November 2006 Archives

"Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both."
--John Andrew Holmes

"Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations."
--Orson Welles

My friend of many years, JR, was visiting Atlanta today. He has lived in Birmingham now for about 7 years--my, how time flies! I had taken the day off to run errands (including the dreadful teeth cleaning on which I wait even now!). We scheduled lunch at one of our favorite haunts from times past, which I posted about this past weekend, The Silver Grill!

I miss spending time with JR. He makes me laugh--a lot. As is typical of our visits together, we made a scene at the grill laughing ourselves nearly to death. JR can tell a story like no other!

At any rate, as is typical of Kevin, the owner of the grill, as we went to pay, Kevin didn't charge JR anything since he hadn't been to the grill in a very long time, and we specifically has lunch at the grill so JR could eat there before they close at the end of the month. I really like good, decent people.

Most of my readers will skip this post. I am publishing it because at times I use my blog as a scrapbook to catalog information I will later want to access. When I need this information, It will be a simple search away! I know about the second method, but I don't know this first method.

I need to clear some room on my PowerBook’s hard drive in a hurry for an upcoming project. I have a high-capacity hard drive in my Power Mac that will fit all the data on my PowerBook but I don’t want to copy my laptop’s data over the AirPort network because it will take forever. Is there a faster way?

There is/are. Both involve the FireWire ports on your Macs.

The first is to use a network, but instead of the not-so-zippy AirPort, use FireWire networking instead. To do so, follow along:

With both Macs up and running string a FireWire cable between them.

1. On each machine launch the Network system preference.
2. Choose Network Port Configurations from the Show menu.
3. Make sure that Built-in FireWire is enabled. If it isn’t, enable it and click the Apply Now button. Drag this Built-in FireWire option to the top of the list so that it will be chosen before a slower protocol.
4. Choose Built-in FireWire from the Show menu on each Mac and be sure that Using DHCP appears in the Configure iPv4 pop-up menu.
5. Move to the Sharing system preference on each machine and ensure that Personal File Sharing is on within the Services tab.
6. On your Power Mac, move to the Finder and choose Go -> Connect to Server. Click the Browse button and your PowerBook’s name should appear in the Network window. Double-click on it and in the resulting Connect to Server dialog box, enter the user name and password for your PowerBook. Click Connect.
7. You’ll be offered the choice to mount the directory that contains the PowerBook’s user folder or any mounted volume on the PowerBook. Which you choose depends on the data you want to move. If it’s just data in your user folder, choose that rather than the entire startup volume.
8. Once the user folder/volume is mounted, it’s a simple matter to copy the data you want from the PowerBook to the Power Mac via the Finder. If you like you can use a synchronization utility to move the data for you (a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner doesn’t work, however—it needs to see a volume that it believes is directly connected rather than a network volume).

So that’s FireWire networking. There’s a more direct route, and that’s FireWire Target Disk Mode. Like so:

1. Switch off the PowerBook and string that same FireWire cable between the two Macs.
2. Power on the PowerBook while holding the T key. The PowerBook’s drive will appear on the Power Mac’s desktop as a FireWire drive.
3. Have your way with the data on the PowerBook—copy, sync, or clone it as you like. Yes, in this case, Carbon Copy Cloner works perfectly well as it believes your PowerBook is now a local volume.

Source: Macworld: Mac 911: Swifter FireWire transfers

Tragic news! I am a Prius owner

(11-27) 04:00 PST Los Angeles -- Search crews on Sunday morning located the wreckage of an experimental plane that crashed into the ocean off San Pedro, southwest of Los Angeles, on Saturday, killing the pilot, a top engineer for Toyota.

After sonar spotted the submerged plane, divers from the Los Angeles County Fire Department videotaped it to aid a crash investigation, according to Mark Savage, a department spokesman. Savage said plans are being made to retrieve the wreckage, which was found about 70 feet below the surface.

The Saturday afternoon crash killed David Hermance, 59, from Huntington Beach (Orange County). His body was found floating in the water shortly afterward.

Hermance was Executive Engineer for Advanced Technology Vehicles at Toyota's technical center in the Los Angeles area. He played a key role in unveiling to the American market such cars as the Prius, which runs on a combination of gasoline and batteries.

"His job was to take the technology developed in Japan and bring it to the United States," said Bill Reinert, a longtime colleague. "He was the American father of the Prius." ...

