unraveling
31.Aug.2012
Go ahead, make my day
When word leaked out that Clint Eastwood was going to make a special
appearance at the GOP convention, I had high hopes. I've enjoyed a lot
of his work over the years, most recently the "Halftime in America" ad for
Chrysler at the last Super Bowl and
Gran
Torino and I was hoping he was going to go for something bold,
off-script and off the rails, turning out to be a left-leaning
infiltrator. Of course, his politics swing right-handed, and the
Chrysler ad was just a paying job for him. The party (if
maybe
not Karl Rove) was able to figure that out.
Opening with the personal bit about how some folks in Hollywood are
indeed conservatives, and now we know there are at least two: him and
Jon Voight. But back to the script, comprising a scene in which... we
come to
@jboule's
pithy review:
"It is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man
arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama."
Update:
I see that
Lawrence
Downes agrees:
"Mitt Romney doesn’t use a chair. But he, too, is having a pretend
argument with an invented friend, Imaginary Barack. Imaginary Barack who
apologizes for America. Who hates business and rich people. Who robs
Medicare, closes auto factories, kowtows to the Chinese. Who is the sole
reason for the soaring national debt, high unemployment, the housing
bust, etc., etc."
(And yes, the NYT editorial page editor wrote "etc., etc." which goes to
show that we all make mistakes.)
And this,
from
the son of the guy who invented the "talk to the empty chair"
schtick: "we could have all learned more if Mr. Eastwood had followed
through and actually put himself in the chair."
30.Aug.2012
Day finis
Unlike Rick Santorum, whose likeability index increased considerably
with his chat with the Newshour folks last night, Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell's is still in the tank. Challenged by Mark Shields about
his oft-stated top priority of making Obama a one-term President,
McConnell got pissy about the "context" of all that, and how "we were
ready to deal," but seriously? Once he felt wound up to pontificate, he
wasn't having any interruption from Shields. "May I finish?" he asked,
twice, peremptorily. Um, sure, whatever.
Nice of Dick Durbin, the Democrats Whip in the Senate, to show up and
correct some of the blather and bogosity. Durbin was a member of the
Simpson-Bowles commission, along with Paul Ryan, and helpfully pointed
out that Ryan voted NO on the final report, which didn't stop him from
complaining about Obama not sufficiently embracing the commission's
result.
How 'bout that Paul Ryan?!
CNN
fact check: "Ryan ignores his own role in the failure." And
TalkingPointsMemo catalogues the
top
five lies in Ryan's speech last night.
The opinion out of Madison is not warm and fuzzy for their home-state
boy.
The
Cap Times hammers the "man who would use his hometown as a
prop and then try to deceive the country about the causes of its
circumstance":
"Wisconsinites, at least those who can remember 2008, will not believe him.
Nor should discerning voters in the rest of the republic."
How we came to this sorry state
What Ezra Klein deemed
the
one graph you need to see before watching the RNC, from a
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blog post in May:
What's
driving projected debt? Answer: half of what's coming at us is from
the Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are some nuances in that, projecting forward to 2019, with the
numbers scaled to (projected) GDP. A simpler view (still projected, and
scaled to projected GDP) is in an earlier post,
Economic
downturn and Bush policies continue to drive large projected
deficits.
Not to be constantly blaming someone else, but there you go.
When George W. Bush came to town, we were flush, and decided to stop
paying the bills for a decade. When the decade was up, Grover Norquist
led the Republican choir in singing "no new taxes!" and the sun never
set on the "short-term" plan to give the "surplus" back to the people
who needed it least.
Robert J. Samuelson looks at
the
biggest forecast blunder of the millennium, the $12 trillion
difference between the rosy scenario used to pitch those tax cuts and
how things turned out. The part no one wanted to hear, and that's as
true now as it was then is what the deputy CBO Director told the
Senate Budget Committee in January 2001:
"Over the longer term, budgetary pressures linked to the aging and
retirement of the baby boom generation threaten to produce record
deficits and unsustainable levels of federal debt."
Congress responded with something like "good point. We'll look at that
in ten years." And when the time was up, they were too busy fighting
with each other and campaigning for re-election to actually do anything.
Except to look for somebody to blame for their failure.
Manufacturing resurgent
"They're depending on people having no factual memory whatsoever,"
Jeanette said this morning. "They don't hear about fact-checking from
their email buddies." I'm a little leery of "they" statements, but I
think she must be right. Makes me think of George H.W. Bush in the
video they ran for the convention last night, saying "never a taint."
Perhaps time and forgetting will polish even 43's Presidency to that
same kind of glow a father's memory could bring.
