Beth's Friends

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Hope this is not treason to the community...
Fellow book lovers,

This morning found me flipping through a crate of old books. Some dating back five or six years. Such joy was found in thumbing through those read novels. Coming across pages with wavy underlined sentences and highlighted paragraphs. Recalling the events in my life, feelings I possessed, and people reminded of when reading those bright yellow lines. Raising a corner of my mouth remembering a time when I thought with intricacy, yet simplicity. Adolescence and the books that represented me. Finding new strings of words begging for an uncapped pen. In writing this, it is my hope that you will do the same and come across forgotten quotes to share with our community.

Jonathan Richard Kemper.

Not Bestiality... exactly
Here:

Ok, just kidding... bestiality:

Colo. Man Accused of Having Sex with Dog (It wasn't

cluebyfour, so there goes that opportunity to plug our community and ideology in the press)

GRAND JUNCTION (MyFOXColorado.com) – A Castle Rock man faces a felony charge after police say he had sex with a dog and forced a 7-year-old boy to watch. Lee McRoberts, 30, is free on $1,000 bond after being charged with obscenity in Mesa County, where the alleged incident occurred sometime between December 2007 and June 2008. McRoberts moved from Grand Junction to Castle Rock earlier this year.

An arrest warrant says the 7-year-old boy’s mother told police about the incident. Mesa County's District Attorney Pete Hautzinger told The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction that it's not clear whether McRoberts will face any child-abuse counts.

Ok, on the one hand, if the boy was detained and forced to watch against his will, then that is a rights violation (if you believe in rights, no offense,

thedesertmouse,

volkris); however, if not, then shouldn't this kid's family pony up, so to speak, for the free sex-ed lesson and the crash course in libertarian theory he was privy to? (No offense,

evil_genius)

Pinker at UBC, Sep 26
http://www.sci-hum.pwias.ubc.ca/abstracts.php#pinker

Steven Pinker, The Humanities and Human Nature

Many humanities scholars have expressed a malaise about the current state of their fields, reflecting a lack of optimism about the possibility of a progressive agenda for discovery and accumulation of knowledge. I argue that consilience with the social and biological sciences offers the exciting prospect that both sets of fields could prosper from exploring how the activities of the humanities spring from human nature -- the cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and social faculties that arise from the evolved structure of the human brain. I list several areas in which the two can be brought together, and explore in greater depth two connections flowing out of my own research on language: the application of research on inflectional morphology to an analysis of literary form, and the application of research on indirect speech acts to an analysis of dialogue and plot.

The whole event looks interesting. It's about how the humanities should listen to cogsci. Another famous speaker is Dan Sperber.

Wolf in Shadow - David Gemmell
"I think you had better stay for a little while, Mr Shannow," said Eric.
"I think perhaps I had. It would be nice if we could be friends, Eric."
"I don't want to be your friend."
"Why?"
"Because you took my mother away from me, and now I am all alone."
"You are not alone, but I cannot convince you of that, even though I probably know more about loneliness than any man alive. I have never had a friend, Eric. When I was your age, my father and mother were killed. I was raised for some time by a neighbour called Claude Vurrow; then he too was killed and since then I have been alone. I am the Jerusalem Man, the Shadow, the Brigand-slayer. Wherever I am I will be hated and hunted - or used by 'better' men. That is loneliness, Eric - sitting with a frightened child, and not being able to reach out and convince even him - that is loneliness.
"When I die, Eric, no one will mourn for me. It will be as if I never was. Would you like to be that lonely, boy?"
Eric said nothing and Shannow left the room.

Monogamy is Windows. Polyamory is Linux.
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

MORE SUMO!
Today was a day of concentrated awesomeness.

theinimitable_l and I, after a brisk brunch at Cafe Du Village, headed down to the L.A. Sports Arena to catch the US Sumo Open. We'd been offered discount tickets by a theater producer friend, and after the fun I'd had at the Grand Sumo Tour last June I was eager to catch some more.

