Monday, November 14, 2011

RODIN'S DOG

The following is nearly self-explanatory. Read the letter by Rodin's dog to Clark County Commissioner, Tom Mielke, then read Mr. Mielke's comments to the Columbian newspaper here in Clark County. Rodin's Dog's letter and his creative work were stimulated by Mr. Mielke's comments. The conceptual piece of art, called Rodin's Dog, consists of a photo of Commissioner Mielke as manipulated by the dog's own work. The entire collection of letters, columns and art are being submitted to the Clark County Art's Commission as an exercise in conceptual art.

Monday Nov/14/11

Dear Commissioner Mielke,

As a suitable comment upon and in honor of your sophisticated taste in art, I am submitting this artistic work entitled, “Rodin’s Dog”, to be considered as a future work to be placed outside the Commission’s meeting room. As you will recognize, it is a perfect analogy to the sort of mass produced work that superb salesman Thomas Kinkade has grown rich selling to his doting public.

The work may be viewed as a work of conceptual art or as a construct whichever you prefer. It may be hung on a wall or placed in a corner with a doggie dish nearby.

I will be glad to frame it appropriately if and when my work is selected to be so honored. I’m attaching the price of $1500 dollars to my effort. Copies of my submission are going to the Arts Commission, your fellow commissioners as well as to the Columbian.

Thank you for considering my carefully conceived work of art,


Rodin’s Dog








Sunday, November 13, 2011

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Monday, November 07, 2011

HAS THE TEA PARTY BEEN SOLD
OR IS IT SELLING A BILL OF GOODS?

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

CAPITALISM'S IMPOVERISHED SENIORS



Details like this tell the whole story of the failure of capitalism to supply enough good paying jobs so that all Americans can retire with dignity. You might be able to blame some of the seniors for their own poverty, but you cannot blame 25% of them for their current situations. Capitalism thrives on the poor. Capitalism rewards the rich few because it impoverishes a very large number of the rest of us. A strong middle class requires that everyone is middle class as far as earnings go.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Monday, September 12, 2011


They are all, every one of them beholding to Tea Party nonsense and, thus, tainted beyond election. No one but a hardright neocon Cheneyite could vote for them.

Also...I like our flag. I've got nothing against it as a symbol of our nation, but to see 3 grown men and women with hands over hearts as in kindergarten...? Can't help it; that's what that image brings to my mind, those days when I was a child. There must be a more grownup way to salute our flag, like maybe just standing at attention with eyes focused on it?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Friday, July 22, 2011

Tom Coburn: President Obama Will Back Down On Budget Bill Veto Threat (VIDEO)


The Republican Tea Party has been quick to hold a gun to the head of our economy in order to "cut, cap and kill" Medicare, an effective, efficientl­y managed national health care plan for the elderly. Let's hope that for once, Republican selfish has gone too far. This idea that we must gut and fillet the poor in order to protect the filet mignon tax cut that Bush gave himself, his family and his friends is a disgrace in a wealthy nation. Specially since all of us paid taxes that bailed this country out of a Republican economic mess.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Monday, July 11, 2011

Gonorrhea Superbug: First Antibiotic-Resistant STD Strain Discovered

Evolution in spades. But, of course, evolution doesn't exist, does it? Then what created this super bug? It will be something like this super bug, only deadly, which will sweep the world pretty much clear of the human species.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Minnesota Shutdown 2011: Budget Dispute Continues, Negotiations Resume (LATEST UPDATES)


The Republican Tea Party is as cold as dead fish. They care not who they harm just so long as they keep the wealthy wealthy and in control of their party and the nation. They got us into this mess, but we must first bail them out, then suffer all the cuts, while the wealthy go right on raking in the dividends from their global economy companies. Tom Delay is partying hearty down in Texas for certain with who knows what oil man from the Middle East?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Obama Says 'Nothing Can Be Off-Limits' In Budget Talks


The Bush tax cut for the wealthy must be returned to the treasury. The wealthy created this mess with their greed and malfeasanc­e. We bailed the wealthy out with our tax dollars and now we are cutting funding for services that help the unemployed­, the underemplo­yed, the permanentl­y unemployab­le for physical and mental reasons and also those on fixed income. AT WHAT POINT DO THE WEALTHY CONTRIBUTE THEIR SHARE TO CLEANING UP THE MESS THAT THEY CAUSED? If this isn't class warfare, the rich plundering the poor, then this is not 2011.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Mitt Romney Backtracks: Economy Not Worse Under Obama


I suggest Romney (as well as many other of us) ought to read The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives:



"It may come as an epiphany merely to recognize the ubiquitous role of random processes in our lives; the true power of the theory of random processes, however, lies in the fact that once we understand the nature of random processes, we can alter the way we perceive the events that happen around us."



Leonard Mlodinow, pp. 217-18.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Monday, May 02, 2011

MY CREDO FROM A REAL HUMANIST HERO

I must tell you that my world view changed just as Vonnegut's changed once I decided to accept the facts of evolution and the happenstance from which natural selection picks its winners. Take the miraculous out of the world and, then, one must accept the facts or go crazy. This is why so many who accept the miraculous go around proclaiming how crazy the world is or how horrible life is. They keep wanting to be transported into a better world, even though it means their dying to get there. In truth, life is very understandable, if mean, once one accepts the biological processes that drive human behavior.

But let Vonnegut speak. He captures the change with such humor and precision. In Breakfast, the author sometime intrudes himself into the story, and the following passage is something the author is saying about the characters he has created. This follows earlier passages in a preceding chapter in which the author speaks of his having been told he is schizophrenic and speaks of wanting to die.

from BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS by Kurt Vonnegut

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian [a fictional minimalist] with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler [fictional gothic novelist] had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.


[Things haven’t changed much, have they? For me, it was the black and white movies I loved as a kid. I realized eventually that I thought that life could be changed by a major speech by a major character (think Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington") or that a critical, very dramatic moment of denouement would altar the course of my life or someone else's life. One lives dramatically under such delusions, posing and making speeches, rather than getting down to work. The alcoholic is specially susceptible to those beliefs. Pay close attention to people who are drunk. You'll catch them at it.

Even more thrilling to me is when we add in what Steven Hawking just wrote in The Grand Design: our bodies operate by the same physical laws that direct the Cosmos, and we are as determined by natural laws as is the Universe. As he says, "...we are all biological machines. Free will is an illusion." That means, not only are we acting as if we are characters in books or plays, but we imagine we have some choice in the matter about being the characters we are, when in all truthfulness, we are who we are by genetic accident and nurture, both of which have created, create and continually tweek the synaptic patterns through which we receive the world into ourselves and by which our actions in the world are directed.

I know this seeming chaos is scary to some people, but until we accept it, we'll remain children, frightened and rejecting of the world as it is, living in childhood fantasies rather than in reality.]

ON BIN LADENS' DEMISE:

Did anyone notice the most vituperati­ve and dogawful response by public figures was by a Christian with a supposedly loving god, i.e. the fundamenta­list Mike Huckabee?

I'm also glad the deed is done, that justice is done, but only a Christian, I think, would get pleasure at imagining an enemy burning forever in a lake of fire with all the accompanyi­ng suffering that would entail. Why are these Christians (who plan and hope for an early and rapturous release from their suffering—­why do they suffer so?) so full of rage? Why does a belief in a loving god create such unloving thoughts in them? It's all a mystery, isn't it?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost