George Bush

I heard a comedian say the following:

“George Bush is the worst president in the history of America!”

The audience starts cheering and clapping their agreement.

“Isn’t it amazing then that his son, George W. Bush, is the best president ever!”

The State Mental Hospital

Hello and thank you for calling The State Mental Hospital.

Please select from the following options menu:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.

If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.

If you have multiple personalities, press 3, 4, 5 and 6.

If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want, stay on the line so we can trace your call.

If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be forwarded to the Mother Ship.

If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.

If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press, nothing will make you happy anyway.

If you are dyslexic, press 9696969696969696.

If you are bipolar, please leave a message after the beep or before the beep or after the beep. Please wait for the beep.

If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9.

If you have low self-esteem, please hang up our operators are too busy to talk with you.

If you are menopausal, put the gun down, hang up, turn on the fan, lie down and cry. You won’t be crazy forever.

If you are blonde, don’t press any buttons, you’ll just mess it up.

Contemplative Spirituality

Since I learnt to meditate 15 years ago, I have been drawn to the contemplative life which is an investigation into our experience of life. My natural inclination is to Self-Inquiry, also called Gyan Yoga in India, which comprises three stages: shravana, manana and nididhyasana. This translates as hearing, reflection and realisation.

Basically, you find out about the state of enlightenment – preferably from someone who is enlightened – then you consider very carefully the knowledge that they impart and make it your own (this means more than being able to parrot it) and then finally contemplate directly on your essential nature as unconditioned consciousness 24/7.

This is principally an intellectual, masculine path and I can talk endlessly about its strengths and weaknesses. However, there is a corresponding feminine path of devotion called Bhakti Yoga. This is the path of love and it yields very sweet results for those attracted to it. This path is very nicely explained by a Christian monk called Brother Lawrence in some letters and conversations recorded here.

Here is some more about him:

The 17th century French monk, Brother Lawrence, developed a technique–mostly through inspiration and intuition–which leads to results akin to those developed by the continued practice of either Zen or mindfulness meditation. He worked in the monastery’s kitchen and in later years he repaired sandals.

In The Practice of the Presence of God, he wrote:

“This made me resolve to give the all for the All: so after having given myself wholly to GOD, to make all the satisfaction I could for my sins, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He; and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world … I worshipped Him the oftenest that I could, keeping my mind in His holy Presence, and recalling it as often as I found it wandered from Him.

“I found no small pain in this exercise, and yet I continued it, notwithstanding all the difficulties that occurred, without troubling or disquieting myself when my mind had wandered involuntarily. I made this my business, as much all the day long as at the appointed times of prayer; for at all times, every hour, every minute, even in the height of my business, I drove away from my mind everything that was capable of interrupting my thought of GOD. Such has been my common practice ever since I entered into religion.”

The Pluto Song

I like this song about Pluto:

Steamy Campaign Video

This is a saucy video about a hot young Democratic woman who mistakenly goes home with a Republican. Follow the link to watch:

http://truththroughaction.org/

Barack Obama Explains the Meaning of Life

At a town hall meeting in Kaukauna, Wisc., Thursday afternoon, amidst questions about health care and the economy, a young man said he had a question for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and Obama should “please be as intellectual or spiritual as you would like.”

“Well this is a lot of pressure,” Obama said to laugher.

“My question is: what does life mean to you?” the young man asked.

“Oh goodness,” Obama said, a bit taken aback. “What does life mean to me?”

He stammered a bit as he contemplated the enormity of the query.

“Well, uh, I, uh…”

The crowd of 2,500 supporters at Kaukauna High School * laughed with apparent sympathy.

“I don’t know where to start on a question like that,” Obama said. “Let me just say a couple things. Right now what I think about most is my daughters who are 10 and 7,” he said, referring to his daughters Malia and Sasha. “And not that I’m biased but they are perfect in all ways.”

To the young man who asked the question, Obama said, “when I was your age, I thought life was all about me. And how do make my way in the world and how do I become successful and how do I get the things that I want. And right now life for me revolves around those two girls. And I think about what kind of a place am I leaving them.”

And with that, came the able pivot.

“Michelle and I have been incredibly blessed,” Obama said. “As long as God’s looking over, my girls are going to be OK.” They go to “great schools, will be able to afford college, are in good health and will be well cared for if they ever get sick.

But the country and the world they’re living in, Obama said, needs work.

“Are they living in a county where there’s a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day?” Obama asked. “Are they living in a county that is still divided by race?

“Are they living in a country where because they’re girls they don’t have as much opportunity as boys do?

“Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don’t cooperate with other countries as effectively as we should? Are they living in a country where they are threatened by terrorism and a nuclear explosion could happen in a major American city? Are they living in a country in which because of a lack of sensible energy we are not only ransoming our future, but we’re also threatening the very livelihood of the planet?”

Obama continued, “what life means to me is that every day I wake up trying to figure out how can I secure their futures and the futures of all children, …How can I make sure that we are giving a planet and a country to them that is better than the one we got? And, you know ,so I guess what I’ve discovered is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re somehow giving yourself to something larger to yourself. And that’s part of my Christian faith. It’s also part of the reason I am running for president of the United States.”

So.

That’s what life means to him. In case you were wondering.

