The Mandelbear's Musings

Two signals to boost tonight:

The first is my sister-of-choice pocketnaomi, who posts Roommate wanted: Shoreline, WA. The room is just as delightful as she describes it.

The second is ysabetwordsmith, whose Poetry Fishbowl is Open on the theme of "influential women."

Cat Faber wrote the song, and Lookingglass Folk sang it at Conflikt. But nobody seems to be doing it -- yet.

pocketnaomi thinks it's time somebody did. I'm boosting the signal. Check it out. Watch for more; we're working on it.

Daily Kos: Where's Your $50,000? From Alan Grayson. Mr. Grayson is a former Congressman from Florida, currently running for his old seat back. I really hope he makes it. We need people who will speak this kind of truth.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks.

Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS.

That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show.

How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to or more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries.

A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice.

That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years.

All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster.

I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib.

Whatever a jib may be.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing more about this. But right now, I wanted to keep this really simple. Just give folks something to talk about when they’re standing next to the coffee maker.

The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it. Think about it. Think about what that means.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

To put it another way, $16 trillion will buy enough gas to drive to Alpha Centauri and back. Twice.

It's Cat Faber's idea:

You remember the Koran burning thing.

Well, I have an idea. What if we start a backfire (metaphorically)? Let's make September 11, 2010 "Stand Up For Religious Tolerance Day"

Everybody post something on religious tolerance.

That way we don't reward Koran burning trolls with attention, BUT we don't stay silent and let it look like we don't mind, or even agree.

If you think it's a good idea, please pass it on!

I do, so I did. See you Saturday.

LiveJournal's new sneaky trick -> LiveJournal's latest misguided attempt to make a quick buck. -> No Opt In, No Ads

What they're doing is redirecting links to outboundlink.me, which adds an affiliate code and sends you back to, e.g. Amazon with the affiliate bucks going to LJ. Sleazy, and both a privacy and a security risk. Not to mention a violation of my copyright.

... So I now have, after much delay, an account on Dreamwidth (mdlbear, of course), though I haven't made use of it yet. I'm not going to abandon LJ -- most of my friends are still here, and I have a permanent account. And I'm not going to move my primary blog to DW; eventually they'll both be cross-posted to from someplace completely under my control, probably under steve.savitzky.net.

Sign the PublicACTA Wellington Declaration! - Boing Boing

The PublicACTA activists have been meeting in Wellington, New Zealand -- site of the next round of negotiations on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- drafting a declaration on how the next global copyright treaty should read, and how it should be negotiated.

The "Wellington Declaration" says that the world copyright treaties shouldn't be conducted behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms, but rather in the full light of public participation at the United Nations, where copyright treaties are customarily made. The UN admits non-governmental organizations, journalists, and representatives from poor countries, while ACTA is only open to rich countries and lobbyists from powerful corporations.

Yes, I've signed it.

"Obama is not a brown-skinned, anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus." - John Fugelsang

(from mia_mcdavid: Quote of the day)

A couple of days ago I posted a link to ysabetwordsmith's post on Loneliness and Fraying Social Fabric.

She has since followed it up with Fighting Loneliness, Part 2: Very Basic Steps and Fighting Loneliness, Part 3: Friendship Tips for Introverts. Wow! I'm finding these incredibly useful.

It's hard for an introvert like me to learn how to function around people, especially when they were raised by introverts like my parents (Dad was, certainly. I'm not sure about Mom). And especially when they're shy and have learned to avoid people. All of the role models the media present us with are extroverts. At least all of the really conspicuous ones. Because, well... extroverts.

It occurs to me that if social interaction is anything like a language (either programming or human), the only way to learn it is to get a lot of practice. Programming languages are easy for me -- computers are patient, and I can practice programming any time I like. They're not likely to get upset at me when I make stupid mistakes, and I'm not likely to get upset at myself. And there are lots of useful manuals to read, to help learn computer languages.

There's a lot to read about interacting with people, too, but it's difficult for a novice to tell what's useful. And of course most of it is written by and for extroverts.

More on that later, perhaps; it needs a longer post, and it's getting late.

Not a bad day. A little odd in places. I'm still having muscle aches in my legs when I walk; I'm assuming this is mostly due to being out of shape.

Went to what was supposed to have been a meeting of some people from Kaiser's caregiver support group (on hold because the person running it retired last month). It's possible that I simply wasn't persistent enough about figuring out why nobody else was there. Plus I kept getting lost/making wrong turns on the way back to work. The whole experience was overlaid with a distinct feeling of being totally out of place. Somewhere out of my comfort zone, apparently.

On the plus side, I sent $5 to pocketnaomi for the next installment of the crowdfunded story she just started. Check it out -- it promises to be a lot of fun.

Some good links. Some weird trivia posted by dejla. The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009 (from wcg). MakeHuman, a GPL program similar to Poser; see the wikipedia article for links to some others.

Loneliness is Contagious/Causes Isolation (from haikujaguar) -- the general idea is that when you drive people away with your loneliness, they become that much more likely to become lonely themselves. No hint of what to do about it, of course.

I've already signal-boosted a couple of posts on grieving.

ETA: And I sold a CD on CDBaby!! Thanks, whoever it was!

dsmoen has made a good post on grieving -- some people reading this may find it helpful.

My friend pocketnaomi had a dream of a friendly society (read mutual-aid society, co-op, mutual benefit society) -- households banding together to help one another out in the current unfriendly times.

Here's her original post, where she says:

I want to see what we can do with this. The filk community is the group I know, the people who already have a predisposition to help each other when someone truly needs it, to regard themselves as family, and to see with a bit longer an eye than most of modern economics. It also covers a wide cross-section of economic, geographical, and occupational ground.

The resulting community here on LJ is called filk_friendly. See you there, maybe?