My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, a bunch of my mom’s friends and associates who have kids with disabilities are Christian conservatives and they now LOVE Sarah Palin. Well, somehow I ended up on their mailing list, and, well, I got involved…

You’re assuming that a VP Palin would be able to DO anything in her office.  Our country’s in a hole, our society’s practically moving backward in every way important.  McCain would just be a different flavor of what we have right now, and what we have is pretty rancid.  America needs a change, something completely different.  I guarantee that if we stay on our current path of war, pollution, cultural stagnation, rights for the relatively few of us with disabilities will be quite low on anyone’s “to-do” list.  

 

Michael Phillips

michael@lithiumcreations.com

https://lithiumcreations.com/

On Aug 29, 2008, at 8:24 PM, Nikole wrote:

Dear Michael,         

I so respect and honor you as a person.  No one has lived the life you have, no one has the knowledge of what it is like to fight for rights, even for life itself as you have.  I must agree that no one administration – Republican or Democrat is the answer.  Over the years your mother and I have fought battles on both sides of the political realm just to get what children with disabilities needed.  We have seen an amazing Governor Jeb Bush honor our kids and the horrible Governor Crist cut their services to the point of families losing their ability to care for their loved ones in their homes – both Republicans.  I have seen amazing work by the Kennedy family for our kids, and at the same time several Republican Presidents who signed more civil rights laws into action than the other party.  

What I have learned, and even more recently experienced is that amidst all these who we choose to support or believe in, there are those who care, those who understand, and those who do not – and unfortunately most do not.  What I see in Palin is a glimmer of hope that she will “get it.”  I have a new word for the most insidious form of discrimination – Benevolent Discrimination – most likely the title of the book I will write some day.  It is meant for those who seem to care, but instead have very low expectations.  We found that in the judge I just had for my due process ruling.  If you read the ruling carefully you can sense the discrimination.  The fact is that he felt Andrew was not capable of what we were asking and that the low expectations of his teachers were okay, since they were doing their best, and they cared for him.

I think it must be akin to those slave owners who treated their slaves well, physically, but never believed they were worth valuing on an equal basis.

The Republicans have failed people with disabilities.

So have the Democrats.  The Democrats of today are not the same as the party of Martin Luther King.  I heard his niece on the radio on the historic day of his speech, yesterday, and she decried the abortions in this country her uncle would have despised.  

So in no party is the answer.

The answer is in the hope we need to all seek, no matter who is elected.

The answer is in the valuing of worth of each individual in our country as equal  – not special rights for special interests,  but equal rights, no segregation for the disabled, and no low expectations.

One of the wisest men I know, a proud member of the Green Party, Mark (who in a personal letter to me after our recent loss said the following) (hope you don’t mind me sharing Mark)  The root of the problem in our schools and in society in general is an ugly prejudice toward individuals with disabilities.  It has to do with the way society views their worth.  We live in a crass, commercial age, where we measure human worth by an individual’s ability to conform to our view of physical beauty and intelligence and their ability to produce capital wealth.  The revolution that is needed is a spiritual one, where we view an individual’s worth by their spiritual beauty and the innate value given by God.

I have been following Palin since the birth of her child in April, and have learned that she understands the value of her child, his “spiritual beauty and the innate value given by God.”  While I understand that it takes more to run a country than valuing one human life, one that some would say a life worthy of abortion, I think it is a good start.

With love

Nikole

On Aug 29, 2008, at 7:03 PM, Michael Phillips wrote:

Trust me, I don’t think a Republican administration is God’s answer to anything.

Michael Phillips

michael@lithiumcreations.com

https://lithiumcreations.com/

On Aug 29, 2008, at 6:56 PM, Lilly wrote:

Amen!  Praise be to God!  This is the best news I have heard in a long, long time – I have to say that as a registered democrat who served for several years in a democratic administration, my vote will always be for “our children.”  And this mom of 5 is one of us and she sure has my vote!!!!        

Subject:

 

Dear Friends,

 

What I thought to be only a long shot has come true. For the first time in this election I have hope, real hope for our children, our broken education system. I cried when I learned McCain had chose Sarah Palin for his running mate.

