The Kockadura Dojo!

RIP Big Pun

2012-02-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

You sir, had that flow that rappers these days can't even dream of. You're lyrical melodies are missed and your flow is envied. Rest In Peace Big Pun.

Seth Morrison: The Ordinary Skier

2012-02-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

Heading to Colorado in a couple weeks for 5 days of shred. This movie gets me stoked as hell about it, so does the 6 feet of snow that just dumped on the Rockies...

Snow Bay Entertainments #1

2012-01-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

My friend, who goes by Christ, minus the T found this gem.

Andy: How the fuck did you find this?

Christ (-T):
In this case my friend said he needed a partner to play some hoops.
In a homophobic moment, I thought, man, like hulahooping with another guy.
Then I googled "hula hoop 2 people" and thats what i got.

1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!

2012-01-18T04:20:00.000-08:00

7H15 M3554G 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!

1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H 0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,

B3 PROUD! 0NLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R3AD 7H15.

PL3453 F0RW4RD 1F U C4N R34D 7H15.

Dirty keep it nasty in Mexicoland

2011-12-31T10:07:00.000-08:00

Gonna check him ridin' fatties! #occupybikeseat #bigfattires

Musical Mondays #17

2011-12-18T06:49:00.000-08:00

Hypster vs Deadmau5/Kaskade - Move For Neon Trees (Armour Bootleg) by armour

I Like Enchiladas

2011-12-17T17:49:00.001-08:00

The Whole Enchilada: Top to Bottom - Moab, Utah from Phil Shep on Vimeo.

Lagunitas Holiday Ale

2011-12-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

This seasonal deserves some serious praise. Holy moly where to start! Like for real if you can get your mits on this, do it now!!! I also heard the secret tonight about this beer; they brewed a shit ton of it (probably because they know they blew the roof off with the recipe) and after the new year, they will re-name it as "Holiday Leftovers." So don't be fooled, buy as much as you can because it's absolutely delicious. First, I'll offer my snobby notes, and then I'll say it how it is. Check it:
The suds gold body with small creamy white cap ever so charming to the eye. Lacing is moderate. Clarity is nice. Carbonation is speckled throughout the body. Seriously, grab a clean glass and hold it to the light. Great aroma, like pow! Citrusy and resiny. Lemon, tangerine, cannabis, norway pine...very nice, very nice indeed. All that translates nicely to the palate, with primary flavors of pine resin, pot, clementine and lemongrass. Really quite nice. Mouthfeel is very agreeable. Not too heavy, definitly not too light. On a scale of 1-1,000,000, I'd give r' a solid 726,684. Moderate carbonation like not the big bubbles but not the small ones either. Like medium. Bitterness is just right, not too jagged but enough to give you peach fuzz. Forget Brown Shugga. Bring this back again next Christmas. Is there a summer Christmas too? Please!!!!

@lagunitasbruhws Holiday Ale is like drinking a pine cone candy cane dipped in hoptabulous amazingness. Easily the best gift of all time.

Nightly Wisdom #55

2011-12-16T16:49:00.001-08:00

If you aren’t the master of your thoughts then you are the slave.

Nightly Wisdom #54

2011-12-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

Life only tastes good when you eat what you kill. When you hustle for what you earn and someone pays you money in proportion to the service you’ve offered, the idea you’ve created, your ability to execute on it, and their ability to consume it in a way that benefits them.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T04:19:00.001-08:00

I grew up going to a Lutheran church and having a partial comprehension of what god and religion was. Christopher not only illuminated me, he enlightened me. I realized that mankind can be good without god. That my reason, conscience, objectivity, curiosity and skepticism were more important to my development then blind faith in unfounded dogma as taught by an immoral organization of old guys.

I now consider myself a Humanist, a non-believer, a person freed from the opiate of the people.

Thank you Christopher!

You know you've found the right girl when...

2011-12-15T18:54:00.001-08:00

She gets you this bottle of beard oil for the holidays:

Burroughs writes in his Indoor Studies: ...We readily attribute some extra virtue to those persons who voluntarily embrace solitude, who live alone in the country or in the woods, or in the mountains, and find life sweet...

The woodsy, earthy scent of this beard oil brings together the solitary notes of nature and craftsmanship. The smell of freshly chopped forest woods move into a dusty carpenter's workshop, leaving behind the deep leathered richness of a cobbler's apron. Its very hardy, masculine fragrance works well with the rugged scruff left behind after a lazy summer's week of no shaving to the full-grown winter's beard. In addition to smelling great, the oils also help to moisturize surface skin and condition follicles. Can be used as a beard oil or as an oil based cologne. Great for all skin-types.

Available in a 1 oz. mini-flask bottle with orifice reducer and a 0.5 oz. bottle with glass dropper lid.

Ingredients: Argan Oil, Grapeseed Oil, Cedarwood, Sandlewood and other pure essential oils.

Drew Bezanson Joyride

2011-12-14T04:08:00.000-08:00

Before this video was shot, I asked Drew how he builds up the courage to do what he does. He told me this, "I live how my grandfather told me to live right before he died, "Go fast, jump high, and don't be a bitch." So I guess I've been lacking bitchness ever since I hopped on a bike."

Drew Bezanson from Justen Soule on Vimeo.

Got my vote...

2011-12-13T04:17:00.000-08:00

Bad Lip Reading: Rick Perry's "Strong" ad - watch more funny videos

"I'm proud o' mah gun. And I pooh'ed in space."

How Doctors Die

2011-12-12T05:01:00.000-08:00

It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be

by Ken Murray

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.

But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.

Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.

Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC.

Brass balls

2011-12-10T05:22:00.001-08:00

telephone

2011-12-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

pick up, tremble,
shudder, lose,
linger, speak,
decipher, win.

Musical Mondays #16

2011-12-09T19:00:00.002-08:00

Collage

2011-12-09T19:00:00.001-08:00

White Collars Turn Blue

2011-12-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

By Paul Krugman
Published: September 29, 1996

When looking backward, you must always be prepared to make allowances: it is unfair to blame late-20th-century observers for their failure to foresee everything about the century to come. Long-term social forecasting is an inexact science even now, and in 1996 the founders of modern nonlinear socioeconomics were obscure graduate students. Still, many people understood that the major forces driving economic change would be the continuing advance of digital technology and the spread of economic development throughout the world; in that sense, there were no big surprises. The puzzle is why the pundits of the time completely misjudged the consequences of those changes.

Perhaps the best way to describe the flawed vision of fin de siecle futurists is to say that, with few exceptions, they expected the coming of an ''immaculate'' economy -- one in which people would be largely emancipated from any grubby involvement with the physical world. The future, everyone insisted, would bring an ''information economy'' that would mainly produce intangibles. The good jobs would go to ''symbolic analysts,'' who would push icons around on computer screens; knowledge, rather than traditional resources like oil or land, would become the primary source of wealth and power.

But even in 1996 it should have been obvious that this was silly. First, for all the talk about information, ultimately an economy must serve consumers -- and consumers want tangible goods. The billions of third-world families that finally began to have some purchasing power when the 20th century ended did not want to watch pretty graphics on the Internet. They wanted to live in nice houses, drive cars and eat meat.

Second, the Information Revolution of the late 20th century was a spectacular but only partial success. Simple information processing became faster and cheaper than anyone had imagined, but the once-confident artificial intelligence movement went from defeat to defeat. As Marvin Minsky, one of the movement's founders, despairingly remarked, ''What people vaguely call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire.'' And it takes common sense to deal with the physical world -- which is why, even at the end of the 21st century, there are still no robot plumbers.

Most important of all, the long-ago prophets of the information age seemed to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

These, then, were the underlying misconceptions of late-20th-century futurists. Their flawed analysis led, in turn, to the five great economic trends that observers in 1996 should have expected but didn't.

Soaring Resource Prices

The first half of the 1990's was an era of extraordinarily low prices for raw materials. In retrospect, it is hard to see why anyone thought that situation would last. When two billion Asians began to aspire to Western levels of consumption, it was inevitable that they would set off a scramble for limited supplies of minerals, fossil fuels and even food.

In fact, there were danger signs as early as 1996. A surge in gasoline prices during the spring of that year was prompted by an unusually cold winter and miscalculations about Middle East oil supplies. Although prices soon subsided, the episode should have reminded people that industrial nations were once again vulnerable to disruptions of oil supplies. But the warning was ignored.

Quite soon, however, it became clear that nat-ural resources, far from becoming irrelevant, had become more crucial. In the 19th century, great fortunes were made in heavy industry; in the late 20th, they were made in technology; today's super-rich are, more frequently, those who own prime land or mineral rights.

The Environment as Property

In the 20th century, people used some quaint expressions -- ''free as air,'' ''spending money like water'' -- as if the supplies of air and water were unlimited. But in a world where billions of people can afford cars, vacations and food in plastic packages, the limited carrying capacity of the environment had become perhaps the single most important constraint on the standard of living.

By 1996, it was obvious that one way to cope with environmental limits was to use market mechanisms. In the early 1990's, the Government began to allow electric utilities to buy and sell rights to emit certain kinds of pollution; the principle was extended in 1995 when the Government began auctioning rights to the electromagnetic spectrum. Today, of course, practically every environmentally harmful activity carries a hefty price tag. It is hard to believe that as late as 1995, an ordinary family could fill up a Winnebago with $1-a-gallon gasoline, then pay only $5 for admission to Yosemite. Today, that trip would cost about 15 times as much, even after adjusting for inflation.

Once governments got serious about making people pay for pollution and congestion, income from environmental licenses soared. License fees now account for more than 30 percent of the gross domestic product, and have become the main source of Government revenue; after repeated reductions, the Federal income tax was finally abolished in 2043.

The Rebirth of the Big City

During the second half of the 20th century, the densely populated, high-rise city seemed to be in unstoppable decline. Modern telecommunications eliminated much of the need for physical proximity in routine office work, leading more and more companies to shift back-office operations to suburban office parks. It seemed as if cities would vanish and be replaced with a low-rise sprawl punctuated by an occasional cluster of 10-story office towers.

But this proved transitory. For one thing, high gasoline prices and large fees for environmental licenses made a one-person, one-car commuting pattern impractical. Today, the roads belong mostly to hordes of share-a-ride minivans efficiently routed by computers. Moreover, the jobs that had temporarily flourished in the suburbs -- mainly office work -- were eliminated in vast numbers beginning in the mid-90's. Some white-collar jobs migrated to low-wage countries; others were taken over by computers. The jobs that could not be shipped abroad or be handled by machines were those that required a human touch -- face-to-face interaction between people working directly with physical materials. In short, they were jobs done best in dense urban areas, places served by what is still the most effective mass-transit system yet devised: the elevator.

