jasonlamberton

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Damn!

Indoor Skiing/Snowboarding

Please Don't Let Me Die!

Why I Stopped Watching the News on TV

A Letter to Dr. Stephen Hawking

Cardboard Cat Castle Construction Completed

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08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004 09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004 10/01/2004 - 10/31/2004 11/01/2004 - 11/30/2004 12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004 01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005 02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005 03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005 04/01/2005 - 04/30/2005 06/01/2005 - 06/30/2005 07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005 08/01/2005 - 08/31/2005 09/01/2005 - 09/30/2005 10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005 11/01/2005 - 11/30/2005 01/01/2006 - 01/31/2006 03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006 05/01/2006 - 05/31/2006 06/01/2006 - 06/30/2006 07/01/2006 - 07/31/2006 11/01/2006 - 11/30/2006

BUDDY BLOGOLINKS

curlsdivine

elisaism

Deaf Gay Militant Terrorist

BLOGOSPHERE

A deaf forest fire fighter

DeafFreedom.com

Mike's Deaf Politics blog

FreeRepublic.com

Kokonut Pundits: a HoH Republican

instapundit.com

Little Green Footballs

Weapons of Mass Discussion

Jason's Ruminations

rumination. n. The act of pondering; meditation.

blog. n. a personal Web site that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user, also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user; also written web log, Weblog; also called blog (thanks, dictionary.com!)

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Damn!

Check this picture out!

A young boy was arrested for trepassing when he, along with several other kids and adults, attempted to take a glass of water to Terri Schiavo. This is awful! Arresting kids for TRYING to keep someone ALIVE, for God's sake!

It ain't like Terri Schiavo was going to be executed by lethal injection, and these people attempted to physically restrain the government-sanctioned Dr. Kevorkianesque executioner from injecting the lethal bariburates into her veins. Terri Schiavo is starving to death because the government ordered her feeding tube be pulled out. These people just wanted to try to give her water! If this is not an execution, I don't know what this is!

We are standing on a very slippery slope, my fellow Americans.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Indoor Skiing/Snowboarding

Wow. There simply is no limit to human ingenuity. From the second indoor pool ever built in America, which so happens to be at Gallaudet University, humans have been bringing increasingly larger outdoor activities into the confines of the Small Indoors. Ah, the good 'ol Great Outdoors: skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, offroading, surfing, kiteboarding, water skiing, skydiving(!), all adrenaline-filled.

We have seen surfing, water slides, bungee jumping, Formula One go-karting, golf driving ranges, football and baseball, and other activities move indoors. My first shocking exposure to that cold, hard reality of mass modernization was in Minnesota, where I saw several HUGE, hangar-sized superstructures with weird tubes looping outside the exterior. No, it was not some exotic particle accelerator, what I was seeing was indoor water parks. Ah, it made sense, Minnesota gets bitteringly cold all the time, and of course people there want to escape. Thanks to modern technology, they got options.

It was inevitable that someone would try to bring the snow slopes indoors. But, it totally blew me away when I found out that there is more than 300 indoor snow domes, according to snow365.com, scattered all over the globe except for North America! Yes, you read me right, in good 'ol materialistic America, there is nowhere where you can go indoor skiing. If you were from the Netherlands, you would have several locations (I think seven) to pick from! Even in South Africa and Dubai! I was almost ashamed till I learned that there are plans to build indoor snowparks in New Jersey, Texas, Atlanta, and Mexico City. The one in New Jersey, Xanadu, wil open in Sping 2007 , cost $1.3 billion and feature a 140-foot high snow dome covering 250,000 square foot. (source: CNN.com)

Welcome to the future, my friend. Starting to look like The Matrix, with its huge domed city-pods, eh?

Friday, March 18, 2005

Please Don't Let Me Die!

I am pissed off. Who gives the government the right to kill people who are alive? Notwithstanding capital punishment, which is not the topic of this fulmination, this is about Terri Schiavo. She had been on the backburner for quite a while, but today is when she is scheduled to start dying from induced starvation, a pivotal moment in the future history of this great nation. Think of this like the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision. Ever since, it has cascaded into 44 million pre-born babies being killed largely because of personal convenience. You kill when you intervene and stop the miracle of life from living. Thankfully, the death penalty has greatly reduced to the point where Scott Peterson has a better chance of getting married to two women and dying at 88 of old age than meeting his maker in San Quentin's gas chamber.

Terri Schiavo, in a nut-shell, has been in a coma ever since she sustained brain damage due to a cut-off of her respiratory system, caused by increasingly questionable, but unknown reason. The blurry picture thus painted seems to look like Michael Schiavo, her estranged husband, had something to do with it. Terri has been in a vegetative state since 1990, fed by a feeding tube. She breathes on her own. She blinks and laughs and can look around. Bottom line: she's alive. Not by a respirator. On her own. She would starve to death in about a week if her feeding tube was removed. And that's just exactly what Michael Schiavo wants to do, with the courts on his side.

