Finding my place spiritually has been a big issue for me over the past few years, searching for the “true north” of my soul and finding how to both incorporate that into my life and conforming my life to it. (more…)
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Pure genius! Now I just need to get a hybrid that runs on bio-diesel.
Go Green! Homemade Diesel - video powered by Metacafe
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This evening my wife and I went to go see Michael Moore’s latest stroke of genious—SICKO, a massive exposé on the health “care” industry. I know Michael Moore has quite the reputation, particularly from the Republican party side of things, but this film is perhaps one of the most important films of this decade. I can say that because of one single statement that was made in this film: you can tell the true nature of a country by how they care for the least of its citizens.
Example after example and case by case, Moore dismantled the paranoia that’s been stirred up by the media, by health care lobbyists, and by political officials—the paranoia that so-called socialized medicine doesn’t work. Of course Canada becomes the glowing example of limited coverage, waiting for care, and people dying because of having to wait for essential services. But with great ease and case after case after case, the citizens of Canada speak out for themselves to the quality of their care and the worry-free life they have.
Moore examined the health care system here (in all its absurdity) and compared it to the likes of Canada, the UK, France, and even Cuba. Even in Cuba, the poorest of the poor have access to the most basic of services. In America, for example, an inhaler cost one woman over a hundred dollars. That very same inhaler in Cuba—same brand, same dosage, same ingredients—cost the equivalent of five cents.
In the UK, where they practice a national medical coverage, ALL medicines cost the same. So whether you need an antibiotic or some serious drugs to treat your cancer, you pay roughly £6 for all medicines. Your hospital visits and doctor visits…all free and completely covered regardless of who you are and what your condition. And if you had to pay a cab fare to get to the hospital—get this, the cab fare is REIMBURSED to you. The hospital actually PAYS you for your transportation costs to get there if you came on your own.
But what infuriated me the most in this film was how they treated workers from Ground Zero—volunteers who came from all around the area to help in the rescue efforts. If you weren’t on the city’s payroll as a CITY employee and passed the dozen or so strict terms and conditions, you were denied ANY portion of the $50 million that was allocated in funds for the rescue workers from that terrible time in our history.
Moore followed the stories of some of those workers that were denied assistance (REPEATEDLY) and listened to their horrid stories of being intentionally and willfully rejected by the city, state and federal government along with the health care industry—all because they didn’t meet an unreasonable set of standards.
Michael eventually brought them to Cuba, where they received quality exams, care, and a plan for recovery…for free. That care was the exact same care that they offer all off their citizens. Care that you would never find in America because the HMO’s are too busy lining their pockets with our health care premiums and convincing federal bureaucrats to drive fear into the hearts of its citizens, that our system is good enough—and that anything that smells of “socialist” medicine is of the devil.
One Canadian put it best [and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have THAT good of a memory] when he said, “we’re just looking out for each other… if someone’s sick or hurting, you help them… and when we pay our taxes, we’re just doing our part to help each other out, helping others that have needs.”
My wife and I agreed wholeheartedly—the health care system in Canada is far more “Christ-like”, in that they actually care for the “least of these.”
I have to confess—if my wife or I had a great job offer in Canada, England, or even France, it would be hard to turn down with the kind of care and coverage one could find in such countries.
[Mental note to add the UK, France, and Canada to my Monster.com search perimeter.]
Filed under: Awareness, Culture, Politics
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I generally lock my doors on my car—it’s pretty much habit. And I’m not quite sure if somehow the “unlock” button was pressed in my pocket upon leaving the car or if I just completely spaced it (which is unlikely), but somehow someone got into the car that I had been renting for the weekend of busy photography [mostly for the wedding that I had scheduled on Friday]. Back to the car.
I was asked to shoot some spokesperson finals competition at Visage and parked up in the ramp nearby. I left a few photography accessories behind and a few stands and my iPod tucked away in some pocket of the car. I returned to my car a few hours later to find the door ajar, the glove compartment opened, my bags rummaged through, and my 60GB iPod stolen. Fortunately they weren’t interested in any of my photography stuff—but they ran off with my iPod, dammit!
