Running and thinking in Colorado
'Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?: How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio': -- has been several months in development and will contend that a concerted effort was undertaken by high-level Republican officials to steal the Election in Ohio -- and thus the country -- in 2004!
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:08 PM
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Tell the truth, brother Gore!! Wake up, America:
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:30 PM
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Like a lion, Sam the Wolfdog stands watch on our tent where we camped last night on my property south of Westcliffe, Colorado... 
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:46 PM
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View from my 20 acres south of Westcliffe, Colorado extends to Mt Blanca the SE corner of the sacred territory of the Navaho...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:43 PM
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posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:39 PM
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Rick Hessik and Steve Bremner, 2+ hours up the Rampart Range Road and halfway through our four hour run on Saturday... Rebekka and I ran to the top of Pikes (that would be the mtn in the background) on yesterday...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:37 PM
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If you can guess this canyon's name you get a "no prize".
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:34 PM
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AlterNet: It's Not Enough to Be a Vegetarian: "He got us to stop eating meat. Now ethicist Peter Singer is out to demolish environmentalist mantras like 'buy local' and 'eat organic.'"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 5:54 AM
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posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:56 PM
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L. to R., Steve Bremner, Harry Harcrow, Karen Brennan, Ben ?
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:19 PM
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Channelchooser.com features some 70 channels on video streams to your computer.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:48 PM
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Dvorak Uncensored » Congress in Action! Just not for you.: "Think the leaders of Congress are in touch with working families? Here’s Dennis Hastert, R-IL, in action — worrying about tax cuts for the people who really matter to him."
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:43 PM
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MoJo Blog: Sex, Swedish-Style: "The Washington Post has a good article about how European countries with healthy attitudes towards sex—or, let's say, the sorts of attitudes that least resemble Focus on the Family's—have fewer problems with STDs and unwanted pregnancy than, say, we do here in the United States:"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 11:20 PM
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End of the road on our attempt on the high point of Michigan north of L'Anse on the UP last Friday, May the 12th. With 12 miles to go to the high point from here, we prudently decided to turn around and head back to our hotel in Eagle River, Wisconsin where we had a marathon to run the next day...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:59 PM
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Jane Smiley nails him: :
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:39 PM
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Juan Cole has a Very Basic Suggested Reading List on Middle East. I've only read two: "The Assassin's Gate" and "A History of the Arab People's". Guess I'd better hotfoot it down to the library...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:20 PM
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TheStar.com - PM is no Bush, says U.S. pollster: "'The Canadian and U.S. leaders could not be more different,' Frank Luntz said yesterday. 'Stephen Harper is a genuine intellectual, brilliant in his understanding of issues.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:32 PM
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posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:26 PM
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Awesome project to ski from the summit of all 54 of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 11:36 AM
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Two Harvard professors lobbed a bombshell last month in the London Review of Books with their article on The Israeli Lobby and American Foreign Policy. Their thesis is that we Americans have been hoodwinked into aligning ourselves so closely with Israel that we are no longer acting in the interest of the United States. Predictably the usual suspects are launching scathing personal attacks on the two professors and charges of Anti-Semitism rather than engage in honest debate. The article from the London Review of Books: The Israeli Lobby. If you can't access it here is the original Working Paper (PDF) published at Harvard University.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:37 AM
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Not surprisingly, Colorado's Republican governor Bill Owens is one of the top three of America's Worst Governors. Fortunately this is his last term. His most recent outrage was to veto a measure for clean air in Colorado.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:45 PM
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Sam spent the better part of last week up in Denver at the Veterinarian Emergency Clinic under the care of Dr. Stephen Lane, one of only 100 animal neurologists in the world. Dr. Lane's best surmise at this stage is that Sam suffered "viral encephalitis" that initiated a lesion on his thalmus: the section of his brain that guides the limbs, etc. This explains the loss of sensation for Sam along his right side.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 11:02 PM
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I run a lot. I get outdoors as much as I can. I read and I think. I love intellectual confrontation. I'm a liberal secular humanist atheist who speaks French (and German). I am the opposite of the "Christian Right".
“There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.”
Robert F. Kennedy (stated in 1968, when Robert was Attorney General, and his brother John had been the President)
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick
“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.” Bertrand Russell
"Just as nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight... and it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness."
-- William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison
"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy."
-- Charles Manson, serial killer and one-time cult leader
"A very popular error-having the courage of one's convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one must be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false."
-- Voltaire
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-- Albert Einstein
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
-- Bob Dylan, 'Masters of War'
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
James Madison, April 20, 1795
"In the end the party would announce that 2 plus 2 made 5, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim, sooner or later, the logic of their position demanded it."
-- George Orwell, in 1984
"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. " --€”Richard Feynman
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
"I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."
--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
"We're all in this alone."
--Lily Tomlin
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
-Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 1911
“The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.�
--Bill Moyers
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
--Hermann Goering
"Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasure, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing." --Jerome K. Jerome
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." -Benjamin Franklin
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." --Aldo Leopold
"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do." --Jose Ortega y Gasset
"The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity...."
"Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism."
-- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831
"Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level." --Henry David Thoreau
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly." --Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Mother Night
"I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels."
--Diogenes of Sinope (c. 408-323 B.C.)
"Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow;
They toil not, neither do they spin;
And yet I say unto you,
that even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these."
Jesus
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