Here again, there were straws in the wind. At the beginning of the 1990's, there was speculation about which region would become the center of the ballooning multimedia industry. Would it be Silicon Valley? Los Angeles? By 1996, the answer was clear. The winner was -- Manhattan, whose urban density favored personal interaction, which turned out to be essential. Today, of course, Manhattan boasts almost as many 200-story buildings as St. Petersburg or Bangalore.

The Devaluation of Higher Education

In the 1990's, everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. A college degree, even a postgraduate degree, was essential for anyone who wanted a good job as one of those ''symbolic analysts.''

But computers are proficient at analyzing symbols; it is the messiness of the real world that they have trouble with. Furthermore, symbols can be transmitted easily to Asmara or La Paz and analyzed there for a fraction of the cost in Boston. Therefore, many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not she has studied world literature.

This trend should have been obvious in 1996. Even then, America's richest man was Bill Gates, a college dropout who did not need a lot of formal education to build the world's most powerful information technology company.

Or consider the panic over ''downsizing'' that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90's was not especially high by historical standards. Downsizing suddenly became news because, for the first time, white-collar, college-educated workers were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled machinists and other blue-collar workers were in demand. This should have signaled that the days of ever-rising wage premiums for people with higher education were over. Somehow, nobody noticed.

Eventually, the eroding payoff of higher education created a crisis in education itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire academic credentials with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training -- paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance and so on -- pay nearly as much as if not more than a job that requires a master's degree, and pay more than one requiring a Ph.D.

So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one -- a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.

The Celebrity Economy

This century's last great trend was noted by acute observers in 1996, yet most people failed to appreciate it. While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations. Nowadays, if you develop a marvelous piece of software, everyone will have downloaded a free copy from the Net the next day. If you record a magnificent concert, bootleg CD's will be sold in Shanghai next week. If you produce a wonderful film, high-quality videos will be available in Mexico City next month.

How, then, could creativity be made to pay? The answer was already becoming apparent a century ago: creations must make money indirectly by promoting sales of something else. Just as auto makers used to sponsor grand prix racers to spice up the image of their cars, computer manufacturers now sponsor hotshot software designers to build brand recognition for their hardware. The same is true for individuals. The royalties that the Four Sopranos earn from their recordings are surprisingly small; the recordings mainly serve as advertisements for their concerts. The fans attend these concerts not to appreciate the music (they can do that far better at home), but for the experience of seeing their idols in person. In short, instead of becoming a knowledge economy we became a celebrity economy.

Luckily, the same technology that has made it possible to capitalize directly on knowledge has also created many more opportunities for celebrity. The 500-channel world is a place of many subcultures, each with its own heroes. Still, the celebrity economy has been hard on people -- especially for those with a scholarly bent. A century ago, it was actually possible to make a living as a more or less pure scholar. Now if you want to devote yourself to scholarship, there are only three choices. Like Charles Darwin, you can be born rich. Like Alfred Wallace, the less-fortunate co-discoverer of evolution, you can make your living doing something else and pursue research as a hobby. Or, like many 19th-century scientists, you can try to cash in on a scholarly reputation by going on the lecture circuit.

But celebrity, though more common, still does not come easily. That is why writing this article is such an opportunity. I actually don't mind my day job in the veterinary clinic, but I have always wanted to be a full-time economist; an article like this may be just what I need to make my dream come true.

Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His last article for the Magazine, on tax reform, appeared in April.

commit

2011-12-09T04:59:00.001-08:00

A Cow based Economics Lesson

2011-12-03T05:22:00.000-08:00

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you
want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive

Phunk Fresh Powders

2011-12-02T04:08:00.000-08:00

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.) from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

Musical Mondays #16

2011-11-28T04:25:00.000-08:00

I'm a serious joke.

2011-11-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

This is not in self deprecation, rather a way to come to terms with being. If you know me personally, which about 99% of you do, unless you are Canadian and were directed to this site after googling "dominating wart." For the premise of this post, it won't matter if you know me personally or not.

We deal with everyday trials which mold us into the person we hope to be; to alter our lives each hour of every day in an effort to create the highest possible happiness. That's the goal isn't it? To become complacent kills one's motivation, creativity and pursuit of enchantment.

The word stubborn accurately describes me. It has for five years. I resist most things, unless it's a beer, and question the decisions that affect me. Some call it depressed, others think it's negative. Those who can relate see the stubbornness as positive and a fight against complacency and the craving for authenticity in all we do.

Authenticity refers to that of undisputed origin; genuine, the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions.

Let's focus on the word genuine. The genuine people in life are the ones that mix it up, that do things because of no other reason other than to be who they really are. I flock towards these people. I trust them, I enjoy being around them, and I learn from them.

I am a serious joke. I like to have a good time. I like to laugh. I like to do things to break up the monotony of of every day life. It's pretty simple, and very cliche' yet many of us still feel bounded to act a certain way to meet standards placed upon ourselves, or by our "peers."

Let us think about why we shun those who roll the blackball? And venerate people who if didn't hold their VIP status, would be thrown under the bus. This isn't an argument against anyone or anything, it's a call to reevaluate what we perceive as normal and how things "should work" and to encourage those who choose to live their lives more abstractly. The selfish motivations behind perceived judgement need not to be taken out on divergent beings, rather be dealt with in a personal manner.

Think of it as an opportunity to solidify our genuine traits which make us all unique and colorful souls. Think of it as a way to become more understanding and accepting of all people and all differences. The concern isn't with the those living a serious joke, it's with those who think the joke is serious.

Unbend.

Always Be Knolling

2011-10-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

Shoes un-shined? Pay a fine!

Musical Mondays #15

2011-10-12T05:56:00.000-07:00

Let's get this blog rolling again with some fresh beats.

Ballad of a New Age Workhorse

2011-10-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Living out of a suitcase, forgetting about the hobbies you love, putting your head down and jumping in, only to awake the mind to complete dissatisfaction in an overwhelmingly ridiculous city. People come here for the opportunity, whatever that may entail.

To me, I see lonely hearts and tired eyes. People who come here to play the game, live the dream, and make lots of money.

Money.

What people in the big city seem to care about. The clothing, the high rises, the "fine food," superficialities that at night make you weep and ask "why am I doing this?" You wake up in the morning, shower, suit up, and get to it again. Sell, scare, scam, any means to positively influence the bottom line.

How can we live with ourselves?

How is this the supposed city of great opportunity? It seems more like a walkway to Hell. Better yet, a speeding elevator to Hell. That's how I feel when I take it down to the street from this 26th floor apartment.

Play the game. Get paid. No worries.

Just foing with the glow.

2011-08-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, Bobbi and I planned an adventure to Spain. Today we leave. We have no plans other than to take a bus from Madrid to Lanjaron, a mountain town, and become slaves for a woman named Anne. To be honest, I'm totally poshed to get my hands dirty and live a simpler life for a while. Nothing to worry about except for the next days almond harvest and capping the days with Kalimotxos. If you don't know what a Kalimotxo is, neither did I before I was told to get ready for them by my friend Christ Minus the T over @ Drunkcyclist. 50% red wine, 50% cola. Simple, sweet, and pretty damn neat.

Some goals for the trip are to become expert life-livers, expand my Spanish speaking skills that currently end at the number 10, hook Spartacus up with a couple Kalimotxos at the Vuelta, learn to salsa, learn Flamenco, pick pocket the pick pocketers, and keep a regular pooping schedule.

I'll be covering all the exciting happenings of our travels here on the Dojo and I really don't care if you stay or leave. All I ask is that you cover my share of IPA guzzling while I'm away because I don't think they have that over there...Perhaps they need some young American stallions to come show them how we brew in 'Merica. Until next time, support your local brewery and ride some bike. Tschüssy!

Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente.
Whatever the eyes don't see, the heart doesn´t feel.

In the heat of things...really, it's 115 degrees outside.

2011-08-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

Steve Jobs said that.

Challenges hit each of us over the course of our lives, getting fired, failing school, getting dumped, and looking back, we've got to realize that it all ends up being hugely significant towards our later realizations of life. This quote is a great way of putting life’s challenges into perspective, or really, anything we do in life; looking back and seeing how they connect with where you are now.

It's great to have this understanding, but now it's time to use it and map the future. Use the experiences, the pains, and the gains and turn them into a passionate pursuit of prosperity.

Hopefully this will help us all live a dream life.

This scene from Beerfest comes to mind...

Unsure, astray life; how to make skrilla with no job...

2011-08-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

[Via: Make Money With Zaarly]

Nightly Wisdom #53

2011-08-08T17:43:00.001-07:00

"Linear thinking is a death knell for creativity."
- Peter Sims

Imaging Err.

2011-08-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

Ohhhhhh Crap.

Ehhh it ain't no thang but a chicken wang on a g-strang. All the pictures of this blog have been deleted by yet another stupid mistake I made on Googlactica...I started a G+ account and saw a bunch of crap (tri) photos that had been auto. uploaded onto my account. Thinking that it would just delete them from my G+ images, I forgot that almost everything on the interwebnet is owned/linked with Googtastica. So, by deleting stupid pictures of myself from G+, it simultaneously deleted them from this Bee-eL-Ohh-Gee...

I won't equate my lackluster page views with the extinction of my images, rather to my lack of producing meaningful and worthwhile literature (which never happens BTW), but I'll blame it on this Tucson heat...Actually, wait, all I do is sit inside, shouldn't I be typing all day? Oh should I, I mean, I was...thinking of, doing this until...never mind.

To make a short story long, the pictures got deleted, I lost focus, and gained focus. I'm officially done with school (with a degree) on Wednesday. Remember when I was a drop out pursuing a career in triathlon? hahahahahahaha LOL ROTFFL...

In five short days, the Bob and I'll be starting fun lifey stuff in San Francisco and then to the mountain city of Lanjaron, Spain, taking a much needed rest from routine life in America...I'm sure I'll be posting loads of the experience and sharing all the hippie crap do dads. Till then, enjoy good music and cold beers with friends, shoot guns, and give people high fives. L8es.

Can Big Food Regulate Itself? Fat Chance

2011-08-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

By Mark Bittman

Life would be so much easier if we could only set our own guidelines. You could define the average weight as 10 pounds higher than your own and, voilà, no more obesity! You could raise the speed limit to 90 miles per hour and never worry about a ticket. You could call a cholesterol level of 250 “normal” and celebrate with a bag of fried pork rinds. (You could even claim that cutting government spending would increase employment, but that might be going too far.) You could certainly turn junk food into something “healthy.”

That’s what the food industry is doing.