Words can’t convey how pissed off and violated I feel. Yes, I’m grateful they didn’t take anything else, but somehow that just isn’t all that consoling. Looks like I’ll have to bring my portable drive to work and plug it into my computer to listen to all my music.
DAG, that just pisses me off to no end. Undoubtedly I have to wait before I’ll be able to get a replacement—my wife comes first and she’s long overdue for a new iPod.
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Ok…this one made me laugh. A friend sent this to me today. VERY funny.
Personally, I can’t STAND Comcast. They’re overpriced, terrible customer service, long hold times, and have a notoriously inconsistent internet connection.
I’ve been more than pleased with Qwest and their DSL service and don’t plan on ever switching back to Comcast. They just suck all around.
This day has sure turned out to be a thoroughly uninspiring, miserable day. After sleeping 12 hours last night [I literally fell asleep at 5:30 pm, got up once or twice to get water or whatever, and woke up around 5:15 am and went to work at 6], my day was pretty well decided for me. It was busy, wall to wall meetings and some uninspiring moments where I had to create things for others, and went home around 2:15 or so…no lunch break, no real time to take any photos, and came home exhausted and feeling defeated.
Of course it didn’t stop there; after watching a movie (to try and unwind from the day), I messed up the burgers on the grill—they were on for 25 minutes at medium heat and were VERY pink in the middle. So I threw them back on at HIGH for ten minutes and they were charred and rendered inedible. Not a great way to begin the wrap up of my day. It only made me feel worse about myself and impacted my feelings, that I just can’t get much right today and most things in my life are essentially being either decided for me or I have no reasonable say in the matter. Of course I have a choice—you always have a choice—but the choices I’d like to make just aren’t reasonable or rational.
I could go on, but I’d rather not my employer (current or prospective) reading about just how uninspired I feel.
In today’s Photo-A-Day, I just didn’t have the time to explore and take interesting exposures. I know that it’s not the end of the world and there’ll always be days like that—but this has become an important part of finding out how to express myself, to create (anything other than a friggin website), and to get some semblance of positive feedback to push me further along.
Creating nice-looking websites just doesn’t compel me like it used to. A friend of mine compared his job to being a janitor for his workplace network—cleaning up after all the network issues that come up. I feel that I’m creating things that: a) are highly subjective as to what’s “good”, b) don’t really matter all that much [as long as you can easily find the information, what difference does it make if it's nice-looking or not?], and c) I feel there are more important things in life that I could be doing and I feel like my life (and the potential of it) is just passing me by.
My lovely and supportive wife and I have had talks about this, and she knows how important it is for me as a creative-type, to feel fulfilled in what I do, get lots of positive reinforcement, and to be doing something that matters. In the end, will it really matter that I’ve built nice-looking websites? Probably not. I just feel there’s something more than the mundane—and at the moment it seems beyond my grasp. I know better than to think that going into photography as a career will not fix this problem; and I guess I haven’t quite yet figured out what is.
I’m also on this journey into Orthodoxy, exploring the roots of a faith that used to be strong and was central in my life. I’ve dealt with a dying faith, isolation from all-things-Church, and trying to somehow reconnect with the Creator in what I view as my last real hope of doing so—the Orthodox church. Of course I know the organization itself—and all organizations for that matter—is flawed and is imperfect. But in comparison with my disheartening experience (over the course of a decade or so) with the evangelical/protestant church, the Orthodox church has some distinct up-sides to what they believe and practice. And some of those things really appeal to me these days.
Anyway, I’m really tired and need to head to bed. It’s been a long and tiring day and need to get some rest. I hope tomorrow has some good things in store for me—today was just a bear.
Filed under: Awareness, General, Orthodoxy, Photography, Spirituality
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I’ve heard rumors of rumors, that the honey bees are disappearing mysteriously—leaving their hives to pollinate, not returning home, and dying often miles from their hive. The first that I’d heard of this was from my parents a week ago; an old schoolmate of mine has a few beehives and her bees have been not returning to the hive. I think she’s lost a few colonies already.
Well, because I don’t watch too much of the news anymore these days, I was oblivious to this latest development: disappearing bees… and on a global scale.
