Onyx Lynx

[Storyboarding] is an essential part of the filmmaking process, though as Houser's students were discovering, it is also a very difficult part. As the year progressed, he noticed more and more students forgoing storyboards.

And that's about when it hit him, "my cell phone has a built-in camera and it has a little computer."

...it’s this mentality that divides us from nonwhite working people even more. The vast majority of nonwhite working people are in support of this healthcare reform. They are in support of social service spending. They are in support of legislation that affects their survival as working class people.

We’re divided in a way that is fairly predictable. White working class people, people who have been bought off by the rich, would rather protect property rights that are used against us and our interests than work for healthcare and social services that we don’t like to admit that we utilize and need.

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. Taxes are the price we pay for not living in a country like Somalia. We have highways, sewer systems, clean water, good (for the most part) public schools, a technologically advanced (if not always equitable in terms of access) health care system, and a whole slew of other benefits because we pay taxes.

It also appears that CIA requested a number of after-the-fact variations to protect practices that clearly exceeded guidance. Why does this matter? It undermines the ability of CIA employees and contractors to “rely in good faith” on the OLC memos, because it shows that OLC wasn’t really giving legal advice. Instead it was issuing “get out of jail free” cards.

I know many of you would respond with the tired old argument, “but if the unions…” Well, the unions have heard your argument and are right now petitioning FOR this bill. The unions know that their jobs are more likely to stay here if somebody else picks up the tab for health care.

And isn’t it great that the unions ALSO are working to ensure that ALL U.S. citizens, not just workers or even more specifically, Big Three workers, are healthy and safe? You have returned that favor by constantly advocating for the end of and abolition of unions.

"Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn't like modern creationism. It wasn't joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest - valid enough in its own terms - against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of - and private reservations about - evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn't stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about 'presuppositions' and 'world-views', in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?"

We sang a hymn (not "angel band" but another fine old bluegrassy song with good harmony possibilities) in memory of Mike Seeger, who died this weekend, and Phil sang a lot of great old George Jones songs, stuff from the Royal Calypso Orchestra, and a lovesong with clever, tightly-packed lyrics about a long distance call, Tokyo to Tulsa, between ichiban number one cowboy and Su Li Su.

The consultant, on the other hand, kept their sweet gig, and long after I was a ghost they were still billing my former employer at an hourly rate somewhere between "But didn’t we just lay a bunch of people off?" and "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

Because at least until 1929, and in some areas until 1948, to get free medical care you needed: either to be provably below a certain poverty line, in which case you were eligible under the Poor Law (which was a huge stigma - cf people putting away money they could ill afford to avoid being buried 'on the parish'), or, if you needed hospital treatment, you had to get a letter of recommendation to a voluntary (i.e. funded by charitable subscription) hospital to say that you were a deserving candidate for treatment and care (I have among my papers a photocopy of a printed letter form of a leading maternity hospital, late 1930s, to be issued only to married women and unmarried women pregnant for the first time only - and some maternity hospitals, I suspect, did not even make that concession).

7 "Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.

8 Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;
rebuke a wise man and he will love you.

9 Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;
teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning.

they are, in a nutshell (which is where they belong), causing trouble just to cause trouble, which, ironically, is more like the joker than obama ever was.

they are the little kid in the back seat who, after being admonished to stop hitting his sister, sticks his face right up next to hers and says "i'm not touching you, i'm not touching you."

grow up already.

1. Brilliant at Breakfast links to Salon on insurance-rationed health care. (Um, Jill? I love you, but blaming "a gum-chewer sitting in a cubicle getting paid for denying your care" shows class bias--those decisions are made a bit further up.)


2. Better than salt money issues a clarion call.

   Healthcare is already rationed, but not on any sort of measurement of actual limitaton. It's being rationed by corporations looking to make a profit. The decision on an MRI, or a CT scan, or a hip-replacement isn't being made on the basis of need, or availability; it's being measured against the bottom line.

Every day in the United States, children with autism or cerebral palsy are denied occupational therapy. Children with juvenile diabetes are denied insulin pumps. Children with asthma are denied inhalers. American parents of children with chronic health conditions must fight a tangled bureaucratic health insurance system constantly to make sure that their kids can get access to the care recommended by their doctors.

[...]

That's why I support health reform. Because I am a parent of a child with special needs. Because I've spent hours and hours of my life tangled up in the red tape that stands between my son and his needed health care, desperately fighting against enormous for-profit corporations who see my beautiful, beloved child not as a person who needs help but as a profit loss.

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

1. Beatles Remastered a month from Sunday; and
2. Abbey Road the tourist attraction with video (BBC), and the making of the cover.

The truth is, it's a sham. These "grassroots protests" are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They're trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

Of course, everyone wants to belong, and everyone wants to be part of the jolly throng of golden boys who throw and catch and block and tackle on weekend afternoons. But people have principles, too, or they should have, and sometimes things are not all right, things meant as jokes are not funny, and it might be good if people started saying so in real time.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/04/DD5E1928OA.DTL#ixzz0NEIWnvSM

In 1973, Ms. Sims decided to start her own business. As a model, she often did her own hair and makeup, since many studio assistants were unfamiliar with working with darker skin. And she noticed that most commercially available wigs were designed for Caucasian hair, so she began experimenting with her own designs, baking synthetic hairs in her oven at home to create the right texture to look like straightened black hair. Within five years, her designs, produced by the Metropa Company, had annual sales of $5 million.