Tag Archives: history

LJ – Smirking Chimp

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From 6/26/2003

Saw this on www.smirkingchimp.com, reprinted from America Held Hostile

The facts do not support George Bush’s or Colin Powell’s statements. These two men testified before all of the people of our great country and the representatives of other nations falsely.

The document that purported to show the connection of Iraq seeking enriched uranium had been declared a forgery long before George Walker Bush uttered those words in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. The “intelligence” documents that Colin Powell waved in the air were plagiarized from the thesis of a college student that was more than twelve years old.

The proof of their statements has been shown to be false in the weeks following George Walker Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

On June 21, 2003, George Walker Bush said “The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed. We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, no matter how long it takes,”

That’s a far cry from his earlier testimonies of quantities of WMDs. Now we are looking for papers and documents of past “programs,” not actual weapons.

The “mobile biological weapons labs” have been found to be units sold to Iraq by Great Britain for the purpose of inflating artillery balloons with hydrogen.

We have found fertilizer factories, swimming pools and vacuum cleaners.

We have sacrificed the lives of almost two hundred of our best and bravest. We have caused the deaths of approximately 10,000 Iraqi civilians.

We have found no weapons of mass destruction.

We, my friends, have been played for fools. We have been lied to.

I feel so patriotically ashamed… but it’s the Shrub at the wheel and I’ve got a good idea about how and why he was selected president and I will never ever vote for any republican candidate, no matter who his rival is. Anything is better than the GOP that drags the nation into Hell.

LJ – Too Much Time

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From 6/23/2003

In Cedarburg, Wisconsin some locals have decided that the local playground, built with donated funds for the enjoyment of children has to be hidden because the colors used in the playground do not mesh properly with the theme of place in which this playground is in. Several other people have arranged a petition and wish the school to erect some sort of visual boundary which hides the “Playground of Atrocious Colors” from peoples sight.

Quote:

“I love children. I love the schoolyard,” said Phyllis Widstrand, who has lived across from Parkview for 33 years and enjoys watching children play there. “(But) the colors are atrocious. They’re McDonald’s colors. They’re bright yellow, bright red, bright blue.”

Widstrand and her husband, John, are among 23 neighbors who signed a petition protesting the brightly colored equipment. The neighbors are asking school officials to screen the swings and slides on two sides with evergreen trees.

The bright primary colors look out of place in the area, according to Widstrand, who said she would have preferred more subtle earth tones.

“It does not fit the Cedarburg type of landscape,” she said. “Maybe the children do like (the bright colors). I think they would be just as happy with brown, beige and green.”

Although she can’t see the playground from her house, Dori Cesario signed the petition because she understood the concerns. Many people wished they had been consulted ahead of time about the equipment’s appearance, Cesario said.

“It looks like McDonald’s with all those colors. It does stand out,” she said. “My grandchildren like it, and it looks cute, but they should have asked us first.”

People with too much time on their hands are always the most fun… 😉

LJ – Bottoms Up!

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From 6/20/2003

I got this message forwarded on to me from the head MD at our local health clinic:

Dear employee:

Alcohol use among college students is a serious and growing public
health problem, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. Their comprehensive report, entitled “Healthy People
2010,” demands a reduction in the prevalence of binge drinking on
campuses. Forty percent of college students have engaged in binge
drinking – defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row for men
and four or more drinks in a row for women – in the past two weeks.

I distinctly remember my freedom to drink myself silly back when I was in College to be one of the best fundamental lessons of my entire life. The freedom that came with College life, and the ability to intoxicate yourself willfully, even dangerously, was the perfect teacher of “Actions have Consequences”. I found the pleasure and pain of that entire part of my life helped me understand many things, including personal limits, unintentional weight gain, and a new appreciation of ultra-intense headache pain. A dry campus, or one for which this message later on urged, that concerned staffers mentor students not to drink, robs these students of the chance to learn from the most effective teacher possible – pain and agony – and the ability to drink until your obnoxious roommate becomes a permanent visual blur.

Drink Up Kids!

LJ – Fun!

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From 4/20/2003

Discovered a new company making workout-style apparel, Under Armour brand. Everything they make is a special kind of Polyester and really works amazingly well on me during my workouts. I got one shirt to use today, but since I like it so much I’m thinking about adding 3 more shirts for variety-sake, depending on what I decide to spend my IRS refund money on. I’ve since put two other UA shirts in my Amazon wishlist, so we’ll see how that turns out. My eyes are getting dry and bleary so I should call it a night.

