Whatever happened to “Hey Cutie. : )” and “Just thinking about you…how was your day?” Perhaps I need to distance myself from you, teach you a lesson…but I’m terrified that if I do that, you’re just gonna say, “Fuck it, I don’t want a relationship that badly.” So instead, I send you a text or two and try not to let it hurt my feelings that you don’t seem to care at all.

I know you do. You prove it every time that you look at me. Every time that I do something and it’s the only thing that has made you really smile in a long time. Every time you hold me so tight I can barely breathe, or kiss me goodbye until we’re both late for wherever we were supposed to go, and no longer have the ability to leave…that’s what I console myself with when I’m waiting for the inevitable disappointment of your non-existant or one word texts.

I know you’re busy; I’m extremely swamped and stressed with everything right now, too. I understand. But talking to me doesn’t take that much time and effort, does it?

And if it is honestly too much, just tell me, so I can freaking escape you and save my heart in the progress.

Although the visual refresh/update of the 2010 Mustang, in my opinion, is brilliant, the drivetrains are old hat. With that 4.0 liter asthmatic V6, the 2010 Camaro’s 3.6 liter V6 made Ford’s thoroughbred look geriatric and was more in line to give the 4.6 liter V8 a run for it’s money.  But has Ford been sleeping on the job? Hell no.

For a few months now, Ford has been testing a new V6 and V8 to replace the current iron horses.  The all new V6 gives up displacement over the outgoing powerplant at 3.7 liters, but it produces 306 hp, dangerously close to the 4.6 V8 and an even match to the Camaro V6.  The all new  Coyote V8 ups the displacement to 5.0 liters even and with impressive results. The Mustang is a snarling, road-devouring carnivore of a car with 315hp, but this new V8 will be producing 400 hp! Holy crap!!

If i’m correct, both engines blocks are aluminum, making them lighter than the old iron ones. So expect sharper handling with a noticeable difference of front end behavior, slightly tweaked suspensions, and possibly even a new performance pack for both trims.

So what does all this add up to?  Well, as much as I adore the Dodge Challenger, even the mighty SRT8 is starkly outmatched now.  It’s too damn heavy, the heaviest of the 3 new muscle cars.  The Mustang  GT 4.6 was a sharper than the Camaro SS and still pretty quick, mostly due to it being a couple hundred pound lighter.  But now, with 85 more stampeding stallions ready to burst out of the gates at the twitch of your big toe, will the Camaro SS, with it’s 6.2 liter 426hp V8, continue to reign supreme? Or will the Mustang prove that is not only a bigger movie star, but the king of the track, drag strip?

With 400hp, you'll get to do bigger these!!!

-TripleDeuce

It’s finally time for John Demjanjuk,former Nazi internment camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” to face the music for the atrocities he committed at the jewish death camp known as Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps.

During the period 1942–1943 Demjanjuk committed murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners,as an act of loyalty to Hitler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Demjanjuk

The 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker arrived at the opening of the trial in a wheelchair to face the final chapter of some 30 years of efforts to prosecute him, wearing a navy baseball cap and covered in a light blue blanket.

At 89, Ivan the Terrible looks…terrible.

He appears to be a slobbering, shaking, infirmed shell of a man, who is deserving of all the prosecutions efforts to convict him of the Nazi’s crimes against humanity, and more directly, the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi death camps.

Lawyer Ulrich Busch said “How can you say that those who gave the orders were innocent … and the one who received the orders is guilty?”

“There is a moral and legal double standard being applied today.”

Well…he is a Nazi.

Source…

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/11/23/1009359/demjanjuk-nazi-trial-set-to-begin-in-germany

A segunda temporada do reality “A Fazenda”, por enquanto, não consegue repetir o sucesso da primeira.

Até o momento, a nova temporada do reality show da Record, durante a semana, não passou dos 10 pontos. No período, quem mostrou sinais de crescimento teria sido justamente a emissora principal concorrente, SBT, que saiu do patamar dos 4 pontos crescendo para 7 na audiência média.

