Tipped scales

The richest 2% of adilts own more than 1/2 of the world's household wealth.

The richest 10% of adults accounts for 80% of the assets.

The bottom 50% of the world's adult population owns barely 1%.

America has 6% of the world's population, and 34% of its household wealth.

Boingy Boingy

Back from Australia. If you go there: Margaret River. Plain and simple--good wine, beeeeeeautiful landscapes, and wild kangaroos and bunnyrabbits galore.

Erin and I survived driving on the wrong side of the road. We survived the limited choice of fish and chips or fish and chips for lunch in many small towns. I watched her play awesome at Worlds. I came back with a renewed love of ultimate and a new hope and determination for the next year of play as well as a hatred for my injury during nationals. I now (mostly) understand cricket and rugby and now realize that they are much more exciting than baseball and hockey.

Seriously.

Its good to come back to the right side of the road, no option for fish and chips and free ketchup, and a couple of dogs. G'day Yanks!

Viva la vote!

AMERICA RESPONDS TO RENAISSANCE TAN!
Thanks for reading and listening voters! Oh joyous House of Representatives, you are blue again--and probably Senate. And Donald Rumsfeld runs like a little girl.

Still a success.

I don't want to say a whole lot more about Nationals this year. We were close--SO CLOSE. We can do better.

Despite the votes to the contrary, Jekyll and Hyde perhaps should have been our logo.

I pity the teams that will encounter me with a healed hamstring--I've been inspired by my teammates like I never have been before--and I'll try my hardest to live up to my index card.

Basic Comprehension.

I read this, and I remember this. It's times like this where I remember the above, and see this.

His administration better take this election as a mandate from the people--it's a much clearer one than he got before.

Time after time they've done the wrong thing or nothing at all, and haven't been held (or held themselves) accountable.

I started writing a list of things--HUGE NATION AND WORLD CHANGING THINGS--that the administration and congress have done the exact opposite of their civic, public, and moral duty for...but I decided to swipe it and just plea that you vote with your minds and what you feel deep down in your heart is right.

Another thing on my mind. The media hasn't really been doing their job in Iraq. Whether that's their fault or the US Military's pathetic "enbed" program, I feel like I don't have any real visual reference for the war in Iraq. As a citizen, I should. Everything is very much third person.

Is this not why you are here?!

I couldn't be prouder of my team. 15-4 in the finals. Winning all games. Bring it Sarasota. Atlanta is coming!!! ALL OF US!

Wag of the finger to Fox.

Hallelujah! Preach it William!

Part one. Part two. Part three.

Some of the more interesting YouTube comments:

"Did anyone notice the video editing? Watch it again very carefully - whenever Bill leans forward in his chair (like he does when he feels intensely about something), they'd cut to a wide shot.. and then cut back very quickly. It's a trick used in suspense films all the time - the film editor at Fox is trying to make us think Bill's not just angry, he's unstable. If this sounds like paranoia to you, then show me any other TV interview *ever* where the editing looked like this."

"A President that can speak! And he is smart! What a frikkin difference from the retard chimp!!!"

"Little Chrissie Wallace got clobbered by the BIG DOG!!!"

"Clinton is an amazing lier. He is a gifted speaker but cant protect the american people."
--to which the next comment in reply was "You are absolutely retarded"

"Clinton should have just ripped his head off. You could tell that he wanted to."

"What really sucks is that we will never see clips of Bush asked similarly hard and biased questions, especially by Fox News. This is unfortunate for one big reason -- its sheer entertainment value. It would be like watching an episode of "Kids Say the Darndest Things" except the answers would be twice as nonsensical and instead of Cosby asking the questions it would be some smug douche bag wearing a giant pink tie."

