Elaine calls me a while ago...to tell me that she has decided we are adopting two kitties.  Cute, small, baby, orange, kittens.

Um.....yeah.

This is a bad idea on so many levels.  Poison Ivy doesn't play well with others, they'd starve because Pollyanna would eat all the food before they got any and five cats is enough to drive me bug shit.  Plus, we rent...

She tells me that she has the adorable little fuzzballs in a cage in her office if I don't believe her.  I don't believe her.

After stopping at Sonic for liquid fortification (Scotch during business hours is frowned on) and go to her office.  There are indeed, two very small, cute, adorable and very orange kittens in a cage in her office.

I still don't believer her.  But I'm getting very nervous...

One of them has what appears to be respiratory issues and a messy, drainy eyeball.  Not a well kitty, in other words.  So, if she was telling me the truth, then they needed to go to the vets office.

Well, somebody in the office let the cat(s) out of the bag and I finally tumbled to the fact that Elaine was pulling my leg.  Which was not a surprise as Elaine can't lie worth two cents.  And pulling this sort of thing off required lying through her teeth.  No way...

But I was worried for a while.  She loves cats....

And even though they aren't coming home with us, they still need to go to the vets.

Your Excellency,

We, the group of people from around the world, mostly creative persons and artists (but also common people) express our outraged by unlawful actions of putschists. We believe and hope that the fairness will be fully restored and government in exile under your leadership can return to the motherland. We hope that the lawlessness will be stopped and your glorious country can be able to go forward on the way of progress and democracy still more confidently. We will do our best to support your fair struggle and contribute to the progressive development of Honduras republic.

We are all united by the participation in a project that was named Sunland. Its main idea consists in the following: we want to establish a sort of art-colony and, at the same time, a self-sustaining ecological village. For this purpose we want to create on one of the uninhabited islands a settlement for creative people from around the world.

As X-posted to the Right Fan girl community... and I passed my series 3 license yipee... next time i'm going into SLC where the taxes are less, people are nicer, overall cost less and much more appreciative... not fond of mormons but they are good business people and the state is fairly well run in comparison to L.A. la la land.... it's amazing how L.A. has backslid in the 9 months since I have been regularly in and out.... vacancies at strip malls, factory outlets, traffic is less, taxes are up from gas prices to hotel and sales tax.. the usual attitude of non-service in town - my extended stay hotel deal didn't have towels, had to change rooms due to water coming out of the fridge ruining the floor, no coffee cups this morning and no apologies but more 'don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out' forget about discounts for future stays. i think there are more than traveling nurses and few business people staying in such places by the looks of tenants and parking lots. the kickedo ut unemployed homeowners have moved in. oh, and those obama t-shirts on local unemployed blacks in gardena and compton? yeah.. he's done so much for you and the community.
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Driving back to Vegas this later afternoon/eve I discovered Al Sharpton (the supposed reverend) has a radio show.

someone called in and seriously proposed that Sarah Palin has something to do w/ Michael Jackson's death. he didn't bother to call her on crap but thanked her for calling in and allowed her to repeat her statement 'just think about it'

swear you can't make this sh*t up...

yep. glad i'm not in and out of L.A. regularly anymore.
----------------
top of all stories - Shit outta luck - literally... the company that pumps latrines at california state parks hasn't been paid in several months. they have been issued vouchers of iou's... talk about, yes, shit out of luck. ;-0

but wells fargo will take those CA iou's for the next 2 weeks as cash if you open a bank account w/ them. holy moley...

$18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site
- http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html

stossel on krugman‏
- http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/healthcare-from-dr-krugman.html

House Dems Eye Surtax on Wealthy for Health Bill
- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Health/wireStory?id=8028076

I have a circle of witches. Not many people are so lucky, but I managed to inherit them along with my mother's pots and pans, and old clothes from the 60's. When mom died recently, all was confusion and hard work, until the emails started coming. "Just call us the witches," wrote her best friends, and based on their unique magic, it's a good name. We knew them before, vaguely, but suddenly, we had a support group of earth mothers. enter..

Monica, the flamboyant! Argentinian! Witch!!
Irina, the sweet and serene Russian New Age witch.
and Lynn, the super efficient, get it done, American witch.

Mom and this group used to do everything from going to see healers to going to the Metaphysical church in Arlington to watching Sex and the City with a bottle of wine. All very important witch things, you understand.

My sister and I came to DC on this trip to deal with banks and the DMV, but mostly to commune with our adopted coven. Monica is off in Argentinia, but the others dropped their lives to be with us, help us, and be our best friends.