O reality só consegue bons resultados no fim de semana quando não compete com a novela da Globo. Neste domingo, dia 29, marcou uma média (prévia) de 14 pontos e pico de 18.

*PlanetaTV

So I’m sitting here. Bored. Kinda cold. Kinda hungry…just chillin alone in my dorm, and I realize, this is exactly what I do every night. I am alone all the time. And, as nice as that is when I’m feeling overwhelmed or introverted, it sucks ass when I want to just hear someone’s voice, or if I miss Seattle Sweetheart. I’m lonely enough that I call my parents to talk about nothing, or text people I don’t even like. But the biggest problem is that I don’t want to make any real friendships here because I’m going to be leaving soon. No one wants to invest the effort in getting to know me because I am leaving, and I don’t want to bother with it either. So I’m alone. All the time.

Furthermore, SS needs to get his shit figured out. SS’ Crazy Ex(es) severely messed this amazing, wonderful, intelligent young man up. For example, he has zero trust or faith in me. I took offense to this for a while before I realized that he just can’t help it, and that, frankly, he knows that I’m the last person to ever do something like that–especially because my long-ass relationship with Fratty Asshat my First Love was ruined because of the fact that I had to kiss My Main Gay in the Winter Play Flowers for Algernon. I mean, really. I had to kiss someone so gay he dyed his hair pink and moved to NYC to pursue a career in theatre, wore fuzzy Ugg boots, and had a murse. Not to stereotype, or anything.

I digress.

SS now treats me with a cold indifference through text message. It’s an interesting way he goes about protecting himself…a coping mechanism, I suppose, for all the insecurities he has about relationships. He preempts my “hurting him” by hurting me, thus, if the relationship ended it would end on his terms and not mine. But, to be perfectly honest and not at all arrogant, all I have to do to defrost his ice shield is be around him. If he sees me, it’s Game Over. SS has admitted many a time that he can’t resist me. So there.

But, frankly, it’d be nice if he’d just stop playing games, trust me, and finally make things official. I’m tired of this kinda-sorta-but-not-really-but-it-will-be shit.

Oh, but I had a great ride back to Pullman. The weather was clear and beautiful and I was riding with a friend from Mukilteo that I always have a blast talking to. We’re very similar, and differ in ways that compliment each other. All in all, good chemistry. We bitched about girls and boys and parents and teachers and all the good stuff.

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler's Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

A screenshot with my ex-guildies with one very out of place wannabe Spartan.

Cousins in the far north!

My first time seeing the L70TCs in Shattrath

I went to meet my maternal uncles (mamus) today. It was a long time since I had met them and I had a lot of fun catching up with my cousins. Halfway through, cousin M(big) said that he had a snap of RS and SS where he couldn’t tell which was which. This was taken when they were a couple of weeks old.

So I asked him to show me the snap and I could let him know.

He showed me the snap.

And I was struck dumb!!!

It took me a whole 10 minutes to figure out which was RS and which one was SS.

Just look at them :-

Regular readers, can you guess which is which??

Attempted Sleepover

Cousin Grey was GOING to sleep in the same room with Burke and Maggie (and Mike), but as soon as his daddy left the room…so did Grey.

Are the waffles done yet?

Grandpa made waffles this morning!

Kids' Table

Cheryl over at Twinfatuation hosts this one. Go over and have a look at what others are doing on this dreary Saturday.

I love Zangarmarsh!

I’ve always found this type of boss rather adorable looking. Imagine my horror when I saw this guy dead >.<

After numerous runs through Naxx, I forgot how beautiful the place looks.

Roasting my down-syndrome lion face.

کتاب هم جنس من(لزبین) زن با زن شماره 5

موضوعات:

بوچ وفمه, ختنه زنان, تامی بالدوین, کتاب قدرت ولذت قسمت سوم, لزبین چیست , شعر, قاب ,عکس ,و….