As with any quest for knowledge, I asked the great and all-seeing Google, is it true that the honey bees [are] disappearing? I wasn’t prepared for the deluge of information, with article after article citing various region after region experiencing a decline in their bee population—an alarming figure of 30 to 90% of our bee population is gone, varying of course by region.
The cause seems to be partially illusive, but scientists say that there are a few contributing factors: the radiation and waveforms produced from mobile phones, mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops. While scientists haven’t conclusively proven the cause, my money is on the combination of pesticides and both the the radiation and waveforms produced from mobile phones and the signal towers.
One article stated:
In some cases, 70 percent of bees exposed to radiation failed to find their way back to the hive after searching for pollen and nectar, according to the research by Landau University of Koblenz. Link to study (in German).
According to the study, radiation from cell phones disorients the bees and destroys their ability to communicate.
“When bees are exposed to signals from cell phones, they can’t find their way. They get no nutrition and consequently die,” said Dr. George l. Carlo, chairman of the Safewireless Initiative.
If you ask me, I think that between our consumerism and the driving force to have the latest technology, we’re going to create our own famine. With a rapidly declining population of bees, we’ll be hard-pressed to pollinate our crops, which in turn translates into failing crops, which results in little food. One would hope this nation of ours would rise to the cause and solve the problem in an eco-friendly manner, but as long as we’re driven by what we want and not what we need, I think we’re going to walk willingly into disastrous consequences.
I’d like to think that we could turn this around, but our culture has become so consumed with electronic devices, wireless technology, and more of the latest and greatest things to come about. And I’m just as guilty. But we are becoming more and more dependent upon things we just don’t need—iPods, mobile phones, more than one computer, lots of entertainment consoles, etc.
It’s also startling to think about just how many devices are becoming wireless. I had just recently purchased a wireless USB transmitter for our TIVO unit, so I could transfer recordings over to my computer. But it hasn’t been until yesterday that I really started to wonder about all the wireless frequencies that we’re being bombarded with. Wireless networks, mobile phones, HD radio, signals from satellites.
But after these reports about mobile phones and the radiation they produce, I’d have to say I’m more inclined to get rid of my mobile phone than contribute to a nation-wide famine of biblical proportions. I don’t mean to sound apocalyptic, sporting a doomsday theory, but Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left.” That perspective could be construed as extreme, but a major disruption to our food production would not only have a damaging fiscal impact, it could have terrible implications upon our nation’s ability to survive. Kind of ironic how we, a world super-power, can be brought down by such a simple thing—a self-induced food production crisis.
Is it possible that in the quest to have the biggest and the best, that our nation could fall victim to our own insatiable drive to have more? While I’m no techno-phobe and love gadgets along with the next person, I think technology is going to offer us a choice—use it responsibly in ethical and moral proportions and live well, or continue in the track we’re in now and face the prospect of famine and the struggle to live at all.
Gloomy post, I know. Sorry.
But how can we not see this coming? The climate is changing rapidly, our carbon emissions are off the chart, famous mountain-tops are losing their snow caps, bees and other pollinators are disappearing, frogs are also disappearing. I think that unless drastic changes are made within our culture, these will be the least of our worries.
Filed under: Awareness, Culture
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I had a quick thought pass my mind as I was looking through stock photography, in search of images for my employer’s home page. I had been looking for photos on istockphoto.com with the keywords “business” and “smiling (expression)” and had a pretty good selection to choose from; but that’s not what I want to comment on.
With a selection of mostly white people, I wanted to diversify my options—so I added the keyword “ethnic.” It was then the thought occurred to me, why am I searching with the term “ethnic” with the hopes of finding people of other nationalities? I am just as much “ethnic” as the next person.
Of course, most of us with the American persuasion have come to think of ethnic as correlating to countries of origin like Africa, China, India, or other countries of stark differences from our own. But to say that I, as an American with Swedish, Norwegian, German, and Irish decent, am not as “ethnic” is just not true; a misnomer I’ve never really given much thought to before.
The movement towards becoming politically correct has spurred us into ensuring all of our collateral has imagery that diversely represents your audience. But I think it has brought with it a set of issues when it comes to terminology. We place keywords like “ethnic” based upon our own context—if they’re descendants from another country and obviously look different, they’re “ethnic.”