Source: Plane crash kills U.S. 'father of Prius' / Toyota engineer, an experienced pilot, was at the controls of experimental craft

In previous years I have been quick to post how dreadfully dull and boring Fall has been. During the last several, the leaves basically just turned brown and fell off of the trees.

Well, not this year!

This year I celebrate the most colorful Fall I can recall. Unfortunately I have no pictures of it as I spent the peak of the season in Japan.

Everyone celebrates important dates in their lives, anniversaries. Most are birth dates, wedding dates, even sobriety dates. And sometimes these anniversaries are assigned special significance: 10th, 25th, 50th anniversaries. These anniversaries matter as they make significant and meaningful contributions to our lives and the lives of others.

Well, I'm about to celebrate a little-known anniversary of my own soon, one which has remained unknown to almost everyone who knows me. In fact, I think that only one person presently alive even knows about this anniversary, and she has no doubt long since forgotten about it. This anniversary changed many things in my life and has grown to actually impact the lives of the many people around me and even all over the world. And this will be the 25th anniversary! Yes, this is big!!

Twenty-five years ago I had no idea how truly significant this anniversary would become, how much it would change so many things. I mean, I knew it would change things, but I really wasn't exactly sure how.

Stay tuned. The 25th anniversary is coming soon! As the anniversary gets closer, more will unfold. ...

"Momma Walton" started the business in 1946, a tiny midtown diner seating only 58 customers at 900 Monroe Drive. It has remained a country-cooking meat and three (vegetables) for 60 years now, a place with a loyal customer base, where people call you by name. I've known Kevin, the present owner who is married to the granddaughter of "Momma Walton," and Peg, a 73-year-old waitress who has worked there since she was 13, for the 15 years I've personally frequented The Silver Grill. I even remember seeing Momma Walton working the cash register years ago.

The diner has an eclectic customer base and has been more than just a restaurant to the midtown community. Through the years I've even observed Kevin quietly serving meals to lone individuals who didn't say much beyond "Thank you" and didn't have to pay anything because, well, they couldn't afford to, and they were hungry. I've always thought him to be a good man, about my age, very gregarious, with a colorful down-home-good-ole-boy personality, and a sense of responsibility to the whole of the midtown community. He sort of reminds me of my grandfather, who never met a stranger.

Kevin says that "if these walls could talk... There was that time when grandma saw grandpa, who always had his pistol on him, pat one of the waitresses on the butt. Momma Walton put that big butcher knife all the way through that metal trash can!"

And, on a personal note, one of the waitresses I had for many years got married and moved to Hawaii. One evening, while I was having dinner at the grill, she called from Hawaii. Kevin had to pass the cordless phone around to all of her customers so we could chat with her. The place is plenty small enough.

Well, the lease is up. The property owners want to redevelop. The Silver Grill closes its doors forever at 9:00PM on December 22, 2006. Kevin goes to work in sales, and Peg has her applications in at three nearby restaurants.

Many of my friends and family members have eaten here with me over the years. I'll miss this place. An Atlanta tradition comes to an end.

I was in Paris! I have enjoyed a tremendous amount of travel in the last 3 years!

In the United States we have a long list of things of which we have a generally disproportionate level of fear, sometimes bordering on the irrational. Some rather remote things about which we worry:

• Being killed by terrorists
• Catching the bird flu
• Dying from mad cow disease
• Eating that fateful microbe of e.coli served up on a leaf of spinach
• The dreadful dirty bomb
• Being poisoned by a radioactive mist sprayed in a restaurant by a Russian spy

And then of course we have the list of the more imminent possibilities which could start with something like being killed in a car crash. But here is one, remote though it may be, that might keep you awake at night!

Did you realize that 600 Americans died last year by falling out of bed?!* Good lord!

Once, maybe twice, I dreamed I almost fell out of bed in my sleep. It was horrible. I so violently jerked back from the very real sensation of falling out of bed that I woke myself up. I hadn't nearly fallen out of bed at all. I was just dreaming it.

It never occurred to me that one could actually die from falling out of bed! Heavens!

I think we could invent a fall-out-of-bed proof bed for far less than $350,000,000,000.00--the present cost of the war in Iraq. Are the odds of my dying from falling out of bed or by a terrorist attack about the same?

I just don't know...

*Source: Time Magazine: How Americans Are Living Dangerously

Really, really good!