Lynn took me around today for about six hours (don't even get me started!) to deal with DMV paperwork, which ultimately ended in tears, Irina and I giggled and spoke of reincarnation. It all came down to a moment in Lynn's dining room, with her husband playing the piano, and mom's old rug across the hall, the one she and I chose from a flea market. I just let loose and the tears came out, silently flowing down my cheeks, unstoppable, sobbing for my dead mother and old friendships and my old home.

Today, we took mom's ashes to her gym. She would swim 5 days a week for 45 minutes, she saw it as her solace and her peace. Lynn found a little park behind the gym, and lo and behold, there was a path into a majestic woodland (in the middle of DC?!) with soaring trees, vines, quiet gulleys, and a burbling stream. A lush jungle - mom's perfect resting place. Burials may be solemn and somber, but this scatternig of mom's ashes was silly, giddy, and delightful, because we knew she was so delighted to be there. Jen and I waded into the stream and let her go, watching her cloud the water then settle into the rocks.

This evening, Irina and I sat in the field by the woods, watching the fireflies light up the trees and grass like a kid's fantasy of a sparking wonderland woods. We giggled, told stories, and talked about the nature of our universe and our lives. Mom, I know you're gone, but you're obviously not so far away.

A while back I wrote a rather frustrated review of one of Paul Davies' books (a collections of lectures for a seminar) saying that nothing quite got where it needed to be going. Well, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life is the flip side of that coin, taking one of those themes and giving it a full examination.

Now, I have to admit that I had a trace of trepidation when picking up this book, as you never know where fundie insanity might raise its insufferable head, and one could certainly get the impression from the title/subtitle of this that it was nudging into "design" territory. Fortunately, this is not the case!

Of course, it can be argued that our particular Universe is mighty fine-tuned (at this particular point in time, in our particular point in space) to allow for the sort of observing creatures as humanity (as well as the other sentient biota of Earth), and Davies takes a good hard look at the number for many of the component parts of that.

As regular perusers of these reviews know, I've read a lot of books in this general genre, and so I'm always pleasantly surprised when I run across something new and this book did not disappoint with that. Among these was the remarkable assertion that the Universe has "zero mass", deriving from the argument that gravity is negative energy (in that one must apply work to counter gravity), and that if one totals up all the gravitational attraction, the number comes out very similar to the estimation of all the mass in the Universe! Cool, huh?

Davies looks at dark matter/energy, hidden dimensions, universal topography, the history of the Big Bang, and various theories, old and new. One point that Davies and I diverge on is the concept of the "Multiverse" ... he seems to be in the camp that feels that it is a philosophical slight-of-hand, where I still hold that it's the most plausible theory (that our Universe is only one among an infinity of other Universes, and the reason we're here to SEE this particular Universe is that it's one that happened to have "the settings" set for our particular type of creature, sort of a modified weak anthropic stance). He does take the "Multiverse" theory and spin off of it, however ... with one fascinating proposal ... in an "ultimate reality" of that sort, there should be "fake" Universes:

... if our universe is part of a multiverse, the balance of probability shifts dramatically in favor of simulation. It's a matter of basic statistics. ... the multiverse allows all possible variations on a theme, including [universes with a supercivilization with immense computational power] able to simulate fake realities. Unless there is some law that forbids emergence of such civilizations ... it is inevitable that some universes like ours will give rise to universe-simulating supercivilizations. These universes will then spawn a vast number of fakes, so that in the total mix of real and fake universes, fake ones will overwhelmingly predominate. Therefore our universe is very, very likely to be a fake.

Speaking as somebody who has spent much of the past couple of years working in Virtual Worlds, this does not seem too extreme a stretch ... because if we're able to produce immersive environments with our present technology, what could a people with many orders of magnitude more computing power than ours create?

Anyway, if you're interested in a solid, but not too technical, dip into the current state of cosmological theories ... you could do a lot worse than Cosmic Jackpot. Davies covers most of the recent thought in the field with enough depth to give you familiarity, but not so much that you're spending all your time trying to wrap your head around the Calabi–Yau manifold (a 6-dimension string topography)! This is still in print, so you should be able to find it at your larger local brick-and-mortar book vendors, however Amazon has it for 34% off of cover, and their new/used guys have "new" copies for as little as $1.41 ($5.40 with shipping). This is hardly a "for all and sundry" book, but if you'd be open to learning a lot about cosmology, I'd heartily endorse this.

"Now that I've got your attention . . .
Every time I take a stab at debunking pseudo-science topics like UFOs and the 2012-doomsday predictions, it’s like kicking a hornet’s nest, judging from some of the comments posted here.

"Some of these counterpoint arguments from readers are tied to references in clips on YouTube (truly a cesspool of idiocy) where self-styled 'experts' try and sound authoritative in front of the camera. More often than not these 'whistle-blowers' assert having special knowledge about 'government conspiracies.' They’ve discovered the Internet is a bottomless pit of people who feel powerless and suspicious of everything. Healthy skepticism is good, which means followers should not unequivocally swallow the tall tales from self-proclaimed 'insiders.'

