ODDS AND ENDS
FEATURES AT RCJ

Performing Well
Rick Alan Rice
-
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.
Of late, I have been deeply
involved in something that is almost antithetical to my nature: analysis
of performance, most specifically the components of performance that
must be mastered to master the performance art. In my current brush with
the performance demon – the one that studies show terrifies more people
that does any other aspect of life, other than suddenly having it all
end – I am concerned with one of the mundane aspects of performance, for
performance is legion, that being skillfulness in presentation.
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HOME FRONT: Disassociating
from Financial Scumbags - Resurrection of the Subprime Loan
Rick Alan Rice
-
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.
Let me speak frankly, so that you
may understand what I am about to say.
My family is under water on our
mortgage. We bought a home in California in 2006, not so much because we
were anxious to pay the absurdly overblown prices for which homes in
California were going for at the time, but because our previous home had
burned down in a house fire and we needed a place to live. Our options
were to rent, which has always struck me as antithetical to building
personal wealth, or to roll the dice on the California housing market.
We plunked down $50,000 in down payment and purchased a home that,
within three years, lost 40 percent of its value, a calamity from which
it is not recovering.
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Whatever Happened to Win-Win?
Rick Alan Rice
-
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.
As I have watched the negotiations
taking place on Capitol Hill over the last many years, and most notably
since Barack Obama took office in 2009, I have wondered whatever
happened to the negotiation concept of “win-win”? Have we, as a society,
given up on that now?
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Is Belief In God a Sign of
Weakness?
No, but it may be a signal for help,
and not necessarily in a bad way.
God is a construction of peoples’
need to have an organizing influence in their lives, standards to live
by, and some reason to carry on. In all of those ways, God and
everything that comes with it – the afterlife, sense of well being and
spiritual comfort, and purpose in all things – is truly helpful to
people, as various studies have seemed to indicate. Belief is powerful,
almost regardless of its details.
That God, and the belief therein, is
a signal for help is endemic to the genesis of the subject, if you will
pardon the pun.
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We
Need A New Party!
Kenny Lee
Lewis - Member of The Steve Miller Band,
Guitarist/singer/songwriter, Novelist/screenwriter'
www.kennyleelewis.com,
www.stevemillerband.com
I am a rock
star. Ok, ok, I am in a band with a rock star. I am also a
husband, father of three daughters, and a small business owner who pays
his taxes like anyone else. I never got into politics until the last
election and wrote and produced a non-partisan PSA video for Comcast
called “Get Out and Vote” to help assuage voter apathy throughout this
ailing nation. I didn’t vote for either one of the major candidates in
2008. I am all about trying to rally everyone to start voting again so
we can possibly support a third political party that makes sense. If we
can educate and get people out to the polls again, I believe that there
could be a groundswell of voters who could turn the tides in future
elections.
We need a party “by the people and for the people”. As corny as that
sounds, it is a precept that our nation was founded upon and if we are
to lift up and resuscitate this
suffocating political system, we are going to need a leader who actually
leads rather than folds like a cheap stroller just to please his
parties’ special interests.
(Use the link
below to read Kenny's entire post (© Kenny Lee Lewis, 2011 - All Rights
Reserved).
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The RCJ Posts Issues
Questionnaire on Obama -
Obama 2012 – Where Do You
Stand?
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
The Revolution
Culture Journal (RCJ) invites you to participate in a little experiment
to help us understand public perception of President Barack Obama,
particularly as it relates to enthusiasm for his re-election in 2012.
We have identified
34 issues in U.S. foreign and domestic policy and devised a scale to
determine how well respondents feel President Obama is doing with each.
Use this link to go to the questionnaire.
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Bechtel’s Long-Term Commitment
to Nuclear Disaster
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
Somehow the idea of
using nuclear fission, and eventually nuclear fusion, to boil water,
produce steam, drive turbines and produce direct current electricity has
found its way back into the list of acceptable alternatives as an
environmentally friendly solution. This bit of Houdini depends entirely
on comparison to power generation through the burning of coal, which
produces carbon emissions and is a primary contributor to rising levels
of greenhouse gas (GHG) in our choking environment.
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Applying Grover Norquist to
Corporation Intellectual Starvation
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
In my career as a
consultant, I have all kinds of opportunities to interact with different
personality types at different levels of organizations. Some of these
are of the kind that might make others feel that life is not worth
living, but the advantage of consultancy is that my involvements are
focused, short, and generally sweet, and then I leave the office dramas
behind for a quick dip into the next kiln of opportunity. I am like a
merry mercenary in that way, unexposed to the daily grind of the
organizations with which I work.
Staff people, on
the other hand, are subject to hierarchical structures and personality
profiles, and their critical path issue is: a) whether or not to stay in
the roles they are in, given the odds of rising up to a more satisfying
position within the organization; or b) to cast their fates to wind,
which is the job market.
So much of life
happens at the initial sell-in.
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Appointment with Disaster -
Republican Domestic Policy
Rick Alan Rice
-
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.
While the rich
are enjoying tax breaks they have no need for and U.S. corporations are
holding on to record profits, padding their accounts to ensure that this
is not their rainy day, but doing little to further the
employment and domestic security needs of United States citizens, word
comes that we are running out of money to provide help for a growing
population of homeless (see the Huffington
Post on this date).
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Welcoming the Arab Street to
U.S. Foreign Policy
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal.
I was all set
to thank the progressive Arab world, or at least the 25 percent of it
that is situated in Egypt, for taking charge of U.S. foreign policy and
forcing it to make sense. Then those pro-Mubarak thugs showed up and
shocked the global community back to reality.
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Why Your College Student Can't
Read, Write or Even Think
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher, Writer, A&E / IT
Consultant
Back a hundred
years ago, when I was in college, all the guys who were doing the best
in the classes I took all seemed to be Viet Nam veterans going to school
on government grants. They tended to stand out because they were older
and far more experienced than their classmates. It seems unlikely that
they were brighter, but they were fundamentally different in terms of
focus and perspective in ways that seemed obviously helpful to them.
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