Granted, I tend to think more outside the box than many I suppose, but... Alex Steffen, at World Changing, recently unveiled their first One Laptop Per Child machine (OLPC)--a project designed to provide access to educational content for the children in the developing world. The laptop is pictured here.

Here's a person's comment to his excited post: "It would probably been [sic] more useful to supply African schoolchildren with other great, versatile, robust and useful innovations: books, paper and pencils."

Well, yes. That would be nice indeed. So let's think this out a bit, shall we?

If we spent the same amount of money on books, paper, and pencils, which has the greatest potential to impact the world for good? Should we afford the third world with second-rate, static learning consumables that are outdated by at least 3 years when they hit market and provide the children with the hope of writing a paper that their parents may well not even be able to read?

Or perhaps, perchance, just maybe, I mean it's only a thought: we take at least some steps to give children the opportunity to connect to the body of knowledge available to the 1,000,000,000 people connected to the world wide web so the children can produce instead of consume, produce knowledge products that can be shared with the whole of the planet, make a contribution beyond their family, their village, their impoverished state?

OLPC has the potential to significantly impact a child's education, more than any other wireless device I can think of, like OPPC (One Pencil Per Child).

I grow weary of ignorance and lack of vision, of slavery to a hackneyed system of education that has allowed third world countries to remain victimized by over-indulgent world markets.

I found another wonderful little application that lets you drag and drop music files off of your iPod back onto your computer: Senuti. So if your computer's hard drive containing all of your digital music files crashes, and you have them all loaded on your iPod, you're back in business!

This seems like a novel idea. I have only tried it on a local network, and it works fine, but then so would normal iTunes sharing. I am most interested in how well it works at streaming content over the world wide web. This from their website.

"MyTunesRSS allows you to access the music and videos from your iTunes library over a local network or even the internet. You can access your music from all over the world using a simple web browser. The user interface lets you search for titles for browse your whole library by album or artist. You can access your iTunes playlists or create new ones directly in MyTunesRSS."

If you know me at all, you know that Thanksgiving is my most favorite holiday! Perhaps I love it so because, as a child, our home was always filled with all of our friends and family: Daddy, Aunt Easter & Uncle Frank, Aunt Hester & Uncle Shelly, Mamaw & Papaw, all now living only in our memories, filled our hearts with their love and laughter. Their memories still fill my life with happiness frequently celebrated but most assuredly during this holiday.

And then there are my favorite hymns. I include these wonderful renditions from my music collection, not for the taking, but so that you too may join in a celebration of the deepest gratitude for all that is good, all that is love, all that is kind. To play the selection, click the plate above the title to serve it up. (The links are only active during the season.)

Now Thank We All Our God from the album Te Deum And Other Church Music by The Cambridge Singers

Now Thank We All Our God by S. Karg-Elert

Now Thank We All Our God from the album Virgil Fox Encores by Virgil Fox

Prayer of Thanksgiving from the album America, The Dream Goes On by John Williams

Have you noticed that I subscribe to an RSS feed of quotations? Here's another one that I liked: "The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." --H. L. Menmcken

Good lord! This must fall into the "Just because we can doesn't mean we should..." category.

In a controversial study, researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and now sits frozen in the human genome.

Source: Viral Fossil Brought Back to Life -- Enserink 2006 (1101): 4 -- ScienceNOW

It's time to come up with a better national educational policy that does! Doug has an interesting post at his blog, Borderland. I totally agree with Kozol's statement!

Dismantle NCLB
From Susan Ohanian:

The Educator Roundtable: Ending NCLB is a grassroots movement of educators, parents, and concerned citizens who have signed a petition, rejecting the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and calling for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law’s simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

Jonathan Kozol, who spoke here recently, called NCLB a public shaming ritual to punish the public schools and to pave the way for vouchers. Since it’s inception, I’ve said that this law was never about improving public education. It’s emphasis on high-stakes testing is driving us toward mediocrity, and not excellence. Indeed, the achievement gap is not closing.

Testing is not teaching. Sign the petition.

Source: Borderland » Dismantle NCLB

I was delighted when USAToday called me for an interview. I talked with Ashley Bleimes for over an hour. She called last week to tell me the article was significantly shortened and would appear in the paper on Wednesday, November 15th. Since it was tiny and was tucked away in the Life section, I post a scan of it here in my virtual scrapbook.

