry Bradshaw, but predates him by fifty-odd years
"Ninety percent of [baseball] is half mental."
~~ Jim Wohlford
"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something [that] you don't believe is right."
~~ Dame Jane Goodall
"If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?"
~~ Tina Fey
"Intellectual labor tears a man out of society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him toward men."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"If you don't have confidence, you'll alway find a way not to win."
~~ Olympic champion Carl Lewis
"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but to see quickly how to make them good."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]
"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
~~ writer Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]
“Peace is something that you only get by war or the threat of war, however tacit the threat.”
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Everything comes to those who wait . . . except a cat."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti
"Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is."
~~ author Rebecca Solnit
"The function of man is to live, not to exist."
~~ Jack London [1876-1916]
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
~~ author William Arthur Ward [1921-94]
"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
~~ French author Victor Hugo [1802-85]
"If you want the present and the future to be different from the past, Spinoza tells us, study the past. Find out the causes that made it what it was and bring different causes to bear."
~~ Will and Ariel Durant
"Tempus sure does fugit."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
"Class is very simple in America. You're in the upper class if your name is on the building; you're in the middle class if your name is on your desk; and you're in the working class if your name is on your shirt."
~~ syndicated comedian Argus Hamilton
"Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]
"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else."
~~ Douglas Adams [1952-2001]
"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you won't do anything."
~~ author M. Scott Peck [1936-2005]
"Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."
~~ historian Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]
"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]
"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy [that] justice can have."
~~ James Baldwin [1924-87]
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking [that] they can't lose."
~~ Bill Gates
"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
~~ Julia Child [1912-2004]
"Any compulsion tries to justify itself."
~~ Joan Didion
"Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
"Never marry a man [that] you wouldn't want to be divorced from."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
`
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"He who is too eager to preserve his originality is already losing it."
~~ German composer Robert Schumann [1810-56]
"Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."
~~ Mel Brooks
"Stories happen to those who tell them."
~~ Greek historian Thucydides [c.460–c.395 BCE]
"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."
~~ Colin Powell
"Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence."
~~ Philip Roth
"If you want to annoy your neighbors, tell the truth about them."
~~ Italian satirist Pietro Aretino [1492-1556]
"We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
"If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and you would achieve nothing."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower from the cliffs of despair."
~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [1906-2001]
"Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it."
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]
“The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1918-2008]
“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]
“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”
~~ Truman Capote [1924-84]
"Every great film should seem new every time [that] you see it."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
“Life calls the tune, we dance.”
~~ John Galsworthy [1867-1933]
"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
~~ Joseph Heller [1923-99]
“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and [to] hide it at the same time."
~~ Thornton Wilder [1897-1975]
"Why can't I say 'What needs doing?' and then go do it?"
~~ filmmaker Sara Lamm
"I may be dumb but I'm not stupid."
~~ wrongly attributed to football player & announcer Terry Bradshaw, but predates him by fifty-odd years
"Ninety percent of [baseball] is half mental."
~~ Jim Wohlford
"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something [that] you don't believe is right."
~~ Dame Jane Goodall
"If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?"
~~ Tina Fey
"Intellectual labor tears a man out of society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him toward men."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"If you don't have confidence, you'll alway find a way not to win."
~~ Olympic champion Carl Lewis
"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but to see quickly how to make them good."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]
"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
~~ writer Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]
“Peace is something that you only get by war or the threat of war, however tacit the threat.”
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Everything comes to those who wait . . . except a cat."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti
"Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is."
~~ author Rebecca Solnit
"The function of man is to live, not to exist."
~~ Jack London [1876-1916]
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
~~ author William Arthur Ward [1921-94]
"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
~~ French author Victor Hugo [1802-85]
"If you want the present and the future to be different from the past, Spinoza tells us, study the past. Find out the causes that made it what it was and bring different causes to bear."
~~ Will and Ariel Durant
"Tempus sure does fugit."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]
“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
"Class is very simple in America. You're in the upper class if your name is on the building; you're in the middle class if your name is on your desk; and you're in the working class if your name is on your shirt."
~~ syndicated comedian Argus Hamilton
"Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]
"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else."
~~ Douglas Adams [1952-2001]
"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you won't do anything."
~~ author M. Scott Peck [1936-2005]
"Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."
~~ historian Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]
"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]
"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy [that] justice can have."
~~ James Baldwin [1924-87]
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking [that] they can't lose."
~~ Bill Gates
"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
~~ Julia Child [1912-2004]
"Any compulsion tries to justify itself."
~~ Joan Didion
"Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
"Never marry a man [that] you wouldn't want to be divorced from."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
`
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"He who is too eager to preserve his originality is already losing it."
~~ German composer Robert Schumann [1810-56]
"Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."
~~ Mel Brooks
"Stories happen to those who tell them."
~~ Greek historian Thucydides [c.460–c.395 BCE]
"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."
~~ Colin Powell
"Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence."
~~ Philip Roth
"If you want to annoy your neighbors, tell the truth about them."
