Bill Moyer sees Vietnam all over Afghanistan

Oh mother, no you didn't.

Disobedience

Hmmm.

Memorial Bridge in Washington D.C. 1930 under construction

from http://www.shorpy.com/node/7034

AFGHANISTAN DILEMMA

This video from BLOGGINGHEADS courtesy of the NY Times addresses a question that I have thought about. I certainly do not have any answers, but I have wished that we would pull out of Afghanistan, and Iraq and come home or put all our efforts to protecting? (if that’s the word) in situations like this. Are we protecting Iraq? It is all confusing to me EXCEPT we still have Americans giving their life’s in yet another, never ending war. I say enough, but then again, what do I know?

This is one of the first videos I have attempted.  It is rough as a cob, but they are my words, I hope you like those.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE VIEWERS GONE? So starts the pi…

So starts the piece. I thought it was just my wife and I who can’t abide the offerings put forward by the television powers that be. I guess not. The people are staying away in droves. I say, GOOD. I’m glad that the numbers are reflecting the publics dissatisfaction with the drivel they’re presenting. That they don’t have a clue what’s wrong is pretty off-putting. I can speak for the older generation, whom they have saddly no interest in, and tell ‘them’ that they might get a little stir if they would spend a little money on good writers to write good STORIES, not about teen-agers, but grown-up people with grown up interests, and grown up problems. When everything about television was new, the network owners hired well known writers to write new stories for television. It worked then, it might work again if they don’t con the writers into writing teen age pap. Well I know they won’t try this so I won’t waste anymore time on it. You deserve your falling ratings. I’ll turn now to the book I was reading, books remember them?

Read the complete article at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_en_tv/tv_missing_viewers_5

EDWARD HOPPER ON SLATE SLATE has an incredibly go…

SLATE has an incredibly good piece on Edward Hopper this morning. It includes a ten painting slide show and great information about the painter at each location. I would like to show it all but I can’t, but you can see it all if you go to: http://www.slate.com/id/2165773/fr/rss/

It was Hopper’s best-known work, Nighthawks—which he began painting a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the blackouts that followed—that made that image a trademark. Hopper was a huge fan of Hemingway’s story “The Killers,” a violent tale built around terse dialogue in a diner, and a similar air of menace hangs over Hopper’s indelible film-noir scenario. Hopper’s wife, Jo, a fellow artist he met in 1923, modeled for the hard-faced woman, as she did for nearly all Hopper’s female subjects. Her fingers almost touch the beak-nosed “hawk” on her right. Hopper was a supreme poet of anticipation. “The street was too empty,” Rilke’s Malte wrote; “its emptiness was bored.” We don’t know what’s going to happen in Hopper’s empty street, but it’s easy to imagine the coiled action hurtling around the corner into the surrounding darkness. Around the time he painted Nighthawks, Hopper copied out a passage from French poet and critic Paul Valéry about the challenge of making “expectation, doubt, and concentration … visible things.”

NURSING HOMES? I just wanted to post this one mor…

I just wanted to post this one more time. Us older folks, just as younger people center our thoughts on issues which do or might happen to us. Well if you read what I am saying below, then carry it on to the next conclusion, it means that 94 percent of us will never set foot in a nursing home, rest home, whatever you want to call it, and I think that is the best way to think about it. Think about it, then forget it, you and I are probably part of the 94 percent.

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As we age, you and I, one of the things uppermost on our minds is the likelihood that we will probably end our days in a nursing home. It’s one of those things we dread, but statistics tell us that only a small percentage of us will have to endure that fate. Here is what I have found out.

There are approximately 18,000 nursing homes in the United States, two-thirds of which are operated for profit, with 55% owned by large nursing home chains. There are about 1.7 million nursing home beds in the United States. This represents less than 6% of the total number of Americans over the age of 65. It suggests that the vast majority of elderly will most likely spend their final years in their community residence.

In 1939, the New Deal created an Alley Dwelling A…

In 1939, the New Deal created an Alley Dwelling Authority and gave it ten years to clear the slums and build public housing to replace them. But in Washington, as elsewhere, the indigent population grew and unemployment increased much faster than the public housing could be built; and so the alley slums remained.

The depression was finally slowing down, but the second world war was just around the corner so these slums remained for many more years.