I wish politicians would quit playing with the future of our children. Instead, I challenge them to put some serious money where their mouth is! Results demand sufficient resources.

The full article linked below contains an interesting graph of test data.

“The Bush administration wants to hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner over N.C.L.B., but a fair assessment is that progress thus far in closing achievement gaps is disappointing,” Mr. Weiner said. He pointed to financing and teacher assignment systems that lead to schools with mostly poor and minority students getting less money, offering fewer advanced courses and having weaker teachers.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a battery of reading and math tests administered to thousands of students in every state, showed some rising scores for all ethnic groups, and the black-white score gap narrowed in a statistically significant way for fourth-grade math. But on fourth-grade reading, and on eighth-grade reading and math, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps were statistically unchanged from the early 1990s.

Source: Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races - New York Times

I am typically so infuriated with this presidential administration that I rave like a mad man as there is nothing else I can do to stop the madness. This article does an interesting job of repositioning the Bush administration.

Since W is not a liberal, everyone calls him a conservative. If he's a conservative, then, well, I am not. But I have never considered myself a liberal; however, if that's what it takes not to be associated with the lunacy of this administration, then stamp me with a capitol "L!"

In this article, from a very conservative magazine, Jeffrey Hart states that "the word 'conservative' deserves to be rescued." He makes a compelling case that Bush is in fact not a conservative at all. His thoughts are well worth reading!

Ideology Has Consequences

Bush rejects the politics of prudence.
by Jeffrey Hart

Many Republicans must feel like that legendary man at the bar on the Titanic. Watching the iceberg slide by outside a porthole, he remarked, “I asked for ice. But this is too much.” Republicans voted for a Republican and got George W. Bush, but his Republican Party is unrecognizable as the party we have known.

Recall the Eisenhower Republican Party. Eisenhower, a thoroughgoing realist, was one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century. So was the prudential Reagan, wary of using military force. Nixon would have been a good secretary of state, but emotionally wounded and suspicious, he was not suited to the presidency. Yet he, too, with Henry Kissinger, was a realist. George W. Bush represents a huge swing away from such traditional conservative Republicanism.

But the conservative movement in America has followed him, evacuating prudence and realism for ideology and folly. Left behind has been the experienced realism of James Burnham. Also vacated, the Burkean realism of Willmoore Kendall, who aspired, as he told Leo Strauss, to be the “American Burke.” That Burkeanism entailed a sense of the complexity of society and the resistance of cultures to change. Gone, too, has been the individualism of Frank Meyer and the commonsense Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater.

The post-2000 conservative movement has abandoned all that to back Bush and has followed him over the cliff into our calamity in Iraq. On top of all that, the Bush presidency has been fueled by the moral authoritarianism of the current third evangelical awakening.

Yes, aware Republicans are like that man on the Titanic who asked for ice, and this iceberg is too much.

The problem is that Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative.” Today, the media calls him a conservative, yet there is nothing at all conservative about his policies, whether foreign or domestic. William F. Buckley once said that conservatism is the “politics of reality.” But Bush has not pursued reality-based policies. Will we have to find another word? It certainly looks that way.

Buckley has said that Bush has been “engulfed” by Iraq and that if he had been a European prime minister he would have resigned by now. Other commentators known as conservatives have agreed: Andrew Sullivan, George Will, Francis Fukuyama. It is worth considering a statement by Richard Cheney:

Once you get to Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that going to have if it’s set up by the American military there? How long does the United States military have to stay there to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens once we leave?

Smart man, that Cheney. The only problem is that he said that back in 1991 during the first Gulf War when he was secretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush. At that time, Brent Scowcroft was national security adviser and James Baker was secretary of state. Recently, Scowcroft has said that though he has been friends with Cheney for more than 30 years, he no longer really knows him. What has happened to Cheney is anybody’s guess.

It can’t be 9/11. We know from many sources that Bush had decided to invade Iraq long before 9/11. In The Right Man, David Frum recounts being interviewed for a position by Michael Gerson, head Bush speechwriter and also policy adviser, not long after Bush became president. Gerson told Frum that Bush would topple Saddam. At that time nothing was being said about weapons of mass destruction.