~~ Italian satirist Pietro Aretino [1492-1556]
"We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
"If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and you would achieve nothing."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]
"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower from the cliffs of despair."
~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [1906-2001]
"Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it."
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]
“The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1918-2008]
“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]
“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”
~~ Truman Capote [1924-84]
"Every great film should seem new every time [that] you see it."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
“Life calls the tune, we dance.”
~~ John Galsworthy [1867-1933]
"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
~~ Joseph Heller [1923-99]
“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Friday, April 26, 2013
Just Another Blatant Republican Lie
"The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual."
Also, the lies perpetrated by the Republican Party have no end, it seems.
The accusation that President Barack Obama takes too much vacation time is baseless. Barack Obama took 131 days vacation in his first term of office; double that for two terms, the rate is 260 days in eight years.
President George Dubya Bush took 1,020 days of vacation time in his two terms, which factors out at FOUR times the rate of President Obama.
President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush also exceeded the Obama vacation rate.
“If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Also, the lies perpetrated by the Republican Party have no end, it seems.
The accusation that President Barack Obama takes too much vacation time is baseless. Barack Obama took 131 days vacation in his first term of office; double that for two terms, the rate is 260 days in eight years.
President George Dubya Bush took 1,020 days of vacation time in his two terms, which factors out at FOUR times the rate of President Obama.
President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush also exceeded the Obama vacation rate.
“If the fascist Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Sunday, April 21, 2013
March-April 2013 News Factoids
Two new studies in the journal Science conclude that wild bees, such as the American bumblebee, seem to be disappearing in the Midwest in an alarming manner. There are 4,000 species of wild bees in America and 49 of them are bumblebees. Scientists suspect a combination of disease and parasites for the dwindling of both wild and domesticated bees. Another recent article purports that half of the commercial bee colonies in America disappeared in 2012.
Funniest movie premise in a long time: Disney announced the animated "Planes", a spin-off from "Cars"; the main character is an airplane named Dusty who dreams of winning the pylon air races but is 'crippled by an extreme fear of heights'!
The Federal sequester of 2013 cuts 10,000 teaching jobs, 70,000 spots for preschoolers in Head Start, $43 million for food programs for seniors, $35 million for local fire departments, and access to nutrition assistance for over half a million women and their families. {Thank a Republican, huh?}
ANOTHER BRILLIANT IDEA: Since I have set up a store at Cafe Press to sell hats with the Working Minds logo, I can also design t-shirts whenever I have a couple of hours with nothing to do. The new idea is a t-shirt that has small lettering on the back "this t-shirt intentionally left blank" {hee hee hee}. Second idea, weeks later: KEEP CALM AND KARAOKE - but t-shirts and such are already available.
DROUGHT, ANYONE? Spring seems to be here already (in early March), local temperatures are 70s in the daytime and 40s at night, with only ONE day of snow this winter. (I live at precisely 5000 feet elevation.)
White Americans are five times more likely to commit suicide with a gun than to be shot by someone else. But for each Afro-American who uses a gun to take his/her life, five others are shot to death by other people. – Washington Post
The last automobile dealer in the town of Tucumcari, New Mexico closed in April; Interstate Automotive employed 13 people. (The three car dealers in Belén, New Mexico closed or moved in 2009.)
Spent the day in the waiting room at the Chevy dealer watching TV which was very educational. Learned from "C.S.I." that if you are going to shoot somebody, a cat makes a very good silencer. (LMAO!)
Somebody should write a country-western song with the title
"Tears On My Mousepad (Since You De-friended Me)".
Anonymous Collective April 2013 video
'We Will No Longer Tolerate The Sleep of The Masses' [6:57] at YouTube
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Funniest movie premise in a long time: Disney announced the animated "Planes", a spin-off from "Cars"; the main character is an airplane named Dusty who dreams of winning the pylon air races but is 'crippled by an extreme fear of heights'!
The Federal sequester of 2013 cuts 10,000 teaching jobs, 70,000 spots for preschoolers in Head Start, $43 million for food programs for seniors, $35 million for local fire departments, and access to nutrition assistance for over half a million women and their families. {Thank a Republican, huh?}
ANOTHER BRILLIANT IDEA: Since I have set up a store at Cafe Press to sell hats with the Working Minds logo, I can also design t-shirts whenever I have a couple of hours with nothing to do. The new idea is a t-shirt that has small lettering on the back "this t-shirt intentionally left blank" {hee hee hee}. Second idea, weeks later: KEEP CALM AND KARAOKE - but t-shirts and such are already available.
DROUGHT, ANYONE? Spring seems to be here already (in early March), local temperatures are 70s in the daytime and 40s at night, with only ONE day of snow this winter. (I live at precisely 5000 feet elevation.)
White Americans are five times more likely to commit suicide with a gun than to be shot by someone else. But for each Afro-American who uses a gun to take his/her life, five others are shot to death by other people. – Washington Post
The last automobile dealer in the town of Tucumcari, New Mexico closed in April; Interstate Automotive employed 13 people. (The three car dealers in Belén, New Mexico closed or moved in 2009.)