دانلود کتاب هم جنس (لزبین)  زن با زن من شماره 5

کتاب هم جنس من(لزبین) زن با زن شماره 5

موضوعات:

بوچ وفمه, ختنه زنان, تامی بالدوین, کتاب قدرت ولذت قسمت سوم, لزبین چیست , شعر, قاب ,عکس ,و….

دانلود کتاب هم جنس (لزبین)  زن با زن من شماره 5

Entering the secret room to retrieve my Kirin’Tor Familiar pet!

Back on my previous US server, even though it was PVP, allies partied with me.

Back in my day, we didn’t have no stinking Argent Tournament for easy faction rep grinds! We had to do cloth turn-ins! The horror!

Chilling out after beating up the 4 Horsemen.

After finishing the 4 wings of Naxx,  the raid was called as it was late, and I accidentally entered Sapphiron’s room. Was panicking for a bit that I couldn’t exit except by hearthing. But after a while I decided to live the moment and charge in head-long into the boss. I lasted 3 hits! That’s me under his paw.

………….severe hair loss. Courtesy : The Twins!!

So, I’m losing hair rapidly and the ones still holding on are all frizzy and dry. The deadly-duo, undoubtedly, are the chief reason for this premature baldness.

Here’s how they scheme their attack  (in baby-lang. Translated for your reading pleasure):-

===========================================

SS : Am so sick of her!! She NEVER gives me what I demand!!

RS : I guess you’re talking about the fat sack who’s forever cooing over us.

SS : you got it! She KNOWS I love nibbling on that Nokia cellphone, but she just wouldn’t give it to me. Rather, she takes pleasure in teasing me by going yakkity-yak on the phone with our old man.

RS :  (looking around with a bored expression) So, what do you do to get it from her?

SS : I scream. I wail. I cry. No use!! She just wouldn’t give in.

RS : Aaahh!! Thats where you lack the ingenuity little brother. You don’t know the right trick.

SS :  (eagerly) you mean to say, I can get her to dance to my tune?

RS: Of Course!! how do you think I’ve got my way till now!! Listen up buddy. You see those hair on her head? Well, she’s awfully paranoid about them. Specially the ones in the front.So the next time she doesn’t give you what you want, just hold on to a few and give a good yank. It’s sure to bring her down to her knees.

SS : Gosh!! I didn’t know that. you’re so clever Sis. Will carry out the technique asap.

(So SS comes toddling to his mamma…all smiles and grins and aims for the cellphone in her hand. Mamma, picks up her little baby and coos over him, all the while keeping the cell away from his reach. Little SS happily holds on to his mamma’s hair and gives a good yank. Mamma  yelps with pain and lets go of SS, nursing the scalp which  was missing a few good hair. Meanwhile, SS grabs the cellphone and ambles back to his sister.)

SS : (nibbling on the phone) You know sis, your trick worked like a charm. She was down on her knees in seconds.

RS : (Blowing invisible nail-polish on her nails) I know. Been there. Done that. And you know what works quicker??

SS : (eagerly) Nopes. Tell me!!

RS: Instead of a whole bunch, try and target just a couple of hair at a time. They come off sooner….and hurt more. (evil laughter )Muuaahhhaaaahhaaaa

SS :  (joining in) Muuaahhhaaaahhaaaa

=====================================

Note : The above conversation is not entirely fictional.

RS has been pulling my hair since I can remember…..its only lately that SS has started doing the same.

Its not a coincidence……its a conspiracy.

And I’m the victim….sob

Un film di Michael Haneke. Con Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Burghart Klaußner.
Titolo originale: Das Weiße Band. Drammatico, durata 144 min. Austria, Francia, Germania 2009. Lucky Red, uscita venerdì 30 ottobre 2009.