National Review editor Rich Lowry sheds some light on the president’s motivation for invading Iraq in a column titled “The Revenge of Orthodoxy.” Following historian Walter Russell Mead, he notices that we are in the “Third Awakening” of Protestant evangelicalism and that the Bush presidency should be stamped “Brought to you by orthodox Christian believers.” He makes clear the implications of this for American foreign policy:

The reinvigorated Wilsonian foreign policy championed by Bush—and motivated less by Woodrow Wilson’s secular values (international law, etc.) and more by religious beliefs (the God-given rights of all people)—is a reflection of Bush’s Christian base.

Lowry, following Mead, is surely correct here. But just what is conservative about it? Historically, American evangelicalism has veered wildly from the crusading lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the pacifism of William Jennings Bryan.

[... several paragraphs deleted...]

While it is not incorrect to call Burke a conservative, it is also correct to call him an analytical realist. And I suggest that they may be the same thing. Indeed there is a sense in which any successful government must be based upon such analytical realism. Today, many historians judge that Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were among the best presidents in the 20th century and rank them among the best in American history. I think Ronald Reagan will join them. All were realistic in handling the challenges they faced.

Bush has offered two justifications for his invasion of Iraq. First, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. None were discovered, and Bush’s claims, upon examination, have been found suspect. He has also projected a democratic Iraq, some of his statements being so disconnected from actuality as to qualify as pure ideology.

For example, at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 26, 2003, Bush put forth the following theory of human behavior:

Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.

Yes, human beings do dislike “brutal and bullying oppression,” but everything else there is false. The people going to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did not want the same things as Mohammed Atta. Historically, holiness, power, glory, conquest, and empire have had greater appeal than freedom and democracy. But Bush’s belief in the convergence and even identity of goals apparently is unshakable.

Speaking in Whitehall later in 2003, Bush was at it again, claiming, “The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global expansion of democracy ... as the alternative to instability and hatred and terror.” Sure, “global expansion of democracy.” Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, a strategic thinker, wrote of Bush’s

fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration of Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.

On April 24, Bush repeated his fantastic theory in a speech in Irvine, California:

I based a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things I think are true. One, I believe that there’s an Almighty, and secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free. I believe liberty is universal. I believe people want to be free. And I know that democracies do not war with each other. And I know that the best way to defeat the enemy, the best way to defeat their ability to exploit hopelessness and despair is to give people a chance to live in a free society.

Well, it is certainly taking a long time for what the Almighty wants to make its appearance in the actual world. Most of the world today is far from democratic. Over the long span of human history, democracy is almost invisible. In the real world, many people want a society in which the rules laid down in the Koran govern all activities and take absolute precedence over liberty. In Iraq, the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has no interest in freedom, and al-Sadr is the power behind the present Prime Minister Maliki. What planet is Bush living on? He makes the “metaphysical dogma” of the radical philosophes seem sober by comparison.

Before long, students may be allowed to take entire history courses in the expanding library of books analyzing Bush’s Iraq calamity and other failures of his administration, which also derive from his tendency to privilege ideology over realism. Supply-side ideology led to large tax cuts and mountainous deficits. Privatization ideology led to an incomprehensible and unnecessarily expensive prescription-drug plan. No previous administration has produced such an outpouring.

Is Bush a conservative? Of course not. When all the evidence is in, I think historians will agree with Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, who wrote a carefully argued article judging Bush to have been the worst president in American history. The problem is that he is generally called a conservative, perhaps because he obviously is not a liberal. It may be that Bush, in the magnitude of his failure, defies conventional categories. But the word “conservative” deserves to be rescued. Against the misconception that Bush is a conservative, and appealing to Burke, all of our analytical energies must be brought to bear. I hope I have made a beginning here.

Read the entire source from The American Conservative (magazine link): specific article link: Ideology Has Consequences

ABC News published an article from the Associated Press about Henry Kissenger's views on Iraq. He believes that the US will not be able to achieve military victory and that a rapid withdrawal from the country will create a level of regional destabilization that will eventually pull us back into the area. He has been advising the Iraq Study Group for W. He looks so old now! In fact, just how old is he? [Born on May, 23, 1923, he is now 83. Thanks Wikipedia!]

Naturally, I believe the nation should hold W accountable for this unprecedented, immoral debacle. I for one demand his impeachment!

But that's not the reason for my writing. At the end of the ABC article is this statement: "Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed."

Is the AP out of its mind?! Does it think it owns what goes on in this world? Does this mean we can't even talk about Henry as that would redistribute this information? In protest and disgust I "rewrote" (see above) the contents of the article, giving credit, as any academic type would of course, where credit is due: to the stingy news mongers at AP.

