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I have never had a positive relationship with sex. I discovered masturbation at a very young age, when I was between 7 and 8 years old. I used it as a way to escape from the feeling of sadness and abandonment I felt at home.
I watched movies, books and even on television.
I never had a healthy role model for sexuality either. Since my parents barely touched each other.
They also never had a talk with me about sex, so everything I discovered I had to do on my own by watching movies and searching for information. As the years went by, I spent more and more time consuming pornography, until it got to the point where I no longer felt aroused when I was with other people.
I was very lost. I came to doubt who I was and my sexual orientation. I was constantly masturbating to escape and to recreate in my imagination situations of success that I didn’t have in real life.
I wanted so badly to feel that someone loved me, however, I was not willing to let anyone in. After a while and after a failed attempt at a relationship, I ended up realizing that what was happening to me was not simply that I really liked sex, but that I had a problem.
1. Sex addiction is something more than just wanting to have sex all the time
Some people think that sex addicts are sex addicts because they think about sex all the time, but this is not exactly the case. My patient did not think about sex out of desire, but felt an urgent need to have sex or masturbate to feel good about himself.
The fact that a person is very sexually active is not a sex addiction either. The question here is, for what purpose is the sexual encounter being pursued?
2. Sex addiction is not a minor problem
It is common, when talking about sex addiction, to speak in a jocular tone. However, it is an addiction that generates as much or more suffering as any other. The person suffers abstinence and feels empty if he or she does not have sex. In addition, the stigma associated with sex addiction is brutal.
Sex addiction is one of the most complicated addictions to overcome since the triggering stimulus of “consumption” is constantly incorporated.
That is, any addiction involves a mental and emotional sacrifice to be overcome. For example, if I have an addiction to cocaine, it will be easier to overcome it if I do not frequent places where it is passed or simply, I do not have it. However, in sex addiction the opportunity to carry out the addictive behavior is constant.
3. People addicted to sex do not want sex all the time
It is common to think that the person addicted to sex is like a bottomless sack, insatiable and always wants sex. This is not so. The person with sex addiction seeks sex as a way to compensate for an inner emptiness. In fact, on many occasions, sexual intercourse or masturbation takes place without desire.
4. Being addicted to sex does not mean being depraved
If you are a man and addicted to sex, in many cases it is normalized: “if you are a man, it is normal to be addicted to sex”. Although this is not always the case, the male sex addict is also perceived as someone strange, a failure or desperate.
In the case of women, the stigma is even greater. The line of thinking is that the female sex addict is simply a slut. These stigmas generate great suffering to the people who seem them and end up building a sense of identity.
5. The objective is not to stop having sex
The objective is to cure that which leads us to consume sex for what it is not. To return to having a natural relationship with sex, which will take some time, as the body and mind need to be re-sensitized to the stimulus.
The goal is not sobriety.
If your case is that of a person who is in recovery or looking for solutions for it, I would like to tell you that you don’t have to feel ashamed of what is happening to you. It doesn’t say anything bad about you, it’s simply the way you learned to support your emptiness.
Sexuality is not bad, nor will it ever be, as long as it is consensual. The problem with addiction is not that you are having sex, it is the suffering. In fact, one of the goals is to get you back to enjoying sex with full satisfaction.


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The annual Bikes Fight Cancer charity ride was held on Saturday at Tree House Brewery in Deerfield. The Northampton Cycling Club sponsored one of the rest stops for the event and had several riders participating.
Posts Tagged: Bikes Fight Cancer
The annual Bikes Fight Cancer Charity Ride is this Saturday, June 18th. In addition to having several riders in the event, the Northampton Cycling Club is sponsoring one of the ride’s rest stops. There are still a few spots left for the event. If you hurry, you may be able to get one of the final few spots for the fun day of riding.

domain: news


text:
- no chr.!
Since 84 days two labor activists - one official of the irregular workers' union of Hyundai Motors and the other a former irregular worker at the automaker - are now in sit-in strike on a power supply post...
Two weeks ago The Korea Herald reported that "A local court ordered two Hyundai Motor Co. contract workers to end their two-month protest atop a power-transmission tower, saying rejection of the ruling will cause them to pay daily fines of 300,000 won (US$280)..."
And it seems that y'day was the first 'rehearsal' to end the protest by force in the - possibly - near future: So-called 'security guards', i.e. thugs hired by Hyudai Motors, tried to storm and demolish the Solidarity Camp. But as you can see... their 'performance'(^^) FAILED(!!!):
☞ 현대차 송전탑 강제철거 용역, ‘미성년자’ 고용 (NewsCham, 1.08)
☞ Protesting labor activist offered full-time status... (Hankyoreh, 1.08)
☞ Two Hyundai Motor contract workers ordered to end protest... (K. Herald, 2012.12.27)


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It seems that "Mortal Kombat X" is doing more than just following the footsteps of the previous best-selling game--it serves as proof that the studio has challenged themselves to upping the level of the game even more.
"We didn't want to do like just re-skin the same game with next-generation graphics, so we're taking a really impressive approach to adding new elements to the game-gameplay elements and new characters, just a ton of new characters," said Boon during the demo interview as seen below.
Given that the storyline-as little as is known about it-will take place years after "Mortal Kombat 9," aged characters are to be expected (just imagine Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade already having a daughter in the form of Cassie Cage).
For fans of "Mortal Kombat 9," NetherRealms will still be making use of the meters in "Mortal Kombat X," which add another layer to the fighting experience, given everything that has been revealed so far.
"We refined it (the energy meter). That's one of the things that I think had worked out really well with MK9 or 2011 Mortal Kombat," said Boon. "You can do so many things with it. You can enhance your special moves, you can do those breakers, break out of a combo. And you can do that kind of crazy X-ray moves, which is kind of synonymous with Mortal Kombat."
Boon also promised that, while long-time Mortal Kombat fans will find familiar faces and experiences in "Mortal Kombat X," they have also incorporated as many new elements to differentiate the franchise.
"There's gonna be some familiarity but also a newness involved there. We also just want to add new elements, you know gameplay-wise, the character variations, the environment, but also character-wise," said Boon. "We just want people to say, "Who's the big hulk with the lady on his shoulders?" We want to introduce as much elements, not to just rest back on the old game."
When it comes to the story line and who the big bad character is, it seems that Boon and the rest of the NetherRealms team will still have a lot of teasers ahead as they will be revealing who it will be in the coming months leading to the release of the game.
But Boon did give a hint on who it could be: "It's gonna be a fun surprise returning character. Not a lot of people will see it coming but there's a lot of surprises in store."
Gameplay experience: Fatality and Brutality in MK
The Fatality part in every "Mortal Kombat X" fight is possibly one of the more interesting but also more brutal of each entire fight. From Sub-Zero breaking the spine and torso of Torr to D'Vorah's face-eating bugs defeating her enemy, there's really a lot of gore going around. And in next-gen quality graphics, as the trademark gore in the "Mortal Kombat" franchise has risen another notch with "Mortal Kombat X."
In this interview by IGN, you can see Cassie Cage fighting against D'Vorah. Cassie's Fatality is brutal, though very coy at that, with the use of gun and a bubblegum. However, according to PC Mag's own hands-on with "Mortal Kombat X," Cassie also has her own take of her dad's "floor-split/groin-punch" move.
Boon has also explained the dynamism of the environment that the pair is fighting in. Aside from providing leverage for characters, there are also some elements in the environment that can be used in combat. Particularly in The Cove, the swept bodies in the background can actually be thrown at a player.
Comparing the environment to NetherRealm's other fighting game, the report states that its use is more for leverage than being used as makeshift weapons.
As an end note on Fatality, Gamerant reports that, compared to its predecessor, "Mortal Kombat X" may be looking at more than just two Fatality moves, bringing it to a total of five all over.
Read more gaming and tech news:

domain: game


text:
Outdoor 2017 How-To Reschedule a Game
Rescheduling due to field closure/weather and other requests
Rescheduling due to Field Closure/Inclement Weather
- STEP 1: If you require a game to be rescheduled due to a field closure or inclement weather, review and complete the CMSA Game Rescheduling Form: Weather.
- STEP 2: Send the completed form to firstname.lastname@example.org a minimum of 3 days before the rescheduled game for CMSA to provide a referee.
Note: Artificial Turf fields are considered ‘all-weather’ and closure will be at the discretion of the referee.
Other Rescheduling Requests
- STEP 1: If you require a game to be rescheduled due to travelling to a tournament or a special event, the requesting team must send an email to email@example.com stating the reason for the reschedule.
- STEP 2: if the request has been approved, review and complete the CMSA Game Rescheduling Form: Other.
- STEP 3: Send the completed form to firstname.lastname@example.org no later than THREE FULL BUSINESS DAYS prior to the original game date OR prior to the rescheduled game date (whichever comes first).
- STEP 4: Once approved, teams will receive a game update email and the game will be changed on the CMSA website. It is NOT approved until the website has been updated.
Note: Requests due to player vacation, injury and/or coach availability will not be approved.
The CMSA Rescheduling Procedure can also be found online, HERE. Should you have any questions regarding game rescheduling, please contact the CMSA Office.