LJ – Random Musings

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From 3/4/2003

Thoughts are flitting all thru my mind tonight. I heard on the radio that one of the leading causes of child safety seats being improperly installed in automobiles is because the instructions are too difficult to read. They said that the instructions were expressed for people who could read at a 10th grade reading level. What bothers me mostly isn’t anything to do with child safety seats, but rather the sobering statistic that roughly half of the population in the United States only can read to the 5th grade level!

I’m a very strong believer that language is a central component of human sentience, that language is enriched by a vast and capable vocabulary steeped in a language that allows for expression beyond base communication like grunts and peeps. I believe that a rich vocabulary can only spring from three places, reading books, being taught, or engaged with “vocabulary enriched” cohorts and learning from their discussion and wits. I suppose at the root of it I see a rich vocabulary and the ability to use it well as a cornerstone of human thought, that when vocabulary is stunted your ability to express thoughts to others is severely curtailed and that the point of communication and language is not to merely enjoy thoughts in your own head, but to share them with others. I’ve been declared a bit of a lingusitical elitist because I consider the contents and richness of a persons vocabulary to be a direct measure of the complexity of their thoughts, that people with rich, capable speech and understanding are the self-same people with the ability to think beyond food, shelter, and reproduction. When I heard that half of Americans cannot understand written work beyond the 5th grade level I felt alternatively a wave of disgust and a pang of pity, because to me, these people will never be able to forge anything more complicated than “See Spot Run”. The pity comes from all that wasted creativity that obviously exists within each human mind if they only had a toolbox that wasn’t manufactured by Tonka.

LJ – As Man Lay Dying, Witnesses Turned Away

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From 2/19/2003

I found this on Plastic, another blog which got it’s content from a DC newspaper:

“In an unbelieveable display of callousness, several witnesses at a gas station watch and do nothing as Allen E. Price, 43 is shot, point blank. As the man lay bleeding and dying, one witness watches the scene unfold before him, proceeds to finish pumping his kerosene, looks at Price bleeding on the ground and proceeds to pay for his kerosene and drives away. Others drive away from the scene after the shooting. One car even pulls up to the same pump Price’s body is laying next to and also does nothing. It isn’t until 27 minutes after the shooting that the first 911 call is received.” (original story)

Just like what happened to Kitty Genovese in NYC, people apparently are trapped into doing absolutely nothing when there is a chance that someone else could do something, a fallacy is created in each mind saying “Ah, someone else must have heard it and will tell someone” when everyone thinks like this, nothing is done. I can’t help but think if people were not a little conditioned for this behavior from the DC sniper who was moving around DC and VA nicking people left and right.

Human compassion is alive and well, stored neatly in vacuum-sealed jars at home, under our beds.

LJ – At least 21 killed in Chicago nightclub 'stampede'

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From 2/17/2003

I have said it over and over, humanity is 3 meals and 15 minutes away from complete loss of civilized rational behavior. Case in point, this tragedy that happened in Chicago. All it took for rational civilized people to revert to a herd of frightened animals was “perhaps mace or pepper spray being sprayed in the air”. In this day and age when we are supposed to be educated and I dare even suggest somewhat elightened how can it be that people can undergo such a powerful reversion to primitive behaviors in what amounts to a drop of a hat? I suppose the lesson here lies in how easy people are to aggregate, to form a mob. Folk always surprise me, both in their individual brilliance (sometimes) and in their combined stupidity. Now I know why I’m not a bar person. 🙂

LJ – Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap

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From 12/14/2007

It all began earlier tonight. We drove into our driveway with our fake christmas tree in the front window stooped over like a drunken sailor. We discovered to our chagrin that this plastic base had warped and cracked from the stress of holding up this fake tree and all it’s ornaments and had toppled while we were out.

I had a flash of handiness and decided to haul out to the garage and set up the power miter saw. Once I figured out how to get the spring arm to pop up so I could use it it was just a matter of finding two 2×4’s that were long enough. I found two, exactly 16” long. I left one alone and cut the other in half, allowing for the 2×4’s width, which is 3.5. Silly wood. So I cut the 2×4’s to shape and headed downstairs. How to get these to turn into a christmas tree stand was a challenge. I needed something with strength to hold all the pieces together. The perfect way would be to cut a groove into both original 2×4’s so they would fit together like a matched set, but I don’t have a radial arm saw to accomplish that feat, so instead, and without the next option which would have been nails and metal brackets and reinforcing triangles I decided to toenail the pieces together, used up about 15 nails, not a pretty or proud job, but it did the trick. I thought about drilling the hole for the post that the fake tree was going to fit into and it hit me, I just needed another 2×4 small piece on top that could ride over the base and keep it together. I pounded 15 more nails into the bastard and at that point it was acceptably together.

