Great Pizza Jernts

If you're interested in finding some of the great pizza places, Slice: Brooklyn Archives is blog is worth checking. Learn about the differences between slices at Lenny's and L&B Spumoni Gardens. See what it's like to get a slice of pizza at 2 am. Discover why John Travolta ate two slices folded together in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever. Also rated are pizza places outside of NY. (There is no such thing as decent pizza in Texas)

Thank you Harry Taylor

President Bush's advisors have been desperately searching for a bullhorn moment, hoping to rally the quickly diminishing support for his policies. Yesterday, at a Bush town hall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, Harry Taylor was among the carefully picked people in the audience. But Harry turned out to be a real person, and instead of the usual "we support you and are praying for you" comments and questions, Harry asked the questions that a lot of people wanted to ask this president. This may be a bullhorn moment, but not of the type the adminstration was looking for. It remains to be seen whether the right wing talk show hosts will try to discredit Harry, as they tried to do with Cindy Sheehan, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson and others who have disagreed with this administration's policies. Right now the White House is too preoccupied with damage control with the latest leaker in chief scandal. Meanwhile, a Thank You Harry website is now online. It's really unfortunate that a 61 year old real estate agent in Charlotte, North Carolina has to ask the questions that career reporters have failed to ask. I guess Harry doesn't have to worry about staying in favor with this administration.

So what else is new?

Okay, most people now know that the reasons for going to war in Iraq were based on lies: the WMDs, the ties to Al Qaida, the connection to 911 and so on. Now, it's revealed in Scooter Libby's court papers, that President Bush authorized the use of classified information, intended to be leaked to the press, to document the false claims for going to war. One person after another has stated that this administration was intent on going to war with Iraq from day one, long before 911. I have to wonder when the remaining 33% of the population who support this president are going to take a good look at what's happened and realize they've been wrong. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, 61 year old Harry Taylor went off script at a Bush "town hall" meeting and asked questions many of us have wanted to ask him.

Crooks and Liars has the video here.

I believe Harry is a real estate agent in Charlotte. I wonder how his listings will do now? He could be in line for an IRS audit as well.

Now that the Republicans are imploding, it's important for Democrats to make sure their plan is heard. It's likely that the Democrats one or both chambers of Congress in November. You can be sure that the Republicans will be pounding the theme that the Democrats have no plan other than cut and run and tax and spend. They'll also be claiming that if the Democrats gain a majority in Congress, they'll try to impeach Bush. This is a bad thing?

Send this to everybody you know!

I just got one of those forwarded emails claiming that I should forward it to everybody in my address book. It was a dire warning about a virus that has been discovered but so far a fix hasn't been found. It didn't pass the smell test so I looked it up and it turned out to be a hoax. The bottom line is this. People use fear so sell things and that includes politicians. I've made peace with my computer a long time ago. The home computer is too new and the software hasn't been perfected. Maybe we'll be around long enough to see this happen, I don't know. But until then, I'm not going to let the troublemakers ruin it for me. I still compare all of this to the early days of color TV. People were constantly fidgeting with the controls. Images had green lines around them, people had purple faces, you had to adjust the color and fine tuning every time you changed a channel. People who had the money called the TV man in to degauss the picture (as if that did anything other than make the TV man richer). The vertical control would have to be adjusted or the picture would start rolling. Now the TVs don't even have fine tuning controls or vertical or horizontal controls. You just plug it in and turn it on. It even finds the channels for you. For $250 you can go to Walmart and buy a Sanyo 32" TV that will blow away anything costing thousands of dollars in the old days. And you don't even need the TV man because it'll last for 20 years and then you throw it out. I think computers will get to the point where they won't need constant tweaking, monitoring, and protecting. Maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see the day when we can walk into Walmart and buy a high powered computer for $200 that will be safe from viruses, but until then, you need to make peace with the unit because the people who make money from selling fear are the ones who win by preventing you from getting any enjoyment from the technology.

