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2.Sept.2010
Gaffe-o-rama
I got the press release early today, but set it aside, thinking I'd
deconstruct the talking points later. Leave it to the professionals to
handle this business:
Kevin Richert pulls out the bullet pointer on the Idaho GOP's
attempt to castigate Keith Allred for taking undue credit for getting
the Idaho homeowner's tax exemption expanded back in 2006.
My favorite part is having Senate President Pro-tem Bob Geddes, and
House Speaker Lawerence Denney leading the finger wagging, given that
they both voted against the version that became law.
For his part, Allred is
quite gracious about the dust-up while quoting Idaho
Statesman writer Dan Popkey and the Republican chairman of the
Senate Local Government and Tax Committee at the time, Hal Bunderson,
to support his claim.
"I think the errors in today's press release were honest mistakes. In
the five years that I led The Common Interest, they tried to get their
facts right and we worked together well. I look forward to working well
with them again as Governor."
Speaking of honest mistakes, that House Speaker's name is a real
bugaboo. Even the **CORRECTION copy of the press release has it wrong,
two different ways. Join in the comment free-for-all on the topic at
Huckleberries Online.
1.Sept.2010
Religions of the dead
The Latter-day Saints have this idea that people will appreciate a
ticket to paradise, even if it's posthumous. I'm kind of particular
about my own beliefs, so having someone revise my preference after I'm
not able to object has never attracted me very much, but what are you
going to do? (Word is, the Mormons believe "departed souls can accept or
reject" the offer. No offense intended.)
The positive way of looking at it is that it offers families the
opportunity of reuniting in the afterlife.
The downside is that
it might be taken as disrespect "to alter the religion of Holocaust
victims, who were murdered because of their religion."
Mission Impossible
One of two, according to
Tom
Friedman:
"There is so much to hate about the Iraq war. The costs will never match
the hoped-for outcome, but that outcome remains hugely important: the
effort to build a decent, consensual government in Iraq is the most
important democracy project in the world today. If Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds
and Shiites can actually write a social contract for the first time in
modern Arab history, it means that viable democracy is not only possible
in Iraq, but everywhere in the region."
31.Aug.2010
Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite
I don't know where I first heard that, but in my mind's ear, it's in my
sister's voice, so maybe from her. I've said it on occasion, even though
I've never seen, or been bitten by a bedbug, to my knowledge.
News
is, this scourge that might as well be a myth as far as my
experience goes, is making a pretty serious comeback after being
beat down with DDT, malathion, diazinon, lindane, chlordane and
dichlorovos, by turns. Back in the 1950s, "mattresses were sprayed, DDT
dust was sprinkled into the sheets, nurseries were lined with
DDT-impregnated wallpaper."
Aye carumba! This chemical warfare even though the annoying little bugs
haven't been shown to transmit any of the many diseases they very well
might, if they were like other bloodsucking insects, mosquitoes, ticks,
lice, fleas, tsetse flies or kissing bugs.
The new plan is for people to "be aware, but not panicky." Even though
you really can't feel them bite (bug people say). The aware scientists
are said to "routinely pull apart beds and even headboards when they
check into hotels," and keep luggage in the bathroom or heat treat it
when they get home.
The secret backroom deals
I see these press releases from the Idaho Republican Party, and I'm
wondering who on earth is supposed to be the audience? Today's has
Jonathan Parker quoting Norm Semanko complaining about Congressman Walt
Minnick having "smuggled [House majority leader Steny] Hoyer in for
secret meetings with fundraisers they would not identify and from which
the media was barred, rais[ing] troubling character questions."
Speaking of character questions!
It reminds me of Dick Cheney's stealth visits to Idaho to boost the
local GOP back in 2005 and 2006. Larry Craig's 60th birthday, yeah,
those were the days.
30.Aug.2010
An unlikely preacher
Following the link from
the
New York Times account of Glenn Beck's church picnic on Saturday
to the
video
excerpt on MSNBC (and after muting and ignoring the 30 second ad
that preceeds the rather brief selection (not quite 3 minutes), I was
struck by how pedestrian his writing and speaking is. The mixed
metaphors (will we be crushed by our scars?) thud and distract from a
remarkably bland message.
That's when they don't just flat-out boggle the mind, such as his
promoting of the rally as "the Woodstock of this generation."
Beck has the energy and tone and style of preacherly exhortation, but
in a venue and for an event where he had to put the knob back on and
turn it below "crazy", there doesn't seem to be a lot of there
there. "God" drew the most reliable applause from the "overwhelmingly
white and largely middle-aged crowd," but it's the demons and conspiracy
theories that have made Glenn Beck a celebrity.
Even with big screens and big loudspeakers, it's not easy to
entertain
87,000
people (or "more than a million" if you prefer
Michelle Bachman's version of reality). It's not
in-the-dark-of-your-den and up-close-and-personal the way TV works best.
Without an altar call, we can't tell how many people were moved by
Beck's command to start today on a new path, to restore America, to
"turn back to God." I suspect quite a few felt they personally had not
turned away, but we'll just have to wait and see. By their works ye shall
know them.
Beck said it wasn't about politics, riiiiight. Just in case turning back
to God and restoring America's honor buys the Republicans a house of
Congress, brace yourself for
the
witch-hunt that is sure to follow.
Wonderful Life
I intended to put the presentation I gave
about Stephen Jay Gould's book,
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
and several of the responses to it shortly after I'd given it in
December 2008, but I didn't get around to it for some reason.
One of the email lists I inhabit has been busy of late with discussion
about evolution and creation, and when cladistics came up, it seemed
like I ought to get around to sharing. So, there. Kind of an interesting
(but I would think that, wouldn't I?) nexus of the realms of popular
science, evolution denial, the technical details of how the work of
science is done, and interesting stories about some fascinating fossils
left by strange creatures gone before.
"Gould has ample detractors among his peers, in addition to the
other-wordly Creationists. His storytelling and scientific description
is confounded with his own interpretations of what the evidence tells us
about the story of evolution, and a preference for iconoclasm that has
not stood up as well as you might believe from his own account."
29.Aug.2010
Puppetry
Barry Blitt's cartoon accompanying today's column by Frank Rich,
The
Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party sums it up with a quarter
million pixels (most of them white, appropriately enough).
"Only the fat cats change—not their methods and not their pet
bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government
'handouts' to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly)."
The longer treatise that has brought fat cats David and Charles Koch
into the limelight is Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker,
Covert Operations. With a combined fortune just shy of Bill Gates'
and Warren Buffett's, and as the sons and heirs of one of the original
members of the John Birch Society,
"The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower
personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and
much less oversight of industry—especially environmental
regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers' corporate
interests....
"Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a 'kingpin of
climate science denial'... Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition
campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from
health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in
political circles, their ideological network is known as the
Kochtopus."
Bioinspiration
It's hard not to be charmed and fascinated by geckoes the first time you
experience them. Taking the next step, here are some mechanical
engineers applying the biology of the little green climbers to make
Stickybots, climbing robots.
I happened to take a class from Mark Cutkosky (mentioned, but not
featured in the news story, in favor of his grad students) when I was at
Stanford, but the "RobotWorld" we worked with two decades ago was nowhere
near as interesting as this. It was massive, clunky, and definitely not
flying,
climbing or
running.
Cutkosky's Biomimetics and Dexterous
Manipulation Lab just sounds like toyland for M.E. geeks.
And even better: why should robots have all the fun?
"The team's new project involves scaling up the material for humans. A
technology called Z-Man, which would allow humans to climb with gecko
adhesive, is in the works."
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Thursday, 02-Sep-2010 16:06:05 MDT
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