Back in May I wrote about the voluntary guidelines for marketing junk food to kids developed by an interagency group headed by the Federal Trade Commission. These non-binding suggestions ask that the industry market real food to kids instead of the junk they so famously favor selling. But the industry argues that the recommendations are effectively mandatory because non-compliance would lead to retaliation and eliminate all food advertising to adolescents, as well as 74,000 jobs.

On the phone last week, Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, told me that even though the guidelines are “without teeth,” the push-back from the industry has been formidable: “We have seen political showmanship, misinformation about the impact of these voluntary guidelines, insistence that the industry has been successful in self-regulation and that these efforts would violate the First Amendment.”

That voluntary guidelines could curb the right to free speech is absurd, but not as wacky as letting the industry set its own standards. Yet that’s what has happened: The Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a group of food manufacturers that includes McDonald’s, Burger King, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods came up with its own guidelines defining foods healthy enough to market to kids. (It’s worth mentioning another group, too — if just to admire its name, The Sensible Food Policy Coalition — led by PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, General Mills and other big companies, evidently created solely to prevent the voluntary guidelines from gaining a foothold.)

CFBAI is a champion of “self-regulation,” which means repeating a series of mantras that include “facts” like “there is no such thing as good food and bad food,” or that Cookie Crisp cereal (or dozens of others) “http://www.nestle.com/Brands/Pages/BrandsDetail.aspx?brandguid=07A4F068-9482-4A27-A354-69A673A4F42C&BrandName=Cookie%20Crisp,” all the while micro-adjusting hyper-processed food so that “more fiber” and “less sugar” aren’t outright lies, even though the food itself can hardly be claimed to be “less junky.” With self-regulation, even Kraft Singles can be considered “part of a balanced diet.”

And guess what? In general, the companies fare well in meeting their own standards (which, pathetically, the F.T.C. sees as a “significant advance”): two-thirds of the products they advertise are A-O.K., with the remainder requiring just modest adjustments. See? Mission accomplished! Corn Pops are now healthy!

Another example: last week, McDonald’s promised a minor tweak of its Happy Meal, (which, of course, “can be part of a well-balanced diet for kids”) adding a few apple slices, removing a few French fries and making milk — chocolate or regular — a more prominent option. It still comes with a toy, and soda will remain a choice. (I’m not sure anyone is claiming soda is part of a healthy diet, but stay tuned.) The move received widespread praise, with Michelle Obama leading the cheers.

But despite the seal of approval of our first lady/self-appointed nutrition expert, a Happy Meal with a piece of apple is still a box of branded, overpriced junk food sold not by its value but by its marketing scheme. (Forty percent of McDonald’s advertising budget is spent on marketing to kids.)

This is not “progress,” but a public relations victory along with — as Michele Simon points out in her blog — an attempt to short-circuit regulations and laws that have some guts, like the one in San Francisco that forbids the inclusion of toys in meals that don’t meet reasonable nutrition standards. The last thing McDonald’s or any like corporation wants to see is a strong, activist government protecting consumers, whether or not they’re capable of adult judgment or are habituated (a harsher word is “addicted”) to self-destructive products.

Self-regulation may be immediate, non-threatening and magical, but it doesn’t work. A study published earlier this week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine by Dr. Lisa Powell and other researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago tracked changes in exposure for all food, beverage and restaurant TV ads seen by kids from 2 to 11 years old, from 2003 to 2009. It found that, overall, daily exposure to the ads declined but the percentage among companies that had pledged to self-regulate was higher than those that didn’t. And in 2009, 86 percent of these ads still featured unhealthy foods.

What’s worse? Self-serving self-regulation or toothless guidelines set by an agency that appears to be complicit in maintaining the status quo? Hard to say. What’s better is having grass roots movements that drive agencies toward real regulation.

Get ya some Bon Iver Live on NPR 7/2/11

2011-08-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138890247/live-tuesday-bon-iver-in-concert

It Ain't Crapperware

2011-08-02T13:34:00.001-07:00

It Ain't Crapperware

Napoleon Dynamite

— MOVIECLIPS.com

Uncle Rico Could Have Gone Pro

Napoleon Dynamite

— MOVIECLIPS.com

GETTING BIN LADEN

2011-08-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

What happened that night in Abbottabad.
by Nicholas Schmidle
August 8, 2011
No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course. Photoillustration by John Ritter.

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”
The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle#ixzz1Tt98cjUK

Negativity

2011-07-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

I've been a negative person for a while now, maybe four to five years. It wears on you. It wears on the people that surround you. We all go through stress, heartbreak, death and struggle. Makes us think life's a bitch and everything is unprincipled.

You get caught up in the coil of dismissive thought and it rots you from the inside out. It consumes you and disallows enthusiasm, courage, mindfulness and love.

Granted some things in life suck, they do. But there are so many amazing things. So many things that can be achieved, experienced, and embraced. Life is beautiful and negativity is the decay of one's soul.

The mind is magnificent. You have the power to turn it on and turn it off. You have the power to love and the power to hate. You have the power to stop and the power to go. You have the power to assist and the power to hinder. You have the power to comply and the power to ignore. Any circumstance, you are in control.

We all know those people, the one's who complain about anything or everything. My most recent years, I'd be that person. Time's gotta change. Attitude's gotta change. Stagnation is over and it's time to build. Time to collaborate. Time to laugh. Time to love. Time to explore, experience, and embrace the beautiful life I was given.

Think of a person in your life who you love to be around. I'd guess with full confidence, that person has a positive outlook. One who can make people laugh. One who pick up a conversation with strangers, who waves at people, gives a lending hand and puts a smile on another's face. For me at least, I love being around these people and I will become positive. We should all strive for that. American culture's enabled us to become isolationists. To have our gated homes, personal cars, the internet and microwave dinners. We no longer "need" each other. One could go through life never embracing human interaction, but I'd guess it would lead to insanity.

Maybe that's why we're at where we're at...

Papaya

2011-07-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

Christopher Columbus called papaya the "fruit of the angels". He noticed that the Caribbean natives ate the fruit after huge meals and never encountered any digestive distress. And they were 'strong'.

Papayas are shaped like elongated melons or pears. The flesh is deliciously sweet with a musky undertone, and its texture has a soft melting quality. Ripe papaya flesh is a rich orange color with either yellow or pink hues.

The inner cavity contains a wealth of black round seeds, encased in a gelatinous-like substance. Some sources say that these seeds can be used as a black pepper substitute when ground, or that they have a deworming effect.
I advise that the seeds are not to be consumed as it is known to contain a toxic substance called carpaine. Carpaine, when consumed in large quantities, may lower the pulse rate and depress the nervous system.

Nutritional Benefits

The nutritional highlight of papaya is a proteolytic enzyme called papain which is an excellent aid to digestion. This enzyme is so powerful that it is said to digest an amazing 200 times its own weight in protein. It assists our body's own enzymes in assimilating the maximum nutritional value from the food we eat.

Papain can be made into an immediate home remedy treatment for jellyfish sting or other wounds, even surgical wounds. The highest concentration of this substance is on the skin of unripe papayas. Cut the skin and apply it directly to the affected area.

Papaya is a wholesome fruit, another of my favorite. It is a rich source of anti-oxidant nutrients such as beta-carotene (which is what gives it the orange color; green papaya does not contain this carotene), vitamin A and C and flavonoids, B vitamins, folate and pantothenic acid.

It also contains small amounts of of the minerals calcium, chlorine, iron, phosphorus, potassium, silicon and sodium.

The carbohydrate content in papaya is mainly of invert sugar which is a form of pre-digested food. The ripe papaya is endowed with an abundance of energy-boosting natural sugars.

Health Benefits

The papaya has remarkable medicinal virtues recognized from ancient times. It is not a commonly allergenic food. Being one of the most easily digested fruits, it is an excellent wholesome food for young to old, a rejuvenating choice.

The health benefits of papayas are too many to mention, but here is a list of cures for some of the more common ailments:

Anti-Inflammatory: The anti-inflammatory virtue from the papain in papaya greatly reduce inflammation in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, gout and asthma.

Colon Cancer, Prevention Of: The rich fiber in papaya bind to cancer-causing toxins in the colon and is eliminated from the body during bowel movements.

Digestive Aid: Papaya is commonly known for its fine and natural laxative virtue which aids digestion. Taken regularly, it can help habitual constipation, bleeding piles and chronic diarrhea.

Emphysema, Protection Against: If you are a smoker, or are frequently exposed to secondhand smoke, consume papaya juice regularly for its high vitamin A content. This may save your life as it will highly reduce your lung inflammation.

Heart Disease, Protection Against: The three very powerful anti-oxidants in papayas help prevent the oxidation of cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol forms dangerous plagues that can eventually cause heart attacks or strokes.

Intestinal Disorders: The papain in unripe papaya is extremely beneficial for those who are deficient in gastric juice, have excess of unhealthy mucus in the stomach, dyspepsia and intestinal irritation.

Menstrual Irregularities: Consumption of unripe papaya juice help to contract the muscle fibers of the womb, resulting in proper and regular menstrual flow. It is especially helpful in cases of menstruation cessation in young ladies due to cold or trauma.

Skin Diseases: The juice from unripe papaya is highly beneficial in treating skin disorders like acne and psoriasis. When applied to wounds, it prevents pus formation and swelling. Paste made from unripe papaya when applied to the face, may remove pigmentation or brown spots, and making the skin smooth and delicate. Try it.

Spleen Enlargement: Immerse cut ripe papaya in vinegar for a week, then consume twice a day with meals until spleen is normalized.

Throat Disorders: Drink honey mixed in fresh juice from unripe papaya regularly over inflamed tonsils for diphtheria and other throat disorders. It dissolves the membrane and prevents infection from spreading.

Consumption Tips

Choose papayas that have reddish-orange skin if you want to eat them within the day of purchase. Avoid fruit that is bruised or has patches of deep orange color which indicates that it is over-ripe.

Purchase green papayas only if you intend to cook them as the flesh will not develop its sweet juicy flavor.

If you want to slow the ripening process, keep the fruit in the refrigerator. To hasten the ripening process, keep it out in the open, in room temperature

A papaya can be eaten as it is, with its skin cut. Cut the papaya length-wise, and then into smaller pieces. The sweetest part of the papaya is concentrated on the end furthest from the stem.

You may also sprinkle your papaya with fresh lime juice. It adds taste to the fruit.

Or, finally, blend it with other fruits like strawberry or yogurt to make a smoothie.

An Open Letter to Mia Freedman

2011-07-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

Cycling Tips: "Last night I was disappointed to read and watch Mia Freedman's belittling words on Cadel Evan's recent achievement. I'm always respectful of people's opinions, however as a journalist with an influential platform you would think that Mia would have done a minute or two of research before she spoke those words.

Mia obviously doesn’t know that Cadel recognises the power of his success and leverages this to do many positive things for others. He goes about this quietly and asks for no recognition. He campaigns for a free Tibet, The Manasarovar Academy (schools for Tibeten children) Cerebral Palsy (his bike raffle has raised $50k already), The Amy Gillet Foundation, Ian Thorpe’s Fountain for Youth, and many other auctions for charity that go unnoticed. Mia, if you’re reading this, you might want to rethink your words on Cadel not being a hero.

Bridie O’Donnell is a professional athlete, doctor, and someone who I hold in high regard. Yesterday she posted an insightful open letter to Mia Freedman on her blog which I’ve asked permission to repost since her site is down. Here it is if you haven’t had a chance to read it:"

An Open Letter to Mia Freedman
by Bridie O’Donnell

This morning, I woke up to see a stream of statements on social media networks about how you were an idiot.

As a reader of your column when I buy The Age in Melbourne, I was interested to see what was going on.

I went to your webpage, and proceeded to watch the footage of your morning chat with Karl on the Today Show about Cadel Evans’ historic victory in the Tour de France.

I was incredulous.

The fact that you didn’t know who Evans is, or had much information at all about his history in the sport, his numerous achievements and even greater tribulations, injuries, crashes & disappointments… that wasn’t a surprise to me.

My Mother had no idea who Mark Taylor was when he was named Australian of the Year in 1999, despite him being one of the most famous cricketers of the modern era.

She’d never heard of him, hated cricket & thought it was hogwash.

But where you lost me was that you felt compelled to come forth with an ill-informed diatribe about a recent event that has without doubt, amazed millions (the Tour de France has the world’s largest viewing figures for an annual sports event and the third highest figures for any sports event. The two top events are the Olympics the football World Cup, each held every four years).

Needless to say, I am not here to speak for Cadel Evans and rebut your dismissive lines about his 20y career in cycling as ‘getting paid a lot of money to ride a bike.’

He can speak for himself.

But as an elite road cyclist, I feel completely elated and inspired that a man I know and admire has reached the greatest pinnacle of this sport, after such a challenging road to get there.

You said you have ‘always had a problem with the way Australian sportspeople are revered as heroes and worshipped above every other profession.’

You listed a bevy of professions you deem to be heroic: ‘people who help other people or who somehow work selflessly to benefit others. Nurses, doctors, scientists working to cure diseases… fire fighters and those who risk their lives in wars or their daily jobs, those who volunteer.’

Well, the Macquarie Dictionary states that a hero is a “person of distinguished courage or performance, or someone invested with heroic qualities in the opinion of others.”

So, one man’s Fiona Wood, surgeon and inventor of methods to manage burns victims after the Bali Bombings, is another man’s Cathy Freeman, 2000 Sydney Olympic gold medalist and arguably a quiet promoter of improved reconciliation in this country.

Both are recipients of Australian of the Year awards.

Which brings me to the ludicrous point you seemed to be making: one I interpreted as a vehement dislike for sportspeople to be labeled as heroes/heroines in that you deem them not worthy enough.

Did you know that 49% of surveyed junior doctors stated that the primary reason they chose to study medicine was for the money? (And 71% of pre-law students, but is that a surprise? They’re hardly doing it to make friends).

Medical students were also looking for a vocational degree, to help people, to be a respected professional in society & have job security. Some said they got the marks to get in and didn’t want to disappoint their parents.

If you think a career in Medicine or Allied Health is all altruism, working ‘selflessly to benefit others’ to save lives all day, let me tell you it isn’t.

Sadly, most doctors are not Fiona Wood. Many gain pleasure solely from the status of the job; or they’re paying off their mortgages & school fees; they’re in a position that only a fool would abandon; or they just don’t remember why they started it in the first place.

I know this because I am a medical doctor. I have saved plenty of lives, but I’ve lost many more than that.

I worked with surgeons whose egos were barely contained in the confines of an operating theatre and others who seemed truly miserable.

Occasionally, I was in a situation where I did something truly remarkable: I delivered a baby in a taxi; saved a man’s arm from being amputated (while receiving instructions over the phone) and successfully convinced a violent psychiatric patient to surrender his weapon and avoid assaulting a nurse.

But I also spent years as a junior doctor filling out paperwork, working too much and feeling resentful about the tedious and unsupportive environment I often found myself in.

That didn’t make me a very selfless, altruistic human being, I’m ashamed to say.

Similarly, teachers, nurses, firefighters and speech pathologists are often overworked, underpaid, tired and unsupported. But they’re not always doing their jobs because they want to heal, teach or rescue.

Everyone has all sorts of motivations for the jobs they choose, or reasons they keep doing them. Even UN Aid workers might be craving excitement or escaping a former life, they’re not just there to manage African babies with HIV.

And sure, plenty of athletes are overpaid. Did Michael Jordan really need to earn the US$1M per week that was reported? Were his slam-dunks really worth that?

Possibly. I’d rather see that than the cast of Friends being paid the same amount per episode of mindless drivel. And I’m not even a basketball fan.

But for every time you can clamber onto a soapbox to protest the lucrative sponsorship dollars an athlete can reap, think about the other hundreds that do not, or cannot.

Ask yourself if NOT getting paid for the first 10y of your career then having no job stability after you retire works out even, then factor in the current climate of risk in sporting professions.

Remember that an athlete’s body is their mode of income and every single injury, illness, lack of form and mental fatigue costs them income. We make sacrifices, put other aspects of life on hold (like motherhood, owning a car, drinking alcohol on a Saturday night) and we have to constantly navigate uncertainty.

But this isn’t about money, or whose job is more important/relevant to the world at large.

It’s about this simple fact: Cadel doesn’t inspire you, nor do you think he is invested with heroic qualities.

I’m proud to say that I wholeheartedly disagree with you.

We find sports people heroic when they do things we fantasise about, that we could only dream of.

Athletes entertain us, thrill us, make us tense and exhilarated. And when we know them, are related to them or have followed their careers closely, the effect is amplified.

When you know an athlete has failed in his/her ambitions so many times, broken bones, over-trained, made mistakes that cost them a race or just fallen short, then a final victory over every competitor in the race is truly remarkable.

Mia, you should watch coverage of the final week of the Tour de France, see just what everyone is talking about.

Look at the battle weary bodies of these boys and what they push themselves to do. You will see that Cadel also had 8 selfless teammates, whose names most people don’t know, and they rode every single day to protect him.

They are heroes too.

I can only hope to one day achieve something that might inspire a nation to be active, courageous, ambitious and persistent like Cadel Evans has in his efforts over the decade.

Sincerely,

Dr Bridie O’Donnell MBBS

Silver medal, 1987 AUS Maths Olympics

(National Champion, 3 time Oceania Champion, 3-time World Championship team member)

Here's a couple OGs.

2011-07-12T18:16:00.001-07:00

The Perennial Plate Episode 61: Brothers from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Wish it still came like this.

2011-07-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

Nightly Wisdom #52

2011-07-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

"Nothing trumps passion. It's like the paper made out of rock that smashes all scissors."

- Dirty Biker/Yours truly

We talkin' bout practice!

2011-07-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

To some people, practice requires shooting a ball into a hoop. To others, practice requires taking an adventure to get better at life and to appreciate the simple things. This video rocks at doing just that. Check it. [via Dirty Biker]

Bikerafting Alaska's Lost Coast: Yakutat to Glacier Bay. from lacemine29 on Vimeo.

Teabaggers are a confused bunch...

2011-07-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- Republicans may find a resolution to make the rich share more of the pain in debt-reduction "rather pathetic," but new survey data suggest voters in swing states favor the idea -- strongly.

Poll data by the Democratic-aligned Public Policy Polling released Wednesday said voters in Ohio, Missouri, Montana and Minnesota back hiking taxes on the wealthy -- even for people with incomes as low as $150,000.

The respondents were asked: "In order to reduce the national debt, would you support or oppose raising taxes on those with incomes over $1,000,000 a year?"

Nearly 80 percent of voters in the four states backed the idea.

Continue reading article here

Considering the recession and resulting generational debt spawned by the plutocracy inspired policies implemented by Bush 43, the ability of Tea Party borgs to collectively fabricate and/or ignore reality is amazing. So, let’s take a look at how America got to the point of economic annihilation.

Republicans controlled government for a decade and generated record amounts of deficit spending, yet Republicans continue to distort the truth in an effort to “destroy” Obama and dump blame on the Democrats for the economic mess Republicans engineered. Under Clinton, Democrats balanced the budget and created a sizable surplus by adopting “pay-as-you-go” legislation, a fiscally prudent approach Republicans quickly abandoned upon gaining control of both Houses and the Presidency.

According to the CBO, the long-term impact of the fiscally irresponsible policies orchestrated under Bush will lead to the deficit exceeding $35 trillion by 2023. Here’s the breakdown:

(1) 15 year projected lost tax revenue attributable to Bush recession – $13 trillion

(2) Loss revenue attributable to Bush tax cuts for the wealthy – $7 trillion

(3) Bush oil and insurance cartel subsidies – $2 trillion

(4) Bush Prescription Drug Bill – $1 trillion

(5) Bush era unfunded earmark spending – $6 trillion

(6) Bush wars – $6 trillion.

Besides Bush, no other president has ever cut taxes while simultaneously waging war. Obama’s policies save America from economic catastrophe, and conservatives lambast him; Reaganomics increased deficit spending by 189%, and conservatives want to name every building in DC after him. Bush’s economic policies single-handedly led to America’s economic collapse, and Republican revisionists are attempting to deny any culpability on their part, scapegoat Obama, and rewrite history, something I won’t let happen!

Furthermore...

First, to you people complaining that "50% OF AMERICANS DON'T PAY TAXES".

1) Americans 18 and under: 24.3%

2) Americans 65 and older: 12.3%

3) Working Age Americans with severe disabilities: 7.7%

4) Americans in Prison: 0.7%

Sources: US Census Bureau, Disabled in Action

That's a total of 45% of Americans right there

++++++

Second, WHY HAS ECONOMIC GROWTH SLOWED DOWN WHILE TAX RATES HAVE DECLINED?

Marginal, average yearly, top-end tax rates in America, by decade:

1950s 90.54%

1960s 80.33%

1970s 70.18%

1980s 48.45%

1990s 36.72%

2000s 36.23%

2010s 35.00%

Annualized, Real, Per Capita GDP Growth in America, by decade:

1950s 2.76%

1960s 3.01%

1970s 1.68%

1980s 1.56%

1990s 1.57%

2000s 0.35%

2010s 0.60%

Hmm, the correlation coefficient between the marginal tax rate and past economic growth is a surprisingly HIGH 0.88, not negative, as supply siders would have us believe. Of course, we can't equate correlation with causation, and must acknowledge other factors, like the collapse of infrastructure spending in America over the same time period. Still, WOW!