Spent the day in the waiting room at the Chevy dealer watching TV which was very educational. Learned from "C.S.I." that if you are going to shoot somebody, a cat makes a very good silencer. (LMAO!)
Somebody should write a country-western song with the title
"Tears On My Mousepad (Since You De-friended Me)".
Anonymous Collective April 2013 video
'We Will No Longer Tolerate The Sleep of The Masses' [6:57] at YouTube
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Congressional Reform Act of 2013
This arrived in my Inbox from someone who thought that it was real. Easy to debunk as a viral email slash chain letter, because it originated back in January and July of 2011. A later version added a matching quote from Warren Buffett, and the most recent version is given as a request initiated by Buffett. Sorry, it is an email hoax.
Having said that, it sure would be wonderful if these ideas were indeed passed into law. So I am posting a slightly-revised text of the bogus law here in the hope that some Congressperson will actually put forward such a reform, and get co-sponsors, and so on. And what you can do is forward the proposal – NOT as an edict from Warren Buffett, but as a genuine Good Idea – to your delegate in the U.S. Congress and in the U.S. Senate.
Where is Frank Capra's Mr. Jefferson Smith when we really need him?
1. No Tenure / No Pension: A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.
2. Congress Participates in Social Security: All funds in the Congressional Retirement Fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people. Such funds may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Retirement Plan: Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Pay Raises: Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will increase by the lower of C.P.I. or 3%.
5. Health Benefits: Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Equal Rights: Congress must equally abide by all laws that they impose on the American people.
7. Contracts: All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective at the end of the calendar year. The American people did not make such contracts with members of Congress. Serving in Congress is an honor not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Having said that, it sure would be wonderful if these ideas were indeed passed into law. So I am posting a slightly-revised text of the bogus law here in the hope that some Congressperson will actually put forward such a reform, and get co-sponsors, and so on. And what you can do is forward the proposal – NOT as an edict from Warren Buffett, but as a genuine Good Idea – to your delegate in the U.S. Congress and in the U.S. Senate.
Where is Frank Capra's Mr. Jefferson Smith when we really need him?
1. No Tenure / No Pension: A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.
2. Congress Participates in Social Security: All funds in the Congressional Retirement Fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people. Such funds may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Retirement Plan: Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Pay Raises: Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will increase by the lower of C.P.I. or 3%.
5. Health Benefits: Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Equal Rights: Congress must equally abide by all laws that they impose on the American people.
7. Contracts: All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective at the end of the calendar year. The American people did not make such contracts with members of Congress. Serving in Congress is an honor not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Paris, New Mexico News for March
The list of candidates who have so far filed for elective office in the new City of Rio Communities is published in the local newspaper. The City election is scheduled for Tuesday May 14th. Of the 3,640 registered voters inside the new City, 1,063 showed up to vote in January; the result was 63% approving cityhood versus 37% against.
Three males have filed to run for the office of Mayor. Three males have filed for the office of Municipal Judge, ages 23 and 34 and 68.
Nine people filed to run for the four City Council seats; two of the winners will run again in March 2014 so that there is overlap; candidates include four males and five females.
I checked with the Registrar of Voters for Valencia County to get details on renaming R.C. to Paris, New Mexico. Not much can be done until the City Council is elected and convenes itself. What I need to do is circulate a petition to ask the City Council to 'call for' a ballot question on the next scheduled election, which is March 2014. The petition will ask for at least two choices: keep Rio Communities or change to Paris, NM. I will also design the petition to make room for third or fourth choices from others who circulate an equivalent petition prior to whatever is the official deadline. If I manage to obtain 50 or 100 signatures, then we would expect other petitions to go for a similar number.
Probably the next news will be after the April meeting of the Rio Communities Association, which will include a candidate 'meet and greet'.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
Three males have filed to run for the office of Mayor. Three males have filed for the office of Municipal Judge, ages 23 and 34 and 68.
Nine people filed to run for the four City Council seats; two of the winners will run again in March 2014 so that there is overlap; candidates include four males and five females.
I checked with the Registrar of Voters for Valencia County to get details on renaming R.C. to Paris, New Mexico. Not much can be done until the City Council is elected and convenes itself. What I need to do is circulate a petition to ask the City Council to 'call for' a ballot question on the next scheduled election, which is March 2014. The petition will ask for at least two choices: keep Rio Communities or change to Paris, NM. I will also design the petition to make room for third or fourth choices from others who circulate an equivalent petition prior to whatever is the official deadline. If I manage to obtain 50 or 100 signatures, then we would expect other petitions to go for a similar number.
Probably the next news will be after the April meeting of the Rio Communities Association, which will include a candidate 'meet and greet'.
Monday, March 11, 2013
March 2013 Quotations
"Sometimes you gotta give up your principles and do what's right."
~~ Stallone's character in the movie "Bullet To The Head" [2013]
"It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class."