domain: sports


We liked this note that was sent out by SocGen’s Kit Juckes this morning:
It wouldn’t be Christmas without Paul Krugman telling the US government it’s OK to spend money. Krugman thinks that anyone who worries about a disaster coming from the scale of US debt is a doom-mongerer. Especially the WSJ.
That’s snarky, but that is what Krugman’s Christmas eve column is about.
Essentially it’s a reminder of one of his favourite topics: That the prophets of fiscal doom have been warning ever since the crisis that the large deficits were going to spark surging rates and bond vigilantes and fiscal crises and Greece-like outcomes and that none of it has come true.
But it’s not just that the prophets of doom are wrong, it’s that they’re completely blind to being wrong, or at least would never admit that they are. Hence the cult:
In any case, some of the most prominent deficit scolds have indeed been willing to talk about dates, or at least time horizons. In early 2011 Erskine Bowles confidently declared that we would face a fiscal crisis within around two years unless something like the Bowles-Simpson deficit plan was enacted, and Alan Simpson chimed in to say that it would be less than two years. I guess he has about 10 weeks left. But again, don’t expect either Mr. Simpson or Mr. Bowles to admit that there might have been something fundamentally wrong with their analysis.
No, very few of the prophets of fiscal doom have acknowledged the failure of their prophecies to come true so far. And those who have admitted surprise seem more annoyed than chastened. For example, back in 2010 Alan Greenspan — who is, for some reason, still treated as an authority figure — conceded that despite large budget deficits, “inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued.” But he went on to declare, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.” How dare reality not validate my fears!
The key thing we need to understand, however, is that the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.
And of course it’s not just what we’ve seen in the last few years.
We posted a clip yesterday showing Alan Simpson and other Senators in 1990 warning about deficits, and the need to rein in medicare, and how crucial it was to rein them in to foster job growth and all that. Once people get wedded to this idea, nobody ever changes their minds.


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|Album/Movie||Bam Bam Karaoke Version|
|Singers||, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,|
|Music Composer||Camila Cabello, Ed Sheeran, Eric Frederic, Ã©dgar Barrera, Cheche Alara, Scott Harris|
|Lyricist||Camila Cabello, Ed Sheeran, Eric Frederic, Ã©dgar Barrera, Cheche Alara, Scott Harris|
|Other||Antonio Sol, George Shelby, Manny Marroquin, Cheche Alara, Ed Sheeran, Ã©dgar Barrera, Logan Taylor, Eric Jorgensen, Michelle Mancini, Ricky Reed, Kevin Ricard, Michael Cordone, James Kirk, Carlos MurguÃa, Ethan Shumaker, Gerardo Rodriguez, Camila Cabello, Bill Malina, James Zavaleta, Camila Cabello Feat. Ed Sheeran, Ramon Stagnaro, Carlitos Del Puerto, Luis Conte, Harry Kim, Daniel Uribe|
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domain: artistic


Publication: Geo-Referenced Mapping through an Anti-Collision Radar Aboard an Unmanned Aerial System
Our colleagues from the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence published an article on MDPI, titled “Geo-Referenced Mapping through an Anti-Collision Radar Aboard an Unmanned Aerial System”.
Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have enormous potential in many fields of application, especially when used in combination with autonomous guidance. An open challenge for safe autonomous flight is to rely on a mapping system for local positioning and obstacle avoidance. In this article, the authors propose a radar-based mapping system both for obstacle detection and for path planning. The radar equipment used is a single-chip device originally developed for automotive applications that has good resolution in azimuth, but poor resolution in elevation. This limitation can be critical for UAS application, and it must be considered for obstacle-avoidance maneuvers and for autonomous path-planning selection. However, the radar-mapping system proposed in this paper was successfully tested in the following different scenarios: a single metallic target in grass, a vegetated scenario, and in the close proximity of a ruined building.


A Toronto woman who went to the gym hoping to break a sweat ended up breaking a whole lot more when she was told she had to be a member to use the equipment, according to Global News.
Police say the unidentified woman went into a Toronto Goodlife Fitness gym on June 3 and asked to use the equipment, according to the Toronto Sun. But when she was told she could not use it unless she was a member, she suddenly became "irate," the paper reported.
Then things got ugly.
Troy Joe, a Toronto musician, posted videos on Instagram of the woman swinging and throwing weights around the gym and destroying equipment. One video shows the woman walking up to a treadmill with a dumbbell and smashing the console and screen of the machine.
A gym-goer on her right watches for a moment, then grabs his towel and walks away. Others just keep on exercising.
Another video shows the woman speaking with one man and holding a small dumbbell in one hand before turning around and hurling it at the wall. Then she walks around, picks up another, and hurls that one at the wall too.
A third video shows a group of people surrounding the woman and telling her to leave. Another post only shows a picture of a smashed window.
Advisory: One of the videos contains strong language.
Police say the 38-year-old woman was arrested and charged with mischief over $5,000, according to Global News. Nobody was injured, but a window, mirror and treadmill were damaged, causing about $7,000 worth of damage in total, police told the Toronto Sun. Her name was not released because mental health may have been an issue, according to the paper.
A representative for Goodlife Fitness told Fox 11 it was cooperating with law enforcement.
"GoodLife Fitness strives to provide safe and welcoming spaces, and we are grateful that no one was injured," a representative for the company told the station.


