I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Monday, October 15, 2012

Linkee-poo will be proper and prim; go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim

Catherine Schaff-Stump's open letter to Viable Paradise XVI which has just concluded. What she said. Are you listening my brain? What she said.

Jason Sanford's Million Writers Award Anthologies on sale for $2.99. Get 'em before the pixels turn cold.

"This festering disappointment we sometimes feel is the elephant in the room among writers. We’re not allowed to talk of it lest we come off as ungrateful. We also can’t talk about it because so much of publishing ‘success’ is smoke and mirrors—it’s about creating the illusion of being in demand in the hopes it will make us actually in demand. So if we talk too openly about how our career is really going, well, we’ve just let the cat out of the bag, and everyone will know our true numbers and our career will sink even faster." Is there a web cam on me or something? The seven stages of publishing grief. I'm somewhere in the 5's and 6's.

Think feminism is not needed? Here's a children's book page form the 70s. I know people who still think this way. Well, overtly they don't but let them go on for a while and eventually it creeps out. For our clinical training we've often heard the story of a female doctor and a male rad technologist coming into the room. The patient will pretty much default that the rad tech is the doctor. (Grokked from Justine Larbalestier)

Jim Wright on a lot of things, but mostly labels, Libya, and the VP debates. And here I'll address a little bit about the flow of intelligence from Libya. That the Obama Administration changed it's story within a week as more and better intelligence came to late is 52 times faster than the Bush Administration admitted to lying on WMDs in Iraq.

Ever wonder why the "environmentalists" get all worked up about how we're treating the Earth, when obviously what we're doing isn't killing us (because we're not falling right over)? Well, here's an example. Seems the US (and other countries) disposed of a lot of ordinance in the Gulf of Mexico (and other bodies of water) after WWII. Only now, where they thought they had disposed of it 1) isn't where it was actually disposed of and 2) now is becoming a hazard as the containers of chemical ordinance begin to fail, and 3) is right where we need to drill to get more oil. Good thing we didn't have any silly EPA or other regulation agencies back then. (Grokked from Jay Lake)

"But, then, it’s easy to be skeptical when your economic interests aren’t on the line." See, people who must actually deal with the effects of climate change, pretty much agree that it's happening. In this case it's the insurance industry. As storms get stronger and more frequent, insurers and reinsurers are seeing their claims go up as well. While looking at decade numbers can be misleading (such as, in the 80s we had some earthquakes, but for the insurance industry not much comes close to Katrina), still the trend is going up. When it's your money on the line, you tend to be more practical. See earlier stories of coastal communities dealing with rising waters (even if they have to "never say global warming") and the Pentagon planning surrounding the issue. (Grokked from the Slactivist)

Jay Lake on the Romney tax thing. Although I disagree a little. It isn't so much that people took their eye off the tax returns as much as it is so much other stupid stuff has gone on since then (47%, nobody dies from not having insurance, the bald face lying during the first debate, the pro-life or pro-choice position swaps, etc) that the tax returns got drown out. Sometimes I think it's intentional. The Romney campaign is in such a bad position they're forcing out issues one after the other in an attempt to down out real debate on the issues. It's like trying to take a sip of water from a firehose.

Tweet of my heart: @mjp @jasonsanford a corollary is Ira Glass's great quote: "Great stories happen to those that can tell them."

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