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Cultural Direction                  Art, Music and Political Culture
 

The dimension of expression is endless. Andrea Von Ramm


[Site Not Updated For A Few Months. Hope To Get Back To It Soon.]

Art Gallery
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Sidelights
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Poetry
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William Blake Art

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
— William Blake

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Balances
by Nikki Giovanni

in life
one is always
balancing
 
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
 
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
 
3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth
 
our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street
 
and lately i’ve begun wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something
 
we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
 
and i’ve begun
 
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you


XVII
by James Joyce

Because your voice was at
my side
    I gave him pain,
Because within my hand I held
    Your hand again.
 
There is no word nor any sign
    Can make amend —
He is a stranger to me now
    Who was my friend.


Time Lapse

(Full Screen is Best View)

World Series
 

by Robert Caplin →

Night Rush Around the World
 

by HDtimelapse.net →



Astor Piazzolla

Astor Piazzolla has been called the single most important figure in the history of tango – a genius composer who took an earthy, sensual folk music and elevated it into a sophisticated form of high art. Piazzolla was also a virtuosic performer with a near-unparalleled mastery of the bandoneon, a large button accordion noted for its unwieldy size and difficult fingering system. His compositions, influenced by jazz and classical forms, brought him enormous international acclaim, particularly in Europe and Latin America. He remained tango’s foremost emissary to the world at large up until his death in 1992. In these two pieces, the great Yo-Yo-Ma plays cello.


Music Gallery
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Aurora’s Dance

Prime-Number Musical Meter and Celestial Motion
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Life Forms

The Emotional Realms of Fibonacci’s Numbers

  Large View & Information  →


Fibonacci Forms: Photos
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Astronomy Picture
of the Day

We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself. — Carl Sagan
 
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There are some laws that Congress can change. The laws of nature aren’t among them.
– Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse


Politics, News, Opinion
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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. — Albert Einstein



“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am President, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”
— Barack Obama, October 27, 2007


GOP Loath to Credit Obama for Kadafi’s End

As you might expect, Republicans aren’t exactly rushing to credit the Obama administration for first the downfall and now the death of Moammar Kadafi, even though the United States was part of the NATO force that backed the rebels who deposed the longtime Libyan leader. Sens. John McCain and Marco Rubio, who have favored strong U.S. intervention in the Libyan conflict, took it one step further Thursday, praising the efforts of Britain and France in bringing down Kadafi. That’s right. France. It wasn’t all that long ago that House Republicans were renaming their French fries.  Read more  →

A Tale Of Two Presidents
by Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

    Bush and Saddam – One Trillion dollars and thousands of US lives.
    Obama and Qaddafi – One Billion dollars and zero US lives.
    Meep Meep indeed.

And this time, the Arab world loves us as well. To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now.  Source  →


Senate Republicans Block Dem Jobs Bill For Teachers, Firefighters

Senate Republicans, joined by three conservative members of the Democratic caucus, blocked a floor debate on a key portion of President Obama’s jobs bill, which would have provided states $35 billion to hire or retain teachers and emergency responders.  Read more  →

The GOP Kills Jobs
by Michael Tomasky

The Republican Party’s posture to the American people is this. Your opinion on issues like teachers and taxes doesn’t matter a whit to us. True, if you happened to agree with us, we’d use that to our advantage, but since you don’t, we really don’t care. What does matter though, as far as you people are concerned, is what you do next Election Day. If you put a Republican in the White House, we’ll grow up a little. If you give us the Senate, too, we’ll actually get to work (although God forbid on what). But if you keep that man in the White House, we will block everything he and you want. Everything. And nothing will happen in this town for those next four years. The Republicans can’t say any of this, of course, but they don’t have to. People get it. It just sort of seeps out of them, like oil from a polluted stream.
Read more  →


James Crow, Esquire

The GOP War on Voting
by Ari Berman, Rolling Stone

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.
Read more  →

More information & Updates: James Crow, Esq: New Barriers to Voting  →







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October Miscellaneous

 
Cultural Direction                  Art, Music and Political Culture
 

96-Year-Old Dorothy Cooper Finally Gets ID to Vote  →


Dirtier air, dirtier water; that is not a jobs plan. — POTUS

PAUL KRUGMAN: So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker. Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday’s presidential debate, was met with wild applause. Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans. But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy?  Read more  →