Then came the hole. I had regular drill bits that went up to “big size” but that wasn’t anywhere near the hole I needed to make. I found a kit with hole bits and pulled the 3/8ths, the 5/8ths, and the 7/8ths bits. I ran upstairs and put the bits in the dead plastic stand and the 7/8’s just barely fit and rotated around. The post was just shy of 7/8ths. I got my “dangerous and cheap” drill since my cordless drill is deader than a doornail and put the bit in, then went to town. It dug out a nice pretty hole right in the center where I wanted it. I shook the drilled wood out and brought it upstairs. The tree? Fwomp! Down into the hole nice and easy, like it was meant to be there. The wooden stand? Pleasantly hiding just underneath a christmas tree skirt.

That sum-bitch won’t fall over now! Of course if anyone with an ounce of woodworking skills or handiness took at look at it they’d likely puke a little in their mouths. Nails jammed in, some pounded down with about 1/4” of their heads laying on the wood (I got impatient) and still other ones with nice round impact impressions of the hammer I used to drive the nails. It’s NOT PRETTY, but dammit, it’s solid and I dare say could survive a hurricane, especially since I unloaded about 35 nails into the damn thing, it’s 80% 2×4 and 20% nail. 🙂

I am quite proud of myself, even if it’s an eldritch horror of woodworking. 🙂

LJ – Information Horizon

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From 4/27/2006

I began a tangential discussion with a friend a few days ago, regarding something I’ve been thinking of for quite some time. That if you were to visualize the combined intelligence of the human race as a sphere, an imaginary object that contains all the thinking, all the printed words, and all the media that humanity has expressed since we began thinking and recording those thoughts into media that such a sphere would be truly immense.

Then I imagined what one person might look like in the context of that thought-sphere. A dot, a very small very bright dot. Now for each person, you can look around, you can explore and you can learn – this I associate with movement and increase on the surface of this imaginary sphere – the more you know the bigger your dot.

What then, is the chance of any human being able to approach the horizon of that sphere? Or more likely, is it even possible?

In the case that it is not possible for any one human being to reach the horizon of the information sphere then the next logical argument would be that humanity exists on this sphere, that there are people covering every surface of the sphere, just that nobody will be able to visit all the “islands” in this sphere of knowledge. What then for our fate? If we haven’t the hope of integrating all that we know, how could we possibly think that we can consider new things – unless the sphere looks more like a puffer-fish than a beach-ball, with localized growth building up mountains of insight, surrounded by plateaus of general knowledge. What really gets me is the fear that we do have many if not all the answers we seek already, it’s just, there is nobody around bright enough and fast enough to integrate all the separate islands of knowing into a cohesive and definitive answer.

What might happen if someone miraculously did acquire the breadth of knowledge that would be regarded as a span across the horizon?

LJ – The Elderly Will, but What About The Young?

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From 6/20/2006

The Senior Vice President of the consultancy group we hired was in today, wanting to talk about how we are segmenting the phonathon program in our Annual Fund. It came up in the meeting about how it’s not ethically invalid for a university to purchase email lists from email list providers, how that a students previous experience with their university is very much different from a corporate relationship.

And just what do y’all think? Would you be comfortable if the University that you graduated from paid some email-list salesman for your email address? Is it ethical? What say my readers?! I wanna know!

So we got to talking about how people behave when exposed to our phonathon program. I relate it to my experiences with telemarketers, in so far that for me, my telephone is not a warmly lit, fuzzy welcome mat to every Tom, Dick, or Harry caller. I make it a matter of personal right to disconnect a telephone circuit when it suits me, if that is hanging up while someone is trying to sell me something, so be it. Ultimately I think it comes down to the fine sensation of whether or not you have a vested interest in communicating with someone, or if they are being intrusive (maybe insolent, even) in persisting their contact beyond your desire to maintain that contact. I find it very easy these days to simply hang up the telephone when a stranger tries to sell me something I do not want.

I’ve been called “cold and heartless” by various people because of my self-serving right to hang up the telephone when I really want to.

