Moonlapse

So what's the hold up?

On some vehicles that would effectively 'total' the car.

That would be Moonlapse... but he has quite the slate of projects in his queue already. Someday soon! (I hope) The good thing is, my new job pays considerably more than the last, so building up the backup funds and investments to switch over to a more freelance career should take less time. But anyways, we have all kinds of maps and website stuff planned.

I currently have Adelphia cable service which is being transitioned to Comcast. I'm actually looking forward to it; Adelphia sucked and Comcast will offer better services for a better price. With broadband phone, I won't have to give any of my money to Qwest, yay!!

At that point I usually think to myself that I need to push beyond my own standards of patience and fortitude, and while it doesn't give me any real comfort it gives me some needed resolve.

If you look at the URL of this page 'index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=10&showentry=537' or something similar, you'll see that it names a file (index.php) and also gives that file some information (blogid=10, etc). The file is made up of code that returns a webpage based on the information. If you equate this to, let's say, a human resources department, a CEO might ask for a report on turnover rates or something. This would be roughly something like index.php?department=hr&report=turnover. A code snippet would be similar to a person in the HR dept. that has a specialized job, or even the whole HR dept itself, depending on the scope of the entire code.

Best wishes!

Today's weather was extremely warm (a typical temperature swing here) so I didn't have any beer or travel worries -- once I made it out of the cul-de-sac. My wife suprised me with a 1-hour full body Swedish massage at a spa followed by a movie (The Prestige, I enjoyed it) and dinner at my favorite German restaurant, where I drank a large stein full of Warsteiner Dunkel. Thanks for all the birthday wishes and the pictures of bare asses.

I trust that you have beer to celebrate the occasion?

Again? Crap. At least Mother Nature gave me the gift of an additional day off work in the form of a blinding blizzard with 30 - 40 mph winds. I've been listening to Agalloch all day, the best music for winter. BTW, thanks Rameses.

Anything I put on my cat would need some serious glue or tape to stay on for more than a split second. Hmmmm...

It doesn't sound fair or balanced. However, we are conditioned to support the system. FC, do you have a cellphone? Who manufactured it? Who produced the componentry? Does your service provider also off-shore outsource any services? How many of your clothes were made in the U.S. using U.S. produced material? The bottom line for nearly everyone is value over any ideological priciple. This means that global companies are fiercely competitive, thus making successful business leaders a more important investment. Labor pay rates are rising in India and especially China. China will also hit a slump in the next 50 years because their current ratio of productive to non-productive citizen will become undesirable when the current workforce starts retiring and depending on a younger generation that has been supressed with population control. Anyways, I'm not sure how to fix it. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I think our forced schooling system will need to drastically change before we have enough locally minded entreprenuers AND consumers to cause a rise in the middle class. Also, we do owe our standards of living to global corporations. If you enjoy your current level of comfort then be thankful, if you prefer a fairer system then you should be prepared to do without some of the more extravagant aspects of American life. What about places like Denmark? Denmark didn't innovate the technology required to maintain their standard of living. It's mostly corporate capitalist technology that socialism benefits from. Actually, I've come to believe that socialism is basically the corporate subsidy of lower classes, gotta keep the order.

The guy must be mentally ill, how do you recuperate someone like that?

So what can anyone say about the U.S. situation that they haven't heard from mass media? All I'll say is that I've lived my entire life in places with high immigrant populations and what I've seen is that the ones that retain their identity are indpendent, hard working and appreciative. The ones that assimilate to American pop culture, whatever that is, tend to become as dependent or moreso than the typical citizen. That's the aspect that I won't give up because I didn't get that from a talking head from the Ministry of Newspeak, it came from my own real life. The situation in Europe? I don't live in Europe and I don't presume to know enough to give my opinion.

Ooooo, I might be interested in purchasing some of that!

You're right it is human nature, but it's also human nature to recognize a wrongdoing. Kids being sent to their slaughter, you would think alarm bells would go off, not so with some people. The notion is intimately related to the fundamental basis of his beliefs.

Since when did shouting "Watch out below!" become outdated?

Well, I hope that the trend will become widespread but as the article said, "the revolution might never reach many classrooms. The newest English teachers are products of a grammarless era, unprepared to distinguish an appositive from an infinitive." Here's something to compare: The 1882 Appleton School Reader for fifth graders contained writing from William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc. Most of that is currently Advanced Placement high school reading.

That makes an excellent story! Glad that everything turned out well.

What would define this national or cultural identity? Obviously, English language is a start, but what else?

And another quote from an investigative commission of the 62nd Congress in 1913: I'd never heard of these commissions before reading Gatto's 'Underground History...' and I'd be surprised if anyone else has. I certainly haven't heard them mentioned in any discussion on educational reform. Conspicuously inconspicuous?

Some more relevant quotation, this time from the 1954 congressional investigation, The Reece Commission: Read it twice.

I think that's a greater threat than their language or culture ever will be.

This quote from that article might shed some light on his words: I think that he knew that the population was being dumbed down by new educational policy, and obviously stated so, but chose to ultimately support the cause for which the dumbing down was necessary - the centralization of authority. He knew that we were losing something as a democratic nation, he specifically stated that there were people behind it, yet he gave up on the founding ideals that he obviously had once cherished, paradoxically stating that citizens were incompetent to rule democratically. Masses were being made dumb in order to facilitate centralized authority, but then the masses were too dumb to rule themselves so therefore they should be ruled. It's a very strange, consciously made reversal of opinion and I really wonder how it happened to him. But to answer your question, yes, I think the 'elite' ruling class is running the schooling institution. Walter Lippmann may have said and done things that indicate his opposition to this idea, but he ultimately acquiesced. Lippman knew what mass media and mass schooling were all about. GW Bush, champion of standardized testing, scored 566 verbal and 640 math on his SAT's. Bill Bradley scored 485 verbal. Bush graduated from Yale, Bradley from Princeton.

I have previously lived in Southern California, for a total of about 8 years. I even learned to speak Spanish in elementary school. I know there is a problem that needs to be fixed. I'm not denying that. However, I feel that focusing on national identity is a dangerous red herring. Ethnic areas that don't have a specificly American culture or don't predominantly speak English are nothing new. Drugs... there is a big problem right there. We spend some money on drugs that goes to pharmaceutical companies and some money on drugs that goes to foreign drug producers. In effect, our prohibition of certain drugs helps contribute to a situation that people want to escape, or that their involvement in will necessarily make them criminal. The threatening element of Mexican immigration... are these the people with families who are desperate to find work? Or are they they the people who are part of a drug operation empowered by our drug prohibition? I live in Colorado, were in 2000, almost half of the foreign born population was from Mexico, higher than that of California. From what I've seen with my own eyes, not counting some talking head's opinion, Mexican immigrants don't threaten my way of life any more than anyone else. Again, I'd like to point out that nearly every negative aspect can relate back to illegal drug trafficking based on our drug prohibition laws. You can spend a crapload of money to put bandaids on the situations here, but it really fixes nothing. Yes we need secure borders, no we should not have people in the country illegally, no we should not have an economy based on an underclass. What do you really think the answer is?