"Occasionally I’m going to give out a Pants-on-Fire award to those individuals who make outrageous claims that are simply incredulous [sic]. Either they were duped or have endless other motives: selling books, videos, articles, going on a lecture circuit, getting onto radio shows or CNN’s Larry King Live (he loves UFO tall-tales), or simply bolstering their sense of self importance.

"My first winner of the Pants-on-Fire Award is to former Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe who was referenced in a comment on this site. First listen to the YouTube video from 2001 and then we’ll separate fact from fantasy:

Read the rest.

H/T polaris93 

The truth is often harsh and unpleasant, and Neal does not do politically correct.



Boortz is quickly becoming my favorite talk radio guy. While others this week would not stop talking about Michael Jackson, Boortz stayed on message, informing us on this "Cap and Trade" nightmare, and of the consequences of Obama's big government agenda.

Heard this on the Neal Boortz show today. It's a must-read letter to America written on November 6th by Dr. Anne Wortham.

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival - all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration - political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead - and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2009/07/hows-this-for-a-close.html

I was thinking a lot about Reagan today. I was born in '75 so He was the first president I was aware of. The only thing I remember about Carter was my parents hated him.

He never apologized for America. He wasn't afraid to call out evil when he saw it, he believed in American exceptionalism. He believed in Liberty, a strong military, and limited Federal government. Things that our current president doesn't believe in at all. Reagan was proud of this country, he understood it's potential, which comes from the people, not the government. I do not get the sense that Obama believes any of this, or is even proud of this country. In fact I get the impression that he is ashamed. How depressing. I miss Reagan. :(
( Read more... )

State House passes anti-bullying bill
By Paul Woolverton
Staff writer

RALEIGH - The N.C. House by a one-vote margin on Tuesday approved a controversial bill to make public schools draft new rules to protect children from being bullied.

The bill, called the School Violence Protection Act, now moves to Gov. Bev Perdue's office; an aide said she expects Perdue to sign it into law.

But for a bit of chance, the bill could have failed on Tuesday.

Two lawmakers who opposed the bill were absent during the vote. Rep. William Brisson, a Bladen County Democrat whose district includes parts of Fayetteville and Hope Mills, was out sick, his office said. Rep. Ron Sutton, a Robeson County Democrat, was outside of the House chamber during the vote.

If either had been present and voted "no," the bill would have failed.

Schools statewide already have anti-bullying policies. This has been required since 2004 by the State Board of Education.

This law differs from the existing policy in that it would make the state's 115 school systems specify groups who have typically been targeted by bullies, such as groups targeted because of race, gender, national origin, poverty and handicap.

Controversy boiled up because two of the listed groups are gay and transgender people.

Socially conservative Christians said gay rights activists could use the law in court to overturn North Carolina's ban on gay marriage.

Republican lawmakers tried over the past several months to substitute a bill that doesn't list any victim categories.

Rep. Rick Glazier, a Fayetteville Democrat, said those opponents are wrong, and that victim categories must be listed to ensure that the schools protect those children.

Glazier has been trying since 2007 to get this law passed. He recounted stories of children from around the country who committed suicide, were severely injured and otherwise harassed and attacked by bullies in school.

He said a school paid $450,000 in a lawsuit for failing to protect a child, and 15 others recently lost other lawsuits.

"So don't sit on this floor and talk about how the generic policy works to protect children, and how if we all just told teachers to do their job, everything would be OK," Glazier said. "None of you should be able to look in the mirror with that fable and say that it's true."

Rest of story: http://www.fayobserver.com/Articles/2009/06/24/912279

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What do you guys think of anti-bullying laws? They seem a bit ridiculous to me. My Dad personally taught me to fight back physically in self-defense if I had no chance of walking away or escaping an attack from a bully. He taught me self-defense tactics and said that if I ever did get into a fight at school and it was in self-defense, he would defend my position to the administrators (who nowadays tend to do broad-based punishments, regardless of who actually initiated the violence). There's seems to be no attempt by parents to get their kids to stand up for themselves...or they just tell govt to do something after their kid commits suicide.
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The Cow Face Seal of Approval today.

And it is also for the rest of you as well.  Why?

Well, I just got an acceptance letter from physiognomy in letters accepting one of the poems I threw up for thoughts on 6/22.  They took the first one, that I did the rewrite on and shared.  I ended up titling it "Automatic Frequency Adjustment"

I cannot begin to tell you all, especially those of you who read and comment regularly, how much I appreciate and geniunely value your time and thoughts that you share with me here.  In large part, it keeps me going.  Having this outlet here is a great comfort.  And a challenge as well.  A challenge to myself to get better, to keep throwing things at the wall, to see what sticks and what doesn't. 