 

Read her personal statement regarding having a child with Down syndrome.

On April 18, 2008, Palin gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome.[11] She returned to the office three days after giving birth.[12] Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” Palin said. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

 

http://palinforvp.blogspot.com/2007/02/palin-on-issues.html

 

Read her position paper on education:

http://palinforgovernor.com/Position%20Papers/SarahPalinOnEducationInAlaska.pdf

 

Never in the history of our country has anyone with such personal, direct ties to a child with a disability come into the Presidency/vice presidency. In times when many of us have considered our views non-partisan – what matters is our kids – here is our chance to vote for our kids and their rights. I have no doubt that Palin will advocate for us in a new, fresh, strong way. I will take any woman with the nickname Sarah the Barracuda.

 

from an older blog:

Why Sarah Palin?

 

This blog is the result of about a month worth of research on potential Republican Vice-Presidential candidates for the 2008 election. I had been considerably less than thrilled with all of the early speculation, mostly swirling around second-tier presidential candidates, so I decided to see if there was anyone better suited for the job that I hadn’t been hearing about. So, I developed the following profile for the perfect VP candidate (using Rudy Giuliani as my presumptive presidential candidate):

 

1) A energetic, young, fresh face who will energize the electorate

2) Not connected to the current administration

3) Pro-Life

4) Pro-Gun

5) A woman or minority to counter Hillary or Obama and put to rest the idea that America only elects white males

 

One of the first names I found that fit these qualifications was that of Sarah Palin, the recently elected Governor of Alaska. I knew that I had stumbled upon a fantastic candidate for national office, but I kept looking in the hope that I could find other potentially viable choices. However, after looking at every GOP governor, senator, and congressperson, I found that Palin had only become more appealing.

 

She was certainly energetic and young, having become governor at only 42 years of age. Watching her speches and campaign ads, I discovered that she was definitely a new kid of leader, coming off more as a spunky soccer-mom than a stuffy career politician. As for abortion, she was staunchly pro-life; and as a lifetime NRA member she was the most pro-gun candidate in the country. Furthermore, her experiences in rural Alaska provided a perfect complement to the big-city credentials of candidates like Giuliani. Her moderately libertarian positions on most other issues also match up perfectly to Giuliani.

 

There was thing about Palin that initially worried me – “lack of experience”. She had only been elected governor in 2006, and her only previous experience was as a two terms as a city councilwoman and two more as mayor in Wasilla, AK (population 8,471 in 2005) followed up by a failed campaign for lieutenant governor and a brief stint on Alaska’s Oil and Natural Gas Conservation Commission. This didn’t seem very appealing at first, but then I took the time to look closer at Palin’s history. What I had failed to realize was that she had habitually knocked of powerful incumbent opponents and was a quick learner on the job. In the 2006 gubernatorial election, she rolled over scandal-prone incumbent Frank Murkowski in the GOP primary, then went on to defeat former governor Tony Knowles in the general election – pretty impressive. Further back, she had knocked off an entrenched incumbent to become mayor of Wasilla, then developed a reputation as a hard-nosed, effective mayor. Her performance in Wasilla got her elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors and earned her the nickname “Sarah Barracuda”.

 

In the end, I decided that Sarah Palin had actually compiled a rather astounding record of achievements in her 42 years, and was more than capable of making the jump to the national level. So now I ask you who you would rather have as your Vice-President. You could accept conventional wisdom and choose from the lineup of old men currently being bantered about, or you could choose an inspiring leader like Sarah Palin. As for me, I’m going with “Sarah Barracuda”, a candidate who will help us win the election and then deliver solid results.

So, I’m back from the hospital, again. I didn’t explain it clearly, but I was in the hospital all last weekend until Monday evening with a nasty stomach virus. I felt good when I got home, but for whatever reason, I started coughing and by Tuesday evening I was back in the hospital with respiratory issues. I would rather break each finger individually than have trouble breathing. At some point, no machine or medicine is going to keep me breathing, so I always get nervous when breathing feels difficult.

At any rate, I’m out and feel better. I’m trying to decide what to do today, whether to stay in or drag myself out. I’m not exactly sure. For a moment I thought about going to see Death Race or Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but life is too fucking short. There has to be something else. Life is bigger.

So, I finished reading The Tyrant by Michael Cisco and I couldn’t have been more impressed.  It’s the story of a brilliant fifteen-year-old girl, crippled by Polio, a graduate student revered for her work with ectoplasm. The stuff of the afterlife. Being so renowned, this girl, Ella, is invited to assist in an experiment that could change the way the world sees death. It’s an experiment with an epileptic man with unheard-of mental abilities. Through deep trances, he can project his consciousness not only from life into death, but even a state of possible life, the place before one lives or dies. For the experiment he descends into death, sending back both data and visual images displayed on lab monitors. Ella sees what he sees, and ultimately what he becomes. In life he’s a sad, cryptic man, but in death he’s brutal and vicious. He’s the Tyrant. He’s the man Ella loves. As for the experiment, it has unexpected and devastating consequences for the world of the living.

It’s difficult to fully describe this novel, it’s so different from anything of its kind. It’s not the kind of story that one can explain from point A to point B, it’s not full of characters who explain everything to the reader. At its core, it’s like riding a flaming tour bus through the world of human nightmares and beyond. It’s a little reminiscent of The Sound and the Fury in that it’s narrated in a stream of consciousness. Forget punctuation marks and neat paragraphs. Through his prose Cisco captures the essence of nightmares, he puts them into words. For a good section of the book Ella sees through the Tyrant’s eyes and we see through hers. We see things vivid and strange, beautiful and hideous. Scenes shift from place to place, just as they do in sleep, a flood of imagery. We see the fiery pits of Hell, people chained together, taunted and tortured ceaselessly by demons. We see cities in which the dead slaughter the living. This book isn’t a quick read, Cisco’s writing is so rich and decadent that one can’t devour it quickly. This book takes a little patience, it asks a certain amount of focus, but it’s definitely worth it.

Author Catherynne M. Valente wrote an amazing post over at Ecstatic Days on how sci-fi has prepared her for the future…

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is one of the better little novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, an Autism Spectrum disorder. Christopher likes to walk his neighborhood late at night when the world is quiet and seems empty. He likes the solitude, it’s comforting. One evening he finds something quite disturbing, his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, stabbed to death with a garden-fork. His neighbor finds him holding poor Wellington, so of course, she calls the police. Christopher cannot tell lies, Asperger’s doesn’t allow it, he gets to go home with a stern warning to stay out of trouble. Christopher likes dogs, and murder mysteries, he’s a genius with puzzles, so he decides to investigate Wellington’s murder and write his investigation as a novel for a school project. 

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from this book, but I couldn’t put it down. Haddon masterfully captures the behaviors of a person with Asperger’s. Christopher thrives on logic and order, he’s brilliant with math and solving puzzles. He’s emotionally detached from people, he doesn’t understand the subtleties of emotions and body language. He doesn’t like talking to most people because they do and say things that he genuinely doesn’t understand, which is frightening to him. He loves the idea of being an astronaut living alone in outer-space, he finds absolute safety in solitude. We learn all of this as Christopher narrates the story of his detective work. It’s fantastic how quickly Haddan inspires empathy for Christopher. Behaviors exhibited by people with an Autism Spectrum disorder are often seen by people as extremely odd or even disruptive. They can’t look you in the eye, they cover their ears and rock back and forward. They scream in public for no apparent reason. Through Christopher we better understand the whys of his behaviors, he’s living in a world in which he simply doesn’t always fit. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time isn’t just about a murdered dog, it’s really so much bigger. The story is so compelling because Christopher pushes himself so far out of his comfort-zone, he does things that terrify him. Ultimately, he discovers far more than who murdered Wellington.

Okay, there are things I didn’t like about The Dark Knight. I thought it ran a little long. I thought Harvey Dent’s CG disfigured face looked ridiculous. Christopher Nolan’s Gotham is very real, there’s not a hint of fantasy, it’s a look and feel that separates his Batman from the rest. It’s a style that is entirely consistent until Harvey Dent wakes up in the hospital. His disfigurement is rendered in CGI that just doesn’t fit within the context of the world Nolan so painstakingly built. Lastly, Christian Bale’s “Bat Rasp,” the voice he uses as Batman, is incredibly stupid. It ruins all of his dialogue, which is particularly unfortunate since he has far more dialogue in The Dark Knight than in Batman Begins.

