That was hard to watch but he did point out one important fact: We own the country. That’s often overlooked, especially by elected officials themselves.
Politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them unimaginable sums of money to spend as they see fit, and we hold them to such ridiculously low standards . . .
Residents and merchants here have grown weary of the Occupy Tampa movement’s 6-month presence in their midst, and some of them aim to take action.
On Thursday they plan to take a petition to the Tampa City Council. It maintains that the movement has turned a privately owned park on Main Street into an impromptu squatters’ village that is unsightly and, at times, unruly.
Since adult nightclub owner Joe Redner made his Voice of Freedom Park available to the movement in December, it has filled with pup tents, and has become an eyesore that is unclean, disorderly and unsafe due to people using drugs and drinking alcohol, the residents say.
What we have here, then, is a dispute between a rich man asserting his right to use his property in any way he sees fit and the residents of a lower- to lower-middle-class community who are suffering the externalities of his unregulated actions. The Occupy clowns, natch, are on the side of the rich guy.
Here’s a headline from NBC News coverage of the RNC:
Women share their reasons for being at the Republican National Convention
NBC does a lot of editorializing in their “news” coverage.
I propose the following headline for next week’s DNC:
Taxpayers share their reasons for being at the Democratic National Convention
Medical office visits are intimations of mortality . . .
I had an appointment this morning to have blood drawn. Of the patients who went ahead of me, none of them left the office without elaborately thanking the receptionist.
“Thank you,” they all said with immense politeness.
Everyone is superstitious in the face of death. I’m a good person. I’m going to show what a good person I am by graciously thanking a humble receptionist and maybe they won’t find anything bad in my blood test and maybe I won’t die . . .
Deadspin has an excellent “as told to” story on former Olympic discus thrower Mac Wilkins (What The Discus Can Teach You About Life: Lessons From One Of America’s Greatest Throwers)
Wilkins made four straight U.S. Olympic teams, winning a gold medal in 1976, a silver in 1984, and finishing fifth in 1988. He was also the first man to throw the discus more than 70 meters, and he held the world record for over two years, bettering his own mark three times between April 1976 and August 1978.
Some excerpts:
So one day I go out to train and I say, Oh, what the heck. Let’s just give it a little extra effort today. And I did, and I got better and it went farther. And I thought that was kind of fun. What if I could that again tomorrow? And so pretty soon, I’m hooked on, Can I do it better today? And it was fun. I knew I could get better and I enjoyed it.
It was all about, There are no limits. There are no limits. I have no restrictions. I have no inhibitions. And you can achieve anything that you set your mind to. There are no limits.
I thought that the [1980 Olympic] boycott was a stupid thing to do. We continued to sell wheat to Russia. We continued to sell Pepsi to Russia. We bought vodka from Russia. It was business as usual except for the Olympic Games. And, of course, we only boycotted after we won the ice hockey game in Lake Placid that year. So I thought it was very naïve, and I was very disappointed because I really liked Jimmy Carter. And there’s still a war in Afghanistan, even to this day. So it didn’t do anything.
Is there a moral to the story? Well, probably.
I have so many, so many times when I would fall down or fail. Being a teacher/coach, I have to be … well, it’s exactly like being a parent. You have to be a better person than you really are.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. — Dale Carnegie
Bookman, my favorite local used bookstore, had a 25-percent-off sale this weekend and here’s what I got:
USC baseball alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, age 65, pitched a complete-game 9-4 victory for the San Rafael Pacifics of the independent North American League Thursday night, to become the oldest pitcher to win a professional game.
Lee already held that record anyway, having won a Can-Am League game in 2010 at age 63.
The notable thing here is that for some reason, professional pitchers in their prime can no longer do what a 65-year-old man can do, and that is to pitch a complete game.
If you’re too young to remember Bill Lee, he was a major league pitcher from 1969 to 1982, primarily with the Boston Red Sox. He is regarded as one of the game’s all-time colorful characters. (If you’re wondering whether that reputation is deserved, Baseball Almanac has compiled some Lee quotes for your perusal.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on moon, dies at age 82 – Cosmic Log
I’m sorry to hear this. For people my age, NASA and the space program were such an important part of our childhood. We’d wake up any hour of the day or night to watch launches and splashdowns.
Astronauts were as famous as pro athletes and rock stars . . .actually, they were more famous than athletes. Being a pro athlete in the 1960s wasn’t what it is today.
It would be nice if I could let this go without mentioning that Armstrong was a graduate of the University of Southern California, but I can’t.
R.I.P. Neil Armstrong
To paraphrase President Obama:
Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure. There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive. Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them. If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own. Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state.
In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.
Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.
Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.
An elderly woman has destroyed a 19th-century Spanish fresco in a botched restoration conducted without permission.
“Restoration conducted without permission” = ignorant destruction of artistic treasures. This is why it pays to leave art restoration to trained professionals.
Tobias Mayer: How to Write an Agile Job Ad
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. — Joseph Chilton Pearce
Ex-con who reportedly vowed not to be taken alive shot to death — LA Daily News
To live outside the law you must be honest, as Bob Dylan has rightly pointed out. He may have been a violent, drug-addled thief, but he was a man of his word, and that’s important.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. — Andy Warhol
It’s move-in weekend at UC Berkeley, the world’s greatest university . . .
Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is teaching an undergraduate seminar on physics and music this year.
How many schools even have Nobel Laureates on the faculty? Of those that do, how many of them teach small classes for freshmen and sophomores?
Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, are coasting on their reputations. When’s the last time you heard of an enterpreneur from Dartmouth or Brown or Yale?
Stanford is great in engineering and business but limited in other areas. Also, top professors at private schools would rather piss on a spark plug than traffic with undergrads.
That said, the University of Southern California football season starts Sept. 1 against Hawaii. The Men of Troy!
FIGHT ON FOR OLD ‘SC! OUR MEN FIGHT ON TO VICTORY!