Germania, 1912. L’apparente tranquillità di un villaggio protestante viene messa a repentaglio dal susseguirsi di incidenti spiacevoli e misteriosi. Prima, una fune trasparente tesa a mezz’aria provoca la caduta da cavallo del dottore del villaggio, che si infortuna gravemente e viene trasportato all’ospedale. Poi, la morte accidentale della moglie di un contadino al servizio del barone locale provoca forti dissidi fra i braccianti e il loro datore di lavoro. Ma questi due episodi saranno solo i primi di una lunga serie di misteriosi eventi che sconvolgeranno la piccola comunità. La già di per sé delicata situazione non viene agevolata dalla mentalità chiusa, dalla grettezza e dalla crudeltà che dimostrano gli abitanti del villaggio, soprattutto quando si tratta di educare i propri figli, che spesso subiscono punizioni corporali severissime e crescono in un clima di tensione repressa.

Il nastro bianco che viene legato sul braccio dei bambini è il simbolo dell’innocenza. Viene applicato quando il bimbo dimostra immaturità, viene tolto quando invece raggiunge un adeguato livello di maturità. Questo è il significato che gli adulti del villaggio danno a tale simbolo. Ma il nastro bianco è ben più di questo, in realtà: esso rappresenta il microcosmo stesso del villaggio, con tutta la sua crudeltà, la sua meschinità, la sua rabbia nascosta. Gli adulti lo legano alle braccia dei figli solo dopo averli picchiati selvaggiamente e quindi il nastro è il simbolo dello sfogo, dell’oppressione e del terrorismo che il genitore-mostro esercita sul figlio. E il figlio cova, fa crescere dentro di sé il rancore e la rabbia repressa, non si ribella apertamente, anche perché non potrebbe, a questo mondo così apparentemente perfetto. Ma l’apparenza inganna e il bambino in qualche modo dovrà far “esplodere” la sua rabbia, dovrà sfogarsi, proprio come il genitore che sfoga su di lui la sua mostruosità. Diventerà, anche lui, un piccolo mostro.

Il regista Michael Haneke (Il Tempo dei Lupi, Funny Games) torna dietro alla cinepresa con l’obiettivo di dimostrare una tesi ben precisa: non è infatti la semplice storia che interessa al regista, lo spettatore non deve concepire il film come un giallo, trascorrendo le due ore e mezza della visione a chiedersi chi sia il colpevole. No, ad Haneke interessa il messaggio che si nasconde dietro ai fatti rappresentati; vuole dimostrare che l’educazione, che la famiglia in primis, ma anche la scuola e la comunità riservano al bambino, è di estrema importanza perché è in grado di cambiare in positivo o in negativo il suo carattere e di determinare le sue azioni future. Tale messaggio potrebbe sembrare scontato, ma non lo è se, dietro le righe dell’educazione riservata dagli adulti della comunità protestante ai bambini, leggiamo uno dei motivi che hanno scatenato il nazismo nella società tedesca di vent’anni dopo.

Le premesse son buone, il film è ancora migliore: realizzata in un bianco e nero splendido, l’opera del regista austriaco è di una freddezza disarmante, è distaccata e angosciosamente cupa. La stessa fotografia in bianco e nero, unitamente a una telecamera che spesso e volentieri rimane fissa sulla scena per diversi minuti (questa è una delle cifre stilistiche di Haneke), conferisce allo spettatore non sentimenti passionali, non pathos, ma un senso di angoscia e di sbigottimento per ciò che vede. Il bianco e nero “dissangua” il film del suo colore, toglie la vita alla rappresentazione di un luogo che di vitale ha ben poco.