However, the entire movie is absolutely worth seeing solely because of Heath Ledger. His Joker is entirely worth nine dollars and two and a half hours. The character is brilliantly acted and written. He’s so cold, so dark, but so driven. He truly enjoys mayhem and destruction. His entire purpose in life is to prove that chaos is the only true constant. The only thing that’s reliable is the fact that nothing is reliable. He’ll do anything to prove his point, even die. He’d gladly die for his cause. One scene in particular gave me the chills…

Batman’s moral code won’t allow him to kill, the Joker wants to prove that this code will break like anything. After an extended chase through Gotham, the Joker stands in the middle of the street with Batman quickly bearing down on him atop the Bat-cycle. He stands, not moving, not planning on moving. Being run down in cold blood would serve his purpose. He says, “come on, hit me…” over and over. In that moment, he’s ready to die, he wants to die, if it means completely destroying the part of Batman that is most precious. It’s my favorite scene in the entire movie, it’s why I’ll go again.

So, this is kind of a local to Tampa hate blog. On Saturday the 19th we’ll be host to the first annual Red Bull Flugtag. Basically, the event involves people building homemade flying machines and riding them down a 30 foot ramp in order to soar over Tampa Bay. However, most of them don’t so much soar as crash and sink. Yet, it’s THE BIGGEST EVENT IN TAMPA, it’s on the news every day, people are burning with Flugtag fever. Some cities get art festivals or renowned stage-plays, we get Flugtag. Oh, and to make the event even more classy, their web site has super awesome embedded audio which makes any site extra cool.

So, I’m back from the midnight screening of The Dark Knight, and honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it. I know that whenever Heath Ledger was on-screen doing his Joker thing I was entirely entertained. His Joker is entirely different from Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Ledger’s Joker takes absolutely no pleasure in anything but chaos. He doesn’t care about money, or power, or controlling Gotham’s crime syndicate, or even his own life. He burns things just to watch them burn. He also has no definitive backstory. No name. No previous criminal record. He doesn’t exist until he becomes The Joker. He tells different stories about his disfigurement, but they’re all probably lies. Ledger played the role perfectly. I could have easily watched two hours of the Joker being crazy and talking about chaos, but sadly, I suppose, they had to have other characters and such. Though, I was really happy to see Cillian Murphy back as the Scarecrow for a few minutes.

Maybe I have to see the movie again, under less hyped up circumstances. I know I should be raving about it, but something just felt off.

I read some pretty strange fiction. It’s dark, it’s surreal, it’s gorgeous. Whenever I read something like Veniss Underground or The Etched City, I always wonder who could take such truly bizarre works of the imagination and create them visually. Who could bring such strange creatures and worlds to life in movies? Anyone? Until last night, I didn’t really know. Until last night, I hadn’t seen Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

I’ve decided that Guillermo del Toro can take anyone’s wildest dreams and bring them to life on the big screen. He takes cold CGI and gives it warmth and vibrance. His imagery is so absolutely outlandish, yet utterly believable. I guess I should have realized it after Pan’s Labyrinth, but I didn’t actually see that in its full theatrical glory. Also, there’s such a sharp contrast between Hellboy and Hellboy II, the former being a fun, but typical comic book movie and the latter being a simple yet elegant fairy tale with absolutely stunning visuals. With the right budget, I think del Toro could bring any world alive.

One of my favorite authors, Jeff VanderMeer, recently posted some excellent advice for writers wanting to have a solid presence online…

(1) Choose your level of involvement with the internet, and stick to it. If you want minimal involvement, create a static website about your book or other creative endeavor. العاب ربح الجوائز حقيقية If you want medium-level involvement do a blog. If you want more, do more. But decide upfront what your approach will be, how much time you can spend, and whether you can actually follow through or not. تعلم لعب البوكر As in any area of life, you will be judged by what you do, not what you say you’re going to do. العب واكسب The disconnect between words and actions will determine how much integrity you have in other people’s eyes.

It’s definitely worth a read.

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