Spider Silk is Three Times Stronger Than Steel

Human Skin Mixed with Spider Silk Can Stop Rifle Bullets: What started as a work of art and science fiction may become a medical procedure that benefits burn patients, aids bone regeneration … Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi and cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri blended synthetic spider silk with human skin to produce a super strong material that can stop a rifle bullet shot at half its regular speed.  Read more  →


Herman Cain Has Become the Perfect Racist
by Dr. Boyce Watkins

Cain has also made a career of hurling insults at black people that no white man could ever get away with … Most of his comments are not the kinds of things he could say about other ethnic groups; if he were to say that all Jews were brainwashed (as he said about African Americans), he’d be off the stage before finishing his sentence. Herman Cain has become, in many ways, the perfect racist … [he] has volunteered to become the political puppet which allows white America to say the things that they are afraid to say. It is their ability to put Cain out front to absorb the criticism for racist remarks that makes millions of right-wing Americans so happy about his racial politics. Cain validates and brings security to a set of ideas that are generally unacceptable to those who understand America’s ugly racial history.   Read more  →
 
He gives the Republican party the gift of absolution. — Michael Eric Dyson

See also:  Explaining Herman Cain by Leonard Pitts Jr.  →


How Christian Fundamentalism Helped Empower the Top 1% to Exploit the 99%
by Frank Schaeffer

[W]ithout the fundamentalists and their “values” issues, many in the lower 99 percent could not have been convinced to vote against their (our) economic self-interest; in other words, vote for Republicans who only serve billionaires … The unstated agreement went like this: Republicans will pander to the Religious Right on the social issues — abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, creationism in textbooks, and not so subtly the endorsement of religious schools to help white evangelicals and Roman Catholics avoid integration — as long as the Religious Right turned a blind eye to the fact that the Republican Party would sell the soul of the country to corporate America, a country-within-a-country where 1 percent of the population have more wealth than the 99 percent.  Read more  →
 
Also by Schaeffer: The Roots of Republican Actions Today  →


Economy

Senate Republicans Block American Jobs Act. This was 60-vote threshold (i.e., filibustered) cloture vote not to pass the bill, but only to begin discussion.  Read more  →

Moody’s: Senate GOP jobs plan wouldn’t help economy in short term, and it could even make things worse: “I could say, `My plan is to do nothing, and it will create five million jobs.’ And it could work, particularly if I don’t say over what time period.”  Continue  →


An indecent proposal  →
A communication to Grover Norquist


Occupy Global Live Stream  →
 
Occupy Wall Street: Protests Spread Around the World  →


Herman Cain Has Extensive Ties To Powerful Koch Group

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has cast himself as the outsider, the pizza magnate with real-world experience who will bring fresh ideas to the nation’s capital. But Cain’s economic ideas, support and organization have close ties to two billionaire brothers who bankroll right-leaning causes through their group Americans for Prosperity.  Read more  →


Federal Appeals Court Blocks 2 More Sections of Alabama Immigration Law:  Continue  →

Judiciary Committee to Take Next Step toward Repeal of DOMA:  Continue  →


Dead on Arrival:  The Next Shutdown — ?

Democrats Reject Draft House Bill That Defunds Health Law:  “The Senate will not agree to kicking hundreds of thousands of students out of the Pell Grant program, decimating programs that train unemployed workers to get a new job, or adopting any of the dozens of radical legislative riders that the Chairman has proposed.”
Read more  →

GOP Threats to Planned Parenthood, Health Care Law, Heating Oil, NPR  →


Report:  In their upcoming November issue, Bloomberg Markets reveals that Koch Industries violated a US-Iran trade embargo, sold petro chemical equipment to Iran and paid bribes in 6 countries for business.

Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales  →


Department of Labor approved $500M for job training grants
to 49 Community Colleges:  Continue  →

Buffett Rule Backed by 63% of Investors:  Continue  →

US Backs Solar Projects with Nearly $500 Million in Loan Guarantees:  Continue  →

Michigan Approves Spending for High-Speed Rail Line:  Continue  →


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