++++++

Third, why do many higher tax nations have a higher GDP per capita than America?

Percent of GDP coming from Tax Revenue, by nation:

1) Denmark - 48.3% - with a GDP per capita of $62,100 (#8 in the world)

2) Sweden - 47.1% - with a GDP per capita of $51,950 (#14 in the world)

3) Belgium - 44.3% - with a GDP per capita of $47,090 (#19 in the world)

4) Austria - 42.9% - with a GDP per capita of $49,600 (#17 in the world)

5) Finland - 42.8% - with a GDP per capita of $51,320, (#15 in the world)

6) Norway - 42.1% - with a GDP per capita of $94,760 (#2 in the world)

7) Luxembourg - 38.3% - with a GDP per capita of $109,900 (#1 in the world)

8) The Netherlands - 37.5% - with a GDP per capita of $52,960 (#11 in the world)

9) Australia - 30.8% - with a GDP per capita of $47,330 (#18 in the world)

10) Switzerland - 29.4% - with a GDP per capita of $64,330 (#6 in the world)

...

31) United States - 27.1% - with a GDP per capita of $46,350 (#20 in the world)

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit 2011 World Book In Figures

The relationship between taxes and economic growth is more complex than cons make it out to be.

Michele Bachman's Story of America

2011-06-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Lyrical Content of the Day #1

2011-06-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong...
And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you go?

It's great to be able to stop
When you've planned a thing that's wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish.
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there's something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.

Bribery, but Nobody Was Charged

2011-06-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

By James B. Stewart

"A memo about payments to two women in Mexico that was sent to Tyson Foods' headquarters in Springdale, Ark., set off an ethics scandal that raised questions about accountability for high-level corporate crime."

In late June 2004, a plant manager for one of Tyson Foods’ poultry processing plants in Mexico sent a memo to company headquarters in Springdale, Ark.: two women who “most definitely do not work for Tyson Foods in Mexico” each were paid 30,700 pesos, or about $2,700, a month and had been for years. Tyson is one of the world’s largest producers of poultry, pork and beef products, a ubiquitous presence in American supermarkets that has been trying to increase foreign sales. The memo set off an ethics scandal that reached into Tyson’s executive suite and raises questions about who, if anyone, is being held accountable for high-level corporate crime.

The women happened to be the wives of two veterinarians stationed at the plants as part of Mexico’s effort to meet high sanitary and processing standards. The veterinarians certified products as suitable for export, a step required by countries like Japan and increasingly sought after by Mexican consumers as an assurance of quality and safety for locally produced processed meats.

A few days later, senior Tyson executives convened a meeting at headquarters. Someone pointed out the obvious. The purpose of the payments was “to keep the veterinarians from making problems,” according to a subsequent memo — in short, bribes. Participants at this meeting — who included the president of Tyson International, the vice president for operations, and the vice president for internal audit — evidently agreed the payments to the wives had to stop. A company lawyer said he was seeking advice on “possible exposure” from the payments, evidently referring to potential liability for maintaining fraudulent records and bribing foreign officials, which are felonies under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

And then, having identified the serious ethical and legal lapses, and the need to stop the bogus payments, this group of executives “were tasked with investigating how to shift the payroll payments to the veterinarians’ wives directly to the veterinarians,” according to a subsequent statement of facts negotiated by Tyson’s lawyers and the Department of Justice.

Continue reading

The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret

2011-06-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

ON THE CUT-AND-KILL floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the "warm room" where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.

Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the "brain machine"—the last stop on a conveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the "head table." Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat.
Matthew Garcia

They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible ("everything but the squeal," wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

Continue reading this article

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Take a look at this recently released video showing the nation's largest pork producer, Iowa Select Farms, who sell their pork products to Safeway, Costco, HyVee and Kroger. [Graphic]

TAKE ACTION: As a concerned human and subspecies of our pig friends, I condemn this sort barbaric practice. There are thousands of farmers doing the right thing who are horrified at the thought of being in the same "profession" as these mindless thugs. The system shown is flawed in its design, and the quotes about the need for cheap food to justify this institutionalized abuse are without merit. This failed experiment must be dismantled. If you feel inclined, give them a call at 641.648.4479. I'm expecting a "call-back" from their vet...

Financial Reform Destined to Fail

2011-06-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

America's problem isn't that so much of its government (and all of the GOP side is) is "pro business." Because it's not.

No, America, and the GOP in particular are "Pro Big Business," which is a different thing altogether.

America does an amazing job of creating and then catering to monopolies and oligopolies. Examples abound: cable TV, media, healthcare and banking are just a few of the sectors where large companies are able to not only crush any real competition - all with the support of the government - but also to rip off customers with relative impunity.

Indeed, conservative America, along with nearly all of America's "regulatory" infrastructure is "captured" by big business. The revolving door between government and industry just guarantees this.

But here's the thing: big businesses aren't near as good for an economy as small businesses are. Small businesses create most of the jobs - especially good paying ones. Small business, especially in the service and technology sectors, are huge drivers of innovation. And since small companies have far more growth upside than big ones (it's simple math - there are limits to how big companies can get), an economy that bets the firm on big companies is guaranteed to do worse than economies that care more about the success of smaller firms.

America has become a finely honed machine to allow big companies to thrive at the expense of smaller ones. CItizens United merely cements their unfair advantage, and now political power is essential equal to how much money you have. America's biggest companies have bought for themselves the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the world, and FAR lower than most small companies end up paying.

Unless and until this changes, America's economy will continue to hollow out, and those lucky enough to be part of a monopoly or oligopoly will grow ever richer at the direct expense of everyone else.

Musical Mondays #14

2011-06-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

Did someone mention it's awesome day?

Depeche Mode - Everything Counts by hushhush112

Sugar Rush

2011-06-27T13:38:00.001-07:00

The progress of a disease over thirty years
The number of adults with diabetes more than doubled between 1980 and 2008, according to a new study led by Professor Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London and Goodarz Danaei at Harvard University and published in the Lancet. This jump is not quite as horrific as the numbers might initially suggest, because ageing helped push up rates. But a good 30% of the increase was caused by higher prevalence of diabetes across age groups. Obesity seems to be a main culprit; the authors found a high correlation between rising rates of diabetes and a rise in body mass index. The global leap masks considerable variation between the sexes and among regions. Across the world the rate of diabetes rose by 18% for men and by 23% for women, to 9.8% and 9.2% respectively. In some countries the gap between the sexes was more dramatic. In Pakistan, for example, rates jumped by 46% for men and by 102% for women. The highest incidence of all is found in the Marshall Islands, where more than a quarter of all adults had diabetes in 2008. America has lived up to its hefty reputation. Women’s rate of diabetes jumped 79%, something that has contributed to a decline in life expectancy among some groups. And once again, French women are the envy of the world. Rates there fell by 11.2%.

High fructose corn syrup is different from regular fruit fructose in that the sugar is single fructose instead of chain polymers in fruit. Also, most processed foods have HFCS, have the original starch Glucose and fibres stripped out. Muscles and the brain only use glucose while fructose is only used by your liver.

Result, eating processed food leaves you feeling hungry 30 minutes afterwards because only you liver stores are filled, and your muscles and brain are still glucose depleted. You fall into a vicious cycle where you eat more processed food, and all that excess fructose keeps getting stored as fat. Fat leads to diabetes. 'Merica, happy (In)dependence day...

REVOLT

2011-06-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

CRAMTIME

2011-06-23T06:29:00.001-07:00

OP/ED: New Cigarette Ads

2011-06-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

by MAS

Another act of stupidity. If smoking is so dangerous, why is it legal? Why not put photos of crashed cars on bottles of alcohol? Simple. MONEY.

Government makes way too much money on taxes to ban the products. So instead they talk out of both sides of their mouths.

Have photos of car wrecks on CD cases and cell phone boxes.

Have photos of obese people on Twinkie and potato chip packages.

Change the armed services posters/ads to show pictures of mangled bodies and 18 year olds with no legs and faces blown off. It is a possible consequence of being in the military just as disease is a possible consequence of smoking. But you won't see those pictures. Why ?

As usual, plenty of bullshit.

Good on ya Vittoria

2011-06-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

Type 1 Error

2011-06-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Not many, if any, pieces of writing have ever made me feel so disgusted and filled with rage. This is a beautifully written account of a wrongfully convicted man who was murdered by the state of Texas. As Mitch puts it, "One of the best, most riveting, and certainly tragic things I've read in a long time. A reminder in the fallibility of the justice system and human capacity."

TRIAL BY FIRE
Did Texas execute an innocent man?
by David Grann

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Read more

Fun With Funkmaster T and Giro Chad.

2011-06-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

Why We Need to Take Magic Mushrooms Seriously

2011-06-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Price

Psilocybin. It's the psychoactive substance in those "sacred mushrooms" that causes hallucinations and other novel mental experiences. The effects of those mushrooms have been explored and appreciated by members of the ancient Capsian culture in North Africa, Aztec shamans, and modern college students. But they're now the subject of serious study by scientists.

A team from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recently published results from a roughly year-long experiment. The researchers worked with 18 volunteers who were given pure psilocybin to measure how it affected people and how different dosages changed the experience. The subjects were screened for psychological health and given the drug in a pleasant environment, after preparatory guidance. They even had a soundtrack consisting of "classical and world music chosen to complement the arc of the psilocybin action, from onset, through the peak of the effects, and subsiding back to baseline."

The results? At high dosages people occasionally experienced fear, anxiety, or delusions. But the negative effects of those "bad trips" were easily mitigated by the reassuring researchers and didn't outlast the session. At more moderate doses, the results were almost unambiguously positive. Moreover, people didn't just appreciate the experience as fun; they found it spiritually meaningful, with lasting benefits.

As a piece on Newswise explains:

Looking back over a year later, most of the experiment’s 18 volunteers (94 percent) rated a psilocybin session as among the top five most or as the topmost spiritually significant experience of his or her life. [...] Most volunteers (89 percent) also reported positive changes in their behaviors, and those reports were corroborated by family members or others, the researchers say. The behavior changes most frequently cited were improved relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased devotion to spiritual practice.

Reading the volunteers' first-hand reports of how the experiences affected them is a testament to their value. "More and more, sensuality and compassion and gratitude continue to unfold around me." "I try to judge less and forgive more." "I feel that I relate better in my marriage. There is more empathy." "I need less food to make me full. My alcohol use has diminished dramatically."

I'm not saying we should all start doing mushrooms. These were carefully measured doses, taken in a setting designed to be comfortable and supportive. There are certainly situations in which it would be dangerous or irresponsible to take psilocybin.