This is being circulated around the net. I guess if would be funny if it weren't so close to the truth.

Here's the football version of what is going on in education right now.

• All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If, after two years, they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.
• All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!
• Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don't like football.
• Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."
--Henry Kissenger

Source: Steven Garrity

Nov. 17, 2006 — Ford is giving prospective car buyers another avenue to find the right car. Come Monday, the automaker will start selling its luxury Lincoln brand through online retailer Amazon.com.

Source: ABC News: Ford to Sell Lincoln Cars Through Amazon.com:

I must say that I was privileged to hear Dr. Ive speak during the summer of 2005 while visiting Cupertino, California. His passion for perfection, elegance, and unobtrusive functionality is inspiring. Certainly his work at Apple has been legendary and standard-setting!

Apple’s Jonathan Ive was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London. The award is in “recognition of the outstanding contribution that an individual has made to his or her chosen field of endeavor.” Ive is the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple and is behind the company’s most lauded designs, such as the iMac and iPod.

Source: Jonathan Ive awarded Honorary Doctorate

I hate spending as much of my time as I do dealing with anti-theft deterrence. I mean, how much time in our lives is spent locking and unlocking, taking time to hide something from view so it won't be stolen, etc. And now, today, I am having to rip everything off of my iPod because I moved my music library off of my laptop as the hard drive is too small to hold everything I use.

Naturally this caused huge issues. For some reason my playlists all disappeared. And when I connected my iPod to my laptop, it said it was in sync with another machine ... did I want to erase it and sync it with this one? What?! It's the same machine. It was supposed to be the exact same music library just relocated to an external hard drive.

All of this because of people stealing from people. The music companies have charged absurd prices for years (theft) and now people have begun stealing from them (retribution?). As a result, we have digital rights management which is a royal pain for those of us who do not steal music.

I have discovered a fantastic little program, iPodDisk, that mounts my iPod as a server. It lets me read and manipulate it as a regular hard drive! So I am now wasting my time copying the files off of my iPod that disappeared during the relocation of the original music library.

Click to download the free app!

How much time do we waste because of theft?!

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
--Theodore Roosevelt

Reach out and touch someone!

That "stepped on feeling"

From RocketBoom.com

I am hooked on RocketBoom.com. I recently saw these pictures on one of their vlog episodes and decided to share one a day for the next three days.

Is It Stalin?

Is this interesting or what?!

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. ...

Read the entire article at Source: TIME.com: Exclusive: Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse

The more I travel, the more I feel language challenged. I wish so badly that I had mastered several languages at a very young age. I fear I am too old and haven't the time to invest in learning languages now. Such a pity!

At any rate, this little video is a hoot!

Source: Wikipedia

Quotation from Hermann Wilhelm Göring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, second in command of the Third Reich, and commander of the Luftwaffe. He was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946 and sentenced to death. He was of aristocratic heritage and a war hero of World War I.

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

I suppose one of the things I find most upsetting is how the Republican party squandered such a rare and precious opportunity. They controlled the executive and legislative branches. They significantly influenced the judicial branch. They had one of the rarest and most powerful opportunities in my lifetime to really do some enormous good for the people of our nation. In the mid to late 1970's I actually worked very hard for this party to bring it the very opportunity it has had for the past 6 years.

Instead, their governing degenerated into unchecked, unfettered scandal and corruption amounting to nothing less than theft by taking at a massive and unprecedented level. They became a government of delusional, selfish, materialistic, extremism.

Yesterday it dawned on me (duh!--byuh): whether you're a liberal or a conservative is really rather unimportant in the bigger scheme of things. Karl Rove's Republican noise machine's focus on these two words was simply designed to hide some of the truly significant issues of governing I listed in my previous post below, New Political Agenda, issues with which the Republicans were doing a very, very wretched job!

As I reflect back on several conversations I had over the past few years with people I dearly love, I found it incredulous that they would buy into the crazed madness of what the ultraconservative extremist agenda became. They simply wanted what was best for our country and were more optimistic than I was that the Republican party would deliver it.

I am just so deeply disappointed in the Republican party's failure to do what was right for our nation. They had their day in the sun, and regrettably, the shadows their legacy has cast are very long and very dark indeed.

Will having a new party controlling the legislative branch actually help our country in any meaningful way? Only time will tell.