Words

bakku-shan (Japanese): a girl who when seen from behind looks as though she might be pretty, but when seen from the front is not

desus (Indonesian): the quiet, smooth sound of someone farting, not very loudly

fucha (Portuguese): to use company time and resources for one’s own purposes

koshatnik (Russian): a dealer in stolen cats

kucir (Indonesian): a tuft of hair left to grow atop an otherwise bald head

latah (Indonesian): the uncontrollable habit of saying embarrassing things

nylentik (Indonesian): to flick someone on the ear with the middle finger

o ka la nokonoko (Hawaiian): day spent in nervous anticipation of a coughing spell

pomicione (Italian): a man who seizes any chance of being in close physical contact with a woman

seigneur terrasse (French): someone who spends time, but not money, at a café

torschlusspanik (German): the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older

tsui-giri (Japanese, samurai-era): to try out a new sword on a passer-by

zechpreller (German): a person who leaves without paying the bill

The word tingo itself comes from the Pascuense language of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and is particularly evocative. Tingo: borrowing things from a friend’s house, one by one, until he has nothing left.

What happened to World Trade Center 7?

From the Financial Times (FT.com)

To the truthers, “building 7” – the third building in the World Trade Center complex to collapse on September 11 – is evidence that the mainstream media is in on the plot. On that day, the BBC reported the building’s fall almost half an hour before it happened. Journalist Jane Standley was broadcast at 4.54pm eastern time reporting that the tower had collapsed – but in the background, it was still standing.

It fell 26 minutes later, seven hours after the Twin Towers came down.

When the Standley clip hit YouTube, truthers bombarded the BBC’s website with questions and accusations. Richard Porter, head of BBC world news, was forced to deny that the broadcaster was reading from the Bush conspirators’ script. He said the BBC had misreported warnings from fire crews of the building’s imminent collapse and instead stated that it had already happened. He blamed the confusion of the day for the mix-up. CNN had earlier reported rumours that a third building had either collapsed or was about to.

But in the minds of the truthers, this explanation was undermined by Porter’s admission that the BBC no longer had the original tapes of its coverage.

Building 7 is the truthers’ smoking gun for other reasons, too. How, they ask, could this modern, steel-framed skyscraper collapse merely because of fire, without even being hit by an airliner?

The 47-storey WTC7 fell straight down, at almost free-fall speed, largely into its own footprint: all the hallmarks, the sceptics say, of a controlled demolition. Building 7 had some fascinating tenants.

The main occupant was Salomon Brothers, the bank, but on floors nine and 10 was the secret service. On the three floors above that was the Securities and Exchange Commission. The New York Times reported that the building also housed a secret office operated by the CIA dedicated to spying on and recruiting foreign diplomats based at the United Nations. The station’s loss had “seriously disrupted” intelligence operations, it said.

The CIA shared a floor with an office of the Defence Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

The collapse of the building also wiped out the operations centre of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management on floor 23, throwing the response that day into further mayhem.

Truthers have focused on a comment on the afternoon of September 11 by Larry Silverstein, the building’s owner, to a fire department commander: he said they should “pull” the building after a faulty sprinkler system left fires to rage all day. “Pull”, the sceptics claim, is industry jargon for demolish. Debunking911.com points out that the term actually refers to pulling one building away from another with cables. Silverstein’s spokesman later said that Silverstein told the fire chief that the most important thing was to protect the lives of the firefighters, including pulling them out of the building if necessary.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology began investigating the collapse of building 7 along with the Twin Towers in 2002, but hived the inquiry off into a separate probe, which will not report until August. This fuelled suspicion that officials were struggling to come up with a plausible line of obfuscation. NIST says progress has been slowed by the complexity of the computer model it is using, which simulates the collapse from the moment it begins all the way to the ground. Another 80 boxes of documents related to WTC7 have also been found and need to be analysed, it says.

NIST’s working hypothesis is that fire and/or flaming debris from the collapsing north tower (which left a long gash in building 7’s south face) damaged a critical column which supported a 2,000 sq ft floor bay. The remaining floor bays were unable to redistribute the loads, and the whole structure came down on itself. The fact that the collapse was triggered by an internal failure would explain the appearance of a controlled demolition with a small field of debris left behind.

The influence of the truthers can be found in this line from a 2004 progress report: “While NIST has found no evidence of a blast or controlled demolition event, NIST would like to determine the magnitude of hypothetical blast scenarios that could have led to the structural failure of one or more elements.”

The BBC, meanwhile, has yet to persuade some of its critics. It had wanted to film the 9/11 Truth seminar at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles but was barred by the organisers, who cited building 7.

‘Simpsons’ voice actors reach deal

The standoff between “The Simpsons” voice cast and series producer 20th Century Fox TV is over.

After months of negotiations, the cast of Fox’s long-running animated series reached a new four-year deal with the studio during the weekend.

Under the pact, the top actors will be paid nearly $400,000 per episode. While this is lower than the reported $500,000 the cast originally sought, it remains a significant increase from their current paychecks of about $300,000 an episode.

Additionally, Dan Castellaneta, who voices Homer Simpson and has penned several “Simpsons” episodes over the years, is being named a consulting producer.

Castellaneta and most of the other key “Simpsons” voice players — Julie Kavner (Marge), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Yeardley Smith (Lisa) and Hank Azaria (Moe) — are slated to begin work on the upcoming 20th season today with a table read.