Not all superheroes are human.
This is our cat – Harry James Potter – he wasn’t named after the most famous wizard for nothing. Just stay out of his line of sight if you know what’s good for you. LOL.
ABC has a new show called earth2100. There is also a companion game available online. The basis is that you can protect the earth by imagining a better future. Online, the game features three basic categorical points in earth’s history 2015, 2050 and 2100.
Scientist today believe that if left unchanged, we will increasingly enter a world that is overpopulated (9.2 billion just a few years from now), has record temperatures, storms, famine, large populations moves, and violent crime as a means of survival.
If we do nothing, there will be too many people and not enough resources.
We must work to solve the energy crisis and find better ways to power our world – ways that do not continue to damage the fragile infrastructure in which we live; for decades we have allowed industry to poison our water and our air. Without these two important resources life cannot exist. Despite this – the polluting continues.
What is your vision of Earth in the next 7 years and beyond?
If I live to be 100, I will have lived until the 2064. Should this happen, I will have experienced what is likely to be some very challenging times on the road ahead.
What are all of these middle-class folk whining about? John McCain thinks we’re suffering from a mental recession and that the ills that are affecting the country are all in our heads.
Apparently, McCain’s definition of “Middle-Class” includes those who earn up to $5 million dollars a year. Hmmm, last time I checked that wasn’t the middle-class I lived in, and I earn a respectable $47,000 a year with a Bachelor’s Degree. That’s a far cry from $5-mil, Mr. McCain.
It would also seem that John and Cindy McCain have so many houses they cannot keep track of just how many they do have. When asked about it recently, McCain said, “I’ll have to have my staff get back to you.” So how many times have you bought “Park Place”, Mr. McCain?
Today, people are struggling to keep the one home they live in, and Senator McCain has an untold number of houses scattered all over the place.
How does a man of that level hope to believe that everyday voters will find him “in sync” with their beliefs and needs as the country reaches out in desperation for a leader who will break tradition and not carry on the failed policies of Bush and Cheney?
Is it possible that we could blame a man who died in 1920 for our current energy and economic woes? Maybe so. John D. Rockefeller is a well-recognized entrepenuer and at some point in history was the richest man in the world.
Looking deeper into the role he played in the formation of Standard Oil, a monopoly in the late 1800s early 1900s, potentially gives us insight into the impact of this business venture to this very day. You see, when the United States Government successfully sued Standard Oil, labelling it a monopoly under the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Laws, Standard Oil was forced to split up into 34 separate companies each with their own boards of directors.
Many of those companies live on today – just under different names.
Several of the companies changed names a few times before they eventually took on the monikers by which we know them today. Companies such as Amoco, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Sunoco just to name a few. Even the makers of Vaseline (Cheeseborough Ponds) was a company spoken off by the dissolution of Standard Oil.
Much of the governments argument against Standard Oil, as it once existed, was that it used its market dominance and its financial might to levy unfair business practices on its competitors. Standard is alleged to have control the flow of oil into the US as a mechanism for controlling prices (Sound familiar?). Standard was also charged with price-fixing to gain the support of railroads and steel companies; a mechanism which allowed it to gain over chief competitors and to squash them. Today we would call this action a merger and acquisition – all very legal.
Make no mistake about it – Standard and Rockefeller weren’t going down without a fight. Those some legal posturing, some of Standard’s endeavors were left unscathed, like Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which had a Trust model and later was able to acquire ownership in some of the dissolved standard oil companies. Today we see microcosms of the former Standard Oil. Mobil was acquired by Exxon to form ExxonMobil; Texaco was acquired by Chevron, became ChevronTexaco and later changed to Chevron. Atlantic and Ritchfield merged decades ago to form Atlantic Richfield or ARCO; today ARCO is part of BP (British Petroleum), and the Atlantic operations were acquired by Sunoco.
The company also spun off into numerous pipelines and refineries, which may just have given them more control over how these disparate pieces operate in terms of delivering oil to the U.S. Today we have some of the highest energy prices ever. The major oil companies will say that they are not causing this, but rather that Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations is the cause of price spikes. Amidst all of the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, we end up without any real answers as to what’s causes our energy woes. Saudi Arabia reportedly has enough oil for the next 80 years, yet all we hear is that our global oil reserves are drying up. While we knew this was an eventuality, we’ve done precious little to find alternate sources of energy; a rather narrow-minded vision when one considers that one day we’ll have no more oil to drill for. Of course, today there is oil and there will be oil for much of our lifetime. It’s clear that the major companies don’t want us transitioning too quickly to alternate forms of energy because that will have a negative effect on the value of their core product – oil.