Then, shortly afterwards I tried to open up the notion that todays alumni that are graduating may not behave in the same way that this consultancy firm is telling us they will. I suspect that the nature of the game has changed and we are not compensating for that change in gameplay. In the past, when you were smart, when you were lucky, when you really wanted to, you went to a University and pursued a bachelors degree. The drive was personal, it was uniquely desired and all your own. You went to a prestigious institution, you took classes, you were serious about it, and you really loved your time there because it was something you were fully wanting to do. You graduated as a class, you knew other people in your class and they were your friends. As you all aged, your deep affection for where you went was carried along and as you were a success, you made sure that the place you went to, the place you were lucky to go to, was in some small way bettered later on via a nice big donation or a series of smaller donations over time. This is how it has been since the beginning…

Until around the 90’s… the 90’s changed a lot.

Instead of a culture and world where you could get a job out of high school, now you can’t, really – and be “successful” or “happy” and who doesn’t want that? So you need more education. That’s the fundamental change in the game. It went from “want” to “need”. When it became a needful thing, it became common. Every dullard went to college, everyone did, everyone took their SAT’s, everyone borrowed or had family to support them through school – because the culture was pounding it into your head that there was absolutely no future at all for high school graduates. Because of this it stopped being “K through Twelve” and started to be “K through Sixteen”. This is a fundamental change in how we perceive our education. K-16 now puts college as super-high-school. It’s wonderfully optional (no, no it isn’t, if you want to be happy), but instead of being “optionally desirous” it now is “optionally needful”. This change had effects in one direction, but not in the other. Keep in mind this unidirectional change, it’s important.

Since going to a University (or College) is needful more than desirable, this has changed how people who are undergoing it perceive their time. Now college is common, everyone does it, even the morons. You don’t have to be smart really, you aren’t there because you really want to be, you are there because you’ve no other choice, it’s another pressure that is put-upon you as you grow. This little nugget of pressure grows into adversity, suffering, and anger. You care not a drop for anyone else who you deal with in a day-to-day basis because it’s just like high school, only now with cars, apartments, jobs, and the first glimmers of true adult independence. You are a slave to your credit-hour achievement mark – you strive for 120. You might have friends in college, but nobody ever really expects those relationships to matter, they didn’t in high school, why should they matter in super-high-school? When you think back to your college days, what is more common? A tight-knit group of like-minded people who really desired to learn and grow or the perception of endless adversity as “The Grown Ups” blocked each and every move forward you made, grumbling and pissing and moaning as you passed by. Does it feel more like a real honest achievement or rather does it feel like a trip through a food mill in which you avoided successfully the paddles pushing you into the mesh below?

This isn’t the only change either! Not only did the situation change, but the people playing the game changed! Now kids are growing up in a K-16 world where they attend not Universities or Colleges, but rather ESP’s. Educational Service Providers. I’ve written about this before, how in the heyday of the long-ago, a University Professor was up on a dais, his lectern, where he professed, taught, and lead. The University of the long ago was a place where you respected your professors, there was a little fear, a little trepidation and a lot of obeisance. This was how it has been and how it was “meant to be”, but it didn’t stay that way. Instead of this notion of a University being a special place, now it’s an Educational Service Provider. The professors? Educational Service Provider Employees. The students? Educational Service Provider Customers. Now instead of the old way, when going to University was special and marked you as being exceedingly bright, you are just like all the others in the giant throng of the K-16 food mill. Students now treat their tenured professors like a customer would treat a clerk behind a counter. Students email professors making demands, being full-of-themselves with “Customer is Always Right” mentality. It doesn’t hurt the development of this when the University system regards students as “Walking Streams of Income”. The University treats the students like cattle, so the cattle treat the University like it’s a farm. The nature of the game has changed, even the nature of the place has taken this change.

Remember when I made mention of the importance of this unidirectional change? The students changed, the academy-component changed, but the University hasn’t. I suspect that as the alumni who graduated from contemporary University get old enough to give, that they won’t. That what they’ll remember isn’t how wonderful their time was spent with people of equal brightness, all shining brightly – but rather they’ll remember their acceptable time, spent with people of pitifully equal brightness, shining dully. The path that alumni relations takes has to be fundamentally different, we can’t use the classic indicators anymore, we can’t depend on “Class Identification” or “All your Friends” or even “The University that Cares” because obviously, they don’t really (will 2439-0790 please step forward!). Instead of these approaches there will have to be new approaches made, and I don’t really have a lot of faith that we can even read the rules for the new game, let alone play it.

So I sit back while this consultant is going on and on about “if they aren’t ever going to give, then drop ‘em, ignore them and concentrate on those that will.” and I think to myself that if they aren’t going to give, ignoring them is exactly what they expect. There is no reason to change, to see if the path we are on is taking us in the right direction, after all, alumni will always give.

Always.