Recent Comments:

beautiful shot, in wales!

i had a nice get together last night with a guitar-playing compadre, who brought a cello-playing friend, and another friend who's a multi-instrumentalist. we had fresh made pizza and played our asses off.

hearing my songs with violin, cello, mandolin and piano was a blast, and we jammed on some old neapolitan songs too, a lovely vein to explore.

so today was pretty chilled...

tomorrow is a busy one, time to erect the new pergola posts, should be fun.

What does the public gain from having access to that information?  Will they stop their children from going out, take alternative routes to the shops, scream blue murder about it at neighbourhood watch meetings?

There are apparently registers for sex offenders where I live (Virginia) and the State makes some of that information available to the public.  One of my friends and a neighbor, with small children, looked up and found that one of our close neighbors was a registered offender (pedophile).  This was information she considered important to know but I don't beleive she had any intention to harass the individual in any way.

Frankly, I don't consider any neighborhood in the US safe for small children anymore, and watching how parents guard their children, it would appear that my views are shared by many. So, knowing where pedophiles live is not really the answer. Eternal vigilance may be the price of liberty, but it also pays to keep a very close watch on your children no matter where you live. A sad commentary on modern society regardless.

Watching the basketball game, among the barrage of commercials (there's something to do about analysing the difference in advertising between Europe and the US...), I notice a Dodge commercial : the motto is Let's Refuel America, and they are guaranteeing gas price under $2.99 a gallon... Ugh.

You are not alone.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for also. I think I actually voted for him only the first time though.  As with you, I awoke before  the second term and never again voted for a Republican presidential candidate.

That is not to say, however, that I have been exactly  charmed by the Democrats.  Many of my votes since Reagan have been for independents.  In my opinion, neither traditional party can be trusted to do what is best for the people of America.

Still there is this galactic amount of totally wasted resources, labor, human lives squandered away simply to maintain the constructs that enable these super rich, dare I say it, ubermenschen to go about their profit margin seeking ambitions unfettered.  I promote and disseminate CT information here in the US perhaps as a futile attempt to break into the propaganda clearly present in mainstream American media.  Even from my own European experience way back in the 1990s I cringe in the embarrasement of Europeans traveling to and living in the United States and partaking of "our" manufactured M$M "culture".  It is my opinion some of this is working and the most visible effect of it in American politics is Ron Paul. I have to take that as a survey of the non-delusionals remaining in the American populace even if that assumption is off base.  Many here are disillusioned and not content even if they know not why.  Our "media" is geared towards twelve year olds plain and simple.  You say shutting off the cash flow to "my" government might do it, well this American peasant says fine by me.

Well, he said he had changed at the beginning of the presidential campaign. He said the same thing a few weeks ago. He'll say it again the next time his character gets over him and he starts to act like the attention-starved teenager he never developed from.

Well, sounds like an efficient and ecological use of resources : cable doing dual use as a fence...

What I said, 5-7 people seem to be the maximum amount people that work efficiently on an agricultural exploitation before you have to add in various administrative and coordination tasks.

Land area OTOH is very variable, depending on the type of production, the amount of capital available... A shepherd with a dog can look over a much larger herd than without...

The insight is that agriculture is very easy to decentralise, which is why economies of scale don't apply.

As a note to US readers, filmconnection.org is a free public lending library for documentary, foreign and art film DVD's. They have a dozen or so films under the Russia tab:

http://filmconnection.org/countries/russia

I don't know how they do it, but I'm glad they do.

especially that last one.  melanin-deficiency is the best way to stay out of trouble in today's America -- pretty much as it was in yesterday's America and for quite a few "days" now.

while we're on prison systems, how about

Over the last three decades 12 million Americans have lost the right to vote for all or most of their adult lives.

Prisoners Prohibited from Voting

We have been interviewing current and former prisoners in New York , Connecticut, and Ohio about their voting histories, attitudes about voting, and knowledge and understanding of the rules of disenfranchisement that apply to them.  We find that prior to disenfranchisement they registered and voted at rates similar to the general population (40 to 50 %) and most would like to do so again.