The ironic thing is that Terri's parents desperately wants to continue taking care of their daughter, something which they already have been doing. They really want Michael to divorce Terri, so her parents can once again become the legal guardians of their daughter and ensure that she receives the care she needs. It is strange that Michael Schiavo is sitting on a $780,000 medical malpractice award made to Terri, something that he probably will lose if nothing is done and Terri continues to live. He already has another woman and kid.

You know what? People in vegetative states have woken up! Just check out Kate's Journey, which essentially is evidence that Terri Schiavo can wake up someday in the future (with its technology). Kate Adamson was worse off than Terri. She had her feeding tube removed, and went through excruciating pain for eight days. Then she woke up!

The person who removes Terri Schiavo's feeding tube will be carrying out an execution of a disabled woman merely for being disabled, a homicide (executed criminals have "homicide" indicated as cause of death on their death certificates). I am afraid, very afraid of the huge precedent this sets.

If I were Terri Schiavo's parents, I would exercise my Second Amendment rights and ensure the survival of my innocent daughter by any means necessary.

This all boils down to our inalienable right of Freedom, and whether if the Government supersedes our basic sovereign right to be alive. If being disabled forfeits my God-given guarantee of freedom, I would wrap my 2nd amendment priveleges around myself like a protective cloak and arm myself (and other Deaf people who still want to freely and primarily use ASL and not be foricibly cochlear implanted) to the teeth.

Adolf Hitler, before he killed millions of Jews simply because they were Jewish, he began with homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped (including the deaf).

Friday, March 11, 2005

Why I Stopped Watching the News on TV

Today was a perfect example of why I inadvertently stopped watching the news on TV, even Fox News (I have had my fill of O'Reilly, he is no longer authentic - it is because of ratings, methinks). It's the economy, stupid! The media is an industry, and the buck, not ingerity, is the driving force. We are better off getting our news from independent sources, like Drudge and WND (though they are no exemption to the universal human characteristic of innate bias). The media giants feed pseudo-news to the herd of sheep-people (sheepeople, that ought be a new word!) eager to believe every word that is, er, Rather well-said (pun partly intended). If you have a maverick streak like I do, then you are the master of your destiny. Check out Elisa's blog for more on destiny (as opposed to fate). You get to pick the "flavor" of the reality show running 24/7 now, the show called Real Live History. Corgito ergo sum.

Now, to the perfect example, the original reason why I started writing this post. All day, on all the news channels, there has been continuous coverage of that court shooting in Atlanta. Of course I totally sympathize with the judge, court reporter and deputy killed by this deranged guy, who had just stole the deputy's gun. But, that does not mean it is "breaking news." I consider the 3/11 Madrid train bombings as news worthy of "breaking news." Or the resurrection and ascension of Yasser Arafat from atop Mt. Arafat. Not some murder of a white judge by a black guy. I find it ironic because the judge for Saddam's trial was just assassinated, something much more significant, and it received not even a few seconds' worth of coverage by the big media.

Obviously the media is hungry for some big news. Based on my experience as Speaker of the Student Congress at Gallaudet University, it is quite easy to make news. Simply throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of the machinery. What did I do? I pissed off the Chief Justice off enough to initiate impeachment proceedings against me. The Chief Justice, August Berg, though no Rehnquist, was no little guy. He was a late-deafened adult armed with a law degree from an unaccredited school. To make a long story short, I successfully won my defense, and I nearly got him impeached in the process, even though that actually was a violation of the constitution - Chief Justices' decisions are final, and they have immunity from impeachment.

What happened was a coup: In a time of crisis, I was able to overrule a ruling that in itself had immunity from being overruled, and had, by popular support, the powers of an absolute ruler - er - judge, effectively tempered. A good example of people power! Sometimes actions are illegal, but even much more illegal is the deprivation of the spirit of human freedom, which caused me to act in the first place. August Berg rendered an entire meeting, with all its productivity null and void, based on what he thought had happened - a simple parliamentary procedure error made by one senator during committee reports - which never happened. Imagine Chief Justice Rehnquist ruling that, because of a typo in the 3,000-page $187 billion proposal to support a grassroots revolution in Iran, (hypothetical situation here of course) the members of Congress has to come back from vacation to Washington to simply revote on the bill. However, what he thinks is a typo is actually a consequence of his suppressed dyslexia. I know what President Bush would do. He would revert to the neutralize-and-neuter approach.

If you simply drink in what CNNCBSFOXPBSESPNABC gives you on a daily basis without a second thought about what is actually happening in the world, then you are a sheeperson, a member of the herd of sheepeople, blindly idling along, letting the cowboys do the dirty work. But, I assure you, it is very simple to jump fence. It may just be me, but I like to get my hands dirty once in a while.

Vive la revolucion!

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

A Letter to Dr. Stephen Hawking

I was just cleaning out my overly clogged e-mail folders, and came across this letter I sent to Dr. Stephen Hawking, one of my heroes. Just something I thought I should post here.

