Dictionary.com word of the day: Lucubration

lucubration \loo-kyoo-BRAY-shun; loo-kuh-\, noun:
1. The act of studying by candlelight; nocturnal study; meditation.2. That which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.

Intermission

Time for a few breaths of night air...

Image from the liner of the New Order album "Republic"

Article: "Acorn's a Creature of the CRA"

"As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini. Any review of the history of the affordable mortgage movement in America demonstrates the power that CRA had in helping to shred mortgage underwriting standards throughout the industry and exposing us to the kind of market meltdown we've experienced."

by Steven Malanga

URL: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/09/16/acorns_a_creature_of_the_cra_97409.html

Article: "The Media and Medievalism"

"Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the exposure of just a few sordid details. When the staff of a show like 60 Minutes decides which stories to pursue and which to leave half-finished on the cutting room floor, the destiny of any number of people is quietly being determined. That is actual and not virtual authority, however responsibly it may be employed: more authority, often, than any congressman or senator has. And as the editorial tastes of the tabloids dissolve into those of the mainstream media, the pace of character destruction quickens. "


by Robert D. Kaplan
URL: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3432216.html

Retro Trapper Keeper images from the 1980s

Fascinating to look at what was hip! Neon, grid-like Tron inspired landscapes, pastels, Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, Lamborghinis... Love it love it love it!

Retro arcade stickers from 1980s

A recent trip to a dimly lit beach arcade had be awash in 80s sentimentality, from the bleeps and bloops down to the smell of the carpet cleaner. Presented for your viewing pleasure: a selection of 1983 arcade themed stickers from the Scholastic Inc. publishing company.

There was a big time sticker craze (and not to mention, a lapel button mania) in school those days. So without further ado -

From the private collection of Cagey: "1983 Scholastic Inc. BLIPS stickers" (SN 0590-32986-3)





See also:

http://i31.tinypic.com/2mnrucp.jpg

http://i27.tinypic.com/73h34w.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/2eewk0x.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/2efj803.jpg

I'm thinking $300 on Ebay?

Quote of the day: Slogan approved for National Day!

"Uphold the basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role and diverse forms of economic ownership developing together, and with the practice of distribution according to work being carried out as the mainstay alongside other forms of distribution."

- One of 50 officially approved slogans issued to citizens to mark national day in the PRC.

- Source: The Economist, 5 September 2009

Composition inspired by birds

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Transmissions of many forms connect, educate us

I love radio as a medium. I love fishing for interesting things on the airwaves, fishing for signals far and near. I always thought the nationally broadcast Coast to Coast was middle-of-the-night E.T./conspiracist tuning (but I don't have an issue with that). Although I'm not an enthusiast, when I have tuned in, I've occasionally enjoyed guests reasoning with wisdom and discernment on human behavior - not just fluff or whipped topping - and resonating with truth. "Peeling back the onion" is a clever way to describe this. Using one's own intuition, I believe it's important to "hit record" and hold onto these words and hear them again. Like horoscopes, you start out with a message with broad general appeal ("You are good." "You be careful." etc.) and deduce its personal meaning to your station in life, its worth to you in the way you carry on.

Case in point today: Dr. Les Carter. I liked this clinician's way of analyzing aspects of anger and fear, both some of the most powerful of human emotions, and an important charge at the end.

On conflict and respect: "Anger creates more disrespect: you don't end up getting what you want for expressing your anger, you [risk] an opportunity of what you want for more disrespect, which keeps anger alive... [and you have a] whole cycle going of unhealthy anger."

"Suppose you're in a relationship, and somebody displays some disrespect for you, there are healthy ways you can respond to that. Anger can work on your behalf. Example: You can stand up for what you believe is right in that, but you can do it in such a way that shows dignity and the worth toward that other individual, as you stand your ground and treat that other individual with genuine goodness, there's the good chance that that the other’s vision is going to diminish some of the things coming your way, and you don't perpetuate ugly behavior."

"Is there a measurable physiological response when you get angry?"

On fear: "What’s the emotion that drives pretenses? It’s very easy. Fear! The person who lives with pretenses is thinking, 'Well I’m threatened by the possibility of being seen threatened, of being seen as something other than wonderful. So, I’ve gotta keep up these false fronts because it’d be awful of people made a wrong interpretation of me.' The link to anger saw something else. Certainly the individual that drops the fear and learns to have a certain inner trust you know, it’s o.k.: To be what I am. Sometimes you’ll find that - 'I’m a mixed bag.' Sometimes I make wise decisions, sometimes I don’t. Drop the pretenses and learn to live without the fear. That’s where emotional cleanness starts to occur."