But these results illustrate the artificial dichotomy between medicine and recreational drugs in America. Stateside, Prozac is regarded as medicine, but psilocybin is a schedule 1 controlled substance like heroin. Americans assume that if some substance is made by nature instead of Eli Lilly, it can't be medicine. But if psilocybin has true psychiatric and emotional benefits, what's the difference? Sure, you can have a bad experience with psilocibin, but antidepressents like Prozac have been linked to suicidal thoughts, and it's hard to imagine a worse side effect than that. We also think that if a drug is used for fun, there must be something bad about it. But Vicodin and OxyContin are all still on the market. There are plenty of FDA-approved drugs that get used (and abused) recreationally.

We should aim to evaluate any drug objectively, whether it's made by an enormous pharmaceutical company or grows in the forest. If an engineered antidepressant generated reports like those from the volunteers in this study, it would be regarded as a breakthrough in psychiatric medicine.

Totally Rad

2011-06-16T15:27:00.001-07:00

2011 Whiskey Off-Road endurance mountain event & festival from Epic Rides on Vimeo.

Not fake!

2011-06-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

Read about it.

Total awesomeness of the day

2011-06-15T10:34:00.001-07:00

Wisconsin Union Law To Take Affect (Best of)

2011-06-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

These comments were a response to the recent Union Law passed in Wisconsin. I do not necessarily agree with the following comments, I just find them provocative and I re-post them to facilitate debate. Enjoy...

1) And now, the Pledge of Allegiance , with Gov. Walker's proposed revisions:

"I pledge allegiance unless I secede to the flag of the loosely United States of America, and to the Republicans for which it stands, one nation under the God of Capitalism, indivisible pending secession with liberty and justice for all the rich."

2) "Remember when the teachers and the unions crashed the economy, took trillions in bailout money, and gave themselves billions in bonuses?...yeah, me neither."

3) "Thank You Unions

- The 8 HOUR WORK DAY. Honey I'm home!
- The 40 HOUR WORK WEEK. Weekends off! TGIF!
- OVERTIME PAY. No more working yourself to the bone_ in a sweatshop_ .
- BREAKS. Have a snack. Call your loved one. Rest your weary legs.
- VACATIONS. Family Time = Priceless Memories.
- HOLIDAYS OFF. Merry Christmas!
- JOB SAFETY. OSHA. It's nice to have all of your fingers and toes. Isn't it?
- WORKMAN'S COMPENSATION . Health care for injuries on the job.
Compensation for lost wages due to injury on the job. SECURITY.
- The ABILITY TO COLLECTIVE BARGAIN. Before Unions, you got what they gave you. Period.
- WAGE INCREASES. Even if you work for a non-union company, when union wages go up,
so do yours.
- MINIMUM WAGE. Do you want to work for the same wages that are paid in third world countries?
- HEALTH BENEFITS. For you and your kids.
- CHILD LABOR LAWS. Lets kids be kids.
- Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act. EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK.
- ARBITRATION. NLRB. WORKERS RIGHTS.
- PROTECTION against discrimination. CIVIL RIGHTS.

Even if you're a salaried employee, YOU HAVE BENEFITED FROM UNIONS!

Of the advantages listed above, only about half of them are set into law.
Many people believe they have "rights" that they actually do not have.
The presence of unions helps to ensure those rights for you.
If unions become less influential, workers rights become less secure."

Way neat!

2011-06-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

I could get into this type of "road racing."

That guy sitting on his MTB at the end is entirely way too cool.

Same video w/ PIP.

How to wash a train in 20 seconds

2011-06-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

I find this especially hilarious.

10 Steps to Defeat the Corporatocracy

2011-06-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Bruce E. Levine

The only way to overcome the power of money is regain our courage and solidarity. Here's how to do that.

Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.

Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans' ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day - from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs - the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples - from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago - of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.

The elite spend their lives stockpiling money and have the financial clout to bribe, divide and conquer the rest of us. The only way to overcome the power of money is with the power of courage and solidarity. When we regain our guts and solidarity, we can then more wisely select from - and implement - time-honored strategies and tactics that oppressed peoples have long used to defeat the elite. So, how do we regain our guts and solidarity?

1. Create the Cultural and Psychological "Building Blocks" for Democratic Movements

Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has studied democratic movements such as Solidarity in Poland, and he has written extensively about the populist movement in the United States that occurred during the end of the 19th century (what he calls "the largest democratic mass movement in American history"). Goodwyn concludes that democratic movements are initiated by people who are neither resigned to the status quo nor intimidated by established powers. For Goodwyn, the cultural and psychological building blocks of democratic movements are individual self-respect and collective self-confidence. Without individual self-respect, we do not believe that we are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and we accept as our role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, we do not believe that we can succeed in wresting away power from our rulers.

Thus, it is the job of all of us - from parents, to students, to teachers, to journalists, to clergy, to psychologists, to artists and EVERYBODY who gives a damn about genuine democracy - to create individual self-respect and collective self-confidence.

2. Confront and Transform ALL Institutions that Have Destroyed Individual Self-Respect and Collective Self-Confidence

In "Get Up, Stand Up, " I detail 12 major institutional and cultural areas that have broken people's sprit of resistance, and all are "battlefields for democracy" in which we can fight to regain our individual self-respect and collective self confidence:

• Television

• Isolation and bureaucratization

• "Fundamentalist consumerism" and advertising/propaganda

• Student loan debt and indentured servitude

• Surveillance

• The decline of unions/solidarity among working people

• Greed and a "money-centric" culture

• Fear-based schools that teach obedience

• Psychopathologizing noncompliance

• Elitism via professional training

• The corporate media

• The US electoral system

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."

3. Side Each Day in Every Way With Anti-Authoritarians

We can recover our self-respect and strength by regaining our integrity. This process requires a personal transformation to overcome our sense of powerlessness and fight for what we believe in. Integrity includes acts of courage resisting all illegitimate authorities. We must recognize that in virtually every aspect of our life in every day, we can either be on the side of authoritarianism and the corporatocracy or on the side of anti-authoritarianism and democracy. Specifically, we can question the legitimacy of government, media, religious, educational and other authorities in our lives, and if we establish that an authority is not legitimate, we can resist it. And we can support others who are resisting illegitimate authorities. A huge part of solidarity comes from supporting others who are resisting the illegitimate authorities in their lives. Walt Whitman had it right: "Resist much, obey little. Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved."

4. Regain Morale by Thinking More Critically About Our Critical Thinking

While we need critical thinking to effectively question and challenge illegitimate authority - and to wisely select the best strategies and tactics to defeat the elite - critical thinking can reveal some ugly truths about reality, which can result in defeatism. Thus, critical thinkers must also think critically about their defeatism, and realize that it can cripple the will and destroy motivation, thus perpetuating the status quo. William James (1842–1910), the psychologist, philosopher, and occasional political activist (member of the Anti-Imperialist League who, during the Spanish-American War, said, "God damn the US for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles!") had a history of pessimism and severe depression, which helped fuel some of his greatest wisdom on how to overcome immobilization. James, a critical thinker, had little stomach for what we now call "positive thinking," but he also came to understand how losing belief in a possible outcome can guarantee its defeat. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian political theorist and Marxist activist who was imprisoned by Mussolini, came to the same conclusions. Gramsci's phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" has inspired many critical thinkers, including Noam Chomsky, to maintain their efforts in the face of difficult challenges.

5. Restore Courage in Young People

The corporatocracy has not only decimated America's labor union movement, it has almost totally broken the spirit of resistance among young Americans - an even more frightening achievement. Historically, young people without family responsibilities have felt most freed up to challenge illegitimate authority. But America's education system creates fear, shame and debt - all killers of the spirit of resistance. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and standardized testing tyranny results in the kind of fear that crushes curiosity, critical thinking and the capacity to constructively resist illegitimate authority. Rebel teachers, parents, and students - in a variety of overt and covert ways - have already stopped complying with corporatocracy schooling. We must also stop shaming intelligent young people who reject college, and we must instead recreate an economy that respects all kinds of intelligence and education. While the corporatocracy exploits student loan debt to both rake in easy money and break young people's spirit of resistance, the rest of us need to rebel against student loan debt and indentured servitude. And parents and mental health professionals need to stop behavior-modifying and medicating young people who are resisting illegitimate authority.

6. Focus on Democracy Battlefields Where the Corporate Elite Don't Have Such a Large Financial Advantage

The emphasis of many activists is on electoral politics, but the elite have a huge advantage in this battlefield, where money controls the US electoral process. By focusing exclusively on electoral politics at the expense of everything else, we: (1) give away power when we focus only on getting leaders elected and become dependent on them; (2) buy into the elite notion that democracy is all about elections; (3) lose sight of the fact that democracy means having influence over all aspects of our lives; and (4) forget that if we have no power in our workplace, in our education and in all our institutions, then there will never be democracy worthy of the name. Thus, we should focus our fight more on the daily institutions we experience. As Wendell Berry said, "If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant."

7. Heal from "Corporatocracy Abuse" and "Battered People's Syndrome" to Gain Strength

Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don't set people free to take action. But when we human beings eat crap for too long, we gradually lose our self-respect to the point that we become psychologically too weak to take action. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that, after years of corporatocracy subjugation, we have developed "battered people's syndrome" and what Bob Marley called "mental slavery." To emancipate ourselves and others, we must:

• Move out of denial and accept that we are a subjugated people.

• Admit that we have bought into many lies. There is a dignity, humility, and strength in facing the fact that, while we may have once bought into some lies, we no longer do so.

• Forgive ourselves and others for accepting the abuser's lies. Remember the liars we face are often quite good at lying.

• Maintain a sense of humor. Victims of horrific abuse, including those in concentration camps and slave plantations, have discovered that pain can either immobilize us or be transformed by humor into energy.

• Stop beating ourselves up for having been in an abusive relationship. The energy we have is better spent on healing and then working to change the abusive system; this provides more energy, and when we use this energy to provide respect and confidence for others, everybody gets energized.

8. Unite Populists by Rejecting Corporate Media's Political Divisions

The corporate media routinely divides Americans as "liberals," "conservatives" and "moderates," a useful division for the corporatocracy, because no matter which of these groups is the current electoral winner, the corporatocracy retains power. In order to defeat the corporatocracy, it's more useful to divide people in terms of authoritarians versus anti-authoritarians, elitists versus populists and corporatists versus anticorporatists. Both left anti-authoritarians and libertarian anti-authoritarians passionately oppose current US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wall Street bailout, the PATRIOT Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the so-called "war on drugs" and several other corporatocracy policies. There are differences between anti-authoritarians but, as Ralph Nader and Ron Paul have together recently publicly discussed, we can form coalitions and alliances on these important power-money issues. One example of an anti-authoritarian democratic movement (which I am involved in) is the mental health treatment reform movement, comprised of left anti-authoritarians and libertarians. We all share distrust of Big Pharma and contempt for pseudoscience, and we believe that people deserve truly informed choice regarding treatment. We respect Erich Fromm, the democratic-socialist psychoanalyst, along with Thomas Szasz, the libertarian psychiatrist, both passionate anti-authoritarians who have confronted mental health professionals for using dogma to coerce people.