***

Hello Dr. Hawking,

I want to first say that it is a great honor to be able to directly send you a message, in this age. This feels somewhat like the 19th century, where a regular citizen like myself could walk up to the President for a chat during his daily walks outside the White House, though, being deaf, I probably could not do that without modern technology. I realize that your time is very precious (however illusory it is), so I will keep this brief.

I am a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I teach (despite my youthfulness) developmental mathematics at Gallaudet University as a means to support myself and to sustain my research. My research, which is just beginning, will deal with technologies that augments the communications and aural gap that deaf people routinely face on a daily basis. Right now, I am working on a project that uses a glove to electronically recognize the hand movements of sign language and translates it into voice. I have an especially high stake in this research, because it will enable me to communicate to any hearing person without relying on a paper and pen. I am working under Dr. Jose-Hernandez-Rebollar, the inventor of the AcceleGlove, and currently it is able to translate 200 signs.

The reason I contacted you is not because I need some help on my astrophysics, (your books do that for me!) is because I recognize how effectively you use technology to communicate.

Receiving your new book, "On The Shoulders of Giants" just today, catalyzed an epiphany - I have been reading Newton's work, and his assertion that he was merely "standing on the shoulders of giants" struck a chord in me, and upon receiving your book, it simply *clicked.* I am standing on the shoulders of giants, I would never get where I want to reach in order to help my people if not for all the work done by humans for thousands of years.

My epiphany? I realized that you must have quite a few extra aged speech synthesizers lying around. It would mean very much if you might somehow let me "borrow" or obtain one of these modern marvels. It would enable us to quickly move ahead without having to wait a year for the next round of grant proposals. I would find good use for one with an American accent! ;-)

In closure, if you are quite interested (hopefully), I think you might like reading this passage that I wrote about you a while ago on my website- http://www.jasonlamberton.com/ME.htm down in "My Heroes" list.

I look forward to the future! Thank you, Sir!

Jason Lamberton

Postscript: I just happened across the note on your website regarding "The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe" and isn’t it fateful that that very book is on its way from me from Barnes and Noble.com? You did not endorse it, I want nothing to do with a book that I now perceive as soul-less. What do you suggest me do with it? Send it to you? Burn it as a historical demonstration of medieval practices? It could double as a demonstration of E=mc2: show how much energy it takes to convert some matter, say, your illegitimate book, into light (minus the solid by-products of smoke and ash). The center of my university's Mall is a good location...

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Cardboard Cat Castle Construction Completed

My 8-month old female Bengal, Nefertiti, is pregnant, according to my neighborhood vet, Dr. Ericson J. Isles, an African-American veterinarian educated at Tuskegee Institute (recall those legendary black pilot aces during WWII). That diagnosis was made 5 weeks ago, when Dr. Isles told me that Nefe's "one month pregnant." Cats have an 63-day gestation period, which translates to 9 weeks. Being an instructor of algebra enabled me to do the simple math. 5 weeks ago+1 month pregnant diagnosis=9 weeks pregnant. The mathematical implication is that I am facing an imminent expansion of my family size, with a projected 83% chance of at least doubling the numbers of lifeforms sustained at the 802 Eye Street Northeast residence.

Nefe's pregnancy and the impending birth of x number of kittens necessitates a quiet, clean sanctuary. A pregnant female cat should be provided a large cardboard box lined with towels and a litter box to give birth in. Having previously undertaken cardboard construction efforts (i.e. a science fair project in which I demolished cardboard bridges which I built), I admittedly went a little bit overboard with this project. But, come on, I had itchy hobbyist hands, longing to build something..

Nefe facing the camera

Cat Castlemania, a modern marvel of engineered cardboard architecture

Nefertiti checking out her new palace

It may be Nefe's palace, but it is still Ake's kingdom!

Nefe emerging from the castle's 1st-2nd floor porthole (yes, it even has its own private litterroom

For me, this site will be less of a personal diary and daily pulpit, rather, it will focus strongly on being an e-soapbox for my political issues of concern, and to highlight the technological advances that will uniquely benefit us, the Deaf tribe, and simply a portal for everything else that constitutes the Artist Formerly Known As An Embryonic Stem Cell, Jason C. Lamberton.

THE LAMBERTON REPORT

Not Wanting to Earn Their Wings: Graying Pilots Lament Decline in Interest Among Young

CNN.com - Mergers proposed for schools for blind and deaf

Getting More Than 'Halfway to Anywhere'

SPACE.com -- Mars Analog on Earth: Taking a Trek in the Outback

LiveScience.com Blogs - Sex in Space: Getting a Grip on Gravity

Storms push firefighters off front lines

FDA Says No to Bionic Eye (why don't they say NO to the Cochlear Implant?!)

Amateur Farmers Find A Paradise, Unpaved

Gadgets get the feel of the tactile world

LiveScience.com Blogs - Half of All Languages Headed for Extinction

LiveScience.com - What a Trip: Psychedelic Drug Study Recalls the '60s

Washingtonpost.com - Drug's Mystical Properties Confirmed

Last updated on 27-Oct-2004