POST UPDATED (See end)
A secret recording of a campaign strategy session between U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell and his advisors was taped by leaders of the Progress Kentucky super PAC, says a longtime local Democratic operative.
Mother Jones Magazine released the tape this week. The meeting itself took place on Feb. 2.
Jacob Conway, who is on the executive committee of the Jefferson County Democratic Party, says that day, Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison, who founded and volunteered for Progress Kentucky, respectively, bragged to him about how they recorded the meeting.
Conway says neither the local nor the state Democratic party had any part in the incident.
Instead of wasting the FBI’s time, McConnell might want to invest in some soundproofing for his Kentucky campaign headquarters.
Morrison and Reilly did not attend the open house, but they told Conway they arrived later and were able to hear the meeting from the hallway.
“They were in the hallway after the, I guess after the celebration and hoopla ended, apparently these people broke for lunch and had a strategy meeting, which is, in every campaign I’ve been affiliated with, makes perfect sense,” says Conway. “One of them held the elevator, the other one did the recording and they left. That was what they told to me from them directly.”
The meeting room door is next to the elevators on that floor. McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton has told multiple media outlets the door was shut and locked on Feb. 2. But the door has a vent at the bottom and a large gap underneath….if the conversation was audible from a hallway, it’s disputable whether recording qualifies as eavesdropping.
And perhaps McConnell’s campaign manager Jesse Benton might want to tone down his public statements just a tiny bit. From Mother Jones:
A day after Mother Jones published audio of a Louisville meeting in which Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his campaign staff discussed opposition research on prospective challengers, McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton has validated Godwin’s law by playing the Hitler card. In an interview with NBC News, Benton compared the leaking of the recording to Nazi Germany. “This is Gestapo-kind of scare tactics, and we’re not going to stand for it,” Benton told Michael O’Brien.
The Gestapo, who served as Hitler’s secret police from 1933 until 1945, were best known for enforcing a reign of terror typified by abductions and executions, as well as aiding and abetting genocide. That’s all quite a bit different than recording 12 minutes of a political strategy session or publishing a legally-obtained tape.
And there’s no evidence that the audio was the result, as the McConnell campaign has insisted, of a Watergate-style bugging operation. Still, that hasn’t stopped McConnell from taking the opportunity to play the victim, blasting out a fundraising pitch accusing the “liberal media” of “illegal and underhanded tactics.”
In other news, Mother Jones reports that
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog, has asked the Senate ethics committee and the Federal Bureau of Investigationto probe whether aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell improperly conducted political opposition research on federal government time.
A tape of a February McConnell campaign meeting that Mother Jones released Tuesdayincludes a section in which a McConnell aide states that McConnell’s “LAs”—congressional parlance for legislative assistants—helped gather background information on Ashley Judd, who was at the time considered a potential opponent in McConnell’s 2014 reelection race. The tape also refers to a “Josh” who worked on the research, which CREW’s complaint speculates might be Josh Holmes, McConnell’s congressional chief of staff.
Senate ethics rules forbid legislative assistants and other Senate employees from participating in political activities on government time. “In general, however, the ethics rules do not bar staffers from engaging in campaign activity provided they do it on their own time and do not involve government resources or property,” Tara Malloy, a government ethics expert at the Campaign Legal Center, told Mother Jones on Tuesday. You can read the relevant section of the ethics rules here. Bottom line: If McConnell’s aides did the research in their free time, they’re in the clear. But if they used government resources or worked on political matters on government time, they could be in trouble.
This is an open thread.
More is coming out on this story. TPM reports:
The co-founder of Progress Kentucky, a liberal group accused of recording a private strategy session by aides of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConell on the potential candidacy of actress Ashley Judd, has denied doing so, at least according to Joe Arnold, a political editor for the local TV station WHAS11.
The county Democratic Party official who outed two Democratic super PAC operatives in the Mitch McConnell secret tape case has been contacted by the FBI.
Jacob Conway, who sits on the executive committee of the Jefferson County, Ky. Democratic Party, told TPM on Thursday that he was going in to be interviewed at the bureau’s Louisville, Ky. office….
According to Conway, the FBI contacted him only after a local NPR station published its story in which Conway claimed that two local activists from the group Progress Kentucky, Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison, had admitted to him that they were the source of the recordings published by Mother Jones earlier this week.
Erik Wemple posted yesterday on the legal issues related to David Corn receiving the tape of McConnell and aides: How did Mother Jones obtain McConnell tape?
I’ll post any further updates in the comments to this post.
Tuesday Reads: Margaret Thatcher’s “Dark Legacy,” Death of a Feminist Revolutionary, and Mitch McConnell’s Ugly PlansPosted: April 9, 2013
The death of Margaret Thatcher is still dominating the news this morning. It seems she was one of those public figures that inspired varied but passionate reactions–you either loved her or hated her.
I was a teenage Thatcherite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity – the part no one ever truly gave her credit for – was her gender. She came from a small grocer’s shop in a northern town and went on to educate herself in chemistry at Oxford, and then law. To put it mildly, those were not traditional decisions for a young woman with few means in the 1950s. She married a smart businessman, reared two children and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Tory party.
She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it – coining a new and very transitive verb, handbagging, to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared ministers or clueless interviewers. Perhaps in Toynbee’s defense, Thatcher was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader; she never appointed a single other woman to her cabinet over eleven years; she was contemptuous toward identity politics; and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.
Her policies “inspired” the revolutionary reactions that created a “cultural transformation.”
Thatcher’s economic liberalization came to culturally transform Britain. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, especially from South Asia, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation. The seeds of today’s multicultural, global London – epitomized by that Olympic ceremony – were sown by Thatcher’s will-power.
And that was why she ultimately failed, as every politician always ultimately does. She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, money-making opportunist. The ripple effect of new money, a new middle class, a new individualism meant that Blair’s re-branded Britain – cool Britannia, with its rave subculture, its fashionistas, its new cuisine, its gay explosion, its street-art, its pop music – was in fact something Blair inherited from Thatcher.
Of course Sullivan no longer lives in Great Britain, and he has the means to avoid the worst effects of the elite’s austerity policies regardless of where he lives. Others aren’t so fortunate.
Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher‘s death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power.
Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on.
To cheers of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead,” posters of Thatcher were held aloft as reggae basslines pounded.
Clive Barger, a 62-year-old adult education tutor, said he had turned out to mark the passing of “one of the vilest abominations of social and economic history”.
He said: “It is a moment to remember. She embodied everything that was so elitist in terms of repressing people who had nothing. She presided over a class war.”
Builder Phil Lewis, 47, a veteran of the 1990 poll tax riots, said he had turned out to recall the political struggles the Thatcher years had embroiled him in. “She ripped the arsehole out of this country and we are still suffering the consequences.”
Just as Ronald Reagan did to the U.S.–and we’re still suffering the consequences.
Here’s a video from Brixton.
Hugo Young, Thatcher biographer, writes in The Guardian: Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared. For Young, a positive was Thatcher’s indifference to her popularity with the public.
I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. The machinery of modern political management – polls, consulting, focus groups – is deployed mainly to discover what will make a party and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren’t about getting the leader liked. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident.
But this attitude “didn’t come without a price” and “Thatcher left a dark legacy…”
What happened at the hands of this woman’s indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs. It led to riots that nobody needed. More insidiously, it fathered a mood of tolerated harshness. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Everything was justified as long as it made money – and this, too, is still with us.
Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. But the sense of community evaporated. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn’t care if it happened or not. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse….
[I]t’s now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain’s idea of its own future. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence.
At least the British media isn’t trying to canonize Thatcher as the corporate media in the U.S. did to Reagan.
A Less Remarked Upon Death: Shulamith Firestone
At The New Yorker, Susan Faludi pays tribute to a feminist icon of the 1970s, “Death of a Revolutionary: Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it.”
When Shulamith Firestone’s body was found late last August, in her studio apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement walkup on East Tenth Street, she had been dead for some days. She was sixty-seven, and she had battled schizophrenia for decades, surviving on public assistance. There was no food in the apartment, and one theory is that Firestone starved, though no autopsy was conducted, by preference of her Orthodox Jewish family. Such a solitary demise would have been unimaginable to anyone who knew Firestone in the late nineteen-sixties, when she was at the epicenter of the radical-feminist movement, surrounded by some of the same women who, a month after her death, gathered in St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, to pay their respects.
The memorial service verged on radical-feminist revival. Women distributed flyers on consciousness-raising, and displayed copies of texts published by the Redstockings, a New York group that Firestone co-founded. The WBAI radio host Fran Luck called for the Tenth Street studio to be named the Shulamith Firestone Memorial Apartment, and rented “in perpetuity” to “an older and meaningful feminist.” Kathie Sarachild, who had pioneered consciousness-raising and coined the slogan “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” in 1968, proposed convening a Shulamith Firestone Women’s Liberation Memorial Conference on What Is to Be Done. After several calls from the dais to “seize the moment” and “keep it going,” a dozen women decamped to an organizing meeting at Sarachild’s apartment.
I well remember reading Firestone’s book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. It was mind-blowing stuff in those days.
In the late nineteen-sixties, Firestone and a small cadre of her “sisters” were at the radical edge of a movement that profoundly changed American society. At the time, women held almost no major elected positions, nearly every prestigious profession was a male preserve, homemaking was women’s highest calling, abortion was virtually illegal, and rape was a stigma to be borne in silence. Feminism had been in the doldrums ever since the first wave of the American women’s movement won the vote, in 1920, and lost the struggle for greater emancipation. Feminist energy was first co-opted by Jazz Age consumerism, then buried in decades of economic depression and war, until the dissatisfactions of postwar women, famously described by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), gave rise to a “second wave” of feminism. The radical feminists emerged alongside a more moderate women’s movement, forged by such groups as the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and others, and championed by such publications as Ms., founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. That movement sought, as now’s statement of purpose put it, “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society,” largely by means of equal pay and equal representation. The radical feminists, by contrast, wanted to reconceive public life and private life entirely.
What a brilliant tribute by Faludi. It’s well worth the read.
Mother Jones’s David Corn has gotten his hands on a tape of “a private meeting between the Senate GOP leader and campaign aides reveals how far they were willing to go to defeat” Ashley Judd.
On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to “point out” the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader. During this strategy session—a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones—McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views….
For much of the Judd discussion, McConnell was silent as aides reviewed the initial oppo research they had collected on Judd and weighed all the ways they could pummel her. The recording was provided to Mother Jones last week by a source who requested anonymity. (The recording can be found here; a transcript is here.) McConnell’s Senate office and his campaign office did not respond to requests for comment.
The aide who led the meeting began his presentation with a touch of glee: “I refer to [Judd] as sort of the oppo research situation where there’s a haystack of needles, just because truly, there’s such a wealth of material.” He ran through the obvious: Judd was a prominent supporter of President Barack Obama, Obamacare, abortion rights, gay marriage, and climate change action. He pointed out that she is “anti-coal.”
But the McConnell gang explored going far beyond Judd’s politics and policy preferences. This included her mental health. The meeting leader noted:
She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.
So what? Mitch McConnell is a sick, closeted, hateful old freak who appears to lack any semblance of human feelings.
I’m running out of space, so I’ll add a few more links in the comments. I hope you’ll do the same. What are you reading and blogging about today?
I’m in a bad mood, hopefully the Relpax I took will kick in. Teenagers! Nuff said.
I had a couple of links from Financial Times for you tonight, but the pay-wall is keeping me from posting them.
So, this is all I’ve got for you:
Sleep loss can be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s, new research suggests.
The findings, from a study of apparently healthy volunteers, point the way to new methods of detecting and monitoring the disease, say scientists.
Evidence indicates that the link between sleep and Alzheimer’s runs in two directions. Alterations in the brain caused by the disease may disrupt sleep, and poor sleep also promotes the changes.
Lead scientist Professor David Holtzmann, from Washington University School of Medicine in the US, said: “This link may provide us with an easily detectable sign of Alzheimer’s pathology.
“As we start to treat people who have markers of early Alzheimer’s, changes in sleep in response to treatments may serve as an indicator of whether the new treatments are succeeding.”
Sleep problems are common among people with full-blown Alzheimer’s. The new research suggests they may also be a sign of early-developing disease and symptoms to come.
That article alone was enough to keep me awake all last night.
And then there is this crap: Ashley Judd Is Making Kentucky Democrats Nervous
What the hell is it with the democrats in Kentucky? That is ridiculous.
This is an open thread, and angry one at that….feel free to rant and rave in the comments.
Hey, I’ve got some funny things for you today. I am actually in a good mood. My laptop is getting fixed tomorrow, finally!
Early this morning, I saw a link on Drudge..about Ashley Judd. It went to the Daily Caller and it was your typical Drudge hyped-up link. I wish I had taken a screen shot of it. But…anyway. I figured I would wait and see if anyone picked it up.
Late Sunday evening, the Daily Caller‘s entertainment editor Taylor Bigler posted a short item on actress, activist, potential US Senate candidate, and rape survivor Ashley Judd. The post notes that Judd, who seems to be laying the groundwork for a 2014 challenge to Republican Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, has appeared in a bunch of movies naked, half-naked, or partially naked. The Caller piece cites her performances in films like Norma Jean and Marilyn and Eye of the Beholder, and is based on data from MrSkin.com, an online database of nude and sex scenes celebs have done on-screen. MrSkin.com—which I will decline to link to in this post—gives Judd four stars and ranks her as “Hall of Fame Nudity!”
Judd has discussed her nude scenes candidly before. She turned down an audition for the female lead in a 1992 Christian Slater film because the audition demanded a topless screen test. “My mother worked too hard for me to take off my clothes in my first movie,” she told People magazine. And in this interview with Delaware County Magazine, Judd opened up about stripping down for the sex scene in Double Jeopardy, one of the films referenced in the Daily Caller story.
“But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us?” Bigler wrote, with tongue firmly ensconced in cheek.
MoJo goes on to document the Republicans who have bared all.
Another double standard link for you, There Is A Solution to the Housework Wars | The Raw Story
The Atlantic has been running content from this new book out about how middle class American families manage in this era of two-income families, a book called Fast Forward Family that I am now curious to read. I made gentle fun on Twitter of an earlier dispatch deeply analyzing who says hi to whom when they get home, but of much more interest to me is their research into the gendered division and management of housework. Hurt feelings when you get home from work are one thing, but the continuing expectation that women devote more time to childcare and housework than men is a major roadblock for women finally achieving social, political and economic equality. From every work level from working class jobs to executive offices, women lose out in the workplace because they have more to do at home, and find that they have less free time and opportunity to enjoy the lives they work so hard to maintain.
But the discussion of how to rectify this problem always stalls out the second anyone suggests that men step up and do their fair share of housework. Women are usually blamed, with men invariably complaining that their wives are somehow just born with higher standards for cleanliness and order.* Women are also blamed for not speaking up more, as if the time and energy investment—as well as the negative reaction you invariably get—that goes into nagging isn’t a loss for women. Women are also blamed for being control freaks that don’t “let” men do more around the house. The entire discussion gets so derailed into blaming women that men are conveniently forgotten. The problem of men not doing more is inevitably cast as women’s problem, and so if men don’t do more, it’s inevitably cast as women’s failure.
So what did the researchers find about division of labor and the stability/happiness of marriages? A lot that will disappoint the woman-blamers out there. The big thing is that they acknowledged what I call the “nagging differential”: Even if a couple agrees to split the housework fairly, the expectation remainst that it’s a woman’s job to keep track of what needs to be done and to do the hard work of assigning chores. Beyond just being unfair—keeping track of stuff is a chore and quietly leaving it off the mental spreadsheet is bullshit—this puts women in an impossible situation. If she assigns her partner his chores, she’s a nag, which no one wants to be. It often ends up being less work to do it yourself than to nag him into it. Thus, even when couples supposedly agree to do more, the fact that he’s waiting around for instructions effectively means he gets to do less work.
And one last link for you this evening…but in this link…the girl is getting the praise in a mostly male dominated scene. Six-year-old breakdancing girl wows crowd at international competition | The Raw Story
Watch this video, this kid is amazing:
A 6-year-old breakdancing phenom is on the verge of becoming an online star after video of her performance at an international competition was posted on YouTube on Sunday.
The girl, identified as “Bgirl Terra,” was filmed competing in the “Baby Battle” division of the Chelles Battle Pro tournament in Paris against an unidentified older boy. The footage of their battle has already drawn more than 250,000 views in just two days.
Though no slouch himself, the boy quickly found himself just as impressed as the crowd; at one point in their battle, he points toward Terra in acknowledgement of her skills.
This is an open thread…
This past week I was watching TCM, and realized just how whacked out this world has become. Well, not this world, more specifically our world…here in the US.