The partisan reviews of Paul Ryan are harping on this "fact" business
that seems to mean so little. Jim Messina's morning fundraising
missive:
"If you've seen any coverage of Paul Ryan's speech in Tampa, you know
that the consensus among journalists and independent observers is that
it was ... factually challenged.
"He lied about Medicare. He lied about the Recovery Act. He lied about
the deficit and debt. He even dishonestly attacked Barack Obama for the
closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin—a
plant that closed in December 2008 under George W. Bush. He also failed
to offer one constructive idea about what he would do to move the
country forward."
He was preaching to the converted, of course, so who needs all that
window dressing of "facts" and "constructive ideas"?
Not that it matters, but I'm curious what level of participation Ryan
had in what he said, and how much he was just following someone
else's script rolling by. Mostly I'm wondering what it will take for
him to see something on the TelePrompTer that's just a bridge too far,
and to stop, say "this is wrong, I can't read that" and go
off-script.
I expect it'll happen between now and November, and there will be media
coverage. Maintaining an utterly fabricated faux reality takes energy,
just like a Romulan cloaking device, and eventually the invisible will
be made visible.
29.Aug.2012
Day 2
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said "We believe Mitt Ryan."
But he also believes in getting back up again when he fails.
He told a golf joke, and that ghostly smile... gave me a shiver.
He was boring, mostly. Jeanette said "give him the hook."
Rand Paul got past the "Hellooos" and one sentence, she said "give him
the hook."
The Bushes showed up, on video. Can you imagine? I assume HW isn't well
enough to be there in person, but George W. was the last Republican
President, served two terms. And he's not at the 2012 convention?
It's bizarre. I did appreciate HW appreciating Dana Carvey's wit.
I did not appreciate Poppy saying "there was never a taint of scandal
around [his son's] Presidency." Really? The cocked-up rush to war in
Iraq wasn't a scandal? Amnesia is a beautiful thing.
"That was more revealing and personal than anything we've heard about
Mitt Romney," Mark Shields said, about the video as a whole, not that
crazy thing about "no taint." It taint necessarily so.
Humbug
Heard about 2 minutes of Paul Ryan's speech tonight, and it got me
shouting at my radio. Here's the deal: the Republicans want to blame
everything—absolutely everything—that's going or gone wrong
on Obama, and criticize him for pointing out that guess what? There are
a lot of other causes and actors in this drama.
It's a great con. Don't blame us, blame him! And look, he's
trying to blame us, how awful he is!
One of those actors is Paul Ryan, promoted to the #2 supporting role in
the festivities for god knows why. He's one of the Republican leaders in
Congress who executed the strategy of obstruction, delay and sabotage,
and now he comes to cash in on the "success" of that strategy. To blame
someone else, and to win the 2nd highest office in the land.
It could work. Voters have divided close to 50-50 for a long time, and
it's more like a football rivalry than it is about serious discussion
about how to address the problems of the day. Mr. Ryan is a most
unserious man, in his budget proposals, in his wringing his hands over
the deficit even as his only proposal would make things worse, in
his enthusiasm for destroying the Medicare program, in his willingness
to read bald-faced lies from a script and give it all the theatrical
delivery he has in him.
It's quite a show. Mark Twain could have written a book about it.
Notable: Joan McCarter's take on
"reintroducing"
Paul Ryan.
28.Aug.2012
Party poopers
I gave it a try, but I don't think I can take another two days of the
convention. The suspense got sucked out of it when they went ahead and
nominated Romney before doing anything else, squelching the Paulites
with barely a squeak.
"Grassroots is dead," said Gary Heyer of Minnesota. They want to re-do
the nomination count? Woot! Delegates walked out! Talk in the
blogosphere about forming another party, he says.
Pass the popcorn!
Why does this guy have his finger in his ear?
"It's about creditors and debtors," he says. Huh.
"It's absolutely corrupt and it's ridiculous." Yup.
They wanted to do something, something BIG at this convention, but the
party bosses—obviously—had other plans. It's a love-fest,
what in the world were you thinking?
John Boehner, comparing Obama to a "guy who walked into a bar," wow,
this guy can't tell a joke. His meme for "We can do better" (Monday's
theme, shifted to their new day 1) is "we'd throw him out."
The most inexplicable theme of the night was the moving white smoke?
cloud? on the blue background behind most of the speakers. Morphing
vapors? Not sure what the concept for that was, but it made me
woozy. (Is it to match the Governor's continuously shifting positions?
Just a thought.)
Boehner says the Romney/Ryan team needs some "true believers," he's got
that right. Do you suppose this working class hero has read
Eric Hoffer?