"There's nothing wrong with thinking, 'I’m a good guy who tries to go to work and help people.'"

"If you have a certain giftedness, I believe it’s wrong to hold that back. To not live in a forward way without using that gift in a forward way is not making good use of the life that’s been given you."

"Clara talked about pretenses – trying to pretend much more than you really are – you don’t have flaws, weaknesses or fears. There are lots of things you can do with a nice, moderate level of self-identity, not saying 'My underarms don’t stink, etc.'" :)

"Admit and acknowledge when you don’t have good moments!"

80s video of the month: Johnny and Mary

Struggling, why, oh why couldn't I remember the name?

.......................Something I can't put my finger on

Set in motion a series of thoughts and flashes

That somehow had me humming the bars to

One truly rad 80s song today

Outside a pet store?!

Of all unlikely places

Until I was home

And I knew

Inbound:

Relieving the iconic Tina Turner, uncontested for several months with the extended anthem of "We Don't Need Another Hero" ( "Thunderdome"), is Robert Palmer's "Johnny and Mary."

Robert Palmer, 1949-2003, like many of the legendary 1980s musicians, was a dressy, Britain-born performer who uniquely epitomized New Wave style and jazzy swagger. He did this perhaps most memorably in "Simply Irresistible," the music video (in the dawn of the video era) capitalizing on the pastel red, black and alluring flourishes often associated with Patrick Nagel and the general artistic zeitgeist of the time.

Please see this excellent online bio: http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Palmer_Robert.html

Outgoing:

"Thunderdome": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TViZKt-AX6E

Fare thee well, great diva Tina.

Quote of the day: On unruly children in public

From a forum post about an unruly child who was slapped in Wal-Mart by an unrelated adult, by "Worldwalker." I really love the last paragraph.

"Speaking of kids crying really loud, no, you do not have a right to allow your kid to scream in a store, a restaurant, a movie theater, or anywhere else where civilized behavior is expected. You have no more right to do so than I have to play the bagpipes there. Of course a 2-year-old isn't mature enough to be responsible for his own behavior ... which is why it's your job to see that he doesn't do uncivilized things. That goes with this whole "parent" thing. Having a child is a major responsibility, and part of that is accepting that taking proper care of that child is going to require some changes in your lifestyle. You can't go on as if nothing has changed and demand that other people endure the consequences."

"If you've got a child who's too young to behave in public places, then don't take him into those places until he's old enough. Leave him with Grandma for the afternoon. Get a babysitter. Shop online. Get the movie from Netflix, with the added bonus that you can watch it without being distracted by the heavy breathing three rows back. Get take-out."

"Your right to swing your fist in the air stops where my nose starts. Your right to let you child do whatever it wants stops where other people's rights -- what's called "quiet enjoyment" start. It's like we're starting into a social tragedy of the commons, where people take a little bit more, and a little bit more, until eventually have a world with all the charm, pleasantness, and civility of a cage full of poo-flinging monkeys."

Article: "At 29, Depeche Mode is now post-post-punk"

Love the catchy headline: "...post-post punk".  Our efforts to lay latticework upon latticework in order to categorize and taxonomize is grand.  Depeche Mode what - is post-punk, so that would make them New Romantic...?  Synth...?   Click HERE to read the article.

Heh.

Miracle unfolds as diver is saved by whale

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2560871/Beluga-whale-saves-drowning-divers-life.html

"Teachable moments": Doublespeak for "Caution, P.C. pitfalls near"

I love how everything's a "teachable moment" after elitist Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. accused police Sgt. James Crowley of being a racist, and President Obama needlessly injected himself into the swirling fracas. Surely advised to diffuse the growing race crisis he himself had fomented, President Obama invited both to the now famous "Beer Summit," and called the grievous errors in judgement "a teachable moment." Journalist Katie Couric used the term in a different situation in an interview.

'Take that thing off your head'
by WorldNetDaily
"Maybe it's because her dad served in the U.S. Marines ... or because her high school mascot is a fierce-looking eagle ... or because she plans to enlist in the Army next summer after graduation to defend her country ... whatever the reason, when Heather Lawrence saw a Muslim student refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and recite it with the class, the 16-year-old Junior ROTC member saw a teachable moment and took it. And for that, she's been suspended five days."
Read the latest now on WND.com.