I lunghi silenzi sono, per usare un ossimoro, ancor più rumorosi delle parole. Certo, i dialoghi sono accuratissimi, ma lo scricchiolio di una porta che si chiude, o il vento che fa muovere le spighe di grano o le fronde degli alberi, si rivelano molto più oppressivi e angoscianti per lo spettatore. Tutto, del resto, lo è. Anche la musica è totalmente assente e il motivo, a questo punto, è chiaro e preciso: la musica suscita emozioni spesso forti, suscita passioni e sentimenti calorosi, ma, come detto, non è questo lo scopo di Haneke.
Dirigere un film nel quale non c’è musica, dai titoli di apertura a quelli di coda, genera l’effetto contrario, genera freddo, genera distacco e assenza di emozioni. Esattamente le sensazioni provate dai piccoli figli degli abitanti del villaggio. Oltre alla storia, alla regia, alla fotografia e alla sceneggiatura già citate, è questo forse il grande merito del film di Haneke, che gli è valso una (meritatissima) Palma d’Oro al Festival di Cannes, ovvero quello di generare nello spettatore le stesse sensazioni che provano i piccoli protagonisti nel film. Non c’è modo migliore per convincere qualcuno di qualcosa, che fargliela provare sulla pelle, per due ore e mezza.
Poi, lo spettatore esce dalla sala e si scrolla di dosso la tensione accumulata. I bambini invece restano imprigionati in questo mondo chiuso e senza via di uscita, continuano il loro processo di disumanizzazione. E a noi non resta che immaginarceli vestiti da SS vent’anni dopo.

Voto 9

David Parasporo

START HERE:

Dear Stock Photography Professionals, Amateur Photographers, Illustrators and Graphic Designers

“Success” is relative …

It was just over two years ago I started to research how to sell my photography when I caught “The Bug” to start selling my images online. In September of 2007 I decided to dedicate two years to explore the possibilities of the incredible world of stock photography. I felt that two years would be enough time to give me a chance to sink my teeth into training myself from any and all sources and to get up to speed, starting basically from scratch, on this rapidly expanding and growing industry. At the time I had never even picked up a photography book or taken a photoshop tutorial. It is now two years later, and while I feel I have come very far and achieved many successes, I find that there is always more to learn. I absolutely love this work !

In July of 2007 I relocated to Washington State after accepting a transfer to work at The Boeing Company’s Commercial Airplane Headquarters in Renton, Washington just outside of Seattle, Washington. Analyzing Market Research was my specialty. Driving out to Washington from Colorado during the course of my relocation I captured a few thousands pictures on a Canon SD750 camera. At that time I was interested in seeing if I could market my images by selling prints of them at festivals, art shows and galleries. It was during this period of research that I discovered the world of commercial stock photography.

My first site that I was approved as a contributor at was BigStockPhoto in September of 2007. For that reason alone I will always have a special place in my heart for them. I found that their entry criteria was not as strict as some of the larger sites. The same applies for 123rf so these are both excellent places to get your first exposure to in selling your photography online. That being said you will want to get into Shutterstock and iStockPhoto as soon as possible. This took me many months to achieve as I was starting from nearly complete scratch with the exception of strong information technology background.  FYI: Recently BigStockPhoto was acquired by the subscription based microstock giant Shutterstock .

Stock Photography Sites are often referred to by short abbreviations. It was more than a little confusing to myself when I first started researching microstock on the various forums so I will list a few abbreviations that you may find useful to know your first time encountering them:

• SS = Shutterstock
• IS = iStockPhoto
• DT = Dreamstime
• FT = Fotolia
• BSP = BigStockPhoto
• MP = MostPhotos
• BME = Best Month Ever
• WME = Worst Month Ever
• BDE = Best Day Ever
• MSG = Microstock Group
• EL = Extended License
• RF = Royalty Free
• Glass = Camera Lens for a DSLR Camera ex. Canon 55-250 IS
• IS = Image Stabilization

My first sale came from the second site that I was approved at as a contributor which was Dreamstime. I initially sought out DT during a time when BigStockPhoto was halting uploading over the weekends. This is just one small example of the kind of roadblocks one faces when it comes to trying to build up an approved portfolio at a microstock agency.

