08.10.11
Posted in Social Justice at 12:13 am by beely
Fantastic! Warren Jeffs put away for life for being a child molester and serial rapist. But, what about the community that permitted him to continue his actions? What about his bat-shit crazy wives and brother-husbands who condoned his monstrous behavior? How can a person of conscience stand by and do nothing, knowing he and others were abusing little girls and young women? That sickens me almost as much as what Jeffs did.
Does America now stand by and say the deed is done, we have justice? Or, does America continue and go after the whole damned sick and twisted, evil cult that is FLDS? Don't all the recordings and documents prove the complicity of other cult members? Shouldn't everyone involved, men and women, be charged with being accessories to the crimes Jeffs was charged and convicted? Shouldn't all properties and financial wealth be seized and held in escrow for the young girls and young women who must now live with the actions and inaction of the adults in their cult "community"? These girls will need serious psychological counseling for many years to come and support from social service organizations to deal with their pregnancies and babies born out of these unholy unions.
We should have learned numerous times before about dynamic leaders and their followers: Jim Jones and Jonestown, Applewhite and the Heaven's Gate whackos in San Diego. But do we do anything? Is the Branch Davidian/David Koresh episode of child molestation and rape not a powerful enough lesson that we cannot look the other way? We must protect the innocent and not allow these evil actions go unpunished.
KOLD TV coverage of life sentence verdict for FLDS leader, Warren Jeffs
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07.30.11
Posted in Social Justice, Uncategorized at 1:00 am by beely
I had a thought driving down North 1st Ave as it turns into Euclid Ave south of Grant on the way to Speedway this fine July 2011 afternoon.
First Ave to Euclid – from Grant Rd. to Speedway Blvd.
I noticed an increase in the amount of graffiti all over the walls around houses, duplexes and apartments. Why would any prospective UofA student have any desire to live anywhere along that section of Euclid? A student moving here to go to school would take a look at all the prospective separate houses and duplexes, apartment houses with walls covered in summertime juvenile delinquent grafitti and say, "No freakin' way am I living in an area filled with gangsta tags! This is so ghetto, Buffy! Oh my god!"
On the face of things I would almost agree with this fictional student. But another thought crossed my mind. What if the young, native Tucsonans decided to intentionally put up the grafitti in a play to discourage incoming residents and drive away absentee landlords? Kind of like a reverse gentrification? Drive property values down so local people can afford local housing? They have pride in the housing their grandparents and great-grandparents help to build and are tired that native Tucsonans cannot afford to live in neighborhoods they helped found and develop.
If you can get past the pathetic display of juvenile delinquency and teriitorial bullshit, you can enjoy the houses for their Craftsman style from the late 1920s through the 1940s and 1950s. Wonderful examples of truly fine design and great Tucson home building.
Of course, this argument has a flip side: if you intentionally degrade an environment to make it less attractive to others, you are also making it less desireable for your own habitation. I just don't get the mentality behind graffiti and the senseless defacing of the city. Anarchists? Frustrated idiots with out the balls to have a creative outlet for their anger and frustration? Or simply deranged sociopaths who take great joy in bringing down the quality of life for everyone. I'm voting for the latter.
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04.20.10
Posted in Environment, Transportation at 12:35 pm by beely
I’ve had this vision in my head about buses, light-rail vehicles (LRVs), electric trolley buses running up and down the streets of Tucson. I expound upon my vision to anyone who will listen. Could that be why I don’t have many friends? Be a witness to my vision…
I lived in San Francisco for almost nine years from 1977 to 1986. I didn’t own a car for almost six years during that time and I loved it! I lived and worked and went to school in San Francisco, taking street cars, light rail, electric buses and diesel buses all over The City. I could stay out late, get home in the middle of the night and still be able to catch a bus. I visited S.F. for a few days this fall and rediscovered how creative San Francisco is, how much of a “can do!” kind of spirit is still alive. This is cool and totally awesome!
I was visiting S.F. and was staying at my brother-in-law’s house in the Bernal Heights area and had taken the public transportation to that area many times in past years. The bus to that part of town was previously a diesel bus that strained to get up the steep hill to that neighborhood after winding its way through other areas such as the Fillmore, Western Addition, the Castro and Noe Valley, and down to Bayshore Blvd. These latter neighborhoods have fairly narrow streets, some steep hills–very tough on fueled buses. Turns out that S.F. decided to convert the diesel bus line to an electric trolley line–no easy task as I will describe.
An electric trolley bus in San Francisco typically has a set of poles attached to the roof of the bus. Each pole is connected to the rear of the bus via a cable on a reel. (I don’t know the terminology, please bear with me.) Both poles connect to a pair of wires running overhead that provide a connection to the electricity necessary to generate the power for the electric bus. The overhead wires are supported by guides and tracks around corners and intersections with other electric vehicles. The electric trolleys are quiet and clean running. They are quiet inside for passengers and quiet outside for residents of the neighborhoods the trolleys pass through. You hear the wires singing as the bus approaches and occasionally the wires rattling and shaking as the bus passes by. No diesel fumes in the air. No loud diesel engine grinding by while straining up a hill. The electric trolley bus is powerful: a bus full of people and it just plows its way up a hill–piece of cake! Can of corn! Easy as pie! More pictures and descriptions of the history of these buses in San Francisco found here and a great article on Wikipedia here.
So, the city of San Francisco decided to retrofit this bus line with electricity and run the trolley through the narrow streets of the neighborhoods. This is sheer gumption! Someone had a huge set of cajones, let me tell you. It is quite a feat of engineering to design the system for this trolley, string up all the wires and support guides, connect all the tracks through the intersections so the bus can pass through and not loose its source of electrical power from the overhead wires. Brilliant! If San Francisco can overcome all of the obstacles in its path and put a clean running, quiet, environmentally sound bus line in place, why the hell can’t a city like Tucson do the same?
