And now, a word from one of our many non-sponsors

Tanya has more.

Short warning

Public safety be damned, Lubbock would rather have revenue. Radley Balko has the story.

16 words

Hat-tip Hominid Views, via thehim.

You’ll do, the movement you need is on your shoulder

Adult content

Hat-tip Ellroon.

Spice for the recipe

Punk, what have you wrought?

Issa

No time, like the present

And later he fell upon a sea of hands, who supported him and lifted him up

Res ipsa loquitur

American rounds, made in America?

Smoking, or non-smoking?

Hat-tip the Heretik.

It is a silly song

Stolen from Ellroon.

Plug in, turn on, hook up

Inter-City 123

Free concert up on the roof

Rock the Casbah.

Instead of war

System of music

Global warming a reality

We might as well make the best of it, and this will probably be good for Finland’s tourism and immigration, if they wanted such things. The downside to tourism (and for that matter, the general warming trend) is that we lose our traditional winter cultures. We need to preserve them, however, for future generations to survive a time when the world might again return to the past or present day temperatures. We as a human species need to be prepared to live in changing environments and teach our descendents how we have fashioned ways of surviving.

That, you see, is the purpose of religion.

It is a survival trait of the human race, and of all species of animal and plant. We alter ourselves by our choices of what we value and pass along to the next generation. In our choices of how and who we conceive with, on a physical plane but also on an intellectual or emotional plane, because these teach others and ourselves to make good or bad choices as we and others have made.

Here’s some pictures of Finland.

I pass along my understanding of the world as I gain it, and sometimes my understanding changes. I am willing to admit that I make mistakes. We all do, but not everyone will say so.

All of the mythologies are history. None of them are false, in the sense that they aren’t talking about real things, but they are metaphors to some extent, due to the limitations of human language. When and as we overcome our communication barriers, our language becomes stronger and our stories become better.

Not every story is a good example to follow. You need to be discerning. Consider whether the source is trustworthy. Test for yourself. What do you want to be when you evolve?

Whose example do you follow? Do you evolve beyond that?

What will humanity be like in the future? What do you think we can do right now?

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

– Mohandas Gandhi

Is it A.D. yet?

Who is being protected or served?

Hat-tip Radley Balko.

Those who give shall receive

Light blogging

I am working on a music synthesizer to demonstrate some of the principles that I’ve been studying and writing about for the past several years. Music and color and rhythm are all used to communicate, all can be languages, simultaneously with words and images, and it is done all the time by intuition. Our formal languages for describing them are too limited, our older instruments incapable of retuning dynamically and automatically, excepting the human voice.

So the end result of this is that I will spend less time blogging and more time programming for awhile. On the other hand, knowing myself I will still spend a fair amount of time doing this too, else losing touch with what is going on in the world, but I might have less time or inclination to post substantively.

John Conyers will uphold the constitution

Pelosi in ’07

Maha has t-shirts.

Imagine peace

Here. I guess it’s skippy’s day today.

Music is language, handwritten and spelled

skippy had it, watch and listen how a master does it.

Related posts:

• Music is language.
• Music is language.

Adult content

“Please don’t sue me. I’m just a fan.”

Blogging isn’t a bad life

Lee Rosenberg (thehim) is looking for a way to blog while keeping his bills paid. Our situation is similar, but in our case the insurance and everything are in place and we have just enough to pay our bills and tread water now. It would be nice if we could plan to have a family but we cannot even imagine it financially now. I cannot complain; we are not starving unless we try to live beyond our means. Once in a blue moon we might even go out to see a movie. (I highly recommend Pan’s Labyrinth.)

Oh, also I blog semi-anonymously. It’s not hard for people to figure out who I am if they care enough, but I have no desire for personal publicity outside those who know me by introduction. I’d love to have a larger readership but I don’t want to write for hire. I wouldn’t mind it if I could find a way to support myself on donations but it would have to be done in a way that would be kept away from me, lest I be corrupted by seeing what I can say that brings in more dollars.

I want to speak from my heart and tell you what seems right to me, so that if I make a mistake it was one not made with a gain in mind. I could choose to become wealthy, it would be easy enough if I had the will to subjugate myself to that end, to put aside my childish blogging. I could be a capitalist like the Goldman family, and I love them very much.

But to do this I would have to turn my back on injustice, to stop looking in the dark corners where people are being tortured in our names. To let the problems of the world be someone else’s problem, I cannot do this. To the extent I can integrate what I do with helping people, I will do it. While the current crisis is ongoing, the most helpful thing I can do is communicate a way that I see through the danger. I could be non-essential, maybe my own thoughts are not as good as someone else’s, but I don’t know that. For the want of a nail, the horse, the battle and finally the war were lost.

We are the ’80s

A few days late

NTodd has an interesting perspective on the issue of birth control, of which abortion is only one component. I tend not to write about this issue often because it is so deeply a matter of personal conscience what determines the relative value of a given human life over another. I also take a Monty Pythonesque view on the issue of contraception, which is to say their true view and not the view they satirize by their famous song.

Let me take a moment to point out the obvious hypocrisy of anyone with a purportedly pro-human life outlook being advocates of war. Obviously they value some lives more than others, and some are entirely dispensable to them.

No sane person wants there to be unwanted children or abortions, if it were possible to avoid having them without doing violence to women (or men). We should not want to mutilate people’s genitals, we should not want there to be any harm done to the innocent.

We don’t often enough stop to consider that the cause of violence is usually violence. Stop non-consensual sex and you will stop most or all of the abortions that occur. Stop adultery and you will stop the rest.

Oh, but you don’t want to stop adultery, going by what I see.

Except to punish the woman, because she is the one who is subject to violence from her spouse if she is caught with child.

We have to end the violence done to women, and you know that divorce must be a right for that very reason. But what many of you don’t know or publicly admit due to the risk of persecution is that violence can be tamed by cannabis — marijuana. It is a lie and an obvious one at that when prohibitionists associate cannabis with violence, when the only violence is involved in the criminal aspects of prohibition itself.

End cannabis prohibition and you will see that the very thing you criticize about “hippies” is their non-violence.

End cannabis prohibition and you will end the war in Iraq and in the rest of the middle east. Cannabis can be grown to fuel our economy. Cars and trucks can run on clean biological oils. Paints and chemicals can be made from it. Cannabis may be sacred but she is also profane. We have a petroleum economy today but we cannot have a petroleum economy forever.

Break it down.

Give a sign, if this reaches you.

Turn this mutha out.

Modern conservatives

Animated.

God bless Barack Obama

Protect him from harm.

Athenae has a report from Harvey, Louisiana, at First Draft’s new digs.

War is the enemy of the poor, and the rich

When you spend lives and treasure to destroy lives and treasure, you impoverish yourself.

Listen to Doctor King.

Please read

driftglass.

Now is the time

Via.

Adult content

End cannabis prohibition and the war will end peacefully. That is my advice.

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Update: replacement video:

Vox populi

Now it’s just about time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.

Hat-tip JC Christian.

US consulate in Iran captured, hostages being held

Remember that story?

A lot of folks considered that an act of aggression against the sovereign United States of America, as I recall.

So what does it mean when the Iranian consulate in Iraq is captured, and hostages are taken…by the United States?

Read more from scout_prime and the BBC.

Red, white and blue

The blue is for consensual democracy, unity of purpose

The red is for the blood that has been shed

The white is for peace, a time to heal

The stars are for the heroes in the firmament

The stripes are for the cages we have escaped

Free at last, free at last.