Here is what I mean…while watching Anna and the King of Siam, the one with Irene Dunn and Rex Harrison, one particular scene got me thinking.
Remember when the King summons Anna one late night, because he has a question to ask her about the Bible and Moses claim of how long it took God to make the world ?
King: Mem, I think your Moses shall have been a fool.
King: Moses, Moses, Moses. I think he shall have been a fool. Here it stands, written by him: ‘The world was created in six days. ‘
King: Then what is your opinion of this thing as stated by Moses?
Anna: Your Majesty…the Bible was not written by men of science. It was written by men of faith. It was their explanation of the miracle of creation… which is just as great a miracle… whether it took six days or many centuries. I think science does not contradict the Bible. It has only made us more aware of how great the miracle was.
King: Well, I still think your Moses shall have been a fool. You may go.
I think the King would thing our current day GOP representatives are fools. What do you think?
I have to say, the GOP is not only “stupid” it is “crazy!”
Anyway, here are your links for today, the GOP has started blaming the Sequester on Obama…
From the Maddow Blog: The 2011 ransom note and the GOP’s sequester
A Republican National Committee spokesperson, echoing his party’s favorite new talking point, insists this is all President Obama’s fault.
Tim Miller obviously isn’t the only one making this argument. On the contrary, every speech, interview, and press release I’ve seen from GOP officials in recent weeks includes an obligatory reference to Obama having come up with the sequester.
This next link makes me thing that perhaps the GOP are not completely “stupid” by showing they are a little frightened of Ashley Judd making a run on Mitch McConnell. From Vanity Fair: Karl Rove, Apparently Not a Fan of Kiss the Girls, Launches Aggressive Anti–Ashley Judd Campaign
As evidenced by his embarrassing Election Night temper tantrum last fall, Karl Rove is not one to concede easily. Not when it comes to presidential elections; caloric restrictions, we guess; and completely speculative political runs by Hollywood figures. Proving the latter point, the Republican strategist’s American Crossroads Super PAC unveiled a digital ad against Ashley Judd on Wednesday. It has previously been reported that Judd is considering a senatorial run against Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the considerably less photogenic Senate minority leader who was voted the nation’s least popular senator late last year.
Emptywheel takes a look at a new law per Homeland Security: Every Laptop and Cell Phone in Detroit (and Dearborn) Can Be Searched at Will
I’m not really sure how Detroit is supposed to pursue an arts-based resurgence if the Department of Homeland Security maintains that it can seize any electronics along the nation’s borders — which extend 100 miles and therefore include the bulk of the population of Michigan.
This next link was very interesting, a quick look at the Dawes Act in relation to Labor Laws: This Day in Labor History: February 8, 1887 – Lawyers, Guns & Money
On February 8, 1887, President Grover Cleveland signed the Dawes Severalty Act into law. The Dawes Act created a process to split up Indian reservations in order to create individual parcels of land and then sell the remainder off to white settlers. One of the worst laws in American history, the Dawes Act is not only a stark reminder of Euro-American colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples, but also of the role dominant ideas of work on the land have in promoting racist and imperialist ends.
We might not think of the Dawes Act as labor history. But I want to make the beginning of a case that it is absolutely central to American labor history, a point I will expand upon in the future. Labor history is not just unionism. It is histories and traditions of work. The Dawes Act was absolutely about destroying traditions of Native American labor and replacing it with European notions of rural work. That it did so while opening more land to white people was a central benefit.
Read the rest at the link.
Looks like that python hunt in the Everglades isn’t doing so hot: Florida Python Challenge Unsuccessful – Everglades Burmese Python Hunt Not Going Well
The idea for the competition — which ends on Sunday, the first day of the unloved Year of the Snake — was partially brain-fathered by Gov. Rick “I’ve ridden elephants — I’ve never tried to shoot one” Scott. The hope was to at least partially rid the land of the invasive Burmese pythons that have set up their own stronghold. The guy or team that grabs the most wins $1,500. The one who snags the longest, gets $1,000. Over 1,500 people from across the nation have waded into the park so far, and some, like the two dehydrated men, who are from Tennessee, have slept in their cars during the hunt. It costs them $25 to participate.
But even before the rescue, the competition hasn’t been going too well. As of Tuesday, only 50 had been captured. Not that it would’ve really mattered. As U.S. Geological Survey python expert Robert Reed told us a few weeks ago, “You won’t find any fewer than 10,000. But between 10,000 and 100,000? That’s anyone’s guess.”
Okay, from nasty snakes to cute puppies, Pooches on parade: man’s best dressed friend at carnivals across the world
Here’s a selection of dogs that are making a statement in dog parade sections of carnivals around the world.
Click here to view the gallery
Last night on Discovery, they had their show on The Giant Squid. This next article is also about squid, the flying kind…Revealed: the secret that makes flying squid faster than Usain Bolt
Scientists in Japan have calculated that squid can fly through the air faster than Usain Bolt can run, in a study that confirms the extraordinary aerial prowess of the edible mollusc.
A study based on photographs of flying squid in the Pacific Ocean estimates that they can reach a speed of up to 11.2 metres per second, which is significantly faster than the 10.31 metres per second that Bolt averaged in the 100 metre final at the London Olympics.
Over the past few years, a number of anecdotal accounts have emerged of squid streaking through the air above the sea for several metres and now a team of Japanese marine biologists have photographed them doing it en masse.
Be sure to take a look at that link, there are some images and diagrams that are so interesting…not only from the nature perspective, but also on aerodynamic and hydrodynamic levels as well.
We started this post talking about stupidity and now we end it with a few links about stupidity. The first one is real, Thieves jailed after losing £2m loot
Two inept thieves who stole Chinese artefacts worth £2m from a museum but then could not find where they had stashed them were handed lengthy jail sentences.
These guys couldn’t remember where they stashed the loot. Guess in real life there are crooks that are too dumb and stupid to become successful crooks.
Earlier this week TCM also had another great film, Big Deal on Madonna Street, which if anyone has a chance to see it…needs to see it. It is hilarious. An Italian film from back in the late 50’s, in fact this link below is from the New York Times original review of the film, published in November 23, 1960. Movie Review – Big Deal on Madonna Street – The Screen: Italian Parody of ‘Rififi’:’Big Deal on Madonna Street’ in Premiere Toto Among Bungling Burglars at the Paris –
A LONGTIME popular subject for vaudeville and music-hall farce, the butter-fingered burglar who thoroughly goofs while trying to rob a safe, is given a full-scale treatment and knocked out by a top name cast in the new Italian comedy, “The Big Deal on Madonna Street.” Directed by Mario Monicelli, one of the bright new directors on the Italian scene, this eventually explosive kit of cut-ups opened at the Fine Arts yesterday.
Obviously the film was calculated as an out-and-out parody of the French melodrama, “Rififi,” which was a bit in Italy. For the “big deal” referred to in that title (which was not the Italian title, by the way) is the contemplated burglary of a smalltime jeweler’s safe, and the fellows who conspire to do it try to lay out their plans in the same “scientific” fashion as did the robbers in that serious French film.
But, of course, they are not successful. In the first place, they have a terrible time getting all of their elements together and headed the same way. There’s that nice fellow (Marcello Mastroianni) who has a wife temporarily in jail and so has to mind the baby, which takes a lot of would-be burglar’s time. Then there’s the former prizefighter (Vittorio Gassman) who finds himself much more interested in the maid in the apartment through which the burglars will have to travel than he is in the burglary itself.
There’s the youngster (Renato Salvatori) who falls hopelessly and helplessly in love with the guarded sister of another of the conspirators (Tiberio Murgia), a Sicilian of hot and vengeful moods. There’s the little shrimp (Carlo Pisacane) who is forever concentrating on food. And finally there is the “expert,” a role that the wonderful Toto plays.
This “expert” acknowledged as a genius in the business of blowing safes, knows all the techniques, all the laws, all the loopholes and all the slang words for the chisels and drills. He gives an exquisite lecture (which nobody quite understands). But he gracefully takes a powder when it comes time to the job.
And when that time comes, everybody—everybody who is left—becomes all thumbs. They sneeze, drop their tools with a horrible clatter, they drill holes into water pipes that jet cold streams and they set up a monstrous apparatus with which they laboriously punch through a wall—into an easily accessible adjoining room. At that point, in the cold, gray morning, they all give up and go home.
It was sooooo damn good, see a few clips at the TCM link below, you will not be disappointed.
Well, I know this was a major link dump, but please enjoy these morning’s reads and try to stay warm. What are you reading and thinking about today?
Finally…we have a nippy morning here in Banjoland! I love the cold weather, it makes sleeping late in a nice cozy bed even more enjoyable.
There was another shooting late yesterday, this time in Portland, Oregon. Gunman Opens Fire in Oregon Shopping Mall. According to VOA, the gunman shot and killed two people before turning the gun on himself…no final number of wounded as I write this post. I will be sure to update you on this latest shooting as more information comes forward.
Okay…I’ve got plenty of politics for you this morning, if it is okay I will give them to you in link dump fashion. (Honestly, I am still a bit “gun-shy” with WordPress. It may take a few post before I feel comfortable writing a lot of words in these threads. I think it is a slight case of PSTD, from way back in college…when my final thesis went phffft, poof and gone…just as I was printing the thing out on the day it was due. Nightmare!)
Anyway, here are some of the political stories of the last 24 hours:
Soledad kicked some major ass yesterday. She is awesome at her job, which btw is being a journalist and a real savvy reporter. Soledad Grills Jeff Sessions: ‘You Hurt People Who Need Food’ with Food Stamp Cuts
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) on Tuesday faced tough questions from CNN host Soledad O’Brien for his plan to cut the food stamp program and “hurt people who need food,” including 20 percent of his own constituents in Alabama.
Speaking to Sessions in an interview on CNN’s Starting Point, O’Brien wondered if cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) should be on the table as part of the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations.
“Absolutely,” Sessions insisted. “This month was a record increase in food stamp participation at a time when unemployment is declining.”
“But there are people who say if you’re doing cuts, you invariably hurt people who need food,” O’Brien observed. “It’s 61 percent of households in your state have children who are recipients of the food program that they’re on.”
Sessions continued to spew his crap, I mean opinion:
“Soledad, this program has been growing out of control at an incredible rate and there are a lot of people receiving benefits who do not qualify and should not receive them,” Sessions remarked. “No child, no person who needs food should be denied that food. Nobody proposes that. We are talking about an amendment that I offered that would have reduced and closed a loophole of $8 billion when we would spend $800 billion was opposed by saying it would help — it would leave people hungry in America, but it would have only eliminated abuses in the program.”
The CNN host, however, pointed out that the Alabama Republican had voted twice to grow the program and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities had determined that “SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program.”
“People highlight the program as actually not having a lot of fraud,” O’Brien explained. “Most people who are on it are not somehow working the system. They’re just hungry people.”
Snap for SNAP…Video at the link.
From ABC News, and what looks like the back of Barbara Walter’s head: EXCLUSIVE: President Obama Predicts GOP Will Cave on Taxes
You wanna bet?
These right-wing Republicans are like bulldogs locked down on a hunk of red meat…they do not give up. Just take a look at these headlines:
Yes, threats and promises of all out war to get what they want. Basturds!
In other GOP political news:
You didn’t think Michigan Republicans had an original idea:
I’ve got to share this political cartoon with you, it can’t wait until our Friday Nite Lite:
Yup, piss on…piss on!
This latest PPP poll shows that people are sick of the mutant asshole turtle, I mean…Mitch McConnell…he is highly unpopular according to Public Policy Polling
Mitch McConnell is the most unpopular Senator in the country. Only 37% of Kentucky voters approve of him to 55% disapprove. Both in terms of raw disapproval (55%) and net approval (-18) McConnell has the worst numbers of any of his peers, taking that mantle from Nebraska’s Ben Nelson.
McConnell is predictably very unpopular with Democrats (23/73). But his numbers are almost as bad with independents (33/58) and even with Republicans he’s well below the 70-80% approval range you would usually expect for a Senator within their own party (59/28).
If only this disgust toward McConnell would relate in votes against the man.
The reason McConnell does decently well in the head to head match ups despite his poor approval numbers is that even though a lot of Republicans dislike him, most of them would still vote for him in a general election before they would support a Democrat. This is the same phenomenon we saw in Florida and Pennsylvania this year where Bill Nelson and Bob Casey won by solid margins despite middling approval numbers because Democrats that weren’t thrilled with them still voted for them. And although independents don’t like McConnell they don’t like most of the Democrats either, and they support McConnell in every match up we tested.
The PPP article mentions Ashley Judd, go read the rest at the link. (I sure hope Judd does run for McConnell seat in 2014. But my hope is up there with a Hillary run in 2016….I think it is kind of a long shot they will run period.)
Speaking of Hillary, Nate Silver has this to say about Hillary 2016: Why Hillary Clinton Would Be Strong in 2016 (It’s Not Her Favorability Ratings)
Let’s start by stating the obvious: Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a formidable presidential candidate in 2016.
Mrs. Clinton’s credentials as secretary of state, as a United States senator and as a politically engaged first lady would be hard for any of her Democratic or Republican rivals to match. She would have little trouble raising funds or garnering support from the Democratic officials, and she might even come close to clearing the Democratic field of serious opposition.
Be sure to read the rest of Silver’s post.
With the release of The Hobbit later this week, J.R.R. Tolkien is figuring in lots of blog post, like this one from Medieval.net: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
By J. R. R. Tolkien
Introduction: In 1864 the Reverend Oswald Cockayne wrote of the Reverend Doctor Joseph Bosworth, Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon: ‘I have tried to lend to others the con-viction I have long entertained that Dr. Bosworth is not a man so diligent in his special walk as duly to read the books… which have been printed in our old English, or so-called Anglosaxon tongue. He may do very well for a professor.’ These words were inspired by dissatisfaction with Bosworth’s dictionary, and were doubtless unfair. If Bosworth were still alive, a modern Cockayne would probably accuse him of not reading the ‘literature’ of his subject, the books written about the books in the so-called Anglo-Saxon tongue. The original books are nearly buried.
Of none is this so true as of The Beowulf, as it used to be called. I have, of course, read The Beowulf, as have most (but not all) of those who have criticized it. But I fear that, unworthy successor and beneficiary of Joseph Bosworth, I have not been a man so diligent in my special walk as duly to read all that has been printed on, or touching on, this poem. But I have read enough, I think, to venture the opinion that Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments, specially poor in one. It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem. It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges. This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.
It is of Beowulf, then, as a poem that I wish to speak; and though it may seem presumption that I should try with swich a lewed mannes wit to pace the wisdom of an heep of lerned men, in this department there is at least more chance for the lewed man. But there is so much that might still be said even under these limitations that I shall confine myself mainly to the monsters—Grendel and the Dragon, as they appear in what seems to me the best and most authoritative general criticism in English—and to certain considerations of the structure and conduct of the poem that arise from this theme.
Hopefully one of those three links will work for you. Enjoy it!
And finally, a big hat-tip to Fiscal Liberal, who emailed me these links below…kewl as hell!
First link is to a blog that details the movement of sunlight and weather during the day, via Opentopia – World Sunlight Map
A world map showing current sunlight and cloud cover, as of Dec 12 2012 02:00 UTC.
This is the rectangular projection. You can also see a more realistic hemispherical projection.
Image provided by die.net.
Click the link to see the updated real/time image.
This next link is to a 19 minute video, OVERVIEW on Vimeo
On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.
The Overview Effect, first described by author Frank White in 1987, is an experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of the planet and mankind’s place upon it. Common features of the experience are a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.
‘Overview’ is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.
I’ve embedded the video below…however if you want to see a larger screen image, click on that Vimeo link up top. Hope you enjoy this one too.
That is all I got for you this morning, should be a good start, right? What are you all reading and thinking about today?
Good Morning and Happy Veteran’s Day…
It is that time of year again, when we find members of VA groups selling little red poppies, for remembrance, in front of our Walmarts and grocery stores.
Saturday marked the first of what will be three days of Veterans Day commemorations across the United States.
The holiday falls on a Sunday, and the federal observance is on Monday. It’s the first such day honoring the men and women who served in uniform since the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December 2011.
It’s also a chance to thank those who stormed the beaches during World War II – a population that is rapidly shrinking with most of those former troops now in their 80s and 90s.
Here is Sting’s tribute to WWI, and the Children’s Crusade:
Young men, soldiers, nineteen fourteen
Marching through countries they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a children’s crusade
Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of these young lives betrayed
The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation
Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History’s lessons drowned in red wine
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade
The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation
Midnight in Soho nineteen eighty four
Fixing in doorways, opium slaves
Poppies for young men, such bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade
I’ve got some updates for you this morning, you may remember this woman and her racist rave on Facebook, she made some statements referring to n-word Obama…and assassination. Well, Denise Helms, California Woman, Fired After Calling Obama N-Word, Hoping He’s Assassinated (VIDEO)
…Denise Helms, the 22-year-old California woman whose racist, threatening Facebook status about President Barack Obama went viral this week. Helms has since been fired from her job at a Turlock, Calif., Cold Stone Creamery, and the Secret Service is now looking into her comments.
“Another 4 years of this (N-word),” Helms wrote on her Facebook Tuesday night. “Maybe he will get assassinated this term.”
Sacramento’s Fox 40 news crew caught up with an unapologetic Helms on Wednesday.
“I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal,” she said. “The assassination part is kind of harsh. I’m not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don’t think I’d care one bit.”
She then took to Facebook to defend herself, according to The Modesto Bee.
So apparently my post last night about Obama got onto Twitter and Fox 40 came and interviewed me cause apparently a lot of people in Sacramento think I’m crazy and racist. WOW is all I got to say!! I’m not racist and I’m not crazy. just simply stating my opinion.!!!”
Her Facebook account has since been deactivated.
Cold Stone Creamery did the right thing, in my opinion. She is still under investigation by the Secret Service and she could be charged with a felony.
Down in the Sunshine State, Rep. Allen West finally loses reelection, refuses to concede. No surprise here, according to the article, Democrat Patrick Murphy won by more than enough votes…and the results did not warrant an automatic recount.
