Smarties

The only thing we can handle is to cherish what we have now, our career, dream, friends and lover.

The most important in my life is my family. I can't imagine my life without them. We should cherish life. If we have more free time, we could often goes home has a look, the life is sweeter sweetly!

True , the French and British took a lot of punishment and wore down the Germans , but had not the US arrived when it did the Germans may still have won. The French after the mutiny were not going to go on the offense again. The British were taking children and overaged men. All were paying for not having wise strategy and tactics , left over from a century of them not fighting a real war against a major enemy on the continent. Please don't appologize on my behalf for the US coming late to the show. What matters is, we did show up and in time to pull the Allies out of it. French military history speaks for itself. More defeats than victories is a fact. Some people do throw that in the Frenchmens' faces a lot, but at least they are on the side that always wins in the end. Given this, I will not approve of anyone who derides the French soldier for fighting hard and giving it all for his country, and this man served with honor and devotion. These are the most important things one can do for their country.

I have an avocado tree and my dog ad my chicken also eat them, it is not poisonous for them. But I know you can kill a cockatiel and other psitacid birds with a tiny bit of it..

Amen. Whilst the RQE enjoys a well blended, clever cocktail She is quite bored of self aggrandizing drivel about perfection. If someone is that worried about the blend of their cocktail, they aren't drinking fast enough.

One point on the saving glut in China is that there are no available and reliable investment vehicles in China. The stock markets are crooked and opaque, the housing market has a huge gap between rental and resell prices, even with very low barriers to entry, there is incredible competition to start or grow a new business and credit to finance an ongoing small or medium size business in non-existent for a private, unconnected business.

In addition there is NO social safety net of any kind. Not health insurance, pensions, welfare or even the basics like your home is yours forever. At any time your local district government can take it away for a pittance.

Add to that a highly (hidden) individualistic culture, massive distrust (think cultural revolution), social insecurity (7 million new college graduates a year), complete lack of social capital, rampant corruption, and you are left all on your own.

Basically, people have no choice but to save.

Why is there terrorism? Or more to the point, the whiny question: "Why do they hate us?"

The answer is very simple. "We" make "them" poor.

I fall into that category as well, and the holidays are always a special time to reunite with racial epithets, commemorative Reagan inaugural plates, and the latest version of Deer Hunter.

I don't pretend to understand exactly what motivates the particular case of the libertarian urge to abolish FDIC, or the more general urge to strip regulations of our most non-cherished freedoms such as not having my deposits insured, and it does flummox me to no end.

Perhaps if you tried some yoga you might not be so angry. And since you think "I happen to think that D.C. is a mean little city with little to offer beyond social and political ambition," you obviously haven't gotten particularly engaged with the many community groups that are working to make the city a better place. So why not just go somewhere else instead of living with such angst?

I love Radiolab, though I haven't listened to the "Parasites" episode yet. I wonder whether the aspects you find annoying are the same ones that draw me in.

I wrote a paper for a government class about the inability of our political system, financed, as it is, with corporate money, to cope with a party that represents the left. And I used that quote from Woodward's "The Agenda". It is pretty much a forgone conclusion that the American political system has shifted righward, but the cap and trade issue as you present it crystallizes the point very well.
In Congressional politics, it's pretty apparent that the constant view toward the next election and the need for campaign funds steers Democrats into the arms of corporations that generally have paleoconservative agendas, but I wonder why Democrats cannot elect a president who, once elected, represents their view. What exactly is it that prevents Obama, the most liberal American president in a generation, and the greatest Democratic congressional majority in quite a while from pursuing a liberal, progressive agenda instead pretending to do just that?

Disgusting. Donny...Really. That is not food. That is goop. I can give you recipes that won't result in you pooping out dough balls. Come on!

Is that picture a before or a after?

She has pretty hair. He was looking at her hair, and then saw something shiny on the ground, which reminded him, he needs to find more money to give away.

I'm pretty sure Sarcozzzy is enjoying watching Obama...I can hear the "Ho Ho Ho" naselly laugh of the French class kids on The Simpsons.

Am I allow to reference The Simpsons on the blog? You use words everyday that I only read about in occasional non-8th grade level books.

Last night, I dreamed Billie Mays was cutting my hair. My wife was ticked off by how much the haircut cost.

It makes sense why Neda would be killed by the CIA however it doesn't make sense why Iran would kill Michael Jackson. He was a high profile superstar adored by millions who had recently converted to Islam and who was about to gain a whole new load of publicity in which he would no doubt have spoken about his new religion and what it meant to him...

I can think of one particular warmongering nation that has for the past several years dedicated itself to demonising Islam for political purposes who wouldn't want a superstar icon coming along and undoing all their hard work, and it ain't Iran. YOU do the math.

If I poke fun at the phoniness of male gallantry it's because I don't like women doing yoga? If I fret about gentrification — a fancy word for well-off white people displacing poor minorities — it's because I don't like Hispanics? If I insinuate a ethno-cultural double standard of who is and isn't allowed to leer at women, it's because I'm the racist?

Not everyone expresses themselves in plain, straightforward language and sometimes seeing a person's meaning requires more penetration than is available on the first, hasty pass. Obviously this is sarcasm. Then the natural question should have been what is the other meaning for which the sarcasm is only a suggestion. What a writer wants more than anything else is good readers and you are letting me down, Dan.