These were good seats indeed; the guard did a double-take when he saw our tickets. We were in row two, sitting right behind the officials' table. These were $100 seats (or $500 last June), ours for a quarter of that. On several occasions wrestlers sat practically next to us. We were also behind several visiting L.A. politicians and the announcer, and found ourselves on camera, and thus on the giant screens in the arena, on several occasions.

Now this was the US Sumo Open, so was the equivalent of the minor leagues compared to last June. There were no Japanese superstar wrestlers, but a mixture of Americans and Mongolians, with a few Germans and eastern Europeans as well. The atmosphere was informal, with little of the ceremony that characterized the Grand Tour; no throwing of salt, no two minute pre-match ritual, and so on. The announcer spoke English to an American sports audience, meaning that he dumbed everything down.

Though initially disappointed by the college-gym atmosphere, I slowly found myself just as engrossed as last June - and with a far better view. Sumo is intrinsically exciting because the tides of fortune can shift so abruptly, and they often did. One wrestler would be seemingly on the verge of winning when the other would spin him and toss him out of the ring. We found ourselves picking favorites, usually rooting for an underdog or someone with a good attitude. The belligerent behemoth Germans were usually the bad guys, though my least favorite player was an arrogant young American with a chip on his shoulder.

There was even a woman's division, though this lacked the dramatic surprise element of the male rounds. It opened with a 20-something woman hurling a 47-year-old opponent to the ground, from which she had to be peeled off by two other wrestlers and carried away to the hospital. The same 20-something later faced a woman about half again her mass and got her rear handed to her. Not bad watching, but not really surprising.

The final faceoff between Byambaja "Byamba" Ulambayar and the evil-looking Bulgarian Petar Stoyanov was by contrast dramatic and exciting, with a sudden maneuver by Byamba winning him the day.

Perhaps most exciting was the mixed-weight matches at the end, where lightweights who looked no more sumo-like than your average boxer faced off with mountainous heavyweights. In one brilliant upset, one lightweight virtually leapt forward as soon as the referee started the match, and hooked the leg out his monstrous opponent and took him down before he could even react. This kind of unpredictability, and use of strategy, is what makes sumo so darn exciting.

It may be years or decades before the Grand Tour comes back to the USA - its arrival is comparable to that of the Olympics in frequency - but the US Sumo Open is apparently yearly, and I for one aim to be back.

You'll have to pester

theinimitable_l for photos, and the story about how she ended up hefted aloft by a sumo wrestler and filmed for a Canadian sumo documentary.

Questions. Definitely Going to Be a Long One.
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: Truth, by Seether

human (un)intelligence
Suppose you (B) and your friend (A) are expecting to meet a friend of theirs (D) who you've never met before. You're running a bit late, and just as you get there, you see someone (C) who is walking away, so must decide ASAP whether this is the person you're supposed to meet, so you can decide whether to yell. Are C and D the same person?

A can't see C.

If humans were digital creatures, B could instantly communicate C's image to A. Better yet, A could have instructed B on how to recognize D as effectively as A herself.

However, as a human, A and B must use English to tell each other these things. This is an awful solution! It doesn't bother me so much when machines are dumber than humans. It bothers me more when humans are dumber than machines.

RNC convention security for Paul folks; back to Libertarian
RNC convention security for Paul folks...
Following an article which took me by surprise in the Washington Times. It doesn't entirely get the story right according to a female alternate friend who went. She was followed by the guys in suits and asked one of them (who even follwed them in and out of the bathroom) WHY she was being followed. "I don't know. We were told to." and that was fairly the end of it.

No press mention of the Ron Paul folks who were quarantined off in a fenced area, attempted to be physically removed from the floor in their assigned seating areas which they were legally allowed to be in, all kinds of harassment from everyone else around them being texted then left and they were 'rounded up'

look on the meetup.com las vegas reclaiming liberty sites for various postings. it's disturbing. and yet Lisa Marie will still be a Repub trying to change things on the local level.

i'm going back to Libertarian...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/05/st-paul-minn-8212-fearing-demonstrations-from-ron-/

Letters of Sherwood Anderson
April, 1935

"Dear Roy Jansen: I think the most absorbingly interesting and exciting moment in any writer's life must come at the moment when he, for the first time, knows that he is a real writer. Any professional writer, any Hemingway, Wolfe, Faulkner, Stein, Dreiser, Lewis - I could name a dozen others, prosemen, I mean - will know what I mean. You begin, of course, being not yourself. We all do. There have been so many great ones. "If I could write as that man does." There is, more than likely, some one man you follow slavishly. How magnificently his sentences march. It is like a field being plowed. You are thinking of the man's style, his way of handling words and sentences.

You read everything the man has written, go from him to others. You read, read, read. You live in the world of books. It is only after a long time that you know that this is a special world, fed out of the world of reality, but not of the world of reality.

You have yourself not yet brought anything up out of the real world into this special world, to make it live there.

And then, if you are ever to be a real writer, your moment comes. I remember mine. I walked along a city street in the snow. I was working at work I hated. Already I had written several long novels. They were not really mine. I will ill, discouraged, broke. I was living in a cheap rooming house. I remember that I went upstairs and into the room. It was very shabby. I had no relatives in the city and few enough friends. I remember how cold the room was. On that afternoon I had heard that I was to lose my job.

( Read more... )

the latest in obamamania

now, isn't this silly? community organization is a morally neutral activity. a certain godwinny german was most assuredly a community organizer.

however, this is nothing new: tactics of appropriation and loaded-definition by the left: take a generic term and restrict it to one's own use - like "progressive" - their version of progress! ditto with "socially conscious" - if one doesn't agree with their paradigm, one is asleep, unreconstructed, a friend of the status quo, reactionary. "activist" - if one is acting in compliance with their values.

and so it is with "community organizer." one could call a lynch mob an organized community too.

they propagate this paradigm via the academic and media interlock - as i told a conservative friend, no wonder the left fears educational choice: it'll break up their indoctrination centers.

[ x-posted to

conservatism ]

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore
A seven iron, Tuck, thought. After all these years I need a seven iron.

Tucker Case did not play golf. He'd tried it once, and although he'd enjoyed the drinking and driving the little electric car into the lake, he just didn't get the appeal. It seemed - and he'd examined the game closely because his father had loved it - an awful lot like a bunch of rich white guys in goofy clothing walking around on an absurdly large lawn hitting absurdly small white balls with crooked sticks. If the greens were at opposite ends of the same fairway and foursomes had to play against each other, defending their own green while assaulting the opponents' and risking getting hit with a ball or a club at close quarters, well, then you'd have a game. If the game was scored on how quickly one got through the eighteen holes instead of the fewest strokes and they dropped small-block Chevys into the little carts, why, then you'd have yourself a game. (Maybe put those little Ben-Hur food processors on the wheels and make it legal to hamstring competitors.) But traditional golf, as it was, had always left Tuck cold. Strange, then, that he absolutely yearned for a seven iron, or maybe a shotgun.

Tuck had been up since before dawn, awakened rudely and kept awake by what seemed like eight million roosters. It was now ten o'clock and they were still going strong. What joy to feel the thwack of a seven iron on red feathers, the satisfying impact of balanced metal on poultry (suddenly silenced and somewhat tenderized for your trouble). He saw himself wading into a bucket of roosers, swinging his seven iron madly (but always keeping his head down and his left arm straight), dealing death and destruction like the Colonel's own avenging angel. Welcome to Tucker Case's chicken death camp, my little feathered friends. Now, kindly prepare to have your nuggets knocked off.

Tucker Case was not a morning person.