Double Dose

It's funny how philosophy can drip back into your life at odd times. Twice today, while waiting for PDFs to print at lower resolution (the glamorous part of my job--let me tell you!), I've been halted to ponder my spiritual path. The first occured while reading Promethean: The Created, the newest game from White Wolf Publishing--where I had my internship before I got hired on at DriveThruComics.com. It's basically a roleplaying game where you play a "Frankenstein's monster"--waking up as a fully grown "Promethean" having been made by another Promethean. The end goal of your character is to attain humanity through a long pilgrimage. Like Frankenstein's monster, your character is ultimately rejected by humans who instinctively realize that you aren't one of them....ANYWAYS, there's a passage describing one of the philosophies that characters can adopt--called the refinement of Gold or Aurum:

The soul is a riddle that drives the Aurum. What the soul is has confounded human philosophers for centuries, so the Promethean who takes up the Refinement of Gold doesn't expect to actually find the answer. (If she does at first, she loses this rather grandiose goal in short order.) According to some philosophies, a soul isn't a birthright, it must be attained through devotion, prayer, obedience or other spiritual practices. According to others, humans are born with a soul that they can then cherish or corrupt as they see fit. It's not hard to guess which of these mindsets the Aurum prefer.

Interesting stuff--I hadn't really thought of the "soul" in that regard. I've always adopted the other philosophy mentioned there. Either one is a good argument for "Right" behavior and seem equally compelling.

Then I read an article on Jet Li's Fearless, supposedly his last action film--which is a tragedy in and of itself. The below is an excerpt from the interview, which I found surprising.

"Fearless," Li said, perfectly fits his vision of wushu as more than just self-defense but a path to self-discipline and spiritual peace.

Herein lies the central dichotomy: the Chinese characters for wushu are Zhi (meaning "stop" or "do not") and Ge (meaning "fight" or "war"). Together, Li said, they translate to "stop fighting."

It's a contradiction that's weighed on Li, whose Hollywood films (among them "Romeo Must Die," "The One" and "Unleashed") have been more spectacle that spiritual.

"The message was only how to kick ass, to learn some special move to kill the bad guy," Li said. "But something was missing. [Wushu] is also about how to control yourself, how to become a nice person."

He adds: "Making movies is not my life; it's part of my life."

It's a distinction that was thrown into sharp relief when he and his family were caught in the 2004 tsunami while vacationing in South Asia.

On a trip to the pool with his two small daughters, Li noticed people running toward his hotel, so he started running too. Within a few steps, waves hit his hips, then his chest.

"Then it was too late, the water makes you float," Li said.

When he turned back, "Everything was gone," he said. "The trees were gone, the swimming pool was covered by the ocean. I was standing in the ocean. I looked back, nobody was there."

After a couple more steps, water hit his mouth. His nanny, holding his youngest daughter, started to struggle and the current pulled them out to the ocean.

"He tried to hold the baby, but the water took them out. I couldn't hold them anymore," Li said. "I started yelling . . . "

Hotel employees rushed to help them and brought everyone back inside, above the first floor.

"You're not very afraid at that moment. That was the first wave. But two hours later, the second one came. You think, `I'll die, OK.' But my little girls, my wife . . . that's scary," Li remembered.

That night, Li couldn't sleep at all, so he meditated.

"If God wanted me gone, the water would be here," he said, raising his hand above his forehead. "I couldn't save myself, I couldn't save my daughter, I couldn't swim--but I still have life. What can I do?"

The answer, Li decided, would be to ramp up charity work for his One Foundation (www.one-foundation.com) and to infuse his work with his Buddhist worldview.

"This is the perfect story to match my philosophy," Li says, referencing "Fearless."

The subject of the movie, Huo, turned martial arts into a sport, promoted it as a spiritual discipline and took on all challengers to defend China's martial honor in a series of high-profile exhibition fights against foreigners.

I was going to write about what he must've gone through during those seconds of sheer terror as he saw his daughter being taken out to sea while he was surrounded by one of the most viceral scenes of devastation that humanity can witness. I was going to write about how helpless he must have felt---an athlete at the top of his profession who couldn't swim nor save his family. Instead I'll say that it made me feel great admiration for him--that he is able to face that tragedy with an open mind thanks to years of mental discipline. It is his ability to address and then survive the aftermath of such a thing that makes him fearless and not foolhardy.