Thought Overflow…Golda’s BlogIf memes are like genes, then having a conversation in which you share ideas and come up with new ones is like…?

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Archive for June, 2011

2 idea for writers…

Golda to RandomWrites  

Most content sites and could use more serious, thoughtful writers. Brave activists in democracy movements around the world could use more financial support.

What if, content sites hire democracy activists who need to make a living, to research best practices in established democracies, in community building and local governance? They really need to think about these things and might have deep and genuine interest, and could write from a fresh perspective…

Now, if I just had a bunch of spare cash to pay out…

Most companies are legally required to be selfish. That is, to put shareholder value over all other considerations including worker health, dangers to consumers, damage to the environment, or anything else.

Enter the “B Corp” – a kind of company that can legally pay attention to what most of us call values. Arizona doesn’t yet recognize “B” Corps, but five states now do: Maryland, Vermont, Virginia, New Jersey and now New York.

Arizona? What does your legislator say?

see http://bcorporation.net

New law fosters benefit corporations

Background reading: The Corporation by Joel Bakan, available at the library.

Originally published at bTucson.com/193476

google does presentation and display pretty well – but if the website adds structure and tools and clues

2011-06-20 The Huffington Post ran a hard-hitting article Jun 17:Did Arizona Education Chief Huppenthal Commit a Felony in Growing Ethnic Studies Scandal?

Read it for yourself – the Tucson Weekly has posted a full PDF of the ethnic studies audit online

The audit appears to be a thorough review including unannounced classroom observations, student interviews and curriculum analysis.  The audit firm, Cambium Learning, was chosen by Huppenthal’s department to conduct the audit.  

read more at bTucson.com under Schools

franchise restaurant = convention over configuration
but, the key is documented convention
otherwise you just have a bunch of mysterious dependencies

The cool thing about citizen journalism is you get to talk to really neat people.
I talked to Randy Parraz, who led the Pearce recall effort, back in June. His voice was a little raspy after talking to thousands of voters, and the day after turning in the petitions he sounded a little tired, but took time to talk to me bright and early and explain how this turnaround came about.

So this was a big day for Arizona?

read more at Tucson Politics and Government

Quotes from Shoot an Iraqi by Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen.

Thought-provoking book…raw, kind of a flat humor without hatred even though a US military drone killed his brother, and Saddam killed numerous other family members. Some quotes :

“Solitude was such sweetness to me that it was worth risking my life for some time alone” – when staying at an aunt’s empty house in Kufa during bombing, because he wanted to paint

I love this geography professor – “A joke started to circulate about [Ba’ath] Party officials telling a geography professor he must integrate party philosophy into his lessons. “How? I teach geography.” They insisted. So he told his students “Iraq used to have a cold, wet climate in the winter and a hot, dry climate in the summer, without a drop of rain.” (which is the reality). “But,” he’d continue, “thanks to the Ba’ath Party, it’s nice all year round now.” ”

“He (a cousin in Kufa) was arrested (for being a member of the Dawa Party, a militant Shia religious party), and later his body was returned to the family along with a bill for 72 dinars for the bullets used to execute him. He had been an only son…Later, the government sent my cousin’s family a letter saying the accusation had been a mistake, and apologizing for the wrongful execution.”

“In times of extreme desperation, in the face of adversity, sometimes the only thing that saves us is our own irrational capacity for pride and egotism, a faith in ourselves that has perhaps no logical basis but pulls us through nontheless” (relating to the character in Cast Away

He says that Terence Young, director of James Bond 007, helped Saddam create a fake ‘war crime’ video of a soldier being torn apart by trucks that Saddam used to stir up support for the start of the Iran-Iraq war. He said Young also worked on the pro-Saddam biopic The Long Days. This is supported by this site: http://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/terence_young_saddam.php3 At the time Young made ‘The Long Days’ Saddam was considered a pro-Western ruler. The site does not mention the fake war crime footage.

About living in a refugee camp: “When the Americans were there, they would clean the communal bathrooms every day. But after they left, no one wanted to clean the bathrooms, and they quickly became filthy.”

“I just want to emphasize the point that we are disconnected from reality”

This seems really key to me. Most people are decent if they have their eyes open to what is going on and how it affects others. But we hide stuff and let it be hidden from us because its annoying, inconvenient and disturbing, so we just let it happen ‘somewhere else’.
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Also this seemed very significant to me, about the male role in Arab culture:

” I realized that buried under that layer of cruelty he [Wafaa’s father] was a very sentimental person….People see Arab culture as a patriarchal system that oppresses women, which it is, but men are also oppressed – they oppress themselves with the rigid expectations and roles they must fill or else be shunned. In this vise-like social grip, my father repressed all his frustrations and shattered dreams and humiliations, ending up with nothing but the cruel and crazy outbursts.”

The larval stage is when living in the host’s brain; metamorphosis is the act of writing; and the mature stage capable of reproduction is in written form.

Sometimes larval stage ideas reproduce in casual conversation, but mass reproduction is almost always after metamorphosis. Even ideas transmitted in speeches or on TV have generally gone thru the transformative writing process before being re-emitted as speech.