Monthly Archives: September 2005

Desktops

Posted on by
Reply


I’ve posted a number of recent (and a few not-so-recent) photos on Flickr, in a set called “Desktops”. Feel free to browse the set and download anything that appeals to you; all of the photos are available full size, which should do an adequate job of displaying on a desktop on most systems.

To use any photo, click on the photo, or go directly to the photoset to see all of them. When you’re at a photo that you want to download, click the “All Sizes” button above the photo; then choose “Original Size” and download.

All of the photos are released under the Creative Commons “share-alike” license. You’re free to use them for any non-commercial purpose and to redistribute them at no charge, to make any changes you want to make and to redistribute the changed images, providing that you redistribute them under the same free license. Oh, and you should give me credit for creating the original.

If you use any of these and like them, please drop me a note.

Thanks.

Walrus and Pumpkin Seed

Posted on by
Reply

Walrus airship Slashdot led me to this post on the military’s program to develop the “Walrus”:

According to DARPA’s press release, “the Walrus aircraft will be a heavier-than-air vehicle and will generate lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and gas buoyancy generation and management.”

This sounds a lot like the aircraft that John McPhee wrote about in a wonderful little book called The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed more than 30 years ago. Like the Walrus, the Aereon craft was a hybrid aircraft: though it was filled with helium, it was still heavier than air, and it relied on its aerodynamic shape to get off the ground. In his book, McPhee presents a sweetly sympathetic picture of Bill Miller, the Presbyterian minister who inherited the company from another minister, Monroe Drew, who had a vision of a “Faith Fleet” of Aereon airships traveling slowly but certainly around the world, delivering needed supplies to poor communities, along with tons and tons (literally) of Bibles. Miller preserved some of that evangelical vision, but also recognized the necessity of discovering an economic niche for his technology that paid its way.

McPhee tags along as Jack Olcott, an ace test pilot, takes off at the controls of the Aereon 26, a proof of concept machine, and runs it through its paces—yaws, rolls, smooth landings. The next step was to have been the construction of a 320 foot prototype, capable of flying great distances on small amounts of fuel and carrying enormous payloads.

But the Aereon company ran out of money and never was able to build that prototype.

The Air Force won’t run out of money. And tanks and troops represent a payload that has more urgency today than Bibles and emergency rations have ever had. Perhaps this time, the concept will get off the ground for more than a test flight.

Samsara

Posted on by
Reply

Samsara

Every thing is
(God is, I am),
On the border, that sphere
Infinitely distant from
The center defining
It, porous, indistinct:
Not I, I, dust;
Lightning
Flash, God, comforting notion.

That, this, another,
Becoming as it is,
Soft where it meets
Embracing other, there
Is no harm there,
Nothing really,
there.

And where does that
Leave us then, leave every thing
Here, and how
Does any thing,
Does God, do I return
To where
We were, where
Every thing is, was -
How is it that
Every thing returns to
Will be
At the center

Again?

Richard Blumberg, 2005

Letter to my Senator

Posted on by
1
September 11, 2005

Honorable George V. Voinovich
317 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Voinovich,

I know that you, unlike some of your colleagues on both sides of the aisle, deserve the “Honorable� before your name. I’ve followed your career, sometimes from a distance and other times closely, and I’ve seen you act, time and again, thoughtfully, effectively, courageously.

Senator Voinovich, your country needs those qualities more than it ever has. Your President is out of touch and out of control, his administration is riddled with incompetence at best, and probably corruption, and your party is trotting along meekly, failing utterly to hold its leaders to any reasonable standards of ethics, responsibility, or morality.

You and your colleagues have just authorized the government to spend $52 billion to help New Orleans. Sir, you must demand to know, and you must tell your constituents, how that money is going to be spent. So far, it seems that it is going to Blackwater Security, to Halliburton, and to Service Corporation International, all of them companies with close personal ties to the administration, all of them receiving their share of the booty with no bidding process and no oversight process in place. The administration, as far as I can tell (and I hope that you have certain knowledge that I am wrong), has placed no restrictions on what they are permitted to do; they have even been relieved of the basic obligation to pay prevailing wages to the workers they hire.

Senator Voinovich, how much of the billions we spend on recovering NOLA will reach the victims of the disaster there? How much will go to enrich the shareholders and managers of the companies being rewarded with fat contracts? I know that you understand the importance of getting accurate and honest answers to such questions. Please, sir, don’t abandon your responsibility to act on what you know to be right.

In desperate sadness, for the people of New Orleans and for the future of our nation, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Richard Blumberg

Richard Blumberg

The Bounds of Reason

Posted on by
Reply

Cenk Uygur, at the Huffington Post, has an encouraging piece in which he points out the foolishness of labeling onself a “conservative” or a “liberal”:

Some people who have commented on my posts have wondered whether I am a liberal or a conservative because honestly in my writings sometimes both labels come up. The fact is I am neither. I believe in this crazy philosophy called — the bounds of reason.