~~ President Barack Obama, during Feb 2013 State of the Union Address
"We can get this done! Take a vote, and send me that bill."
~~ President Barack Obama, during Feb 2013 State of the Union Address
"Depending on which economist you talk to these [sequester] cuts will either really hurt the economy or really, really hurt the economy."
~~ radio talk show host Sam Seder
"Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"When all is said and done, more is said than done."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"If your parents never had children, chances are [that] you won't either."
~~ Dick Cavett
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Information is the currency of democracy."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"It isn't the X generation [now], it's the Y generation, because everybody is asking 'why?'."
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008]
"The most American thing you can do is to dissent; the most un-American thing you can do is to stifle dissent."
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008]
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"What's irritating about love is [that] it's a crime that requires an accomplice."
~~ Charles-Pierre Baudelaire [1821-67]
"Part of the evolutionary design of the shark is that they must keep moving: if a shark stops swimming, it will die. Same with the U.S. Republican Party: when a Republican stops lying, it dies."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors."
~~ Spencer Tracy 1900-67]
"A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later."
~~ Gen. George S. Patton [1885-1945]
"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"Some people think [that] luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity."
~~ Coco Chanel [1883-1971]
"To be busy is man's only happiness."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]
"No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids."
~~ Bill Cosby
"The best way out is always through."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man."
~~ Henry Adams [1838-1918]
"Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
"Common sense needs constant reappraisal."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"If you can't reach heaven, raise hell."
~~ ancient Roman poet Virgil [70 BCE-19 BCE], in the epic poem "Aeneid"
"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."
~~ Justice Felix Frankfurter [1882-1965]
"The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]
"The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering'. So 'nostalgia' is the suffering caused by unappeased yearning to return."
~~ Milan Kundera
"A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man [that] nobody trusts."
~~ Harold Macmillan [1894-1986]
"In ancient times, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."
~~ Terry Pratchett
"What you have to do is work with the raw material [that] you have, namely you, and never let up."
~~ Helen Gurley Brown [1922-2012]
"Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"The best thing to hold onto in life is each other."
~~ Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"I believe my subject is bewilderment. But I could be wrong."
~~ author Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008]
"If the path be beautiful, let us not question where it leads."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
"Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back."
~~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Always - even in a limo - wear your seatbelt."
~~ Christopher Walken
"A man always has two reasons for what he does - a good one and the real one."
~~ banker J.P. Morgan [1837-1913]
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility."
~~ filmmaker Errol Morris
"To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone."
~~ Reba McEntire
"Half of the harm done in this world is due to people who want to feel important."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence."
~~ poet Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]
"Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it."
~~ philosopher Karl Popper [1902-94]
"Fear is often disguised as moral outrage."
~~ Judy Blume
"You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it."
~~ Jimmy Dean [1928-2010]
"Don't mask self-doubt with contempt."
~~ British author Zadie Smith
"Art is not what you see but what you make others see."
~~ artist Edgar Degas [1834-1917]
"Great is the power of steady misrepresentation."
~~ Charles Darwin [1809-82]
"Dammit! The a**holes are winning."
~~ G.E. Nordell
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
~~ Stallone's character in the movie "Bullet To The Head" [2013]
"It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class."
~~ President Barack Obama, during Feb 2013 State of the Union Address
"We can get this done! Take a vote, and send me that bill."
~~ President Barack Obama, during Feb 2013 State of the Union Address
"Depending on which economist you talk to these [sequester] cuts will either really hurt the economy or really, really hurt the economy."
~~ radio talk show host Sam Seder
"Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"When all is said and done, more is said than done."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"If your parents never had children, chances are [that] you won't either."
~~ Dick Cavett
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Information is the currency of democracy."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"It isn't the X generation [now], it's the Y generation, because everybody is asking 'why?'."
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008]
"The most American thing you can do is to dissent; the most un-American thing you can do is to stifle dissent."
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008]
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
"What's irritating about love is [that] it's a crime that requires an accomplice."
~~ Charles-Pierre Baudelaire [1821-67]
"Part of the evolutionary design of the shark is that they must keep moving: if a shark stops swimming, it will die. Same with the U.S. Republican Party: when a Republican stops lying, it dies."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors."
~~ Spencer Tracy 1900-67]
"A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later."
~~ Gen. George S. Patton [1885-1945]
"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"Some people think [that] luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity."
~~ Coco Chanel [1883-1971]
"To be busy is man's only happiness."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]
"No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids."
~~ Bill Cosby
"The best way out is always through."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
"Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man."
~~ Henry Adams [1838-1918]
"Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
"Common sense needs constant reappraisal."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"If you can't reach heaven, raise hell."
~~ ancient Roman poet Virgil [70 BCE-19 BCE], in the epic poem "Aeneid"
"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."
~~ Justice Felix Frankfurter [1882-1965]
"The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]
"The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering'. So 'nostalgia' is the suffering caused by unappeased yearning to return."
~~ Milan Kundera
"A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man [that] nobody trusts."
~~ Harold Macmillan [1894-1986]
"In ancient times, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."
~~ Terry Pratchett
"What you have to do is work with the raw material [that] you have, namely you, and never let up."
~~ Helen Gurley Brown [1922-2012]
"Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]
"The best thing to hold onto in life is each other."
~~ Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"I believe my subject is bewilderment. But I could be wrong."
~~ author Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008]
"If the path be beautiful, let us not question where it leads."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]
"Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back."
~~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Always - even in a limo - wear your seatbelt."
~~ Christopher Walken
"A man always has two reasons for what he does - a good one and the real one."
~~ banker J.P. Morgan [1837-1913]
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility."
~~ filmmaker Errol Morris
"To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone."
~~ Reba McEntire
"Half of the harm done in this world is due to people who want to feel important."
~~ poet T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
"Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence."
~~ poet Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]
"Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it."
~~ philosopher Karl Popper [1902-94]
"Fear is often disguised as moral outrage."
~~ Judy Blume
"You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it."
~~ Jimmy Dean [1928-2010]
"Don't mask self-doubt with contempt."
~~ British author Zadie Smith
"Art is not what you see but what you make others see."
~~ artist Edgar Degas [1834-1917]
"Great is the power of steady misrepresentation."
~~ Charles Darwin [1809-82]
"Dammit! The a**holes are winning."
~~ G.E. Nordell
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Paris, New Mexico!
This is a combination/re-edit of two Letters To The Editor that garnered publication in the local Valencia County News-Bulletin newspaper on January 26 and February 23.
During all the discussion for and against cityhood over here in Rio Communities (which passed 63 percent to 37 percent), I was surprised to discover that the actual name of our new city is farther down the line in the cityhood process.
So I have two points on the matter:
First point is that we should be thinking outside the box or outside the nine dots (whichever metaphor works for you).
Rio Communities is too long, perhaps, and East Belén will never happen.
The best place to deliver your suggestions is at the R.C.A. monthly meetings (see website www.riocommunities.org.)
My second point is my own suggestion. Now I have always wanted to live in Paris, France, but that is probably not going to happen.
Second best is to take the opportunity here and rename this new city across the river from Belén as Paris, New Mexico!
No kidding, this could be great for our image. We can do sister cities with Paris, France, and the 10 other cities named Paris in the United States.
Maybe get an endorsement from Paris Hilton.
Build a 40-foot Eiffel Tower where N.M. 304 meets N.M. 47.
So, please, Valencia County News-Bulletin readers, let’s use our creative talents and submit many suggestions, though topping my own suggestion will indeed be difficult.
For as Audrey Hepburn said, “Paris is always a good idea.”
* * * * * * * * Here are 10 more reasons why we should rename Rio Communities to Paris, New Mexico:
1. The Great Seal of the city of Paris, N.M., has an already-defined motto: Audrey Hepburn’s statement that “Paris is always a good idea.”
2. The new city council can outlaw wearing cowboy hats except by people who actually own a horse or cow. Other people who feel the need to wear a hat can buy a beret.
3. The schools can teach the kids how to sing “America The Beautiful” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Home On The Range” in French.
4. An annual auto road race, that starts at the River Bridge, runs out the Manzano Expressway to UNM-VC, west to N.M. 47, south to U.S. 60, west to N.M. 304, and back. What will make the race exciting are the many potholes and the course being a figure eight. It would be called “The 24 Hours of Le Manzano.”
5. The restaurant at the golf course can add new items to the menu: French roast coffee and café au lait, of course, plus beignets, croque-monsieur and crepes suzette.
6. Wine sales will go up.
7. Instead of asking “Fries with that?” fast-food workers will get to ask “Avec pommes frites?”
8. We can celebrate Bastille Day on July 14.
9. The senior center can show movies with English subtitles.
10. The new Municipal Judge can sentence anyone convicted of D.W.I. to the guillotine.
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
During all the discussion for and against cityhood over here in Rio Communities (which passed 63 percent to 37 percent), I was surprised to discover that the actual name of our new city is farther down the line in the cityhood process.
So I have two points on the matter:
First point is that we should be thinking outside the box or outside the nine dots (whichever metaphor works for you).
Rio Communities is too long, perhaps, and East Belén will never happen.
The best place to deliver your suggestions is at the R.C.A. monthly meetings (see website www.riocommunities.org.)
My second point is my own suggestion. Now I have always wanted to live in Paris, France, but that is probably not going to happen.
Second best is to take the opportunity here and rename this new city across the river from Belén as Paris, New Mexico!
No kidding, this could be great for our image. We can do sister cities with Paris, France, and the 10 other cities named Paris in the United States.
Maybe get an endorsement from Paris Hilton.
Build a 40-foot Eiffel Tower where N.M. 304 meets N.M. 47.
So, please, Valencia County News-Bulletin readers, let’s use our creative talents and submit many suggestions, though topping my own suggestion will indeed be difficult.