As few realize they have the right to vote, their registration and voting rates post-release are reduced to half of what they were before. This is accompanied by a time lag in getting back on the roles that effectively doubles the years of voting life lost to disenfranchisement.

A recent study by The Sentencing Project finds sharp disparities in the effects of disenfranchisement by race:  in Atlanta one of every seven African American males is disenfranchised. So as the imprisonment rate for blacks has climbed over 3 decades, long traditions of voting in many black families have been broken – each successive generation votes at lower rates than the previous one. This is true of all Americans since the 1960s, but the rates are most pronounced in black communities, where 30-40% of the men have been disenfranchised. A study by the University of Virginia School of Law finds that in states with the harshest disenfranchisement laws the overall voter turnout among African Americans is 13% lower than those who disenfranchise only for prison time.

And that may be no accident.

gee, ya think not?

the technique of establishing draconian punishments for minor offences, then enforcing those punishments with extreme racial bias, then disenfranchising the convicted, is as neat a "democratic" way of reversing universal suffrage and creating apartheid-in-all-but-name as you could wish.  those who follow US electoral history will probably be thinking "Southern Strategy" at this point.  yup...

founder of the website Prison Planet is dismissed as a paranoid delusional CT promoting nutcase by David Rothkopf author of Superclass yet Alex will cover the tazering of pregnant wheelchair bound handcuffed women when American corporate mainstream media thinks the color of Paris Hilton's underwear is a far more major story.  Tell me again how this is "Sustainable".
Yes, I am a born here, raised in America, American having read 3/4 of the book Superclass, which is prompting me to seek out membership in the local Communist Party.

so infuriating to see such stories, where the punishment so far outweighs the 'crime' it amplifies the negativity that exacerbated the 'crime' in the first place.

self-perping vicious cycle, those poor kids...

between this and nomad's, i think i'll have a cry now, what a waste...

Very crowded in the south up to Lyons, then fine. Better to do that at night, wiht the kids mostly sleeping, than to take the day to do the same trip.

wow, that football story floored me. it fits with the personality he projects, perfectly. somewhere between snake and wharf-rat, it beats me why the french thought he would be a good leader, other than the media's attempt to build a cult of personality around him.

disgusting.

your story exemplifies your sig to a T

well done, linca-

two most recent, grotesque examples: allemano in rome and boris in london

There is a bit of idealism in attraction to teaching. The other reasons for teaching being an attractive job :

• Guaranteed employment. After one year on the job, the only teachers that get fired are the paedophiles. OTOH, if you want to test yourself into an other jobs, it is very easy to take a couple years off, while still getting the job back afterwards.

• Very hands-off management. Until now, teaching remains mostly done by the teacher himself, with little intervention by the hierarchy. Team work is also light.

• Independent time management. The only compulsory hours are in front of the class ; nobody asks you to stay in the school after your lessons, and there are also very long holidays - that are pretty much impossible to obtain in the rest of the job market. It is very good for parents.

• Teaching is quite often the only viable option after university if you were majoring in a field that's not business oriented, and couldn't or wouldn't get into research. French employers don't like to hire liberal arts students, so teaching is easier to get into.

We must not mix "open calls for tender", like this one and "open calls for proposals", like this one

Open calls for tender are very well defined with detailed specifications and tight rules and criteria. They open to everybody, including for-profit organisation, so ET would be in competition with established think-tanks, universities and consultants with a robust background in the field.

"open calls for proposals" are, well, open, which means they don't have detailed specifications. However, they must fit in the policy framework and still follow the same tight rules. They are only open to public organisations, universities and non-profit organisations.

Ok - so we can all blame Jerome if nothing happens on the funding front?

Hope you don't mind if I post a piece by Sibelius: the 7th symphony--this is just a part.  I heard this broken down and explained on the radio one Sunday afternoon, how all the parts interlocked, all the movements, recapitulation of themes etc.

Fantastic!

you, my friend, are a card...

heartbreaking diary, i can so relate...well done for trying. as m-vision said, you did more than you think, and i agree with her that those kids got a message from your example that will be important to them in later life.

what a pit you describe so well, and such a pity....