Daring act that saved so many

By Kevin Cavanagh
The Hamilton Spectator

"Knowledge really is power. It changes the course of history, saves lives, provides the tools that should enable us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past.

Rudolph Vrba, who died last week in British Columbia at age 82, knew all of this as well as anyone ever did.

When he was 20 years old, Vrba staged an ingenious escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp. His flight was the ultimate transfer of knowledge, resulting in many potential victims being alerted to the mass slaughter being carried out by the Nazis.

Vrba's revelations caused international outcry in the final months of the Second World War. Because his inside knowledge got to the outside world, thousands of families avoided being rounded up and herded into gas chambers. It's estimated that Vrba's information saved the lives of 100,000 Hungarian Jews who would otherwise have become more genocide victims.

Generations are alive today because of that turn of fate. How many discoveries, contributions and achievements would not have happened in the past 62 years if Vrba's knowledge of the Holocaust had never got past the barbed wire?

Sharing and procreating knowledge would continue to define Vrba's life. Besides going on to teach medical students at the University of British Columbia, he continued to speak about his Holocaust knowledge. He provided decisive testimony against such defendants as Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. And he published the book, I Cannot Forgive, a volume of his recollections of Auschwitz.

Knowledge was the man, but knowledge without living memory loses some of its potency, and Vrba's inevitable passing sadly weakens a connection to our past. In this particular instance we lose first-hand experience about a terrifying dimension of human nature.

Vrba's was a unique voice among the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who directly link us to a haunting chunk of history that helped shape the values of today's Canada, and the geopolitical path that the entire world has taken into the 21st century.

We are in no danger of forgetting our past. Archives and chronicles, books and other media mean we have no excuse for slipping into a pool of ignorance.

But those who do are much the poorer for it."

The Hammer needs a crowbar

Tom Delay quit because he knows he can't get re-elected. Of course, that won't be the reason he'll give for quitting. Whenever a politician gets caught doing nasty things, shape our opinions of them. Instead of acknowlegeing that he may have done something wrong, he takes a swipe at them there Librul Democrats who are trying to take advantage of his predicament. Maybe the Librul Democrats put those illegal campaign contributions in his hands too? Delay is innocent until proven guilty, but there are a lot of guilty people around him getting ready to talk to save their own skins. Delay will be praised for putting his party ahead of his personal gain, but he was becoming a huge liability to the Republicans and if it wasn't obvious to him, his party probably made him realize that he couldn't win. Tom Delay will do well. He'll end up writing books, giving speeches on the importance of Jay-sus in government. He'll probably be a TV analyst for Fox. He went from being an exterminator in Sugarland Texas to the top of the game. He used the system to his advantage. And about the Texas congressional redistricting that he engineered? John Lennon was right.

How Not To Run a School

It's interesting to see that Lafayette High School in Brooklyn is still a cesspool of troublemakers and misfits. You'd think that after 3 decades they'd find a way to improve the environment. It's not surprising that parents who make meager wages, work three jobs in order to move to the suburbs and keep their kids out of schools like this.

Anupam Chander: Asian Youths Suffer Harassment in Schools:

Associated Press piece, without byline, published in NY Times:

Eighteen-year-old Chen Tsu was waiting on a Brooklyn subway platform after school when four high school classmates approached him and demanded cash. He showed them his empty pockets, but they attacked him anyway, taking turns pummeling his face.

He was scared and injured -- bruised and swollen for several days -- but hardly surprised.

At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged ''severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates.'' Since then, the Justice Department credits Lafayette officials with addressing the problem -- but the case is far from isolated.

Nationwide, Asian students say they're often beaten, threatened and called ethnic slurs by other young people, and school safety data suggest that the problem may be worsening. Youth advocates say these Asian teens, stereotyped as high-achieving students who rarely fight back, have for years borne the brunt of ethnic tension as Asian communities expand and neighborhoods become more racially diverse.