At its most basic level, getting started in microstock photography takes just a few basic steps …

• Check-out the various stock photography links on this blog
• Browse the microstock sites and become familiar and get a feel for the photography on them
• Prepare 3-10 of your best images in accordance to the respective standards of the site you wish to join
• Submit your applications to become a contributor (a.k.a photographer) and get approved to contribute
• Shoot Pictures. Post Process Images in Photoshop. Upload Photos to all sites for review. Repeat.
• Collect the revenue from sales made each month across all sites over the years for the life of the image. Large subscription based sites such as Shutterstock will ultimately produce daily sales for you after your portfolio of approved images grows to a modest size of a few hundred images however credit based sale sites such as iStockPhoto will yield higher commissions at a much slower rate. There is constant debate over which is best. Most stock photographers submit all of their work to each of the most profitable microstock sites.
• Receive your payout after reaching a threshold for each respective site. (ex. $50, $75, $100)

I believe a quick recap of where my interest in photography as a child came from will prove insightful to some readers …

Photography had been an interest of mine since I first began taking snapshot photos with “hand me down” cameras from my parents I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was probably around 1979-1981 ish when I first started using 110 film cameras that I usually borrowed from my mother. The first camera that I actually owned was a Polaroid One Step instant camera. I remember having to pay for my own film. Early on I mowed lawns and later on I worked for the family gas station starting at the age of 10 working for $2.00 / hour. At the very least I know I was responsible for paying for the cartridges of film which were very expensive for around ten photos if I remember correctly. This limited my ability to take pictures as I was saving up to pay my way for a $750.00 30-Day bus tour trip across the country with the Boy Scouts to the National Jamboree in Virginia in 1981. Since the film for my instant camera was so expensive my mother allowed me to borrow her Sony Disc Camera. I took both cameras on my 30-day bus tour “Reunion with History” to the Jamboree. The Statue of Liberty was getting a makeover during our tour but it was still amazing and one of my favorite subjects. However, when I went to the top of the “Twin Towers” World Trade Center, that was my favorite scene. The bridges and skyscrapers of New York City fostered my love for architecture and structures which I later studied at length. I plan to dig up a couple of those first photos of mine from that trip, scan them, and post them here as a point-of-reference …

TIMELINE FOR KEY EVENTS THAT HAD AN IMPACT ON MY STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY:

1981 “Reunion With History” 30-Day Bus Tour of various historical sites of United States with Boy Scouts. Kodak Disc Camera borrowed from parents when I was 12 years old.

1985 Exposure to Mac Paint Graphic Programs on first Macintosh which parents bought 1986 Drafting  1,2,3 Architecture & Architecture Classes 1987-1991 Travel the world while serving in the United States Navy taking photos every step of the way. 1991 Leave the Navy to study Architecture at the University of Arizona. Learn AUTOCAD. 1999 First Photoshop and Image Ready exposure working with web design. 2000 Graduate University of Phoenix Bachelor of Science in Business  Major: Information Systems

2005 May Bought Digital Camera: Canon SD750

2007 July: Relocate to Washington State road trip from Colorado. Research Selling Prints / Selling digital files online.  Research Selling digital negative files

2007 September: Accepted into BSP

2007 October: Accepted into DT / Forum participation

2007 November: Thanksgiving Day 2007 was my 1st Microstock Sale at DT Accepted into Fotolia . BME across all sites. Joined Microstock Group Forum (MSG). 1st SS Application Rejected. Read Photography & Photoshop Books. Study free tutorials from The MIZ and many others.

2007 December: Join Featurepics. Make plans to buy my first DSLR camera by April or May 2008. New BME across all sites. Bus Travel  from Seattle Washington to Denver capturing many photos on this journey. Caught severe flu and ear infections after many winter weather related travel delays.  That took me out of action for most of January and the first part of February …

Illness contracted from December / January travel …

2008 January: New BME across all sites. Stock sales happen even when your down and out sick …

2008 February: Joined MostPhotos . Joined Zymmetrical.  BME’s at DT, BSP, SXP, Met stock photographer suwanneeredhead (Stacey Lynn Brown) through interactions as two of the first few Americans on MP . New BME across all sites.

2008 March: set-up first home studio. Continue to improve work for next SS and IS applications as these are the two largest revenue producing sites for a microstock photographer.  BMEs at DT, FT, 123RF, MP . New BME across all sites. 5th BME in a row.