For as Audrey Hepburn said, “Paris is always a good idea.”
1. The Great Seal of the city of Paris, N.M., has an already-defined motto: Audrey Hepburn’s statement that “Paris is always a good idea.”
2. The new city council can outlaw wearing cowboy hats except by people who actually own a horse or cow. Other people who feel the need to wear a hat can buy a beret.
3. The schools can teach the kids how to sing “America The Beautiful” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Home On The Range” in French.
4. An annual auto road race, that starts at the River Bridge, runs out the Manzano Expressway to UNM-VC, west to N.M. 47, south to U.S. 60, west to N.M. 304, and back. What will make the race exciting are the many potholes and the course being a figure eight. It would be called “The 24 Hours of Le Manzano.”
5. The restaurant at the golf course can add new items to the menu: French roast coffee and café au lait, of course, plus beignets, croque-monsieur and crepes suzette.
6. Wine sales will go up.
7. Instead of asking “Fries with that?” fast-food workers will get to ask “Avec pommes frites?”
8. We can celebrate Bastille Day on July 14.
9. The senior center can show movies with English subtitles.
10. The new Municipal Judge can sentence anyone convicted of D.W.I. to the guillotine.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
February 2013 News Factoids
"We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."
Apparently, this is a 'folk' version of a longer quote from Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"[Man] is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss [that] he refuses to see." — in "The Objectivist Ethics", 1961
(thanks to Harry Binswanger, Ayn Rand scholar for the correction - 1/2013)
"More U.S soldiers died of suicide in 2012 than died in combat."
~~ N.B.C. News headline, January 2013
Several land development companies began selling lots across the river from Belén, New Mexico in the 1960s, collectively named the Rio Communities. Rapid growth slowed at the end of the century, and essentually halted due to the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown of 2008. A few energized locals built a demand for self-rule (versus lousy services under Valencia County), and a special election in January 2013 won passage for cityhood. {Only 1,063 voters participated, but the 672 to 391 count came out 63 percent for versus 37 percent against incorpor-ation.} I am a stand for getting the new city renamed Paris, New Mexico.
SOME HUMOR: The January 2012 nominations for the annual Raspberry Awards {'The Razzies') included Tyler Perry for Worst Director {for "Good Deeds" and for "Madea's Witness Protection"}; he is also nominated for Worst Actress {for "Madea's Witness Protection"}, and for Worst Actor {for "Alex Cross" and "Good Deeds"}.
"Climate change is already affecting the American people. Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting. These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity."
~~ opening paragraph of a draft report commissioned by Congress and issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program
Because of drought and wildfires around the world, meteorologists have added two new colors to the hot weather maps - neon purple and dark violet - to indicate higher temperature ranges (over 130°F). ~~ per The Week Magazine
"Every year, the influenza virus kills about [35,000] Americans."
~~ Michael Specter, at NewYorker.com
The 2012-2013 flu season began earlier and has hit harder than in previous years, and some health officials are already using the term 'epidemic'.
The average high school graduate today makes $12,000 less than the average high school graduate made in 1980." ~~ The Week Magazine
'States With Minimum Wages Above The Federal Level Have Had Faster Small Business and Retail Job Growth' ~~ title of 2004 report by Fiscal Policy Institute
The Republican-caused economic meltdown continues to produce negative results: After being a twice-weekly for over 100 years, the local paper here is cutting to a weekly delivery schedule on Thursday only, along with its sibling paper in Socorro, New Mexico.
"Santa Claus is a god. He's no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn't ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don't gods reflect their creators' society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?"
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008], in the short story "Nackles"
Apparently, this is a 'folk' version of a longer quote from Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"[Man] is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss [that] he refuses to see." — in "The Objectivist Ethics", 1961
(thanks to Harry Binswanger, Ayn Rand scholar for the correction - 1/2013)
"More U.S soldiers died of suicide in 2012 than died in combat."
~~ N.B.C. News headline, January 2013
Several land development companies began selling lots across the river from Belén, New Mexico in the 1960s, collectively named the Rio Communities. Rapid growth slowed at the end of the century, and essentually halted due to the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown of 2008. A few energized locals built a demand for self-rule (versus lousy services under Valencia County), and a special election in January 2013 won passage for cityhood. {Only 1,063 voters participated, but the 672 to 391 count came out 63 percent for versus 37 percent against incorpor-ation.} I am a stand for getting the new city renamed Paris, New Mexico.
SOME HUMOR: The January 2012 nominations for the annual Raspberry Awards {'The Razzies') included Tyler Perry for Worst Director {for "Good Deeds" and for "Madea's Witness Protection"}; he is also nominated for Worst Actress {for "Madea's Witness Protection"}, and for Worst Actor {for "Alex Cross" and "Good Deeds"}.
"Climate change is already affecting the American people. Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting. These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity."
