Wed Aug 11, 7:21 PM ETHere is the link to order Stamps.com's personalized stamps. The drawbacks: It will cost $16.99 to order 20 37-cent stamps. You aren't allowed to use anything controversial--no political candidates allowed, for example.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bad sunsets, cutesy baby pictures, and dogs, lots of dogs, will feature in a new line of U.S. stamps introduced this week by Web-based Stamps.com, which turns digital photos into valid postage.
Stamps.com Inc. said it had won approval from the U.S. Postal Service for a trial run of personalized postage that allows consumers to slap their favorite photos on officially recognized stamps for postcards, letters and packages.
Q: What is conservatism?Go read the whole thing. Here are a few notes:
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.I will post more on each of these with fresh examples soon!
Life under aristocratic domination is horrible. The United States is blessed to have little notion of what this horror is like. Europe, for example, staggered under the weight of its aristocracies for thousands of years. European aristocracies are in decline, and Europe certainly has its democratic heroes and its own dawning varieties of civilized life, and yet the psychology and institutions that the aristocracies left behind continue to make European societies rigid and blunt Europeans' minds with layers of internalized oppression. People come to America to get away from all of that. Conservatism is as alien here as it could possibly be. Only through the most comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed to establish its very tentative control of the country's major political institutions. Conservatism until very recently was quite open about the fact that it is incompatible with the modern world. That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win.
Bianca, enchanting Bianca, is a mystery to me. I study her with obstinacy, passion and despair - with the stamp album as my textbook. Why am I doing this? Can a stamp album serve as a textbook of psychology? What a naive question! A stamp album is a universal book, a compendium of knowledge about everything human. Naturally, only by allusion, implication, and hint. You need some perspicacity, some courage of the heart, some imagination in order to find the fiery thread that runs through the pages of the book.[source: this page]
One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness. Most things are interconnected, most threads lead to the same reel. Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books, whole stanzas of quivering pointed swallows? One should read the flight of these birds ...
A huge "dead zone" of water that has spread across the Gulf of Mexico may be contributing to an unusual spate of shark bites along the Texas coast.Dr. Nancy Rabalais from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium discussed the problem in an interview:
In the last 30 years, the dead zone has been an annual event, fed by the rising use of nitrate based fertilizers.
The extensive area of uninhabitable water may be contributing indirectly to a rise in shark bites in Texas waters.
Three people have been bitten by sharks along the upper Texas coast this year - which is a higher number than normal.
The dead zone has spread across 5,800 square miles (15,020 sq km) of the Gulf of Mexico and is so devoid of oxygen that sea life cannot live in it.
. . . the dead zone extended from the mouth of the Mississippi River, in south-eastern Louisiana, to near the Texas border 250 miles (400 km) west.Here's a link to more government research on the problem--I wonder when someone will get the bright idea of restricting fertilizer run-off into the Mississippi River?
She [Dr. Rabalais] also claimed the dead zone is closer to the shore than usual this year, because of winds and currents.
"Fish and swimming crabs escape from the dead zone," said Dr Rabalais. "Anything else dies."
The nitrates, carried into the Gulf's warm summer waters by the river, feed algae blooms that use up oxygen and make the water inhospitable to other forms of life.
The dead zone's size has varied each year depending on weather conditions, but on average it is about 5,000 square miles (12,950 sq km), and remains in place until late September or early October.
Virtually nothing is being done to stop the flow of nitrates into the river, meaning the dead zone will reappear every year, Rabalais said.
Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive warning essay about the dangers of computerized vote-counting in The New Yorker of November 7, 1988.The final page of the article talks about what people can do and are doing to help ensure valid elections. They include:
