I was born in Regensburg and grew up and went to school there. I spent the first 18 years of my life walking the cobblestones of the city’s ancient alleys. I just visited there again this past May, and stood on the old stone bridge, looking down on the Danube. I thank the author of this post for the beautiful postcard.
“Clinton is the only democrat who could lose.”
Now the fear is that she wins the nomination, and then loses to a bigot like Trump, who spreads hate, singles out specific religions as villainous, makes vapid statements about questionable realities, and acts like he is going to be elected king. As they said during the second Republican debate a few nights ago: These are dangerous times we live in.
What is there to do on a cold and drizzly night in Bozeman, Montana? Go to a Pecha Kucha Night!
Pecha Kucha is a unique presentation format. 20 slides, each slide is on the screen for 20 seconds. That’s 400 seconds. The presenters pick any subject they are passionate about. It’s not like a speech at Toastmasters, because the audience does not really look at the presenter, but rather the slides. So the presenter can read off a script. There is no need to memorize. The subject can be anything at all. Several examples of the Bozeman Pecha Kucha were:
Those were just three of the 10 subjects. I was very impressed with the quality of the presentations. I will seek out Pecha Kucha events again back home in San Diego.
How did this get started, and what does Pecha Kucha mean?
First, the name is not pronounced as you have been pronouncing it reading it here. I tried to record a WAV file and upload it, but WordPress does not allow it. So I can’t “play” it for you. The words are Japanese, and the first syllable of each is suppressed. So try this:
p’CHAk’CHA
So the “p” and the “k” are just hinted, the “e” and the “u” are swallowed completely, and the accent is on CHA each time. If you want to hear it from native Japanese speakers, go to this link and click the arrows.
The words stand for “noisy room of people talking” and it’s an onomatopoeia for loud chitchat. The word pecha is an Japanese onomatopoeia for the splashing of water against a wall, and kucha is an onomatopoeia for crunching of paper.
In case you want to know: an onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like a sound. One of the most famous English onomatopoeia is “cockadoodledoo.” Another more common one is “hiss.”
Pecha Kucha started in Tokyo in 2003 as a one-time event, but quickly caught on and is now practiced all over the world. Just google Pecha Kucha in your community and you’ll find local events.
I urge you to go to one to find out for yourself.
The south-east corner of Montana is closer to Texas than to the north-west corner of Montana. I know you’re all going to run and check your maps now.
That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it.
— Astrophysicist Neal deGrasse-Tyson
The “Koch Brothers” have been a household name in American politics over the past twenty years; since Obama, however, they have been vaulted into the spotlight. They are either revered or loathed, depending on the point of view. Sons of Wichita digs deep into the Koch family history and background, and leads us all the way to the present time. Their story starts in the earlier part of the 20th century, when Fred Koch, a young and ambitious engineer starts building a business in Wichita, Kansas.
The sad fact is that once people begin to get something for nothing then they want more and more at the same price. It destroys their independence, their self-reliance, and transforms them into dependent animal creatures without their knowing it. The end result is the human race as portrayed by Orwell— a human face ground into the earth by
— Fred Koch
Fred had four sons, not just two, as we commonly think of the “Two Koch Brothers”, David and Charles. There are also Frederick, who is the oldest, and Bill, David’s twin, who are known a “the Other Koch Brothers” in their own right and with their own legacies.
Some one-star reviewers on Amazon complain about how this is not a business book but a “soap opera” of American politics. I don’t agree at all. The author didn’t try to write a business book. It’s a biography of a remarkable family. Whether you like or dislike their politics, their characters or their deeds does not really matter. He tells the story like it was and is, and readers can make up their own minds and form their own opinions.
Fred Koch created a company out of nothing during a difficult time in America. The depression, the second World War and finally the post-war years. To make it possible, he was engaged in decades of stressful legal battles. Nevertheless, he built a company that was doing some $70 million dollars in business a year when he handed the reigns to his second-oldest son Charles, then a man in his early thirties. Charles turned that 70 million dollar business into a 90 billion dollar business, more than a thousand times as big.
Charles possessed an uncanny ability to sniff out profitable ventures, and when he occasionally mired the company in money-losing deals, he quickly cut his losses. The results of his leadership spoke for themselves. Between 1960 and 2006, the company’s revenues increased from $ 70 million to $ 90 billion. During that timeframe, an original investment of $ 1,000 in Koch Industries would have swelled to $ 2 million, a rate of growth that outperformed the S& P 500 by a factor of 16. This was not just dumb luck. Charles had a formula.
— (p. 243)
After reading the book, I have come away with several main thoughts myself:
While the book is not an easy read, I found it a page-turner nonetheless. It provides a fascinating view into one of America’s richest and enigmatic families.
Here is a partial view of a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. Everyone of these tents and shacks is packed with innocent families, their children, their babies and a few possessions they could carry. Every one of these people were driven from their homes. They left their possessions, their heritage, the places where their parents and grandparents lived, their familiar surroundings. They did this because it was too dangerous to stay, or impossible to live there anymore, or because their homes were destroyed.
This is civil war. Assad claims his people love him and want him to stay in power and live in opulence in his palace. The dissidents want freedom from Assad’s tyranny. Then the criminals who claim to be religious (ISIS) took advantage of the disaster for their own enrichment and good. This is what happens when a country comes apart at the seams.
Tell that to the father in one of these tents who is trying to keep his children fed, alive, warm and protected.
Go tell him!
This is a really cool gate. I want one.
In the first half of the last century, Germany has done its share of creating misery, death and destruction in the world to last for centuries to come. Perhaps the country and its people have learned a lesson?
This is evidenced by the welcome given to a train of refugees in Frankfurt, Germany, a few days ago:
I wonder what Trump and his followers have to say about this?
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a Koch-backed conservative group that drafts bills, many of which are designed to repeal and weaken renewable energy laws and standards state-by-state. Republican politicians, who are funded by the Kochs, push these laws in their respective state legislatures.
The Koch brothers built the world’s largest fortune based on oil, coal and the distribution, transportation, processing and sale of those commodities. In the last 30 years, Koch Industries expanded into many other areas, buying up hundreds of large and small failing companies and turning them around. One of the largest acquisitions was Georgia Pacific, that makes products like paper towels and such.
The Kochs have an uncanny formula for making companies work. Much of their business philosophy is based on libertarian principles, teachings and values. No government. Since the libertarian movement in this country had its peak around 1980 and have never flourished since, the Kochs have backed the Republican Party and its candidates as the closest fit.
The less government, the better. No government would be best. Let the free market take care of things. Supply and demand should be the only guiding principles.
With renewable energies, versus fossil fuels, the supply and demand principles didn’t work so well over the last 40 years. There were many government subsidies for oil, coal and gas, and Koch Industries has benefited from those. It stands to reason that they will try to squash efforts by the government against support of renewable energies.
When you start seeing massive lobbying efforts backed by fossil fuel interests, or conservative think tanks, or the Koch brothers pushing for new laws to roll back renewable energy standards or prevent new clean energy businesses from succeeding – that’s a problem. That’s not the American way. That’s not progress. That’s not innovation. That’s rent-seeking and trying to protect old ways of doing business and standing in the way of the future.
— President Obama
Fortunately, the tide has turned, and there are more and more people in the country who are genuinely interested in renewable energies. There are still forces that try to squash renewables, calling them job-killers, but they are consistently proven wrong. Here are some facts:
Koch Industries knows how to make money and they are not shy about pushing their agenda. We need to take them very seriously. They are one of the most powerful forces in our government today.
But I do believe the tide has turned. Now how long will it take China to figure this out?
Bernie Sanders has jumped out to a nine-point lead over front-runner Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, and he’s gained ground on her among Iowa voters in the Democratic presidential race, according to a pair of brand-new NBC News/Marist polls.
In New Hampshire, the Vermont senator gets the support of 41 percent of Democratic voters, Clinton gets 32 percent and Vice President Joe Biden gets 16 percent. No other Democratic candidate receives more than 1 percent.
The way things are going right now, we’ll have to choose between a plutocrat and a socialist for the next president. Where is the middle of the road?
We have 318.9 million people in the United States, and these two are our choices?