When taxes for the highest bracket were at 70%, that was outside the bounds of reason. I supported Ronald Reagan. When liberals called for unilateral disarmament, that was outside the bounds of reason. I supported Republicans. When campus liberals (who obviously didn’t understand the term) were for curtailing freedom of speech in the name of harassment codes, that was outside the bounds of reason. I supported conservatives.

When Republicans claim they want to drown government in the bathtub, that is outside the bounds of reason. I support the Democrats. When George W. Bush takes us into a senseless war against a country that did not attack us, that is outside the bounds of reason. I support his opposition. When conservatives argue that deficits don’t matter, then I’m no longer a conservative.

What would our political discourse look like if a critical mass of voters tired of the media-defined labels and issues and started to think rationally about what’s wrong and what needs to be done to make that right?

Left Behind – the true story

Posted on by
2

Refugee from KatrinaSheila Lennon, over at Subterranean Homepage News, tells a moving story of a call she received from her old friend Bob. Bob has a chronic illness and, at age 60, he had been living in a Nursing Home in Harvey, LA, just across the river from New Orleans. When the nursing home was evacuated, Bob stayed behind because he was able to get around and felt that he would be OK. When his generator ran out of fuel, he walked a couple of miles to a pickup shelter.

When the buses arrived Saturday to evacuate them all and the throng pressed forward, Bob hung back. “I said to myself,” he told me, “If Buddha can be the last one to achieve nirvana, I can be the last one on the bus.” He ended up getting one of three seats in a helicopter to New Orleans International Airport, and eventually found himself on a plane to Texas.

In mid-flight, the passengers were told they were going to Corpus Christi.

“When we arrived at the shelter, people applauded and welcomed us like heroes,” he said. “They’re treating us like we were gold: Three hot meals — not sandwiches, home-cooked meals. The amount of clothing people have donated is incredible. Social-security tables were set up today, and the food-stamp people are coming tomorrow.”

But he doesn’t know what’s next.

Sheila points out a truth that everyone knows but no one is talking about much. The disaster relief laws are written for homeowners and small businesses. “Lawmakers hadn’t written the laws for disasters so total that people can’t go back, have no where to go back to, and own little but what they could carry away on foot.”

With Congress back in session, there’s a chance to change that. Bill Clinton knows the truth; he’s the one Sheila heard it from. Do the other Dems know? Do they care? And if they don’t, who will?

For the Love of God

Posted on by
3

Detail from Hieronymus BoschAgape, pronounced ah-gah-pay´, is from the Greek; it means, according to dictionary.com, “Love as revealed in Jesus, seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity.” Pronounced
a-gayp´, it means, according to the same source, “In a state of wonder or amazement, as with the mouth wide open.”

It is in that latter sense that one is forced to read the latest from Agape Press, labeling itself “Reliable News from a Christian Source”. The post, titled “New Orleans Residents: God’s Mercy Evident in Katrina’s Wake”, quotes two ministers from New Orleans. The first, Chuck Kelley, President of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, considers it evidence of God’s mercy that He did not hit New Orleans head on with Katrina. “Had the levee given way during the hurricane, he says, ‘untold thousands of people’ would have been killed.”

OK. But the prize goes to the Reverend Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, who sees the evidence of God’s mercy in the fact that He has, via the convenient mechanism of Katrina, wiped out much of the “rampant sin common to the city”. He warned us and warned us, complains the Rev. Shanks, but did we listen? Noooo. And now this.

“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”

Agape. From the Greek

(Or is that hubris?)

Give

Posted on by
Reply

The American Red Cross is safe, I think. They’ve certainly screwed up in the past, but they’re under a lot of public scrutiny now, and I suspect that they’ll make the most productive use of anything you give.

I gave $50 to America’s Second Harvest; that will go directly to Katrina’s victims, and it will go in the form of what they need most right now: food, clean water, medical supplies.

The Progressive Blog Alliance is coordinating an effort by liberal bloggers to gather contributions from their readers. That’s their ad in the right sidebar.

And Strengthen the Good has mounted a matching campaign that will match your contributions (made through their site) to the Red Cross Disaster Fund. I’ve kicked in $100 to the matching fund, which is up to $1,650 now and growing.

If none of these work for you, Instapundit has the most comprehensive list of helping organizations I’ve seen so far.

Just give.

Federal Emergency Mismanaged Agency

Posted on by
Reply

At Talking Point Memo, Josh Marshall does a number on the “deconstruction, privatization and crony-fication of FEMA.” He points to an article by Joe Elliston in the Independent that gives a moving picture of men and women struggling valiantly to do important work while the crew of thugs they work for fails, at every juncture, to give them the support that they need.

Among emergency specialists, “mitigation”–the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters–is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA’s Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now, communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

Update: 3:02:05 PM good story on the gutting of FEMA at Salon.

Update: Thursday 5:54:05 PM This is unbelievable! The FEMA website, in their list of organizations to which Katrina donations can be made, has Pat Robertson’s personal charity Operation Blessing in the number 2 spot, between The Red Cross and America’s Second Harvest.

Update: Friday 9:38:31 AM The Washington Monthly has a timeline of events regarding FEMA and NOLA flood-control projects under the Bush administration; I can’t do better than the Monthly’s lead-in: “Read ‘em and weep.”