But if history is any indication: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At least now, no one party has absolute power. But the Republicans still enjoy enough power to continue to really hurt the good people of our nation. Or, they can choose to join hands with the legislative branch and start helping people the way government is supposed to help.

What will it be?

W admitted today that he just said to reporters last week that he had no plans to replace Rummie so the reporters would stop asking him the question.

Really?

So...

Did W also say he knew there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq just to send the nation to war for his own illegitimate agenda?

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

In no particular order, a few things I would like to see now that we have neutralized the right wing extremists:

• A transition to pay-as-you-go government
• A significant reduction in military spending
• Meaningful, affordable, and significant healthcare and insurance for the average American
• Honesty and decency in office without the emphasis on getting your friends absurdly weathy
• A government for and by the people, not solely for corporate interests and the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of others
• Tolerance and an end to using divisiveness and mindless emotionality to obfuscate the more meaningful and significant issues
• A meaningful energy independence plan
• The end of the unchecked greed of the get-rich oil companies who have been hurting decent average Americans with their record, out of control profits
• The complete dismantling of the neo-con ideology of using the military to export democracy
• The end of the meaningless manipulation of the American people through fear mongering
• An emphasis on the collective good
• A substantial reduction in the gap between the most wealthy Americans and the poor
• The dismantling of the undue programatic and funding emphasis of No Child Left Behind on minimum standards
• Meaningful and fully funded educational reform that emphasizes providing for maximized achievement for all of our students, including America's brightest and best
• A plan to fix the utterly insane mess W needlessly produced in Iraq
• A complete and utter separation of church and state
• A change to sustainable government and economic growth
• Assuming a substantially increased level of responsibility for environmental protection and safety
• Reform of the FCC to provide for a dismantling of any party's dominance of the nation's media machinery

As I see it now, in just 2 years W and the party that was in power spent all of that political capitol about which he was boasting 2 years ago. They are well on the way to bankrupting the nation emotionally, financially, spiritually and intellectually with irresponsible governing. I join with the majority of Americans in saying, "We've had enough!"

Tonight I enjoyed listening to a conversation between the host, Linda Schacht, and her guests, Geoffrey Nunberg and Deborah Tannen, focused on "Language in Public and Private Life" in the Herbst Theater, an event from the City Arts & Lectures series on NPR. Both of her guests were brilliant and insightful. In this post I just want to focus on Geoffrey Nunberg and am including this expert from the City Arts & Lectures website:

"The worst offense you can commit against language," writes linguist Geoffrey Nunberg in his bestselling book Going Nucular, "is to fail to listen to it closely." Nunberg listens carefully to the popular uses of language, regarding words as window into America's evolving culture and values. A professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and regular commentator on NPR's Fresh Air, Nunberg is a skilled observer of modern semantics. His new book is Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. An outraged account of "The Great Relabeling" of American language, Talking Right argues that the political center of gravity has shifted to reflect a conservative world-view by manipulating words such as "values," "faith," "liberal," and "freedom."

Geoffrey spoke well of a Republican party that knows what words to use to resonate in the hearts of Americans while busying itself doing whatever--even when completely disconnected from the words it uses. In this view, the words are the thing. A white paper was even circulated among the party faithful six years ago about this very strategy! In my world view, the deeds are the thing.

This reminded me so much of ministers from my youth preaching hell fire and brimstone to an affirming congregation while having illicit torrid affairs with their church secretaries. But today, it's the six-term Republican Representative Mark Foley and the mega church pastor Reverend Ted Haggard with the president's ear to name just a few. They say this but do that on such an extraordinarily bipolar level as to appear utterly schizophrenic!

I hope Americans are disgusted and see the liars for what they are! And I can't wait to read Nunberg's book! And just for the record, I do not like sushi!

"Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show" (Geoffrey Nunberg)

Here is short exerpt from the NYTimes. The entire article by Thomas L. Friedman is well worth the read--thanks Lynn.

... Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

Source: Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence - New York Times

I will be interested to see how this plays out over time...

Gannett’s newspaper newsrooms are undergoing a “huge” restructuring into information centers that focus on four goals: 1) prioritize local news over national news 2) publish more user-generated content 3) become web-centered 24/7 news operations and 4) use “crowdsourcing” methods in large, investigative projects — putting the audience to work in digging up details on government malfeasance.

“We’ve already had some really amazing results with the crowdsourcing element of this,” said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s VP for new media content. “Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we’ve just watched those erode. We’ve learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged.”

Summary Source: Lost Remote TV Blog
Source: Wired

Saddam and 2 others are sentenced to death by hanging. Stay tuned...

Poetic Justice Could Be Waiting In The Wings

I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe these guys haven’t quite thought through this whole Saddam verdict thing.

As they have glibly persuaded themselves about so many other things to do with Iraq, they have persuaded themselves that Saddam being found guilty will be a nice little vindication for Dear Leader. Pro-Republican headlines will dominate the media for the last 48 hours or so before polls open. The resulting bounce will save the election for the Republicans.

I’m sure there are those in the Republican camp who are saying to themselves: even if it doesn’t quite work that well, it still can’t hurt.

Oh, yeah?

Try this one. Saddam is found guilty. To borrow a phrase from one of Saddam’s defense lawyers, that opens the doors of hell. Despite the security mega-crackdown, Sunnis erupt in unimaginable violence, far worse than anything we’ve seen till now. Shias retaliate beyond anyone’s imaginings. Not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can even slow down the carnage, let alone stop it. In 48 hours, and in full public view, Iraq goes to hell in a handbasket.

In the last 48 hours before polls open, the media is dominated by evidence that the situation in Iraq is totally out of our control. Totally.

Source: 1115.org - Poetic Justice Could Be Waiting In The Wings

As far as I am concerned, when so much is at stake, you are not allowed to make errors in judgement that are this catoclismic! Bush and his advisors are beyond incompetent. How foolish and absurd, ignorant and arrogant to presume to "bring democracy" to Iraq! The entire concept of democracy requires that the overwhelming majority of the people in a nation want it. This misjudgment is nothing less stupendous than insisting the Iraqi's had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"I think we have the basic strategy right," Cheney told Stephanopoulos. "The president's made clear what his objective is. It's victory in Iraq. And it's full speed ahead on that basis."

But the men who were once the among the administration's strongest supporters see it quite differently. Perle now says that if he had known the catastrophe that Iraq would become, he would not have advocated using war to confront the Iraqi threat in the first place.

"Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention?" Perle said. "Well, maybe we could have."

Rose said he expected to encounter disappointment in the interviews, but was shocked to find despair and fury at the Bush administration's incompetence. And, he said, those he spoke with fear the consequences will go well beyond Iraq.

"Adelman is actually saying that Rumsfeld's performance in office has been so bad," Rose told ABC News, "he fears that the entire neo-conservative project … what he defines as using the power of the United States to spread democracy, to do good in the world, that that project may now be dead."

Source: ABC News: On Second Thought: Neocons Rethink Iraq War

To suggest that we as a nation "use the power of the United States to spread democracy" is nothing short of warmongering and exporting our own brand of terrorism. The neo-conservatives are dead wrong on this. Their influence in Washington's halls of power must be voted out and utterly abandoned! These people are tremendously dangerous.

Yet they have run Washington unchecked for 6 years now. They have spent $350 trillion in Iraq and killed over 45,000 people insuring our nation has the respect of no other in the world. The pattern of corruption, of saying one thing and doing the exact opposite, runs to the very core of a party for which I once, now many years ago, had respect.

"All phone calls are obscene."
--Karen Elizabeth Gordon

I believe Americans are going to say "Enough, Already!" on November 7th and minimize the damage this party has done to our nation. They use the same old disgusting tactics every election instead of campaigning on a record of success! Oh, I forgot...what success? What has the Republican party done in the last 6 years of absolute power that has been good for you?

There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.

There is no line this president has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party in power.

He has spread any and every fear among us in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.

And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people is subtle and nuanced or laughably transparent.

Source: Olbermann: Bush owes troops apology, not Kerry - Countdown with Keith Olbermann - MSNBC.com

O My! You have to be kidding, right?! I mean, how much money did they spend on this study? This is a bit absurd!

Being overweight isn't just bad for your health. New research suggests that America's obesity epidemic is also feeding the growth in U.S. fuel consumption.

Americans are pumping almost 940 million more gallons of gas into their vehicles than they did in 1960 because the average American is roughly two dozen pounds heavier. That amounts to $2.8 billion more spent on gas each year, if gas is selling for $3 a gallon.

So says a new study from researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Source: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State :: Fatter drivers cause increase gas consumption: study