The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20050302161217/http://home.earthlink.net:80/~dswint/photoblog.htm
March 2, 2005
Updated Monday - Friday. Images and songs © copyright 2005 by D.L. Swint. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all photos were taken in Dallas, TX.
Recommended items from Blogland and beyond

A fine two-part piece by Gordon Atkinson at Real Live Preacher contemplates the nature of grief and compassion. Here are parts one and two.

A 30-year-old California high school teacher was arraigned Monday at a Sacramento court, accused of having sex with a 16-year-old student in a car while her two-year child was strapped into the back seat. Geez...all our substitute teachers ever did was spring some dumb pop quizzes.

Video time: When teachers attack.

A photo essay, courtesy of Rock And Roll Confidential | Your Band Sucks: The Hall Of Douchebags...a collection of really bad band promotional photos.

Now Playing Online


Hearts of Space

Hearts of Space began as a Bay area radio show in 1973, went national on public radio in 1983 and started an independent record label in 1984.

In 2001 we launched our online music streaming service — The Hearts of Space Archive. We also sold the record label to Valley Entertainment. While we still help produce new recordings for it, we no longer run the label day to day. These pages will tell you more about us and what we've been doing for almost 30 years.

Our goal has always been to bring you great music using the latest technology, deepen your understanding of the ambient music genre, and save you time. The good stuff is out there...we aim to help you find it.

Additional Listening

Song time again...this one written on 2/11/05
Taking That Walk

Here's a link to a very rough demo of a song I wrote on 2/1/05:
Hiding From the Harvest Moon

Readings

Inside the Committee that Runs the World
By David J. Rothkopf
Foreign Policy

September 11, 2001, was a catalytic event that revealed the core character of the Bush administration’s national security team. As rival factions fought for the president’s ear, the transformative ideals espoused by the neocons gained ascendancy—triggering a rift that has split the Republican foreign-policy establishment to its foundations.

The inner circles of the U.S. national security community—members of the National Security Council (NSC), a select number of their deputies, and a few close advisors to the president—represent what is probably the most powerful committee in the history of the world, one with more resources, more power, more license to act, and more ability to project force further and swifter than any other convened by king, emperor, or president.

At the same time, the political party controlling that committee has a grip on power in Washington unprecedented in recent history. For the first time in nearly eight decades, the Republican Party has won control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives in two consecutive elections. Yet, despite this political monopoly, the elites who exert the most influence on this little-understood, shadowy committee are being buffeted and pulled apart by forces from within.

An increasingly bitter philosophical debate pits the supporters of the policies of former President George H.W. Bush and many of his one-time team of foreign-policy experts, led by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, against those who back views embraced by President George W. Bush and his team, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. What Scowcroft calls the “traditionalists” of the Bush 41 team are pitted against the “transformationalists” of the Bush 43 team, pragmatists vs. neocons, internationalists vs. unilateralists, the people who oversaw the end of the Cold War against those who oversaw the beginning of the War on Terror. Of course, the irony is that many of these people were not too long ago seen as parts of a whole. All are or once were close. What happened?

Inside the Committee that Runs the World is continued here

 

Tests of faith
Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe?
By Ian Sample
The Guardian

First for some figures. Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world.

Faith has long been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition, faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry. In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief to a hunch. It places the assumptions at the heart of many religions on the rockiest of ground.

So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.

One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

Tests of faith is continued here

 

Money and Politics in the Land of Oz
By Quentin P. Taylor
The Independent Review

“The story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to pleasure children of today.” So wrote L. Frank Baum in the introduction to his popular children’s story published in 1900. As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly have conceived that his “modernized fairly tale” would attain immortality when it was adapted to the silver screen forty years later. Though not a smash hit at the time of its release, The Wizard of Oz soon captured the hearts of the movie-going public, and it has retained its grip ever since. With its stirring effects, colorful characters, and memorable music (not to mention Judy Garland’s dazzling performance), the film has delighted young and old alike for three generations. Yet, as everyone knows, The Wizard of Oz is more than just another celluloid classic; it has become a permanent part of American popular culture.

Is Oz, however, merely a children’s story, as its author claimed? For a quarter of a century after its film debut, no one seemed to think otherwise. This view would change completely when an obscure high school teacher published an essay in American Quarterly claiming that Baum’s charming tale concealed a clever allegory on the Populist movement, the agrarian revolt that swept across the Midwest in the 1890s. In an ingenuous act of imaginative scholarship, Henry M. Littlefield linked the characters and the story line of the Oz tale to the political landscape of the Mauve Decade. The discovery was little less than astonishing: Baum’s children’s story was in fact a full-blown “parable on populism,” a “vibrant and ironic portrait” of America on the eve of the new century.

In supporting this thesis, Littlefield drew on Baum’s experience as a journalist before he wrote Oz. As editor of a small newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Baum had written on politics and current events in the late 1880s and early 1890s, a period that coincided with the formation of the Populist Party. Littlefield also indicated that Baum was sympathetic to the Populist movement, supported William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896, and, though not an activist, consistently voted for Democratic candidates. (In 1896, the Populists joined the Democrats in backing Bryan’s bid for the presidency.) Finally, Littlefield noted Baum’s penchant for political satire as evidenced by his second Oz tale, which lampoons feminism and the suffragette movement.

Money and Politics in the Land of Oz is continued here

World Wide Weirdness

6plusequal1

Some very trippy Japanese Flash animation. Enjoy with your favorite substance of alteration.


Bonus Flash animation: a fine little 404 Error message.

The February photo archive is here

A few favorite search tools...

A few favorite online radio stations...

My resume

And since you're already here, enjoy this fine assortment of weblogs...

A Small Victory

Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Blog

An Imperfect Equilibrium

Asymmetrical Information

Bastard Sword

Beautiful Atrocities

Blue Jake

Boing Boing

James Brown

BuzzMachine

Dave Barry

Tim Blair

Joe Bob Briggs

Blog of a Bookslut

The Command Post

Crooked Timber

Daily Kos

Disenchanted

The Flying Space Monkey

Follow Me Here

Gawker

Globe of Blogs

Grim Amusements

Hugh Hewitt

Instapundit

John & Belle Have A Blog

The Known Universe

Jason Kottke

James Lileks (plus his Newhouse column)

little green footballs

Rachel Lucas

Christopher Lydon

Moxie

Newsfeed

Dawn Olsen

oncee's journal

One Hand Clapping

Jerry Michalski's Home on the Web

Virginia Postrel

PseudoPsalms

Raymi the Minx

Emmanuelle Richard

Real Live Preacher

Rebecca's Pocket

Rebecky

Regions of Mind

James Romenesko

Scripting News

Doc Searls

Something Old, Nothing New

Andrew Sullivan

Mark Steyn

Mink Stole

Talking Points Memo

Thought Balloons

Matthew Tobey's The City of Floating Blogs

Tom Tomorrow

Jim Treacher

Joe User

utter wonder

The Volokh Conspiracy

Matt Welch

Wil Wheaton

Oliver Willis

Matthew Yglesias

Meryl Yourish

3/2/05
Transit & Story Pole

3/2/05
Avant

3/2/05
The Other Marx Brother

3/1/05
Not Laundry

3/1/05
Reign Vomit

3/1/05
Abstract Sticker

2/25/05
Pink Flower

2/25/05
Outlet Box

2/25/05
Graffiti

2/25/05
Melted Lamp

2/25/05
Ducks

2/25/05
Cross and Chair

2/24/05
Chain Corner

2/24/05
Feathery

2/24/05
Grate