Much like how the world’s first electric car (GM’s EV1) was killed by the powerful energy industrial, so is the fate of innovations for alternative (cleaner and more cost-effective) forms of energy. These alternate forms won’t truly get the backing off the oil industry until they’ve pumped every last drop of oil out of the Earth, at which time they’ll likely reinvent themselves to support these alternative forms of energy and continue their monopolistic legacies.
There’s no denying that Olympian Michael Phelps is a dynamic individual and that he has brought the United States much pride in his ability to win so many goal metals. As I walked quickly past a convenience store the other day while leaving work, the sight of Michael draped in gold metals and precious little else caught the corner of my eye, and hence my attention. The magazine in question is none other than Sports Illustrated. The issue prominently displays Phelps in all of his Olympic glory, but just for a second another thought entirely raced across my cerebrum. Is it me? or does he look like he’s wearing a really bad 70s-disco-era halter-top trimmed with Olympic goal medals in that cover photo?
OK, so maybe I’m a bit harsh on that photo. Clearly Michael has had some good photo moments and some bad. It’s not overly photogenic, but with the right pose, right angle, right photographer he actually comes off looking quite nice. It’s not his fault, but that rather, of his genetics. He’s tall – very tall, lanky – very lanky, and well toned. In the end who really cares, right? He won tons of gold in the Olympics. He’s on his way to fame and fortune and lots of endorsement deals. It really doesn’t matter what we think of him – he’ll have enough money not to care.
Here’s some other photos of Michael from around the net. Enjoy.
And then there is the more “artsy” focus….
And, I couldn’t resist….. “No Peeking!”
…and focus on saving heterosexual marriage. (not really). From E! News comes word that funnyman Chris Kattan and wife Sunshine Tutt have separated after only two months of wedded bliss or not. It was Kattan who filed for a legal separation citing irreconcilable differences.
With all the fervor over how bad it will be to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples, it would seem that perhaps all the pundits need to stop worrying about gay marriage and focus instead on the stability of the institution of marriage in and of itself. For millenia heterosexuals have been slowly hacking away at marriage. The divorce rate has been fairly significant up until now, and you cannot blame gays for that.
Let’s just face. Some people just aren’t meant to get married. That’s what co-habitation is for. Test it out first, and test it sufficiently before you say “I do” and then realize you meant to say “I don’t”. Fortunately for Kattan, a prenup was signed. You can read the full store here.
Barack Obama has selected Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden brings to the Obama camp many years of experience from working in Congress, and on a number of committees focusing on Foreign Policy and the Judiciary. Biden appears to be well-liked and has been returned to Congress five times by the largely Democratic voters in Delaware.
The one risk is that Biden likes to talk, and in the past, his penchant for gab has landed him in hot water; most recently during his Presidential bid as an opponent of the very man he will now serve as V.P. if they are elected.
Let’s all welcome Senator Biden to the Obama camp. With the selection process behind us, we can now focus our attention and our energy on getting both of these men elected. WE ARE DESPERATE FOR CHANGE and I believe both Obama and Biden can deliver the change that will release us from the misguided rhetoric of the Republicans and the hateful influence of the “Religious Right”.
YES WE CAN!
I am now almost 100% certain that the annoying “Unknown Error -3256″ was related to iTunes version 7.7.1. I based this assumption on my experiences after rolling iTunes back to version 7.6.2, which I was able to download from www.oldapps.com.
This isn’t the actual error message, but it’s fairly similar
A few adjustments to get the proper iTunes library to populate the program, resubscribing to existing podcasts and reconnecting my AirPort Express device and I’m doing fairly well. I no longer get interruptions in my streaming internet radio (unless the interruption is from the source – a frequent issue – as the station I listen to is from Korea), and I no longer get the infamous error while downloading media (including podcasts) from the iTunes store.
iNewAge is an online New Age station that I listen to frequently. They often have very nice content, and they are offering several streams with different areas of focus on New Age music. Many of the artists featured on this station have links on their Recommended Artists page, and some are also available via iTunes.
Recently, the English site has been undergoing a rather lengthy makeover. Some of its content is not fully functional at this time. The link above will bring you to their “listen to” page; here you’ll find controls to download files that will initiate a stream in a variety of media appliances from Windows Media, iTunes, Winamp and more.
I suspect that like so many other internet radio companies, this one is also struggling under in the inequitable pressure from the RIAA and SoundExchange over royalty fees assessed on internet content that terresterial radio doesn’t have to pay. This seems like an attack against the pioneers of internet radio, and sadly it is something that Congress has done little or nothing to prevent.
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