Trapped in the Dimension of Ideas

We're now only six days away from Saturday's big Taxpayer March On D.C. -- are you fired up, people?

My theory, which I have written before, is that the right was essentially ignorant of Alinsky and his book until Barack Obama became a leading contender. Suddenly, even the mainstream media was interested in understanding, or at least explaining, what a "community organizer" is. It was, indeed, important to describe the serious and intellectual basis for community organization, or Sarah Palin's attack ("I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities") would have done damage that the media Obama campaign would have found difficult to mitigate. So the elevation of the the first "community organizer" to the presidency seems also have transferred the most successful tactics of the left to the right, where -- by dint of their novelty -- they are both shocking and awesome to behold. Ironic, that.

Although Obama attended public school in Indonesia early in life, he soon switched to a private Catholic school, and from fifth grade through graduation went to a private college-prep school in Hawaii. His own daughters now attend a private school in Washington D.C.. "Do you think you're going to get into Harvard University with your one-size-fits-all public school diploma?" the president will reportedly say. "Come on! Don't make me laugh. You'll be lucky to survive through graduation. Seriously, you gotta get out of this mediocrity machine. Go ahead! Get up right now. Run for the door. What are you waiting for?"

Some pretty obvious parody from Scott Orr.

Blogging has also become more than simply writing. There's Twitter, that I do occasionally enjoy, but I feel so out of the loop since I can't spend hours interacting like it seems so many others do. I talk to people, they don't talk back. I talk to people and sometimes I don't have time to reply. Hello vicious cycle! I cannot keep up, I feel like I'm drowning in the wake of bloggers who must have 48 hours in their days to my mere

Many people simply want to sit down and turn down the volume. With a newspaper, you control the volume.

A man has won a legal battle to be transferred to a women's prison. The prisoner, who was also convicted of attempted rape, will be moved to a women's jail within weeks The prisoner is serving a life sentence for manslaughter and attempted rape.

"Why do black people have to bargain for what is theirs? Why do we have to wait for the right to vote? Why can't we get what God has given us? And that is the right to live as human beings and not negotiate with white southerners and not court the votes. Just do the right thing," Rangel said.

In a report on their findings the researchers said: 'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she explains in the tome she published last year. "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."

The Associated Press picture has appeared in any number of venues, and it shows two lawmakers sitting in the back row of the historic Hall of the House in Hartford during the lengthy debate over the two-year, $37 billion state budget.

Try to put yourself in the place of a high school student confronted with this ordeal. It's worse than all of the lame "special events" I experienced in my school career, combined. It makes the grainy black and white filmstrip of lung cancer surgery that we had to watch back in the early 1960s--Don't smoke!--look like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The only possible reaction by any self-respecting American adolescent is rebellion. An hour of this stuff, and President Obama will be the least cool person on the planet. No, in the galaxy.

I guess I'm curious now. I am going to find some high school kids & see if they think this exercise is cool or lame

"Some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to start getting a little bit ugly" Van Jones is an associate director of the Council of Environmental Quality which is part of the Executive Office of the President

"Some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to start getting a little bit ugly" (quote from the end of the YouTube video at the link)

I'm predicting ... the white house will have to reverse itself on this.

A good response to this is at Does Obama plan to spy on social-networking sites?. "I'm not sure that highlighting a public contract offer amounts to "uncovering" a conspiracy, especially since their analysis turns out to be faulty. Contrary to NLPC's take, the contractor would be collecting data required to be kept by the White House - by law ... The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP. A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the "information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence", including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn't call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only "information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence[,] both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites." In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else."

Do you realize that light only moves 30 centimeters in a nanosecond? How in hell are you supposed to get anywhere at that speed?

If you follow the link to Damn You, Speed Of Light it says: "I'm testing a new application I've developed at my day job, which takes key parts of the load off our old application. ("Old" in social network / Web 2.x terms, i.e. more than three months.) I've optimised the hell out of the new system, and it's really efficient, on both the small and large scale of things. It can handle 100,000 simultaneous users, and it responds to user requests in under 100 microseconds. But the development server is in Dallas, and I'm in Sydney, so it still feels slow."

Construction guys have the best toys, and that one is the most mysterious to me. It's a pump. A cement mixer dumps readymix into a hopper at the bottom, and it pumps the concrete up as much as four floors. That's quite a column, and wet concrete is heavy. What kind of pump can move a liquid loaded with hard chunks (gravel) against that much back pressure? I suppose it's a screw, simply because I can't imagine anything else that could work, but it's still astounding.

Just thought I would share something completly different today ... see if we can get the construction guy interested in this web site :)

Unfortunately when you follow this discussion through, the link to http://www.bretagdesigns.com/technologist/?p=531 does not work ... So can't see the original article the discussion is about, oh well.

Try to do a google search on 'site:www.bretagdesigns.com zotero' doesn't work either --- so the original article has been lost in the ether

Alternative to the toolbar?

Obama: Trapped in the Dimension of the Presidency ... Can't even take a vacation & relax properly from it. And he really does need a vacation, the Presidency will wear anyone & everyone out. No one can handle such a stressfull job.

I posted my thoughts on Obama needing a vacation: I like how the talk by Azides ends, the goal of a Prime Minister or a President is to buld "Mutual Trust & Respect" in a country. May Obama succeed in this, this is why the American people got excited in him from his 1994 speech at the Democratic convention, and a lot of what he ran his campaign for President on. This is why America trusted him with the Presidency … I hope he returns to this theme of his & starts to govern that way. Hopefully a vacation can give him the perspective he needs.