Thunder Echo Blog

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

When you come full circle

Click on the photos to read them full sized.

When you come full circle, it makes a ring.

This guy's web comic, The DM of The Rings, is really funny.

Well, funny if you love Lord of the Rings and D&D.

OK, its funny if you are a complete geeky dork like me.

Check it out: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612

Monday, June 29, 2009

Signs and Portents...

What does that say? Balrog Trucking? No fishing from Bridge of Khazad-dum?
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"From out of the shadow a red sword leapt flaming."
You really ought to keep better control of your sword near shadow-filled bottomless pits...

Friday, June 26, 2009

Where do all the played songs go?
Lost in the stacks
Folding chairs
Chalk dust erasers
Wish I could see you through
Bible Black
Where do all the said prayers go?
There once was a spark
Smothered is sack cloth
Drowned in sacrament
Wish I could see that light
Instead of
Bible Black
Where do all the old secrets go?
Leather covers crack
Left on walls while
We played in parking lots
Blacktop laughter
Weeds that refuse to die
Refuse to be lost in
Bible Black

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Credits:

Poem and Collage by Jay Larsen

It wasn't until after I wrote this that Google informed me that Bible Black is a sleezy anime/video game, a bad heavy metal song, and a band from the 80s. I didn't know.

Phantom Pains Long After the Amputation

America hates explanations that take longer than 30 seconds. Or at least our current Corporate Media and our current Politicians hide behind the excuse that Americans can’t sit through explanations that take longer than 30 seconds. So the majority of what we are offered in the media and in politics are sound-bite and bumper-sticker worthy slogans that are easily consumed, like junk food, even if the long term effects are chronic life-threatening problems. Arrgh!!!

Yet we keep wanting to believe that we are informed citizens in a healthy democracy, because, as Matt Taibbi puts it, “like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.” Matt’s latest article “The Great American Bubble Machine” in the new Rolling Stone should be required reading for all citizens. He lays out an incredible outline of all the Wall Street bubbles and crashes of the last hundred years and the common elements in all of those catastrophes: Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately, Matt’s explanations take longer than 30 seconds to recount. So I won’t rehash them all here, and I am sure most Americans won’t read the whole 12 page article. But you should.

Investment Trusts, Tech Stocks, IPOs, Mortgage based Securities, Credit Default Swaps, Commodities Futures, TARP are all bubbles that have been created and inflated by Goldman Sachs while luring dollars into the system from ordinary people, siphoning off billions of dollars, and then running for cover before the bubbles burst, and then putting the cost of the clean up on the taxpayer.. And next, Goldman Sachs wants to do the same to Carbon Credits. It is astounding the list of current and ex Goldman employees who “run” the agencies that set policy for these issues and the list of politicians they contribute to, including President Obama whose cabinet is loaded with these guys.

Read the Rolling Stone Article. http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html Matt has put together a compelling narrative. I have always found his research to be compelling and he is seldom off base.

I’m getting a little bit tired of being told I live in the greatest democracy on earth and yet finding out that the facts don’t match the advertising. I’m sick of being a democratic amputee with phantom pains of accountability and participation. We are human beings after all. Our ancestors built the pyramids, went to the moon, discovered music and dance. We invented the concept of civilization. And I for one think it is time to do some hardcore triage and identify the diseases that have infected our institutions our bodies and our psyches and then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Let’s cut the crap. Fool me once Goldman Sachs, shame on you. Fool me twice, no eight, no ten times, shame on me. Fraud is not a good business model. Debt is not a good investment. Rebranding does not change the product. And real commodities and real people are not there for your gambling pleasure. I don’t think you ought to be able to buy and sell a barrel of oil an average of 27 times (driving the price up each time) before I am allowed to purchase my gas. And you should definitely not be allowed to do that with our food supplies. Nor should you be allowed to run the government agencies that are supposed to keep you honest. This Goldman Sachs Mafia needs to get dragged into the light, that place where vampires never like to be.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

3 Cheers for Music!!!

Let's hear it for 35,000 years plus of humans making music.

Probably music is our most redeeming quality.

"A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.
A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.
Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old.

...

Conard's team excavated the flute in September 2008, the same month they recovered six ivory fragments from the Hohle Fels cave that form a female figurine they believe is the oldest known sculpture of the human form.
Together, the flute and the figure _ found in the same layer of sediment _ suggest that modern humans had established an advanced culture in Europe 35,000 years ago, said Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who didn't participate in Conard's study.
Roebroeks said it's difficult to say how cognitively and socially advanced these people were. But the physical trappings of their lives _ including musical instruments, personal decorations and figurative art _ match the objects we associate with modern human behavior, Roebroeks said.
"It shows that from the moment that modern humans enter Europe ... it is as modern in terms of material culture as it can get," Roebroeks told The AP. He agreed with Conard's assertion that the flute appears to be the earliest known musical instrument in the world."

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