Running and thinking in Colorado
This was the norm in this up-scale neighborhood: Cars behind locked cages.
And finally: a waterfall in the calm, relaxing Spyrogyra Butterfly Jungle with many of the species of Butterfly found in this country.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 2:42 PM
1 comments
First impressions… It would seem that few visitors to Costa Rica return home with gasp-inducing tales of the beauty of San Jose. Why? Frankly, it is not particularly beautiful, and any sharp intake of breath will probably have more to do with an attempt to avoid the exhaust pollution. Downtown, streets are packed with traffic as heavy buses barely moving beyond second gear crawl through the streets and kamikaze taxis double dare pedestrians to try and cross the streets. At street level the general theme of clutter and chaos prevails with vendors selling fruit, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and other daily necessities.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:51 PM
0 comments
ums. I knew about the obscure (to Americans) southerner William Walker who came down to Central America before the Civil War attempting to bring the Central American states under the Confederate orbit. I didn't know that Costa Rica considers this the most important struggle of their history. William Walker made several attempts at taking over Central America before meeting his executors in 1860 at age 36.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 5:15 PM
0 comments
James Fallows: The $1.4T question
posted by Steve Bremner @ 2:28 PM
0 comments
In the Socratic tradition of first "define your terms" it is helpful to know the definition of Fascism. From a post by Digby.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 1:31 PM
0 comments
Davis Fleetwood is back
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:44 PM
0 comments
Si alguna vez os perdeis por Madrid no dejeis de ir a la Casa Museo de Joaquín Sorolla, una maravilla del mundo del arte.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:36 AM
0 comments
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:45 PM
0 comments
This morning's run was from Starsmore Discovery Center to Stratton Open Space, Cap'n Jacks to the top of High Drive, Buckhorn Trail, return to Gold Camp Road, then Columbine Trail back to Starsmore. Two and a half hours and about 14 miles. The temperature at our 0700 start was 13F -- much warmer than on Thursday morning's run up Cheyenne Canyon when it was -5 F. More pictures from this morning's run here.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 5:22 PM
0 comments
Nice video here: Burma Underground: Par Par Lay & The Moustache Brothers
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:11 PM
0 comments
Waterkeepers: From the Chairman: RFK, Jr.: Pollution's Chief Victims
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:46 PM
0 comments
Truthdig: Doug Henwood on Robert Kuttner's "The Squandering of America"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 11:09 PM
0 comments
I listened to a podcast review of Haifa Zangana's "City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance" on the Diane Rehm Show earlier today. There is so much information about the occupation that we are not getting from the MSM. This is why it is imperative that each and every one of us seek out the truth and reject the propaganda eminating from our government media organs.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:41 PM
0 comments
Huck, The Constitution, and "God's Standards"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:09 PM
0 comments
I tried to go see Greg Mortenson speak tonight at Colorado College's Shove Chapel, but was turned away because they were at capacity. They said they were broadcasting the talk at nearby Armstrong theater, but that was probably full as well. I had never heard of Greg Mortenson before this morning when a friend emailed me about this lecture. I had bought his book, "Three Cups of Tea" on my new Amazon Kindle this morning, so after being turned away from his lecture I walked over to the Tutt library and read the first chapter. Wow. What a Mensch this guy Greg Mortenson is. What unconditional love to his sister. Enables her to be as full a person as she can be after suffering debilitating effects of meningitis at age three. She dies on her 23rd birthday. He tries to leave a silver chain of hers in her memory on the top of the most difficult peak in the world, K2. But there is so much more to this Mensch. I can't wait to find out just how much more...
posted by Steve Bremner @ 9:50 PM
0 comments
Scienceblogs: Global Warming and the Campaign Trail: A Call for Political Realism
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:52 PM
0 comments
The Year in Right-Wing Sex
Matt Taibbi is the author of Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone Magazine and the eyes and ears for Real Time on the campaign trail.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:42 PM
0 comments
New torture allegations at Abu Graib
posted by Steve Bremner @ 6:30 PM
0 comments
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:54 PM
0 comments
HuffPo: Steven Weber analyzes the Repug candidates: Filboid Studge
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:59 PM
0 comments
New Film Slams Wal-Mart: "Going Big Box vs. Going Local"
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:58 PM
0 comments
Apparently the "District Manager" of Starbucks Colorado Springs has buckled under to a religious fanatic (and we have lots of them here starting with James Dobson, Ted Haggard, etc) and banned the free local newspaper The Independent from all local Starbucks stores. Rick Tosches has this to say in his column in this week's Independent: The War against Starbucks
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:32 PM
0 comments
Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 11:49 PM
0 comments
The Sunlight project asks for your help in tracking down former Congressional Staffers becoming Lobbyists.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:14 PM
0 comments
Jackie and Dunlap have the secret audio of the historic moment in the ABC/Facebook debate in New Hampshire when moderator Charlie Gibson brought both the Republican and Democratic candidates together on stage.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:22 AM
0 comments
GPS of our Saturday Run high above the town of Cascade
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:36 PM
0 comments
Pics from Today's Epic 5-hour run: Manitou Springs-Ute Indian Trail-Waldo Canyon-Overlook Trail-Rampart Range Road-Cascade-Overlook Trail-Waldo-Railroad Tunnels.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 10:59 PM
0 comments
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:37 PM
0 comments
Just to document this for posterity. Remember this. Everyone who voted for Bush TWICE needs to know the extent of the damage they have caused our country.
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:13 PM
0 comments
NY Review of Books: As Iraqis see it highlights McClatchy's important blog that allows Iraqis to speak out to America : Inside Iraq Are we listening? Can we hear?
posted by Steve Bremner @ 8:10 PM
0 comments
Happy Christmas from John & Yoko: Imagine Peace
posted by Steve Bremner @ 7:54 PM
0 comments
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
