Sandhill Trek

Truth Out Goes Bloggerific

Starting Monday Will Pitt will be blogging for Truth Out.

Food for thought...

Niek Hockx points to a link that links up with Blackwater, the apotheosis of free marketry really.

Artie Shaw died.  Who knew he was 94?  Decline of the licorice stick...

Amy Wohl may be giving Jaron Lanier more credit than he has coming.  Based on what I heard at Accelerating Change, and what I've read most recently, I think the lad has stagnated.  The "debate" with Will Wright really wasn't, and Wright would have eaten poor Jaron alive had they engaged in a clash of ideas.  Fortunately for all present, the exchange was mild and boring, a chance for the audience to bask in the presence of the cultural icons, a chance for the icons to chill and collect (one assumes) a decent honorarium for the chillage.

... and that Helen Keller, what a rabble rouser:

We are not free unless the men who frame and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the people and no other interest. The ballot does not make a free man out of a wage slave. There has never existed a truly free and democratic nation in the world. From time immemorial men have followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of money and of armies. Even while battlefields were piled high with their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have been robbed of the fruits of their labor. They have built palaces and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine of liberty.

Read this for a better understanding of visually dominant cultures.

And then as homework, prepare and present a paper on the importance of standards and why XML is a standard but RSS is not.

 

Give me a farging break...

Bloggers are people of the year?  ABC news reports this.  I'd link to them but I don't want to give them the traffic.  Goof balls.

Here is the Person of the Year...

Ms. Emmy Rossum

Somewhere Near Salinas, Lord...

Well, score another one for Bush and the Enron team...

"The three Salinas Public Libraries will close for an indefinite period of time soon after January 1, 2005. These closures are part of the 9.2 million dollars in the service reductions incurred by the City of Salinas due to loss of revenues from the State of California, higher fees imposed by Monterey County, slower than expected economic recovery, and increased costs of employee health insurance and retirement benefits."

What would Steinbeck do?

James Dean would be pissed.

I'm pissed.

Guess somebody has to do it

Al Jazeera reports:

Ziad Khasawna said on Wednesday that [Ramsey] Clark, who held the office of attorney-general under US president Lyndon Johnson, had "honoured and inspired" the legal team by agreeing to help defend Saddam.

The Loudest Car Audio - A Competition

"...they are nothing like the trunk-rattling thugs most people see at traffic lights. They are louder."

Ben Paynter writes: (from this week's Kansas City Pitch, written in large part over the Thanksgiving weekend at our kitchen table...)

Mechanics sneak nips from longnecks. Others clench cigarettes between their lips as they twist wires and pump bass-heavy tracks from Outkast and Eminem, which grow louder with each component added to the electrical daisy chain. A green Ford Metropolitan, lifted on 6-foot wheels and 5-ton axles, rises above the sea of polished metal. The truck has a detachable, touch-screen CD player, three amps and six 15-inch speakers wired to eight car batteries. A black van from Moberly, Missouri, blasts test tones that trigger car alarms -- its open rear doors reveal a cargo of amps stacked like shipping boxes. Some cars have enough raw power to torch amplifiers, shatter glass windshields, rend metal.

Welcome to the 17th annual Tuner Jam: the largest, loudest car-stereo competition on the planet. Stereo geeks from around the country converge here once a year, morphing their cars into the world's most powerful portable boomboxes, pitting sound system against sound system to find out whose is loudest.  Read more...

Susan Sontag

She's dead.  Quintessential pop-culture critic, feminist, novelist, essayist and proto blogger - gone at 71...

"I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate," Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, once said.

Secular Humanism

Secular humanism is generally a good thing and fundamentalist religion is generally a bad thing.  Humanists are all about opening, broadening, inclusion.  Fundamentalists are about closing, narrowing, exclusion.  Humanists support distinctions without prejudice.  Fundamentalist distinctions create prejudice.

The label of "secular humanist" has some baggage attached to it based on the bad press it gets from true believers.  Much like the invidious distinction that Limbaugh laid on us around the phrase "tax and spend liberalism," secular humanism is, in some quarters, thought to be a bad thing, faithless, a position to be avoided.

For me it is easy to posit a metaphysical context beyond my understanding.  I'm pretty good in three spatial and one temporal dimension.  Beyond that, it starts to get metaphysical.  But so far it hasn't required a god for me to grasp that there are limits to my sensoria and my understanding.  On the other hand, the concept of god, the joy, the love, the boundless concern and care we can share with each other, these things have a spiritual aspect that I enjoy.

In the United States, we assert a constitutional separation of church and state under the first and fourteenth amendments to the constitution.  There are those that would tear down this wall, people who assert that their biblical beliefs should be taught in public schools, and worse - that information contrary to their beliefs should NOT be taught, or should somehow be qualified as contrary to their precepts.

I think we should respect these people.  I think we should put all their churches' property on our local property tax rolls and tax their churches' income, and exercise eminent domain over any holdings that could be used for community purposes and respect their rights to have a say in the way our public schools are run.  They are, after all, citizens, and by putting their church property on the tax rolls they will have a stake in the game.

Here in Madison we have some lovely church properties that we could assess at a fair market value and improve our ability to fund the teaching of evolution, and the public health provision of sexual health care including birth control and abortions.

Zit's the Season

More tales of Christmas chocolate...  my prior post left the story half told.  Not only do we spread Claude's good work far and wide, we also are the transfer point for several pounds of See's chocolates each year.  We love See's dark chocolates, and our families enjoy them too.  We have had a tradition of dropping in on my uncle Marc and his family each christmas eve and leaving him a pound of See's, then moving on to Henry's house and sharing a couple pounds with him.  Marc died this last year, but Henry is still on our christmas eve route.   See''s had a store on Montgomery Street when I worked at the bank, and there was another right around the corner on Market near Kearney in case there was a line at Montgomery Street.  Dark chocolate raspberry filled are my favorites.  I'm not much on celebrity spotting, but I did see Tom Hanks in the See's store on Wilshire in Santa Moinica a few years ago.

Traditionally in the Paynter family, my dad has made fudge every christmas for as long as I can remember.  I think we're talking about fifty-five years here.  Dad prides himself on producing the creamiest fudge in the clan, none of your crystalline sugar laced stuff from dad.  We get a pound or so of "the creamy" from him every year.  One year I was changing planes in O'Hare on my way back to San Francisco, so I rented a car and drove up to Madison to see the family.  Dad gave me a pound of creamy to take home, and - glutton that I was - there was very very little of it left by the time I turned in the rental car.

In the old days dad was precise in his use of a candy thermometer and beating and stirring the huge batch by hand.  These were the glory days of creamy production.  Maybe ten or fifteen years ago he switched processes.  He brought in a new recipe and began to use the microwave.  There were a few years when I thought he might have lost the touch, but the last few years he has been back on track with a gourmet product.

The Tsunamis - How can we help?

TsunamiHelp Blog... (link courtesy of BoingBoing which is tracking efforts here)...

- and -

Jayne Cravens writes,

There are two excellent web sites that I suggest to help guide those who are interested in identifying what organizations are working in [Southeast Asia] that would be happy to accept donations to help the people affected by these tsunamis, and provide extensive updates on relief efforts:

http://www.reliefweb.int

http://www.oneworld.net

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Jayne Cravens, Online Volunteering Specialist
United Nations Volunteers
www.unvolunteers.org
Bonn, Germany

Online Volunteering:  www.onlinevolunteering.org
UNITeS: www.unites.org
Global volunteerism portal: www.worldvolunteerweb.org