The story about Romney’s staff finding their campaign credit cards canceled the night of the election is strange in another way: Romney Cuts Off the Hired Help | Occupy America
Forbes‘ Helaine Olen notes:
In case you are wondering, this did not have to happen. The Mitt Romney for President entity does not end with Romney’s Tuesday night loss. There are papers to be filed with various federal commissions and bills to be paid ….
The Mitt Romney for President financial entity survives for as long as two more years as these tasks are completed.
The staff would also still have to face the bitter billionaire donors.
On Wednesday, Romney had a post-defeat breakfast with some of his wealthiest and most loyal donors. At the private gathering, the donors allegedly unloaded on Romney staff for its failed “junior varsity operation.”
And then, a little Karma perhaps?
At some point, early Wednesday morning, when Gov. Mitt Romney and family were tucked into bed, a quiet call went out on the radio channel used by his Secret Service agents: “Javelin, Jockey details, all posts, discontinue.”
Of all the indignities involved in losing a presidential race, none is more stark than the sudden emptiness of your entourage. The Secret Service detail guarding Governor Romney since Feb 1. stood down quickly. He had ridden in a 15-car motorcade to the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston for his concession speech. He rode in a single-car motorcade back across the Charles River to Belmont. His son, Tagg, did the driving.
Too bad he didn’t get that ride back home on the roof.
Over in Kentucky, things are shaking up…and it is not just the earthquake I’m talking about. Tennessee Guerilla Women: Ashley Judd Doesn’t Rule Out Run for U.S. Senate
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Actress Ashley Judd isn’t ruling out a run for U.S. Senate in Kentucky.
The former Kentuckian is an active supporter of Tennessee Democrats. She said in a statement Friday that she’s honored to be mentioned as a potential candidate, but she sidestepped the question of whether she would get into the race.
“I cherish Kentucky, heart and soul, and while I’m very honored by the consideration, we have just finished an election, so let’s focus on coming together to keep moving America’s families, and especially our kids, forward,” she said. Judd lives in Tennessee and would have to re-establish a residence in Kentucky before she could challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in his 2014 re-election bid.
She would be brilliant! Oh, if only she would run…We need a strong voice for women in Congress, because even though there is some relief with an Obama win…the war on women is still ongoing.
Yesterday, retiring Ohio GOP Congressman Steve LaTourette made national headlines while discussing the recent presidential election. He said:
My wife’s a Democrat, and she was so close to voting for Mitt Romney. But then, you know, Mourdock and Akin opened their mouth, and we sent [voters] running back to the Democratic Party, because they think we’re nutty […] We have to get out of people’s lives, get out of people’s bedrooms, and we have to be a national party…or else we’re going to lose.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Rep. LaTourette’s message reached his colleagues in the Ohio General Assembly, as news broke yesterday that legislators may have reached a compromise on Ohio House Bill 125 which would ban essentially all abortions in the state. Ohio’s “lame duck” legislative session starts next week, and legislators indicate they may pass HB 125 before the end of the year.
It seems some state legislators learned nothing from the recent 2012 elections. Issues like cuts to funding for Planned Parenthood and access to contraception became major campaign points. Several federal candidates were embroiled in controversy after they expressed support for bans on abortion even in the case of rape or incest. And what was the result? Women in swing states—like Ohio—became increasingly concerned about their ability to make healthcare decisions. The gender gap between pro-choice and anti-choice candidates widened, and many candidates who took extreme positions on access to reproductive healthcare were defeated. Voters who care about women’s health care made it clear that there are political costs to politicians’ attempts to interfere.
All of which begs the question, why are Ohio politicians now doubling down on the most radical abortion restrictions in the nation? Did they not see the election results or do they just not care about what women have to say?
I guess not, but who really cares what women think…I mean, we are all evil witches anyway. Top 10 Notorious Witches – Top 10 Lists | Listverse
The witch hunting craze that swept through northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was the result of a mixture of genuine superstition and religious fervor combined with political motivations and paranoia. Peasants and nobles alike looked to supernatural causes for storms and diseases, but they also saw the trials as ways to gain office or wealth by eliminating their rivals. The condemned witches and sorcerers were accused of horrifying crimes like intercourse with the devil and killing infants. During the trials their confessions were often extracted by violent means. The neurotic atmosphere of Europe throughout this time period led to more executions than acquittals.
Go to the link to see the list…
I guess we all can’t have a daddy like this little girl…Dad Recodes a Zelda Game To Make FemLink a Female Role-Model
Parents will do anything for their children. Case in point: When father/gamer Mike Hoye plays The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with his daughter, he reads her the story. When he does, he changes all the pronouns so that Link is actually a little girl, and Zelda is her little brother. Why does he do it? In a world where most of gaming classic heroes are men trying to a damsel in distress, Mr. Hoye wants his daughter to grow up thinking that girls can be just as heroic as boys. After doing this for some time, Hoye got fed up with having to do all the work in his head, so he took the time to reprogram the game with his own gender-swapped version of the script.
Since the Hoye family was already playing an emulated version of the game on their PC, it wasn’t incredibly difficult for Mike to get access to the game’s code so he could work his magic. Still, it takes a lot of time, patience, and programming know-how to do change every reference to Link and Zelda’s gender. From a writer’s perspective, for instance, it’s not as easy as just flipping all the pronouns. Writing on blog, Hoye conceded that he had to get a bit creative with changing words like like “swordsman” and “milady.”
I love it! Hoye has made his code available for download at his blog…for other parents to be able to change up the hero to a shero. I think it is fabulous.
With all the election news this week, the story that seems to be creating a buzz outside of the MSM has been the sale of Star Wars to Disney. Stars Wars Going Over the Fiscal Cliff?
A long time ago in a new cycle far, far away Disney CEO Bob Iger warned about the dangers of going over the fiscal cliff.That sparked a Twitter meme: #StarWarsFiscalCliff.Now, The Street is out with a list of the top 15 Star Wars-themed fiscal cliff tweets.
Here is the link to The Street blog post. 15 Best Star Wars’ Fiscal Cliff Tweets – TheStreet
A couple I thought were great:
There is even videos out there by real movie directors…like Wes Anderson, who gave us The Royal Tannenbaums. Via Conan… Wes Anderson’s Star Wars Episode VII is Cool, Makes No Sense
No, it isn’t a joke!
Yesterday, The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz tweeted a photo of the syllabus for California Here We Come: The O.C. and the Self-Aware Culture of 21st Century America. It’s being offered at Duke this semester. We touched on the topic of TV-inspired courses in a sidebar in our last issue, The 25 Most Powerful TV Shows of the Past 25 Years. Here are some non-O.C. classes that have been offered.
1. Oberlin Experimental College: Through the Darkness of Future-Past: An Exploration of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
2. University of Minnesota: Television Studies: Six Feet Under
3. Indiana State University: Philosophy in the Twilight Zone
4. Brooklyn College: South Park and Political Correctness
5. Georgetown University: Philosophy and Star Trek
6. SUNY Oswego: Sociology of Seinfeld
7. University of Kansas: Beyond the Brady Bunch: Supporting Blended Families
8. University of Washington in Seattle: Management Lessons from The Apprentice
9. University of California, Berkeley: Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows
10. Vassar College: Because Dave Chappelle Said So
11. University of Wisconsin: Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles
12. Montclair State University: How to Watch Television
13. Oberlin Experimental College: The Office : Awesome, Awkward, & Addicting
14. Tufts University: The Future is Lost : TV Series as Cultural Phenomenon
15. MIT: American Soap Operas
16. Boston University: The Colbert Report : American Satire
17. University of California, Berkeley: The Simpsons and Philosophy
18. University of Calgary: The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series
19. University of Illinois: Urban Desires: Sex & the City in Caribbean Cultures
20. Northwestern University: Consumerism and Social Change in Mad Men America, 1960-1963
21. Thiel College: Monty Python & Western Humanities
22. Portland State University: Exploring Buffy the Vampire Slayer
23. Indiana University: The (Sur)Real World of Reality TV
24. Middlebury College: Watching The Wire: Urban America in Serial Television
25. Northwestern University: The Tribe Has Spoken: Surviving TV’s New Reality
* * *
Well, if it were me…I’d have to go with the Monty Python one….or the one on Sociology of Seinfeld. What about you?
Let’s end with an interesting series of photographs of The Panama Canal: The World’s Greatest Engineering Project [Slide Show]: Scientific American
Image: Scientific American, November 9, 1912
Look at a map of the world. Where North America and South America connect there is only a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. That skinny piece of land is called the Isthmus of Panama. For the past 400 years people have wanted to dig a canal through it. If ships sailing between East and West could go through a canal right there, they would not have to go all the way around the end of South America. The trip could be shorter by thousands of miles.
It took over 30 years and cost a lot of money to dig a 50-mile canal through the swamps, jungles and hills of Panama. Even worse, many of the people working on the canal died from sicknesses. But by August 1914 the Panama Canal was ready to let steamships through. Some people called the canal the “World’s Greatest Engineering Work.”
Here is a selection of images on the machines and men involved in building the canal, from the archives of Scientific American from 1881 to 1920, with modern captions.
Have a wonderful Sunday, and let me give a shout out to my brother Denny, who turns 41 today.
Happy Birthday Denny
aka Wong Foo aka Uncle Gordy aka G-Man!