9. Unite "Comfortable Anti-Authoritarians" and "Afflicted Anti-Authoritarians

This "comfortable-afflicted" continuum is based on the magnitude of pain that one has simply getting through the day. The term comfortable anti-authoritarian is not a pejorative one, but refers to those anti-authoritarians lucky enough to have decent paying and maybe even meaningful jobs, or platforms through which their voices are heard or social supports in their lives. Many of these comfortable anti-authoritarians may know that there are millions of Americans working mindless jobs in order to hold on to their health insurance, or hustling two low-wage jobs to pay college loans, rent and a car payment, or who may be unable to find even a poorly paying, mindless job and are instead helplessly watching eviction or foreclosure and bankruptcy close in on them. However, unless these comfortable anti-authoritarians have once been part of that afflicted class - and remember what it feels like - they may not be able to fully respect the afflicted's emotional state. The afflicted need to recognize that human beings often become passive because they are overwhelmed by pain (not because they are ignorant, stupid, or lazy), and in order to function at all, they often shut down or distract themselves from this pain. Some comfortable anti-authoritarians assume that people's inactions are caused by ignorance. This not only sounds and smells like elitism, it creates resentment for many in the afflicted class who lack the energy to be engaged in any activism. Respect, resources and anything that concretely reduces their level of pain is likely to be far more energizing than a scolding lecture. That's the lesson of many democratic movements, including the Great Populist Revolt.

10. Do Not Let Debate Divide Anti-Authoritarians

Spirited debate is what democracy is all about, but when debate turns to mutual antipathy and divides anti-authoritarians, it plays into the hands of the elite. One such divide among anti-elitists is over the magnitude of change that should be worked for and celebrated. On one extreme are people who think that anything is better than nothing at all. At the other extreme are people who reject any incremental change and hold out for total transformation. We can better unite by asking these questions: Does the change increase individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and increase one's energy level to pursue even greater democracy? Or does it feel like a sellout that decreases individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and de-energizes us? Utilizing the criteria of increased self-respect and collective self-confidence, those of us who believe in genuine democracy can more constructively debate whether the change is going to increase strength to gain democracy or is going to take the steam out of a democratic movement. Respecting both sides of this debate makes for greater solidarity and better decisions.

To summarize, democracy will not be won without guts and solidarity. Risk-free green actions - such as shopping from independents, buying local, recycling, composting, consuming less, not watching television and so on - can certainly help counter a dehumanizing world. However, revolutions that truly transform fundamental power inequities and enable us to feel like men and women rather than children and slaves require risk, guts and solidarity.

“Let Old Man River alone.”

2011-06-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

In light of the fact that Mother Earth continues to poisoned by humans she will lose. You have made her weak and she is very sick.

The earth is a living creature which has the human race on it now functionin g as parasite a parasitic growth. Things are out of balance it's humans who are slowly killing her.

She cannot bring things back into balance without the help of all those who walk, live and rest on her.

You have made her vulnerable to outside attacks by destroying her rainforest , her oceans, digging huge holes in her body sucking the life out of her veins.

This planet was given to you to take care of not destroy. As long as you continue to destroy her she will fight back and ultimately destroy you.

Unless people start working together to heal her she will continue to fall apart. You all have a choice.

Check out what we are doing to the Mississippi

Less than 1% of 5% of 100% control 25%

2011-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

"5% of the world's population, that is America, consumes 25% of world's available resources. That bothers people around the world as they see the United States as this great octopus, that reaches out with its tentacles and brings all the resources into us and look at the lives we live, while 3/4 of the world lives in destitution. Every day, 24,000 people die of starvation. 30,000 children die of curable diseases. Every single day, these people live tragically, suffering, needlessly suffering lives.

Now, of that 5% of the world's population, less than 1% control more of America's resources, than the other 99% at the bottom. So in fact, 25% of the world's resources are being funneled into this country to serve 1% of 5% of the world's population. It's not a pyramid, it's like a needle going up with a few very wealthy, very powerful people sitting at the top. It's created tremendous resentment around the world. It's what's created our insecurity and I would suggest that we will never be secure in this country, no matter how many guards we have at our airports, until we decide we are going to be a lot more compassionate with the world. That will bring us the security that we "need," when we really start opening ourselves up to the world, welcoming the world as brothers and sisters who we want to share the goodies with."

- John Perkins

I'll say +1 for cyclists

2011-06-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Good form

THE EARTH IS FULL

2011-06-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

by Thomas L. Friedman

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Wednesday Morning History #1

2011-06-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin sure he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shot and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and were going to be armed."

Interview - John Perking (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)

2011-06-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

On the economy...

2011-06-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

We all know which stores in our communities treat their employees like crap and which don't. And we have a good idea which stores ship all the profits out of town-or out of state-or out of the country! If you've got a choice in your town between patronizing a responsible business or saving 50 cents on your $7.50 purchase at a disreputable business, shop at the responsible business. Its like an investment, it'll pay dividends to your community.

Musical Mondays #13

2011-06-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

Accomplish Something

2011-06-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

From Inebriated Isolation to Hawaii Beaches With Kanye

2011-06-05T09:15:00.000-07:00

Paradox? Verification? What do you think?

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) on hunting,

“The first time I ever did it, it was kind of beautiful,” he said. “I was like, wow, I feel more mortal. I feel less important.” Now it’s a ritual. When Vernon learned that his European tour dates this year were butting into hunting season, he had them rescheduled.

Great story about Justin Vernon and how he went from woods isolation in Eau Claire, WI to playing shows with Kanye West at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC.

Who, What and Where is Bon Iver?
by Jon Caramanica of the New York Times

Even by Kanye West standards, the Bowery Ballroom show last November was a spectacle. West had chosen the tiny club for a surprise concert, celebrating the release of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” and it didn’t take long for the scrum outside to get ugly. Having tickets, which went on sale that day and sold out instantly, didn’t guarantee entry. The line stretched around the corner, and for most people, that’s as far as they got. Even those who made it inside — rappers, models, record-company executives, Diddy, Spike Lee, ordinary fans with the good fortune to have shown up very early — had to endure an hours-long wait.

Finally, well after midnight, the house lights dimmed, but the voice to emerge from the dark wasn’t Kanye’s. It belonged to Justin Vernon, frontman of Bon Iver, in a black T-shirt and slightly ratty beard. The fans had come for the megalomaniac rapper, but they’d have to deal with the sensitive loner first.

Read the rest HERE

Also, check out this recent interview of Sean Carey (drummer of Bon Iver), or as Rob calls, SCARY.

Musical Mondays #12

2011-06-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

This one may constitute for the next 10 "Musical Mondays," That 1 Guy performs and records as a one-man band, singing and using a variety of homemade musical instruments.

Genres: Rhythm & Sound, Experimental music, funk, jazz, Gyp hop

The Magic Pipe, also known by his close friends as 'The Broken Bowflex', is a homemade, electronically rigged pair of steel pipes, connected by adjustable joints, with each pipe hosting an orchestral bass string. The harp-shaped instrument is roughly seven feet tall and features 13 trigger points, which can be mapped to various musical sound effects or samples. The front pipe uses a low C string, while the rear pipe's string is used to achieve more tenor ranged notes. The pipes themselves are employed to produce various percussive sounds while That 1 Guy slaps, plucks, or bows the strings, as well as occasionally utilizing a drum stick to sound the strings and the pipes at the same time. The creation of the Magic Pipe was based on Silverman’s double bass experience, as well as borrowing from the concepts of the gutbucket and the diddley bow.

The Magic Boot is a scorpion-emblazoned cowboy boot, which is wired and fed through the Magic Pipe’s audio lines. It is then played as a percussive instrument by tapping on the sole while pinching the boot’s opening to achieve different sounds, similar to an African talking drum.

The Magic Saw is a musical saw, which is wired into the main effects box. It utilizes a small adhesive speaker and is played percussively as well as with a violin bow. It sounds similar to a theremin when played and renditions of Somewhere Over The Rainbow have been performed on numerous occasions.

Couldn't have said it any better myself

2011-06-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

Taken from CyclingTips

Where I'm from, walking into a cafe in lycra isn't quite as acceptable as it is in Australia (well, is it ever really acceptable?). Here, the cafe after a ride is akin to a men's locker room after the big game where we wind-down and shoot the breeze. A ride just isn't a ride without it.

Last week my wife and I watched in horror as an adrenaline pumped group of cyclists rocked up into a quiet cafe swearing within an earshot of kids and sat down smelling like a bunch of sweaty barn animals. Is this the brush I’m being painted with when I walk into a cafe in lycra?

After this incident I went around to a few cafes and had a chat with some staff and asked them about their stories and gripes with cyclists. Most had a goodhearted laugh about it but some had a few shocking stories to tell!

It’s a common scene for most of us. After a ride we’ll head to our favorite cafe, lean a dozen bikes up against their clean windows, clip-clop in, move 2-3 tables together, then take our sweaty helmets and gloves off and lay them all over the place. Then we’ll settle in, loudly discuss anything and everything cycling and woo at the pretty girls passing by. There’s always one cheapskate in the bunch who won’t order anything and will eat his own muesli bars and ask the waitress to fill his waterbottle.

(One cafe owner told me about a recent incident where a cyclist was wringing out his wet gear in the middle of the cafe floor after being caught in the rain. Yes…this stuff happens!)

When the waitress brings the order to the table she’ll need to interrupt some epic tale of”that time when Joe Blog smashed everyone on the climb”, and consequently needs to announce “soy latte” four times before someone realises it’s their order. Then of course there’s always the guy who says “this coffee is $hit” loud enough for everyone to hear.

We’ll then split the bill into 13 separate $3.50 orders and pay with $50 notes drenched in sweat. After we make a monumental mess of the place leaving sweaty napkins and banana peels on the table we all ask to have our waterbottles filled. Then we all stand around on our bikes outside blocking the footpath while we wait for everybody to get ready.

Does this ring a bell? Indeed, this is how the outside world views us on a Saturday morning.

I love my post-ride coffee just as much as the next guy and cyclists are only one example of a tribe who throws away social etiquette as soon as they get into that bubble. I see it with golfers on the 19th hole and footie players or fans after a big game at the pub. And don’t get me started on those mother’s clubs cackling away in the cafe after they drop the kids off at school. Do they have any decency at all?

