More Like This Please

Garbage needs to be called garbage everywhere it is found, at work or play in school and at home. EVERYWHERE!

A Thin Red Thread of Life

@@$%$#$%$period&*^&(*(*&

I despise using periods in phone numbers. It makes them useless and makes me think people who do it are lazy jerks. I just got a list of contacts to work on and all the phone and fax numbers were period separated like 123.456.7890.
I spent half an hour trying to salvage the mess before I sent it back and told the guy to fix it if he wanted me to work on it.

Life is very interesting some days.

I was cruising along the internet a few days ago and saw a WikiHow titled How to Create a Realistic Fiction Character so I checked it out. These are the items in the list:

• Create a basic profile for your character.
• Create goals, treasures, and banes.
• Based on goal, treasure, and bane, create background.
• Create idiosyncrasies.
• Define what it would take to make your character cry.
• Finish fleshing out the character's flaws.
• Get to know your character really well.
• Create the character's appearance, background, and personality.  

That all made me think a little bit about the non fiction characters in my life and how hard pressed I would be to write down or verbalize most of those things about my closest loved ones and friends... or about myself for that matter. I think it might make for a better world if more of us could actually name those traits at least semi-accurately about not only the people we know but about ourselves too and talk more about all those things. But that's just me.

I also wonder if the world would be a lot more fun and better place if everyone had seen Sandel and Gilberrt and "The Secret Life of Chaos" and "What Darwin Never Knew" and "The Human Spark". Then maybe more people would stop thinking people like Robertson, Warren and the guy in the local pulpit or their followers know anything at all. They sure as hell don't know how to do the research and have never ever discovered anything. Since laughter is good for us we could benefit greatly by laughing out loud at them. I know, it's hard to see how I got here from that first sentence. But you didn't hear what I did on the radio this afternoon.

Best Paragraphs About Haiti So Far

"What worries me most about Haiti’s future is the unintended lesson of cargo comfort (delivering stuff, no matter how essential and useful water, food and shelter obviously are now) and remittances both: when people get stuff they didn’t make (or buy with what they make) it’s terribly easy to subconsciously  infer that they can’t do for themselves, and easier when stuff is delivered by white people to blacks in a world with precious little evidence of blacks delivering to whites from prosperity rather than extortion.  This (not the race part)  is the curse of a resource-extraction-based economy (one Haiti doesn’t have to worry about, having nothing to dig up and sell).  Remittances from emigrants are a little different, but villages like the ones in Mexico with no men and everyone living on money from people working in the US are at the least in a very fragile sociological state, and I’m not aware that their local economies are creating much value where the kids can see it happen.

“White man’s burden” movies like the Indiana Jones series play this message out: the cookie-cutter plot is that a bunch of brown people are having a terrible time and can’t do anything about it until a white guy comes into town and saves them (I haven’t seen it, but have the impression Avatar follows this template).  Not too different from the parfait gentil knight saving the helpless peasants from the dragon up the valley; since David and Jeanne d’Arc, I don’t remember a lot of stories about the farm boy (or the Puerto Rican on the loading dock) saving a roomful of bankers and generals from something; it was Robert Gould Shaw who made it possible for the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts to get their licks in. Toussaint L’Ouverture is a glorious Haitian exception to this meme, but it was a long time ago and the docs running the rural medical centers, and the guys handing out the water and biscuits at the airport, seem to be all white now." - Michael O'Hare

Go read the whole thing. >>>

Pat Robertson To Hatians

Read This

Haiti Needs Your Help Now For A very Long Time

Haitians are in desperate need of your help. Donate now to the organizations helping there. This tragedy will not be over in a week or a month or a year or two - it has destroyed much of a whole generation. Here are links directly to just a few of the organizations that need your help now but sign on for the long haul and don't forget the people of Haiti.
http://www.redcross.org/
http://www.pih.org/home.html
http://www.mercycorps.org/haiti?sourc...
More links and resources
Geolocation aid request system: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewf...
News:
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/
Fox: http://www.foxnews.com/
Current news from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8...
Arikia Millikan's twitter feed. Arikia has relatives in the area, and is tweeting current news: http://twitter.com/arikia
Help:
US citizens seeking information on your relatives in Haiti, call this number: 888 407 4747
UNICEF page for Haiti: Information and link to donate: http://www.unicefusa.org/news/release...
Direct Relief International: Web page and link for donations: http://www.directrelief.org/Emergency...
American Red Cross International Response Fund: https://american.redcross.org/site/Do...
Science and other info:
Tectonics of the Haitian earthquake: http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallocht...
Global Seismic Monitor: http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

Copy edit add to and re-post everywhere.

Snake Oil Fraud and Government

"Here's what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid." - P Z Myers

Pure fraud and no one ever challenges them.

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