I've lived in Mount Pleasant for six years now. I happen to know a fair amount about the composition of the neighborhood. Yes, I know that it is a heavily Salvadorian neighborhood. But it's not an exclusively Salvadorian neighborhood. It's mixed Hispanic. When reaching for a characteristic nationality, am I required to adhere to a system of priority based on precision demographic?

Okay, I'll make a concession. I'm contradicting myself here by insisting on much from my readers with some of my turns of phrase, but then being lazy with respect to nationality. Given a hundred people out on the street, they're not all Salvadorian — again, neighborhood of many South and Central American origins — so I figured that I would make a concession to my readers, not be pedantic about nationality, and go with a representative one with which most of my readers, most of whom do not live in Mount Pleasant or concern themselves with the particularities of its national breakdown, would be most familiar. Ethnicity is a sensitive issue and perhaps I should insist on veracity here.

However, I would ask — and you are not obliged to grant – a concession in return. Mount Pleasant and large swaths of D.C. east of Rock Creek Park aren't just "mixed" neighborhoods in some uncontroversial way. Gentrification is contentious. Perhaps you've seen some of the graffiti around the neighborhood expressing some of this contention? Or maybe not: the Heights was sure to scrub the "Mt. Pleasant for Hispanics" stencil-work from the electrical utility box in front of their patio quickly enough. Yoga in the park isn't a neutral act. Look at the composition of the yoga crowd. Yoga isn't just exercise; it's a cultural trope of a specific social and economic class. Yoga in the park is what prosperous white people do in place of graffiti. This was a tremendously bold act of territorial pissing.

Ours isn't just a "mixed" neighborhood. It's a neighborhood in transition. Consider the ridership of the S busses. When you get on those buses, they're already full of Hispanic riders, who then get off at Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan. The places where they work and conduct their business are still in these neighborhoods, though the people have already had to move further out. The new Target, Best Buy, all bode poorly for the bodegas on Mount Pleasant Street, which have already started going out of business. The Kenyon Square and Highland Park condominiums are harbingers of high-priced living that's the future of Mount Pleasant. The apartments on the man street are being renovated at a surprising pace — and they're not being renovated for the sake of their current residents. The group houses are almost all gone, remodeled into million-dollar single family houses. When the Deauville burned, it was a controversy because it left a large number of illegal immigrants without shelter, but afraid to seek public assistance. When that building is rebuilt, it won't be rebuilt for working class Hispanics. We're not just partaking in the local diversity. We're an invasive species killing it off. It's not all good.

Think for a minute how yesterday afternoon's event went down, Dan. And I'm sure that as a neighborhood resident in good standing, you can similarly imagine it. I'm sure that when the first few people showed up to unfurl their yoga mats, the park was heavily peopled, as it always is, with the usual distribution of primarily Hispanic neighborhood residents. And I'm sure that after the preliminaries of the yoga event reached a certain size, those Hispanics all realized that they weren't welcome anymore and departed. And I'm sure that all the nice yoga gals were happy to see them leave. Don't think that everyone wasn't eyeing each other carefully yesterday afternoon. I titled my post "There Goes the Neighborhood," but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thought that.

As for who I am, Dan? I don't know, scroll down. There are five years of archives here. If you look a mere three posts back you will notice that I have long, unkempt hair, wear fancy shirts, bike commute to work and read highbrow fiction. Maybe I'm a SNAG too, but have a bit of a sense of humor about myself. We each represent one social and economic class or other. Pleases see your own for what it is: not the sacrosanct and righteous ONE TRUE WAY, but just another parochialism. SNAGS and yoga girls are not so terrific that we should all tread lightly around them. They can take a little ribbing.

But who are you, Dan? What is it about our culture that produces trolls in such droves? Why is that you think that mucking up my comments section is an acceptable thing to do? I happen to disagree with Donna C. of We Love DC, the woman whose story about the yoga studio I linked to above. I happen to think that D.C. is a mean little city with little to offer beyond social and political ambition, but I don't feel the need to slander her for her unworldliness in her comments section. So what nastiness is it that makes you tick?

How about "mixed" you intolerant loser. You don't like women doing yoga, you don't like metrosexuals, you don't like Latinos (who are probably Salvadoran, anyway, if you actually knew anything about your neighborhood). Who the hell are you, anyway?

True that. I hear you.

There are some things that some people will never understand because there are no memorials or monuments.

MLK's death, in fact the riots of the long, hot summers, where immensely important. In fact, they are the most important moments of the 60's.

Watts, the first riot, was less than a week after the signing of the LBJ's civil rights act. Five days later. That’s all. It was a shocking experience was for white America.

We finally acquiesced and gave this nigras the same rights as us and they go and burn down their neighborhoods.

It was shocking and resulting in a divide.

MLK's death is/was a divide that is still felt in was hidden and profound. Black people in America will always have a complicated relationship with patriotism, but one thing is true: Black folks know American is a fickle and insecure bitch.

Hmm, we are all symbiants. I was struck by a science article that suggested the eye was developed from when a primordial organism began chewing on the head of another organism and eventually burrowed into the skull, which made the wounded area sensitive to light; the invading organism blended eventually became so enmeshed with its hose that it blended its DNA and eventually became a light-sensitive organ. Just think, our liver, heart, skin, and testees could have the result of one thing eating or colliding with another creature to create a new being. Cosmic in a way, isn't it.

Given his cabinet choices, bipartisian obession, and continuity in war and secrecy with the previous Administration, I think Obama should be painted in a Bush likeness. They both have the big ears.