Whatever we do, the country is doomed. This is not good, this is not good at all.
“Man, you have to build a wall! Aren’t you a nation of laws? You have to keep out the illegal and the criminals! Yeah, some of them are good people. I love them, and they love me.”
If Trump were king, that’s what he would do. But Salman already is king. So that’s what he does.
Many years ago I read the book A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. It’s one of those books that you can randomly open up at any page, point to any paragraph and start reading, and within a few seconds you crack up and often laugh out loud. It’s one of the funniest books ever.
The movie is about Bryson (Robert Redford), a writer who decides to hike the Appalachian Trail (the AT), and can’t find anybody to hike with him, except his cantankerous, out of shape friend Katz (Nick Nolte). So they go off and hike into the woods, where they encounter odd characters, rain, snow, endless woods, priceless vistas and the bottoms of their souls. There is something in hiking that opens up a man. Bryson and Katz are going through some good male bonding out in the elements.
The movie A Walk in the Woods is nothing like the book. The funny scenes are a bit predictable and slapsticky. And the story, while cute, doesn’t much follow the book at all, other than both are about hiking. In the end, that’s what it’s all about, and I would not be surprised if the southern terminus of the AT were not swamped next spring with lots of Bryson and Katz pairs, at least for the first few days.
Two stars for the movie, and half a star because it’s about hiking. Hey, I can do that!
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art there are only a handful of van Gogh paintings. The most prominent one is one of his sunflowers. Mother Roulin and her Baby is another, less famous one.
Van Gogh painted a lot of pictures of Mother Roulin, either by herself, or with her baby. There are also several paintings of just the baby, as well as a few charcoal or pencil sketches.
I took this picture at the museum off the original with my iPhone. It brings out the colors well.
The colors are truly van Gogh, and so are the brushstrokes and the free style. Circling the outlines of figures with cobalt blue is a common van Gogh technique.
But really, look at the lack of finish work of the hands, the mother’s face and, most importantly, the face of the baby, which looks like a panda.
If one of my paintings ended up like that, I’d wipe that face and start over again, and over again, until it looked like a baby’s face. Madame Roulin was probably not very happy with this and probably didn’t hang the painting up, unless Vincent was in the house. “Wow, your baby is ugly,” visitors would have said.
But who am I? Just a guy who has done a hundred paintings in his life and painted over another 500 because they didn’t turn out, sort of like van Gogh’s Roulin painting.
But he died and then became Vincent van Gogh. And that makes Mother Roulin and her Baby special, world famous and very valuable.
Kim Davis, the Kentucky Clerk who has refused marriage licenses to gay couples, because she believes in literal interpretation of the bible, received a lot of media attention in the last few days. She was arrested and jailed today for contempt of court.
She appears to be very interested and concerned with what other people do in their own bedrooms and how they conduct their own lives. But then, I wonder how she reconciles her own activities. She’s been married four times. She also had two children out of wedlock by her third husband. I’d say it’s complicated:
According to the AP, Davis married a man named Dwain Wallace when she was 18 and divorced him in 1994. She married Joe Davis two years later and they divorced after 10 years. When she was 40 years old, she married Thomas McIntyre in a marriage that lasted less than a year. The twins were fathered by her third husband and later adopted by Joe, who she remarried in 2009.
Apparently she likes marriage, because she does it often.
I wonder what she would say if some other religious clerk denied her the license to marry after she has already been married once, since the scripture says:
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.
— Matthew 9:19
Maybe her first husband was sexually immoral, and her second one too, and then her third one. But no, that can’t be, because she married her second husband again after her third. Honest, I couldn’t find a bible verse for this situation, so it must be ok.
I decided I am going to start a religion. My religion will only have one rule, and that rule must always be stated on a napkin. If anyone in my religion breaks that rule, they are condemned to eternal damnation. Here is the rule, properly published on a napkin:
Nobody can touch me. My religion forbids me to pay taxes. It says so right here on this napkin. Why should the government have the right to interfere with my religious convictions?
Oh, yes, in the past, I was a bad boy and I paid taxes. But then I didn’t know what was right from wrong. But now, I have seen the light.
And all of you are sinners!