Tucson has these ridiculously wide streets for almost all of its arterial surface streets to carry all the cars commuting to work with single passengers. (Look at the lines of cars flying by and count how many of the them have more than one person in the car: 85%? 90%? 95%?) Most of these streets (Broadway, Speedway, 22nd St., Oracle, to name a few) have an existing right lane that is usually marked as a bus lane. How simple it would be to engineer the supports for the wires, string up the electrical system, put a bunch of new, clean buses on those lines. Tucson would have to have the vision of a city with fewer cars on the city streets, a city with a conscience: using less fossil fuels for private citizens to go between home and work. Tucson would have to promote the hell out of a project like this to get an increase in ridership, get people out of their cars for their commute.
So, where is the electrical power coming from? Yeah, Tucson does recover methane gases from the landfills and then uses the methane to be burned and power the turbines that produce electricity. That’s one way. How about passive solar array panels in “fields” around the city or drawing power from the Springerville solar project in the White Mountains that Tucson Electric Power owns.
Of course, there will be the whiners and nay-sayers who state that they will loose their views of the surrounding mountains if all these overhead wires are in place. (Like they ever get out of their cars long enough to look for the mountains!) My response to this is: will you be able to see your mountains in a couple of years when all the smog produced by the increasing hordes of cars obscures the view?
What about the stress of driving in traffic? The wear-and-tear on your car taking you to/from work? The expense of your gassing up the car each week (well, hopefully only once a week–you are driving a car that gets over 30 MPG in the city, aren’t you?)
If enough buses are on the street, you won’t wait long for your connection. I lived on 29th Street, off a street car line (the J Church line–ran past the St. Paul’s Catholic church and school shown in the Whoopie Goldberg movie, “Sister Act”.) I had to wait 4-6 minutes during commute hours in the morning for the next streetcar to come along. The trip home at night was the same. Since I was downtown, other street cars for the other lines distributed throughout the city would come by every 2-3 minutes. Traveling was easy: I could read, look out the window, listen to my headphones. I was never accosted on any ride at any time in the years in which I took mass transit in San Francisco.
I voted for and totally supported Steve Farley, our Arizona state representative, who has had a vision to have light rail vehicles in a few lines around Tucson. I say, that’s not bold enough! Tucson needs more and Tucson can do more! I have faith. The people have to hear about this and they have to want this: they have to understand the benefits, they have to understand how their quality of life will improve with fewer cars on the road, how they will meet more of their neighbors while riding the buses, appreciate their city and all it has to offer.
That’s my vision. I haven’t been locked up for it, yet…
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06.25.09
Posted in Social Justice at 1:24 am by beely
The following Arizona Daily Star headline caught my eye yesterday afternoon (6/24/2009). I had not heard anything about these bills before yesterday and I freaked out! Was Arizona going the way of South Dakota and with a one-two-punch, repeat the attempt to require teens get parental permission before they try to get a “prescription” and support pharmacists who want to deny the “morning after” pill because it goes against their religious beliefs? (This last blog article is about Religious Right/American Taliban nutjobs who attempted to support pharmacists in Illinois.)
Here’s a brief run-down of the story and the legislation that has passed in both the Arizona state House and Senate:
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06.23.09
Posted in Buddhism at 11:45 pm by beely
A timeline of sorts about my discovery and connection to Buddhism and the Dharma.
Where do I begin? What attracted me to Buddhism? What drew me to continuing my study of the Dharma? Well, maybe a bit of personal history/background would provide a foundation for more historical info.
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Posted in Buddhism at 11:28 pm by beely
Here are a number of quotes I've collected over the years that I considered "potent" — very significant or simply clarified some finer point of the Dharma.
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Posted in Linux For All at 10:49 pm by beely
I own musical CDs (and who doesn’t?) and I run Ubuntu Linux 8.10 on my laptop. I rip songs from the CDs as MP3s (sorry, not Ogg-Vorbiss because my MP3 player doesn’t support that encoding format) and plan on putting the large numbers of digital copies on a house system to talk directly to my stereo. I’m OK with all of this – works for me quite nicely. So, what’s the beef?
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Posted in Linux For All at 10:37 pm by beely
Get creative! Think of novel ways to incorporate Linux systems into the existing school with Windows-centric technology infrastructure… Here are some strategies/tricks I’ve done to bring in Linux through the back door and onto the campus.
"Be verwy quiet…. huhuhuhuhuhu. " Whoever said that Elmer Fudd wasn't an Open Source strategist! He saw the writing on the wall and now you too can devise a sinister plot to infiltrate the dread world of Redmond, be tricksy, my preciousssss. Here are some strategies I've used so far to bring Linux onto my high school campus:
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Posted in Linux For All at 10:28 pm by beely
So many school districts think that if they aren’t using Microsoft products everywhere, especially on the desktop, that they will be missing out on some type of golden opportunitiy. Opportunities like, Bill Gates is going to give them free software for perpetuity, that some huge conglomerate will recognize their district as deserving of some special accommodation because they have played ball, followed the party line, tasted the fine slop while feeding at the huge Microsoft trough…
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Posted in Linux For All at 10:18 pm by beely
A $100, hand-cranked powered personal computing device (can’t really be called a laptop) that is being developed and promoted by folks at MIT and elsewhere is causing some sleepless nights in the techno centers and headquarters around the U.S. A little PC that is being developed for the technology-starved emerging nations (specifically Africa and the Far East) is causing quite a storm.
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