P. J. O'Rourke a welfare statist?
I am finally getting around to reading self-described conservative libertarian P. J. O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World. It has been an enjoyable read so far, but I was very surprised to read the following passage at the end of chapter two, on overpopulation:

"The idea that too many people exist leads to unfortunate and even lethal plans for those people. One of Thomas Malthus's motives for writing An Essay on the Principle of Population was to argue against the Poor Law of his time, which gave aid to pauper families in accordance with the number of their children. This, thought Malthus, bred more paupers. Malthus was also writing in support of Britain's Corn Laws, which imposed large tariffs on imported grain. During the potato famine of the 1840s, these laws would contribute to the deaths of more than a million Irish. Malthus didn't mean any harm, of course. He was a clergyman. 'I would never wish to push general principles too far,' he said, 'though I think they always ought to be kept in view.' So we shouldn't actually shove paupers and Irishmen into the grave, but we shouldn't lose sight of the option either."

O'Rourke's critical tone indicates that he would support government aid to the poor, which is uncharacteristic for a libertarian.

Police use GPS trackers without warrants
http://www.ridelust.com/big-brother-wants-to-know-where-youre-going-all-the-time/

What do you guys think about this technology?
Warrants are actually very easy to get, if there is a real reason, and sometime even if there is only a very lame reason. so the fact that they're doing this without warrants just seems bizarre. But I tend to think that you can't stop technology, and no matter what we think about this kind of thing, it's going to continue, so we just need to develop ways of countering it or ways of finding trackers on your own car.

you can digg it up here

Another Runny Turd Brought to You Courtesy of the Free Market
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On faith
In deep, resonant tones, the vicar tells us of Pippa's beauty and her unfailing goodness. I don't know this flat placard of a girl. I wish I could stand and give a full account of her—the Pippa who could be vain and selfish and in love with her romantic illusions; the Pippa who was also brave and determined and generous. And even if I told them all this, it still wouldn't be a full measure of her. You can never really know someone completely. That's why it's the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they'll take you on faith too. It's such a precarious balance, it's a wonder we do it at all. And yet…

- A Great & Terrible Beauty by Libby Bray -

Jim goes green. (Sorta...)
This plan is actually full-proof, atleast from a scientific perspective.

Rather then argue over if we should look to cleaner fuels, or worry about the now with drilling for cheap oil. I propose that we actually drill for oil, and can still go green while we do it. How and why?

Because the greenhouse effect IS A FUCKING LIE! Or atleast they leaveout some vital information....

Ozone (O3) is made by shining ultraviolet light of around 240 nm wavelength
on oxygen molecules (O2), which split into single oxygen atoms, which each
join an O2 molecule to make an O3 molecule. There is no shortage of
ultraviolet radiation or O2 high up in the atmosphere, so O3 is being made
continuously. It is also continually being broken up into O2 + O1 by
ultraviolet light of wavelength in the range 240-320 nm, and recombining
into O3. (This is why we want the stuff around in the first place, so it
will absorb the UV radiation that ordinary oxygen molecules do not absorb.)

The problem in ozone depletion is not that the stuff is actually lost, but
rather that oxygen atoms are spending more time as members of O2 molecules,
and consequently less time as members of O3 molecules, because other chemical
reactions are converting 2 O3 molecules into 3 O2 molecules. It is a dynamic
balance, and the balance point is shifted by the presence of chemicals that
catalyze the conversion of O3 to O2.

The answer? Plant more fucking trees. If the government (or you lazy liberal fucks) planted more trees, this would inturn result in less methane gas, and convert all of our oil into oxygen. Oxygem which then could be turned into ozone by natural process.

But then, that would be too fucking easy wouldn’t it? Why? When you can just lie out your ass about the doom of all mankind and control our economy and lives and scare the stupider people half to death?

Test that made me lol...
http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=6916

Anarchism
100%
Fascism
83%
Communism
42%
Nazi
33%
Democrat
33%
Republican
25%
Socialist
17%
Green
8%

I get a 100% anarchism result, yet my second best is fascism and green is at a significant bottom? How does that work? XP

Uplifting story needed :)
I'm in need of a few uplifting stories from the wonderful LJ Poly peeps... Anyone want to share their happiest poly / compersion moment? Or maybe just a few beautiful words? No need to share too personal a thought... but this Friday night is calling out for some happy thoughts at the very least :)

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Theatre of Tragedy