Anyway, that was just a thought that raced past me this afternoon.
I had a weird feeling just a moment ago that brought be back years ago.
Frustrated with the pressure of coming up with a logo for a client and the void of creativity that I was experiencing, I decided to surf Google for awhile and see what the competition was doing. That was uneventful, as it seems other job bank providers haven’t given much thought to branding, identity development, and the power of a logo. ‘Course it doesn’t help that the idea of a job bank doesn’t lend itself to a metaphor very easily—at least one that hasn’t been exhausted already.
Then I came across caljobs.ca.gov, and was greeted by the banner saying, “Welcome to California.” Of course I know that I physically haven’t arrived in California, but thinking about that just for a moment brought me back to when the internet was still quite new (to the general public).
I remember when web-based radio was a new thing and you could listen to radio stations on the other side of the planet; specifically I remember just how fascinating it was to hear through my computer what others were hearing then and there with their radios. The idea of connecting personally or virtually to another part of the world was such an incredible concept, I remember thinking that the possibilities would be so vast and virtually unlimited, save for the language barrier.
Now I think about how easy it is for people to access news and information about this and that, and how small our world has become. While it can be such a great thing, having access to such a wealth of information, it can be explosive.
I think about how crowded the world seems to be these days with the clash of ideas, civilizations, values, politics, and religion—and how the fuel for fighting one’s cause only seems to burn hotter with the ease of propagating an ideal. While I’d love to think humanity could rise above themselves and peacefully coexist despite our differences, I can’t help but to see only disaster.
I also think about how extremists have harnessed both the internet and the innocent to further their cause—cultivating a seething hatred for those that think differently, look differently, worship differently, and live differently. Bush calls them terrorists, but they’re all just different people that have extremely different values. The only difference is that some of those people use extreme measures of violence to defend their own perception of freedom.
But what is freedom for one person might be prison for another.
I think that some places in the world weren’t ready for the liberation of information through the internet. Bad news (however you define that) has a sort of encroaching, crowding sensation about it; and can have a number of effects on a person. Some might get stressed, others concerned, and some might protest or resist through demonstration. Some also use violence and force to push back the “aggressor’s” foreign ideas to preserve their own.
I know generalizing is bad and leaves too many gaping holes, but I think that the crisis in the middle east (though very complicated) seems to be only fueled by the West’s creeping ideals and values, thus bringing a clash between world views and the violent resistance we see from various factions.
I wish there were a better way to fix this mess—the conflict between people that think differently. But as long as people feel threatened in any way, there’s always going to be a violent response from those that don’t feel the freedom and safety to negotiate. I wish there could be an end to the cyclical violence.
Welcome to the world.
Filed under: Awareness, Culture, General, Politics
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My wife takes her car to Jiffy Lube for oil changes on a fairly regular basis—regular as deemed by her mileage of course. Well, this morning after getting her oil changed, and leaving their parking lot, she noticed the Saturn running really badly. VERY badly.
She drove around the block, and literally as she pulled back into the Jiffy Lube parking lot, her car died. Unable to jump the car, the employees there thought with their divine wisdom that the battery was dead—even though her headlights were on, the dashboard lights visible, etc.
Another patron thought the starter might be dead. I’m sorry, but starters just don’t die like that without first showing signs of wear.
So we had the car towed to the Saturn Dealership, Natalie told the mechanic there about her experience with Jiffy Lube, and they looked into the problem with the car. Well, their discovery?
The engine seized up. Apparently Jiffy Lube drained the oil but didn’t put any back in. The evidence that points to this fact, is that there was still dirty oil behind the filter.
So it goes without saying that Jiffy Lube will be purchasing a brand new engine for us, which will run them an $8,000 bill plus the cost of a loaner car for us until our car is fixed. If they refuse to pay for a new engine and opt for the engine to be repaired (which will cost half as much), they had better give us incentive to simply have our engine fixed and make it worth our while.
I think we’re done here with Jiffy Lube (and other oil changing services for that matter). I think I’d rather have Saturn changing our oil—we’d also get a free car wash and vacuum out of the deal, too.
Filed under: Awareness, General
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