A vibrant new piece of art is hanging in a La Peer HealthlSystems outpatient surgery center in Beverly Hills, Calif., created by one of the center’s own nurses to spread positivity.
With the help of the center’s anesthesiologists, nurse Stacie Defilio spent almost two years collecting 4,000 medication bottle caps that she fashioned into a mosaic reading, “La Peer,” an idea inspired by another oncology nurse on Pinterest.
The colorful artwork hangs in the center’s pre-operating room, where Defilio hopes it will give patients and co-workers some color and positivity. Many of the caps have handwritten words or phrases that she chose to symbolize nursing, patient care, medicine and La Peer, with messages including “Health,” “Hugs” and “Keep calm and nurse on.”
“Whether they are there for a minor procedure or something more extensive, surgery can be scary for many people,” Defilio said. “I love seeing patients happy and comfortable, and I think portraying that through art reaches people on a different level.”
Defilio’s project inspired some co-workers and friends to start their own projects. A second cap creation already hangs in the same pre-operating room, created by one of the orthopedic surgeons and his daughter.
“We do our best as medical professionals to ease concerns and give (patients) some comfort during a difficult time,” Defilio said. “I would hope the sign shows them that I care about where I work and that I care about my patients.”


text:
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domain: health


MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Friday said President Donald Trump's supporters have a "responsibility" to watch the news and "be informed," after Trump said the Kurds in Syria were "very happy."
Following a ceasefire between Turkey and Kurds and Syria, Trump said at a rally Thursday night the Kurds were "very happy" despite his decision to remove U.S. troops from the region before Turkey crossed the border.
"Well, I'll tell you what, it's actually the responsibility to people that show up at those rallies to not be stupid, to not be so stupid that they should be kept away from blenders," Scarborough said on "Morning Joe" Friday morning.
"All they have to do is spend three seconds actually watching the news," he continued. "All they have to do is spend three seconds on Google, spend three seconds talking to somebody that is not completely brainwashed to see that this is a horrible deal for the Kurds. The Kurds are going to be wiped out and Donald Trump said it was a great deal for Turkey because now Turkey doesn't have to kill millions of people."
He went on to say Trump supporters have to inform themselves and not rely on the president for information.
"They have a responsibility to not be dumb," Scarborough said. "And they have a responsibility to be informed. They have a responsibility not to be ignorant. And all I'm asking is that they just spend two or three minutes actually looking at the news and educating themselves."
© 2022 Newsmax. All rights reserved.


text:
'The godfather of Australian crime fiction.'
Lady Catherine presides over the declining fortunes of the Chatterton estate, which is lacking a suitable heir. When she hears of a grandson she never knew, Cliff Hardy takes the job, reluctantly, of finding him. From the run-down boarding houses of Darlinghurst to the social set of Canberra, Hardy finds the case forcing him into some of the strangest roles a private detective has ever had to play.
- Publication Date:
- 19 / 11 / 2014
- 127 x 197 x 16mm

domain: literature


text:
Top 10 Time Travel Movies
Honorable mentions: The Butterfly Effect, The Jacket, Time Bandits, Timecrimes
Time After Time
The directorial debut of Nicholas Meyer, the man who wrote the only good Sherlock Holmes story not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) and would later go on to direct the two best Star Trek films, Time After Time is a light-hearted movie that posits what would happen if H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper transported from 1893 London into 1979 San Francisco. While the story sounds campy as can be (and the movie occasionally is), the writers clearly took their premise seriously, bringing in extensive knowledge of both Wells and the Ripper to craft an adventure that is as smart as it is silly. The cast, including the likes of Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, and Mary Steenburgen, propel the film through its more ludicrous beats, and there are many scenes that are memorable. Granted, the rules of time travel are inconsistent (one of my pet peeves), but seeing H.G. Wells' surprise at a future that isn't a socialist utopia makes up for that in spades.
The Final Countdown
The biggest problem with 1980's sci-fi flick The Final Countdown is that, every time I think about it, I get the song of the same name by Europe stuck in my head. Aside from that, the movie is about an aircraft carrier--under the command of Captain Yelland (Kirk Douglas)--that encounters a bizarre weather event and travels back in time to 1941, mere days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The crew of the carrier, along with civilian Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen), once they determine for certain that they have travelled through time, are then forced to debate how to act; should they stop the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor, or should they let history run its course? The Final Countdown is like a beginner's guide to time travel issues, and the rules are simple and consistent. The premise is never adequately explained and some of the dialogue is as subtle as Jack Bauer with a belt sander, but it's still a good movie that paves the way for most of the more complicated time travel flicks on this list.
Somewhere in Time
Based on my favorite novel by one of my favorite writers, Somewhere in Time is about Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve), a young playwright who is approached by an old, dying woman who says simply, "Come back to me," hands him a watch, and disappears. Later, Collier vacations at the Grand Hotel, where he sees and becomes obsessed with an old portrait of an actress named Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour). It turns out McKenna was the old woman who is now dead, and Collier finds at her home a book on time travel. He visits the author of the book and uses his ideas to travel back to 1912 and meet McKenna at the Grand Hotel. What follows from there is a trite romance story, but it works because of the setting, the music, and the acting, all of which are stellar. Though the movie deviates in some pretty unforgiveable ways from the book, failed at the box office (it opened the same week as The Blues Brothers), and was blasted by critics as pointless drivel, Somewhere in Time has since earned a cult following throughout the world.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Why is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on this list? Well, it's about two idiotic teenagers who, at the bidding of a time travelling George Carlin, go back in time and kidnap several important historical figures in order to give a presentation on history that will earn them a passing grade. They do all of this so they can impress "historical babes," stay together, and become the godlike figures they are destined to eventually become. They bring Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Napoleon, Sigmund Freud, and Billy the Kid together into modern-day San Dimas, California and let them loose in the local mall, where Beethoven discovers electronic keyboards, Genghis Khan discovers sporting goods, and much, much more. In other words, the movie is on this list because it is awesome. If you have a problem with that, you're just wrong.
Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys is about a convict in a future that has been decimated by a lethal virus that only affects humans. This convict, James Cole (Bruce Willis), is sent back in time to find clues about the virus' origins so that the people of the future can reclaim a planet apparently overrun by animals. Cole falls in love with both the past and a psychiatrist, Dr. Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who nearly convinces him that the future is a contruct of his insane mind. He then tries to escape his captors, who can track him through time, and begins unravelling a conspiracy involving a group headed by Dr. Railly's former patient, Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt in his best role ever), known as "The Army of the Twelve Monkeys." The Army appears to be responsible for releasing the virus, as Goines' father (Christopher Plummer) is the biochemist who creates the virus in the first place. The movie is mind-bending and trippy, and it represents probably the best thing Terry Gilliam has done since his Monty Python days.
-e. magill 11/23/2010