~~ opening paragraph of a draft report commissioned by Congress and issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program
Because of drought and wildfires around the world, meteorologists have added two new colors to the hot weather maps - neon purple and dark violet - to indicate higher temperature ranges (over 130°F). ~~ per The Week Magazine
"Every year, the influenza virus kills about [35,000] Americans."
~~ Michael Specter, at NewYorker.com
The 2012-2013 flu season began earlier and has hit harder than in previous years, and some health officials are already using the term 'epidemic'.
The average high school graduate today makes $12,000 less than the average high school graduate made in 1980." ~~ The Week Magazine
'States With Minimum Wages Above The Federal Level Have Had Faster Small Business and Retail Job Growth' ~~ title of 2004 report by Fiscal Policy Institute
The Republican-caused economic meltdown continues to produce negative results: After being a twice-weekly for over 100 years, the local paper here is cutting to a weekly delivery schedule on Thursday only, along with its sibling paper in Socorro, New Mexico.
"Santa Claus is a god. He's no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn't ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don't gods reflect their creators' society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?"
~~ Donald E. Westlake [1933-2008], in the short story "Nackles"
Sunday, February 10, 2013
State of the Union Priorities
Sen. Tom Udall sent out an email today asking New Mexico constituents what they think Washington's priorities should be, going into President Obama's State of the Union Address on Tuesday. (Republican Senator Steve Pierce has decided to skip the address and attend a 'chicken rally' in support of polluters and against the endangered lesser prairie chicken.)
So I figured it might help some to display my response to Udall's survey on this here blog.
JOBS, which includes the economy & Reason-Based Taxation
EDUCATION, which includes funding more teacher jobs
SAFETY, which includes gun laws & funding police & fire (jobs)
ENVIRONMENT, which is green jobs
INFRASTRUCTURE, which is all jobs program
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
So I figured it might help some to display my response to Udall's survey on this here blog.
JOBS, which includes the economy & Reason-Based Taxation
EDUCATION, which includes funding more teacher jobs
SAFETY, which includes gun laws & funding police & fire (jobs)
ENVIRONMENT, which is green jobs
INFRASTRUCTURE, which is all jobs program
Sunday, January 27, 2013
January 2013 Quotations and some new Laws of Life
"What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge. We want more . . . opportunities to cultivate our better natures."
~~ labor leader Samuel Gompers [1850-1924]
"The man who complains about the way [that] the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"Take care of what you like or you will be forced to like what you get."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals."
~~ Robert Caro
"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know [that] it is part of a tree."
~~ Michael Crichton [1942-2008]
“[Corporations] cannot commit treason . . . for they have no souls."
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Paris is always a good idea."
~~ Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"Temples are to be dedicated to the gods, and books to good men."
~~ Aristides the Just [530-468 BCE]
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing [that] it is stupid."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste."
~~ Charlotte Brontë [1816-55]
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Always have bail money."
~~ rapper 50 Cent
"It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do."
~~ playwright Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière [1622-73]
"[Republicans in Congress] will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy."
~~ President Barack Obama, January 2013
"You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun."
~~ blatherskite Limp Rushbaugh, on 16 January 2013
“Thank God [that] men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination, full of hope."
~~ Maya Angelou
"A secret is something [that] you can only tell one person – at a time."
~~ Beat poet Allen Ginsberg [1926-97]
"Humility is attentive patience."
~~ Simone Weil [1909-43]
"The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine."
~~ novelist Paul Auster
"We must have standards, no matter how low."
~~ Anne Lamott
"When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946]
"I think [that] the universe is all spots and jumps, without coherence or orderliness . . . it consists of events - short, small, haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions just as truly as are catalogues and encyclopedias."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], in 1931
"I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy."
~~ sign at Sandy Hook rally in Pennsylvania
"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"You never fail until you stop trying."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in a moment of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]
"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a noble art of leaving things undone."
~~ Lin Yu-T’ang [1895-1976]
=== more Laws of Life ===
Murphy's Paradox
"Doing it the hard way is always easier."
Spencer's Three Laws of Data
1. Anyone can make a decision given enough facts.
2. A good manager can make a decision without enough facts.
3. A perfect manager can operate in perfect ignorance.
Meadow's Maxim
"You can't push on a rope."
Leo Rogers' Commentary
"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
Howe's Law
"Everyone has a scheme that will not work."
Munder's Corollary:
"Everyone who does not work has a scheme that does."
O'Brien's Law
"Nothing is ever done for the right reasons."
Hardin's Law
"You can never do just one thing."
Law of The Individual
"Nobody really cares or understands what anyone else is doing."
Hane's Law
"There is no limit to how bad things can get."
Jay's First Law of Leadership
"Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else does is creative leadership."
Thine's Law
"Nature abhors people."
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
~~ labor leader Samuel Gompers [1850-1924]
"The man who complains about the way [that] the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it."
~~ football coach Lou Holtz
"Take care of what you like or you will be forced to like what you get."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
"Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals."
~~ Robert Caro
"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know [that] it is part of a tree."