Earth is Small

2011-06-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Nightly Wisdom #50

2011-06-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

"The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."
- Jessica Hische

Here we go. Up up up, heeeuupp. Heup heup eeeuup! Come on girl! Gee dangit!

2011-06-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

Not too often that you get all this neatness in one location, that's called Neature!

Nightly Wisdom #49

2011-06-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

"The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself."
- David Brooks

This kid's got upper management written all over him.

2011-06-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

It’s Not About You

2011-06-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

By David Brooks

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

Danny MacAskill Plays Capetown

2011-05-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

If all advertising was this legit...

Danny MacAskill Plays Capetown (complete video) from leica camera on Vimeo.

Agri-tourism = enlightenment

2011-05-30T20:46:00.000-07:00

Musical Mondays #11

2011-05-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

This one might as well go under "Metrosexual Mondays"

Oh man, he is so done.

2011-05-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

Not surprised, but sad to hear Hincapie's a cheat too...oh well.

Honest Chain Restaurant Menus

2011-05-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

GMHNG

2011-05-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Good Music Has No Genre

Can't wait for the festivities to start

2011-05-11T14:13:00.001-07:00

WOO-AHHH-OHHH-EWWW-OHH-OHHHH!!!

2011-05-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Spike My Lemmon-ade

2011-05-09T07:37:00.000-07:00

It's like that bag of granola that you can't stop eating; they both taste so good but a whole shwabang makes you feel so crapful.

This mountain keeps kicking my arse and I keep going back for more. My first adventure left me depleted and near hallucinogenic, this time wasn't that different.

The original plan was to ride the big bike up there somewhere in the trees and take a study break/nap in the middle of the forest. With the new hammock I got Bobbi, notes for my exam, and a camelback full of food and water, I was off to celebrate mother's day in the pines. Each trailhead I passed on the way up made my mouth water, as I've ridden very little of them, but still, I wanted to get up into the trees and perhaps ride some trails down.

Up near palisades, I found a nice spot, with the wind blown trees as my music.

It was pretty zen.

About 2:30 I decided to pack it up and head back home. On the way down, I stopped at the upper Green Mountain TH with curiosity. A fellow MTB'er was up there hanging out in the shade and he asked if I'd ridden the trail before. I told him I hadn't and he insisted that I do. "Just be careful on the first section (about a mile)," he told me. He also said to ALWAYS veer right. And with that, I was off.

The first section was indeed meant for a rider with much more skill than the devil blessed me with. I learned this the hard way when I endo'ed over a rock and down a steep ledge. Thankfully, this little tree was there to catch me and my bike from sliding further.

Now covered in dirt, blood, and a huge knob on my knee, I contemplated turing around. I didn't because the guy told me it gets better. It did get a little better, but it wasn't purely downhill and my legs were beginning to seize up. Views like this made it worth it though.

Fast forward about 20 minutes, veer right, right? Well, it the trail goes left (down) and right (up). I decide to go left, I don't know why. After about 10 minutes of deteriorating trail, I am lost. The trail ended and I'm clueless. The wind is hurling, it's pretty damn hot outside, my knee hurts, and I'm standing alone on the side of a friggen mountain with nothing in sight. Time to accept my losses and bushwhack my way back up with bike on my shoulder. At this point, I'm also getting a tad bit concerned, but what are you gonna do, sit and cry? The idea of setting up the hammock and crying didn't sound that bad though.

After about 30 minutes of up, many slips and falls, scraped up in the strangest places from thick, pointy brush, I found the original trail. Back on track I guess.

I gingerly made my way down the ridges and into the forest. Things began getting more familiar. And to my glee, the trail became sick, in a good way. Lots of rocks, lots of trees, it was grand. One parting view looking toward the climb up to windy point, with the cumbersome city of Tucson in the crux of them there hills.

Although the first part of this trail is intended for Danny MacAskill and not a total tool douche bag with multicolored bottle cages and a china plate bash guard, I enjoyed the ride. At the end of the day, I got what I wanted, and I didn't die. So all is swell. Take care hooligans.

great country

2011-05-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

Common Sense

2011-04-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

Took this straight from Ben's blog, where he found it on the HP. Enjoy thoroughly.

Common sense is a funny term. In reality, there is no such thing as common sense. What might seem like the simplest and most straight forward concept could be completely foreign to someone nearby.

A great article by Dr. Cara Barker puts into clear terms what has been "common sense" to me.

How to Relax More and Stress Less

"Sorry to mess up your chair," she said, sweating. "I've been going 90 miles per hour." Can you relate? From our own personal experience to the gravitational shifts that scientists say will culminate in December this year, there's increasing evidence that we are living in a world that is speeding up. Who hasn't noticed? Whether you can relate or not, you know someone who can.

What are we doing to ourselves? We tell ourselves all sorts of stories. We con ourselves, as a culture, into believing that we must push, fret and be vigilant about the future. It is a lie that's bad for our health. Life is impermanent, but we pretend that it's not. In spite of time on the meditation cushion, it is all too easy to get caught up in the craziness of rushing and consumerism. One of the biggest bugaboos is the notion that we are our collections, our things, our lifestyle, our circumstances.

Perhaps this is what makes a story like Tom Shadyac's so refreshing. In his magnificent documentary "I Am," we witness the liberating process of surrendering to the inevitable challenge for each of us: shedding. As Meister Eckhart put it centuries ago, "God strips us of our props."

There's been a lot of stripping going around these past 10 years. Change is accelerating. Regardless of whether you're feeling the strip search in your wallet, career, health, relationships or self-confidence, it's happening everywhere. All we need to do is recall what is happening in Japan, Libya and elsewhere to note the toxic fumes of the unexpected, and the dire necessity of scaling back expectations.

In what seems incapacitating, we are left to recover the essential. Just the other day a 40-ish woman told me, "I assumed my kids would go to college, and that my folks would be around to see it. Now my dad has Alzheimers, and my mom was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We have spent the money in our retirement fund just to pay the bills since we both lost our jobs nearly two years ago. Everything is 'up for grabs.' Go figure. You think you are being responsible and then the unexpected happens."

Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun, puts it this way: "The only time we ever know what's really going on is when the rug is pulled out and we can't find anywhere to land." Well, my friends, in this global rug pull-out, we've got more and more places to land.

May we land on our feet. May we be patient with ourselves as we learn to walk again. (Trust me. I know about this one, quite literally.) Like Shadyac, we have before us the opportunity for scrutiny, and the opportunity to ask, "What is wrong with my world, and what, specifically, will make it right?" May we remember that we are not our circumstances, our conditions, our doubts, our fears. May we take the necessary steps to remember who we are below our anxiety.

When you've been running too hot and heavy, sometimes the only thing to be done is to put yourself in time out -- not as a self-imposed punishment, but as a form of self-imposed compassion and respect for the fact that the psyche was not built for such chronic stress and strain. Sure, there is a price tag. When I recently took a bit of time off to simply be, I was more than aware that this meant no pay (the other side of the coin when you are self-employed). When you take yourself temporarily out of the game, there's sacrifice. But if you don't take yourself out of it when you need to, the price is even greater. Maybe your recess is for five minutes, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a season, a year. Maybe it's for 60 seconds. But wherever you are, no matter how important your ego might need you to be, you are not so big that the world cannot continue on its axis while you hop off the merry-go-round to reconnect with the essential.

This is the gift of stripping away the excess, even if only for a moment or two. Because when you do, you discover that you, too, are hard-wired for connection, collaboration, creation of a better world. Look at nature: no rush there. The apple tree outside takes the seasons required to flower before producing its fruit. The meadow lark takes her time to gather the requisite twigs from the forest in order to build her nest. Even when completed, she allows her eggs to hatch on their own schedule, not hers. She trusts the process.

What about you and I? What if you had more trust in the possibility that what you are seeking is seeking you? What if you had the courage to trust that what is being stripped away in your life, and in the world's, is necessary for a greater sense of collaboration, awakening and harvesting? What if we accepted that life is impermanent, and that what must be lost in order to be found?

Tonight, no matter where you live, go outside. Move amongst the elements. If the moon and stars are out, note their splendor. If they aren't, lay down the burden you've been carrying and simply breathe in and out, for free. Imagine laying down your troubles so that you are free to dream again. Imagine what it means to be free, to live joyfully, wholeheartedly, free to dance again beneath the moon, for no particular reason other than the fact that you can and are still here. When you do, know that I am dancing beneath Mother Moon as well, thanking my lucky stars that the two of us are together, in this moment, neighbors sharing the same ground and sky. I am so grateful that we are not alone.

Your turn: What helps you relax, de-stress and slow down? What helps you remember what's most essential? What is dearest to your heart when you take the time to simply be? I'm listening, and I'm learning from you, my teachers.

This experience that we are living is too short to rush through.

Obama's Birth Certificate Through The Eyes Of A Birther

2011-04-28T07:34:00.001-07:00

This certificate is so obviously bogus....I looked at it online and when I ran my finger over the "raised seal" I could not feel any bumps.

"Why wasn't he born on a farm, like a regular American?"

No, for birthers, it's the other box -- "Why wasn't he born on a plantation , like all nigrahs?"

Just imagine where we would be if there had been as much fervor over seeing proof of WMD's in Iraq before illegally marching our troops in. Birthers are pathetic.. . and I'm sure they are not going to move on now. Eating crow is a difficult task.

The Daily Show
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YES!

2011-04-26T12:45:00.001-07:00

Is this real life?

2011-04-25T22:26:00.001-07:00

All you ever want...

2011-04-25T10:43:00.001-07:00

R My Dreams.

Letter to the peasants of America, from the Top 5%

2011-04-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

You asked; Where did all the money and jobs go?

We took the money. We didn't think we had enough. We shipped the jobs overseas and took the profits. We started internatio nal corporatio ns where we seek out the cheapest labor and the least stringent regulation s.

We use the military (you pay for) to take over any competitio n that can't be stolen or bought. We will destroy anyone in our way.

We set up offshore subsidiari es to hide the money. We deposited our personal money in Swiss and Cayman Island banks. We bought enough politician s and judges to write the laws. We implemente d free trade, free markets, low taxes for us, and no taxes for our corporations.

We crashed the economy on purpose. Now we have Americans just as desperate to have a low paying job as anywhere in the poorest parts of the world. We arranged the largest theft in history and we stuck you with the bill. Now you're broke.

We bought TV networks, radio stations, newspapers , and internet providers. We propagandize our point of view to convince enough of you to vote against your own interest. We will go after civil rights, education, environmen tal laws, unions, any group or law that stands in the way of us skimming as much profit as possible. That's our goal. That is all that matters.

Looking down on you from our penthouse.

The Top 5%