Got my first DSLR …

2008 April: Buy first DSLR:  a used Canon Rebel XTI a.k.a 400D continue to shoot and begin working with fractals for part of my SS applications.  Not a BME … streak broken …

2008 May: Accepted into Shutterstock the last week of the month after to many applications to count.

2008 May: BME at DT.

2008 June: BME’s at SS, BSP, 123RF, MP. First Full month of Revenue from SS. New BME across all sites.

2008 July: BME’s at DT, BSP, FP, FT. WME at 123RF. Begin using Cushy Stock management software

2008 Sep:  September 25th propose marriage to suwanneereadhead (Stacey Lynn Brown)

2008 Oct:  Mark Payne (mwp1969) & Stacey Lynn Brown (suwanneeredhead) married in Seattle, Washington. First Extended License Sale on SS …  it must have been a belated wedding gift

2008 Dec:  Canon 55-250 IS lens received as Christmas gift from my beloved wife

2009 April: Accepted into iStockPhoto

2009 May: Upgrade to DSLR Canon Rebel XSI a.k.a Canon 450D

2009 June: Began doubling and tripling my upload efforts to all of the sites that I was behind on …

2009 October: BME for number of sales at DT. Close to BME at SS & IS

2009 Nov: Achieve next level raise at SS . BMEs at both SS & IS. Roll-out initial microstock related blog.

I am always happy to help a newbie try to break into stock photography by submitting their work for sale online.  This is a painstaking task if you try to do it all on your own. I offer my own  trials and tribulations to you so that you might be able to avoid some of  them yourself along your way. Thank you in advance for checking out my image and design portfolios.

If your interested in submitting your own images and want to try and get started right away  you can do so through the links I have provided below.  These links will help you get started with some of the most favorable and profitable microstock photography sites. The commissions from the sale of your own images will pay you again and again for the rest of the life of the image so delaying your decision to start by a day only delays you getting paid by a day down the road.

Best of Luck !

My Referral Links to Top Producing Microstock Photography Websites:

http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery.mhtml?id=144463

http://www.dreamstime.com/Mwp1969_info

http://www.istockphoto.com/mwp1969

http://www.123rf.com/profile_markpayne

http://us.fotolia.com/partner/200479231

http://www.bigstockphoto.com/?refid=HW16kzhvJX

Midstock Photography Sites:

http://www.mostphotos.com/mwp1969

Our Website:

www.PayneImages.com

]]> http://antissmannekiini.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/jussi-halla-aho-neekereista-ranskassa/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:41:25 +0000 antissmannekiini http://antissmannekiini.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/jussi-halla-aho-neekereista-ranskassa/

2. heinäkuuta 2006 17:15:43

Ymmärrän kyllä niitä ihmisiä, jotka eivät halua lukea juttujani, mutta minun on vaikea ymmärtää sitä lukuisaa joukkoa, joka ei lue mutta silti kommentoi. Ongelma on mielestäni edustavuus. Joukkue ei etnisesti edusta sitä, mitä Ranska on tänä päivänä, hyväksyttiin neekeri ranskalaiseksi tai ei.

Lisäksi mielestäni on ihan aiheellista kysyä, onko neekeri samassa mielessä ranskalainen kuin Jean-Pierre, jos neekeri on tullut paikalle 30 vuotta sitten, ja jos hänen ainoa reaalinen roolinsa yhteiskunnassa (gettoriehunnan lisäksi) on urheilla Ranskan hyväksi.

Presently being 19, it’s hard for a guy like me to admit that I’ve grown to like High School Musical. Because guys like me aren’t supposed to like kiddie movies lest being labelled sissy. Haha.

***

It’s hard to believe
That I couldn’t see
You were always right beside me

Thought I was alone
With no one to hold
But you were always right beside me

This feeling’s like no other
I want you to know

I’ve never had someone
Who knows me like you do
The way you do
I’ve never had someone
As good for me as you
No one but you
So lonely before, I’ve finally found
What I’ve been looking for

So good to seen
So good to be heard
Don’t have to say a word
So long I was lost
I’m finally found
I love having you around

“I’ve Never Had Someone” from High School Musical

***

Oh I love this song.