Acceptance

You are in the process of changing your thinking, and are waiting for the right moment to make a decision.

On a spiritual level, the acceptance of the fact that our ego is helpless, leads to inner liberation from its boundaries.
Remember that when the Soul is free, what we perceived before as obstacles, becomes a source of wisdom.

Thanks Stu, Hope You Find Me A Job

"I'll GIF you Poetry : Back on October 7th Frank Paynter took a liking to my photo of a 45-year old Ace Triton entitled Naked English Lady and blogged

Stu Savory triumphs with this poetic offering...

Tennis pros throwing matches in response to online gambling?

Panel Eyes Homeland Spy Service

China Sends Man Into Orbit, Entering U.S.-Russian Club

By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 15, 2003

BEIJING, Wednesday, Oct. 15 — The Chinese spacecraft Shenzhou 5 blasted off from the Gobi Desert on Wednesday carrying a single astronaut. The launching left government leaders jubilant yet also anxiously awaiting his safe return so China can stake its claim as one of the world's elite space-faring nations.

The launching took place about 9 a.m., according to the state-run television network, CCTV. At about 9:30, the network showed a videotape of the rocket soaring to the heavens.

The Shenzhou 5, or Divine Vessel, is expected to orbit Earth 14 times before returning after a voyage of roughly 21 hours.
[more]

Three Days of the Hammer

Published: October 14, 2003
Say this for Tom DeLay, the House Republican majority leader: he does not operate by stealth in epitomizing politics as a blood sport. Mr. DeLay spent three days back in Austin last week, shuttling prominently through the Statehouse as the broker in the plan to remap the Texas Congressional districts and thus fatten his edge of power in Washington. 'I'm a Texan trying to get things done,' Mr. DeLay said, hardly apologizing as his will was enacted by G.O.P. state lawmakers.

After a five-month struggle that had resistant Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state, Mr. DeLay achieved a masterpiece of partisan gerrymandering: a map drawn up to net him as many as seven new Republican seats in Congress next year at the expense of incumbent Democrats. To have his way, Mr. DeLay, aptly nicknamed The Hammer in the Capitol, pioneered a new sort of out-of-season redistricting, which voters must hope does not prove contagious in statehouses across the land.

Mr. DeLay had his loyalists scrap the current court-ordered, two-year-old map, based on the 2000 census, and hurry an egregiously pro-Republican map into place without waiting for the next census. And the congressman personally walked the Statehouse to nail down the final deal. Texas wasn't just gerrymandered; it was Hammermandered.

State Democrats, who were no slouches at gerrymandering when they held the majority, are preparing court challenges to the remapping as an abuse of minority voting rights. Black and Hispanic voters are complaining of being electorally ghettoized into fewer districts. They have a strong case to make, and we hope the Bush administration's Justice Department can consider it fairly. If not, the redistricting plan's zigzags, and nips and tucks, chart a partisan willfulness that should come to haunt Mr. DeLay in the next elections.

More on voting machine design flaws

'The close phylogenetic relationship of chimpanzees and humans and the importance of documenting the range of variation in African hominoid adaptations to forest habitats make it relevant to questions about cooperation and competition among male hominins and to reconstructing the behavioral ecology of early hominins and the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.'

Journal
No struggle these days. No beliefs. Just living in the concrete, doing what needs to be done. And trying to enjoy these moments, opportunities to perfect love, to understand the nature of affection. That which joins.

And wondering about desire. I can see it in others, the desire of the dark night, the sense of absence. Absence or presence mean little. Only words which describe subjective phenomena. When the field of vision is broad enough there is always presence, though perhaps felt only faintly, like reflected light from the moon.

Vertigo

Vertigo is not the fear of falling. It is the fear that you will be unable to overcome the urge to hurl yourself into the void.
—Milan Kundera

Tim assigns my chores in the morning. After I moved the latest pile of green logs to the woodpile and helped to jack up the sagging cabin, I was to sweep the pine needles off the roof. “Are you okay with heights?” he asked. Fine, I lied.

I managed to get up the ladder. Then I stopped. The pine needles were slippery. I sat on the ridge and pushed the broom six inches, then yelped as the duff slid off. Tim took pity on my scaredy-cat antics and followed me up. It was fine, he showed me, not pitched steeply at all, and once I cleared a path through the pine needles, the roof-tiles were nicely grippy. Then he stepped back onto the extensible ladder, which slid right to the edge of the slick deck. He hung on to the roof with one hand and held a corner of the ladder in the other. I had to wiggle off my safe perch to reach out and retrieve the ladder. He got down safely, and the shock treatment had me fatalistically strolling across the roof for the rest of the afternoon.

Go, Samaritan

Brandon Kivi has been expelled from his Texas high school for letting his asthmatic girlfriend, Andra Ferguson, use his inhaler during an attack. The school nurse reported Kivi for violating the district's no-tolerance drug policy.

He was suspended for three days and charged with delivering a dangerous drug. He faced expulsion and being sent to juvenile detention on juvenile drug charges.

On Friday, school officials decided to expel Kivi but not press criminal charges. They said it was an amicable agreement.

'I'm happy. Everything's final,' Kivi said. 'I'm expelled 'til after Christmas and I can come back after Christmas, but I won't.'

Both Kivi and Ferguson will be homeschooled from now on.

"First, forget what time it is for an hour.
Do it regularly every day.
Then forget what day of the week it is,
and do this regularly in company for a week.
Then forget what country you are in,
and practice doing it in company for a week,
and then do them together for a week
with as few breaks as possible.
Follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract.
It makes no difference.
You can change them around after a week.
Both will later help you to forget how to count.

Forget how to count,
starting with your own age,
starting with how to count backwards,
starting with even numbers,
with roman numerals,
starting with fractions,
with the old calendar,
going on to the alphabet,
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous and whole again."
- W. S. Merwin

In Pioneering Study, Monkey Think, Robot Do

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: October 13, 2003

Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.
In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys' brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts.

The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements.
[more]

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Ok, Meg, I Got Out My Crayons

4 Jewish Web sites deemed 'terrorist'