~~ Michael Crichton [1942-2008]
“[Corporations] cannot commit treason . . . for they have no souls."
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
"Paris is always a good idea."
~~ Audrey Hepburn [1929-93]
"Temples are to be dedicated to the gods, and books to good men."
~~ Aristides the Just [530-468 BCE]
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]
"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing [that] it is stupid."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste."
~~ Charlotte Brontë [1816-55]
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Always have bail money."
~~ rapper 50 Cent
"It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do."
~~ playwright Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière [1622-73]
"[Republicans in Congress] will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy."
~~ President Barack Obama, January 2013
"You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun."
~~ blatherskite Limp Rushbaugh, on 16 January 2013
“Thank God [that] men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]
"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination, full of hope."
~~ Maya Angelou
"A secret is something [that] you can only tell one person – at a time."
~~ Beat poet Allen Ginsberg [1926-97]
"Humility is attentive patience."
~~ Simone Weil [1909-43]
"The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine."
~~ novelist Paul Auster
"We must have standards, no matter how low."
~~ Anne Lamott
"When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946]
"I think [that] the universe is all spots and jumps, without coherence or orderliness . . . it consists of events - short, small, haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions just as truly as are catalogues and encyclopedias."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], in 1931
"I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy."
~~ sign at Sandy Hook rally in Pennsylvania
"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
"You never fail until you stop trying."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in a moment of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
"It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]
"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a noble art of leaving things undone."
~~ Lin Yu-T’ang [1895-1976]
=== more Laws of Life ===
Murphy's Paradox
"Doing it the hard way is always easier."
Spencer's Three Laws of Data
1. Anyone can make a decision given enough facts.
2. A good manager can make a decision without enough facts.
3. A perfect manager can operate in perfect ignorance.
Meadow's Maxim
"You can't push on a rope."
Leo Rogers' Commentary
"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
Howe's Law
"Everyone has a scheme that will not work."
Munder's Corollary:
"Everyone who does not work has a scheme that does."
O'Brien's Law
"Nothing is ever done for the right reasons."
Hardin's Law
"You can never do just one thing."
Law of The Individual
"Nobody really cares or understands what anyone else is doing."
Hane's Law
"There is no limit to how bad things can get."
Jay's First Law of Leadership
"Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else does is creative leadership."
Thine's Law
"Nature abhors people."
Friday, January 18, 2013
TOP TEN REPUBLICAN LIES
1) It was on Fox News, so it must be true.
2) If you give money to the One Percent, it will 'trickle down' as jobs for the 99%. (Hasn't happened in the history of Mankind, and is now known as 'Tinkle-Down Economics'.)
3) Labor is the problem, off-shoring jobs and factories is the solution. {See #2.}
4) If the Democrats would only concede [the issue], we'll give up our obstruction.
5) {choose from list} is/are your friend!
a) mountaintop mining
b) toxic fracking chemicals
c) genetically-modified food
d) global warming
e) clear-cut logging
f) Big Oil / Big Pharma / Big Banks / Big Farming
g) Wall Street
h) de-regulation
6) Preventing solutions by Congress is actually a solution.
7) Obedience to {choose from list} will keep America free.
a) the pseudo-Christian fundamentalist taliban
b) the Koch Brothers & A.L.E.C.
c) bankers
d) gun manufacturers and the N.R.A. gun lobby
e) international corporations & banks not based in the U.S.A.
8) Attacking (yet another) foreign nation will free them from oppression.
9) We have to destroy {choose from list} in order to save it.
a) Social Security
b) Medicare & Medicaid & ObamaCare
c) the Post Office
d) free education
e) government
10) Don't worry about giving up your rights, it is only temporary. And besides, the fascists are your friends.
“If the Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
2) If you give money to the One Percent, it will 'trickle down' as jobs for the 99%. (Hasn't happened in the history of Mankind, and is now known as 'Tinkle-Down Economics'.)
3) Labor is the problem, off-shoring jobs and factories is the solution. {See #2.}
4) If the Democrats would only concede [the issue], we'll give up our obstruction.
5) {choose from list} is/are your friend!
a) mountaintop mining
b) toxic fracking chemicals
c) genetically-modified food
d) global warming
e) clear-cut logging
f) Big Oil / Big Pharma / Big Banks / Big Farming
g) Wall Street
h) de-regulation
6) Preventing solutions by Congress is actually a solution.
7) Obedience to {choose from list} will keep America free.
a) the pseudo-Christian fundamentalist taliban
b) the Koch Brothers & A.L.E.C.
c) bankers
d) gun manufacturers and the N.R.A. gun lobby
e) international corporations & banks not based in the U.S.A.
8) Attacking (yet another) foreign nation will free them from oppression.
9) We have to destroy {choose from list} in order to save it.
a) Social Security
b) Medicare & Medicaid & ObamaCare
c) the Post Office
d) free education
e) government
10) Don't worry about giving up your rights, it is only temporary. And besides, the fascists are your friends.
“If the Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
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