"You have someone in the States who is able to enjoy our educational and health care systems, yet it's okay for them to be disrespectful, and it's not okay for my daughter to speak her mind," Mark Lawrence told the Tampa Tribune. "That's her First Amendment right. That's her freedom of speech."

A real teachable moment would be to urge people, including the disrespectful immigrant child in the story to start loving their country and not parading their defiance around like they're anything special.

"She's So Gone" by Cause and Effect

With a bottle of wine
and two friends of mine

We could head to the hills

There's no need for those pills

Under fractal trees and a fractal sky

we are everything

All she needed was,

was a push from us

Now she's learning to fly

She's so gone

but so am I

Both of us been learning to fly

She's so gone

she'll touch the sky

And now I don't know what I'm feeling

Can't remember feeling this high

-

C&E interview here:

http://www.westnet.com/consumable/1997/12.16/intcande.html

Feature: Quotation mark madness!!!

Needing guidance when using quotation marks? I LOVE THIS!!!

SURELY this author is the 9th degree grandmaster of punctuation, the "Neo" of grammatical usage!
-------------------

653 "Single quotation marks are used to punctuate a quotation within a quotation. Double and single quotation marks are alternated in order to distinguish a quotation within a quotation within a quotation."

"I never read 'The Raven'!"
"Did you hear him say, 'I never read "The Raven" '?"

-------------------

-Excerpted from Writer's INC, 1990, Write Source Educational Publishing House

Marvel at the little quotation marks dancing around with such precision in this most trying of situations. These guys are such underdogs - and so easily misunderstood. Despite seeing them move with such affective grace here, I suffer to see them treated with such disregard these days...

655/656/657 "Periods and commas are always placed inside quotation marks. An exclamation mark or a question mark is placed inside quotation marks when it punctuates the quotation; it is placed outside when it punctuates the main sentence. Semicolons or colons are placed outside quotation marks."

-Ibid.

"What am I doing here?" moments

I walked in Sears today at 1:30 p.m. Brisk jazz was playing, the kind you'd hear in a Peanuts sketch. I'm on a mini-vacation, and not going anywhere special. Other than me, I wondered, "What are everyone's excuses for being strolling through the mall on a Wednesday afternoon?"

At that time I felt detached, probably due to the walking and jazz without being in a nightclub, stiff potion in hand. Maybe the energy in the jazz made me feel guilty for walking without a purpose. I shook off the feeling of lonely streetlamps and trees.

Ah, the richness of experience.

On a brighter note, I saw ultimate justice (TM) delivered after a self-absorbed idiophite female almost ran me off the road. I blared on the horn, and as lights came flashing and traffic slinkied to a halt, she was pulled over seconds later by the policeman driving in front of me, who was witness to the whole thing. Boy, that felt good.

Bombshell indictment of Donkey shenanigans appears in Salon.com

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down." - Camille Paglia

Excerpted from: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/08/12/town_halls/index.html


Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.


No need for me to boast in a period of national political turmoil, so please don't interpret this as such. However, there is a need to rally - being that events fall ever quickly from public consciousness in time for the next news story - and it is the shift in balance of what's making news today that deserves examination.

A haymaker of an article appeared in Salon.com this week (Wow, on Salon?), probably leaving many rat-out-your-parents ethics libs catatonic. This honest indictment by Camille Paglia is some of the finest writing I've seen: graceful, dot-connecting, cogent. Rarely will one of the left's own have the honesty to dare criticize her cronies. Some of the GOP ignore this painful lesson (prominent voices in the party admit they're in disarray and have long been in tatters), but Sen. McCain, the former presidential candidate obviously hadn't when he impaled himself with his own lance, courting the hispanic "open-the-floodgates" lobby, and shishkebabing the rest of the party with him.

So when honest, courageous voices like Paglia's surface, we need to listen well. Her courage invested with this is pallates taller than the shoebox I saw mustered by the GOP in producing a leader for the 2008 election. It's courage we've seen highly evident in these vitriolic town hall meetings capturing so much press (!) and I'm hopeful for Salon for producing an alternative viewpoint. I won't go as far as being "optimistic" though.