So, to everyone...I bestow the Moo Cow Seal of Approval.

Let's all hop on the Pancake Truck, ride 'round the fountain and a jolly round of huzzahs for everyone!

I share my joy in this with all of you!  :-)

Oh yeah, there was this also....

Damn.

I had signed up (and paid $26.00) to go to a "Pink Slip" Networking event tonight ... I had it on my calendar as tonight, I had adjusted The Wife's and my schedules so that I'd be there tonight, but just now, clearing some stuff out of my inbox, I find out that it was LAST NIGHT. Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!

I had the confirmation page (with barcode for entry) all printed out and hanging up over my computer, with a post-it that said "WED" on in ... yet there it was (in, admittedly, about 6pt type) "Tuesday, July 07, 2009 from 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (CT)".

I had my whole week pivoting on this tonight and now I'm not only out the $26, but I'm "behind" on all my job search plans.

DAMN!

Some days I feel like punching myself in the face with a brick!

I was reading a piece on libertarian anarchism by Roderick Long and I happened to think about ways things could be better.  One idea I had was in the constitution where the government is allowed to go into debt in the case of emergencies, this could be made to read that all those in seats of power who vote in favor of such a measure may not run again and the executive who signs it must resign on the day it goes into effect.  That combined with a sound money restriction would certainly help.

Certainly not an anarchist idea, libertarian or otherwise, but I found it interesting.

Thoughts?

OK ... the commercial Twitter "follow bots" are now officially irritating me!

This morning, I made a post (in response to one of the Ning customer service folks' Tweets) that said:

I'm not crazy about the new "Members" view ... it takes up a LOT of screen "real estate" and I don't need those links there!

... and when I got back to my desk just now I find that some international Real Estate marketer was following me! Do these morons think I'm going to follow them just because they added me?

If this wasn't so aggravating it would be vaguely amusing, but I still want to march into each of these damn twitspammer's office and smash their hands into bloody pulp with a couple of cinder blocks!

THIS is an interesting piece ... outlining the deal that "saved" Pandora and the like with a negotiated rate structure. "Back in the day", really before LiveJournal, I knew a bunch of folks from IRC who had regular little "web radio" shows they did ... it was a whole "internet niche" ... and, of course, none of them had even the barest version of licensing. Now, I know from my drinking days that even the most insignificant dive bar has to pony up monthly (or annual) cash to keep the music industry off their backs for "performance rights" to play music ... but the web radio folks seemed to think they were immune, and I guess (for a decade now) they pretty much were.

However, with this deal, they all now have something of a target on their backs. Even if they stopped today, the deal is retroactive to 2006. Not that the costs are horrendous (if I'm reading this right) ... for songs played in 2006 the rate is 1/12th cent per song and going up to 1/7th cent per song by 2014 ... I'm guessing that means about 2¢/hour on one end and about 3¢/hour on the other (of course, the question being is that per song played or per listener connected to the stream per song?).

I'd actually gotten something of a heads-up on this via a letter from Pandora's founder yesterday. It was informing me that I probably would have to start paying for Pandora, as they now will let you listen to 40 hours free per month, and (as I noted in an e-mail reply) that's about 3 days for me! Their deal, however, is either pay $0.99 to cover the rest of the month once you hit 40 hours (which would be my best deal), or pay $36/year and get an enhanced service pack with bigger bandwidth streams, a desktop app, custom "skins", etc. I think it's interesting that Pandora has been keeping tabs on who was listening ... as it appears that the letter I got just went out to their top 10% users (and I do, pretty much, have Pandora playing all the time when I'm at my computer, which is pretty much 12-16 hours a day).

I wonder how many folks out there are still "spinning" their own radio shows. Given what I recall about most of these folks, I can't imagine them voluntarily signing up to pay rights fees ... but with this new deal, it's probably going to be a lot like the situation with the bars, with roving "inspectors" looking for establishments that aren't in compliance. Since most of these folks aren't making any money on this (the deal was either a percentage of your revenue or a per-song fee), they'd have to go out-of-pocket song-by-song (and have to keep logs just like "real" radio stations), and I can't imagine most of these folks doing that.

It will be interesting to see how this will shake out. In the meanwhile I'm going to have to figure out how they want to get my $0.99 every month over at Pandora!

Originally, we'd planned to have pork stir fry tonight, but after daisy_knotwise had to get up extremely early this morning to beat the house into submission before the cleaning lady arrived, and got to wrangle the girls down to meet me for lunch and a trip to see Dr. Bob (hers and mine, not the girls), I suggested that I could take her over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner. Gretchen agreed that this sounded reasonable, so when I got home (late already), we mustered the troops, got everyone into the van, and headed out for the restaurant.
( And then all hell broke loose... )