Americans, far too long feeling helpless to throw a wedge in the revolving door of legislators and MSM antics quickly forget what a house of cards is in their midst. How often can grassroots America stand by while their intelligence is insulted? From "flyover states" to "astro-turf," it's evident how far out of touch the liberal elite is with its constituency. A unique feature of Paglia's article is making us confront the cumulative nature of these looney goings-on in government. She not only talks the health-care reform debacle, she stacks up all the other remarkable stories which had quickly scuttled away, winds up, and sends them all reeling:

• Speaker of the house (3rd in line to the Presidency) "Representative" Nancy Pelosi calling private citizens "Nazis"

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down."

• - Not-so subtle caste warfare from the White House (Don't jump to dismissing the storied "beer summit" and criticism as racism)

"Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown."

• Incomprehensible information warfare thrust initiated by former jour-nihilist, now comms-Chief-of-Staff backfiring: http://www.breitbart.tv/spokesman-calls-fox-news-host-flabbergasting-for-questioning-white-house-request-for-fishy-e-mail/ "Report fishy concerns about health-care to flag@whitehouse.gov"

"But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House."



Paglia's article is a modern-day Crisis. Thomas Paine would be proud. Pulitzer, please.

Article & Commentary: School prayer charges stir protests

See article: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/14/criminal-prayer-case-stirs-protests/?page=1

Commentary by "Jaeger"

"The ACLU, via its distortion of the Constitution and the heavy-handed cooperation of Judge Rogers, has managed to turn Santa Rosa County School District into their little police state, replete with stool pigeons, snitches, and informers spying on student body members, teachers, and local officials for any information for which they can use to strengthen their chokehold on this peaceful, most livable of communities."

"If Mr. Lay and Mr. Freeman are imprisoned under the auspices of some gross perversion of constitutional law, then it is very clear that this is not the America that our forefathers fought to uphold, strengthen, and defend with all that they had. If this should happen at the hands of this activist judge, then it is time for the states to reevaluate their relationships vis a vis the federal government and its oppressive judiciary. "

"The time has come for citizens to take a stand against the oppression of radical secularist groups such as the ACLU who have taken the courts from being forums of justice to becoming their instruments of imposing their values upon others via this legal terrorism. A ruling by such a federal judge as this should be rightly nullified by the State of Florida immediately, and Florida should use its state and county police to resist U.S. Marshals from taking Mr. Lay and Mr. Freeman into incarceration."

Facing the Wind

Facing the Wind, by The Fixx

Just give me something to hold on
A piece of the world
That won't go wrong
Is there somebody there
I can talk to
Somebody sharing the same view

Facing the wind

One avenue that would lead to
A place on this earth
Where we all grew
Longing for travel we stood still
Watching a sky that was once blue

Facing the wind

Each line we throw
Gives us false hope
One ray of light, God I can't cope
Thinking about what we all are
One human race that's gone too far

Facing the wind...

Are you a just a leaf in a stream?

I enjoyed this discourse between radio host Dr. Michael Savage and a caller - "John" from New York City. In this transcript, Dr. Savage used a simple but beautiful analogy on free will and religion, and the sense of a powerful communication being made was very clear. Beyond the caller, I wonder how many listeners pondered the exchange.


Hr. 3 22:03, 27 July 09

Caller John: “My personal belief is however the universe works, whatever happens to us is just that, whatever happens - happens irrespective of whatever belief system we believe in.”

Dr. Michael Savage: “So you think you are just a leaf in a stream going downstream and there's nothing you can do as a leaf.”

J: “I'm sorry?”

S: “You believe you are like a leaf and thrown into a stream and you are just moving along and you have no effect upon the stream itself.”

J: “I have an effect on this world if I choose to but not...”

S: “You’re saying you have no free identity and no free association? You can't make your life become what it should be? You can't alter situations and affect the outcome of your life?”

J: “I certainly can, but not after death... as I said, however the…”

S: “Wait wait wait I wanna I want to back up on this, because many people think they're just leaves in a stream, and they have no effect on their destiny.

J: “Just because you believe in Christianity, it's up to the universe...”

S: “Do you believe your acts while you're living will have any impact on what happens afterwards?”

J: “I don't know, but I will tell you I definitely try to do the right thing in life just in case.”

S: (Laughing) “There’re many reasons to do the right thing, some of them are based on selfish motives such as... [unknown] Just in case I happen to subscribe to that as well... I want to gamble that there is a judgment day, not necessarily because I'm such a good person!”