Now Reince Priebus, who comes across as freaky as his name. At least
they stopped the motion on that blue and white background.
Addresses the convention as "guys."
Send him back to Chicago, he says.
Decries gutter politics.
My buddy, my Congressman.
"And hey," he's addressing a big house, it just comes across a little
weird on a TV screen. Is he liquored up? His speech seems a little
slurred, his cadence a little slow. Maybe just drunk with power.
It might be too late. "We're not just spending borrowed money, we're
living on borrowed time."
Oh, here's the
brutal video
of the whole vote counting thing. Knock yourself out.
8 Colorado delegates abstained. Good for them.
D.C. has more votes than Delaware, that's interesting.
Idaho gets 32 votes and its Governor to announce them. Clement
celebrates our 43rd-ness, and "the first to sue on Obamacare"
(making us the first to lose, too, I guess), all our votes for "Ruh...
Romney." Not a good place to stumble there, right before your
candidate's name.
Rick Santorum says "It's a great honor to be here tonight" to walk back
his comments about how we should re-elect Barack Obama if Mitt Romney
gets the Republican nomination.
That pretty Latina ("Loose-SAY") they had introduce Ann Romney, she
talked a little about Ann's husband, "Meat." "Meat Romney."
After all that excitement, Ann started by saying the hurricane had hit
land. That is some sense of timing.
She's here to talk about her man. "From my heart." She's a uniter, not
a divider. She's here to talk about love... her love for her man? Huh,
that's a bit unseemly.
But wait, there's more! Chris Christie, with his own promo video for
introduction. He's introducing himself, sort of. That's weird.
And he walks out to the podium clapping for himself.
NO, NOT THAT BLUE BARF BACKGROUND AGAIN!
He's standing proud. And choosing "respect" over love. Correcting Ann's
speech? Whatever. Let's see what The Daily Show did this thing.
The road to JEB BUSH 2016, nice.
27.Aug.2012
Dreams
Nice graphic from
Restore
Sanity and Take Back America on Facebook:
And in other convention news
Calvin
Woodward's report for the AP, that the GOP is going forward with
convention despite the storm, includes this gem from "veteran Republican
consultant in Washington" Rich Galen:
"You can tone down the happy-days-are-here-again a bit. Maybe you don't
have the biggest balloon drop in history."
I guess I must've missed that series of ads where happy days are here
again. I thought we were going to hell in a handbasket (carried by the
do-nothing Republican-obstructed Congress), down the road to socialism
and/or fascism, led by the anti-Christ from another continent. Happy
days? What happy days? Try this:
Romney, in a Fox interview, said in comments broadcast Sunday that the
fallout over Akin's remarks "hurts our party and I think is damaging to
women," adding: "It really is sad, isn't it? With all the issues that
America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low
level."
Stooping to the low level of pointing out the fact that the Republican
Party's expressed policies (as seen in
their
shiny new platform) are damaging to women and hurt the party? So
confusing.
Statesman of the Year
Believe it or not, that's the honor the local Republican Party in Sarasota,
Florida just bestowed to Donald Trump. He's a "champion of the people,"
who will do "everything it takes to take our country back," from... who,
the
NPR report did not say (but wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you know what
I mean).
The bad news is that the Monday cancellation from Isaac seems to have
scrubbed Trump from the speakers list. This in spite of the man being
"bigger
than Isaac" at least in his own mind, and to the Sarasota GOP.
But he wants to remind us that since it's "an issue that a lot of
people believe in," the question of where Barack Obama was born is no
joking matter, unlike, say... The Donald himself, or the little red fox
that lives on his head.
In other non sequitur news, Mike Theiler's image of RNC chairman Reince
Preibus picked up an interesting bit of teleprompter text... Yes, let's
talk about those merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare,
is an undistinguished destruction of all... wait, where did they go?
(Little did I know: that text is from our very own
Declaration
of Independence, in its bill of particulars of the king's repeated
injuries and usurpations. Are they going to read the Declaration as part
of the convention? Draw parallels between King George and Barack Obama?
Call for further extirpation of savages?)
26.Aug.2012
The irony is thick in this one
We're shocked, shocked to hear that Romney operatives were
busy
on the rules committee last week, "systematically trying to prevent
minorities from having even any remote opportunity of being heard."
I mean, wasn't that already part of their constitution or something?
Also
on
rawstory, Mitt says he's not going to "manipulate his life" by
bringing his banking onshore, apparently getting his back up further
than the previous answer "it's all in a blind trust, so la la la la la I
don't know what's happening."
"First of all, there was no reduction — not one dollar reduction
— in taxes by virtue of having an account in Switzerland or a
Cayman Islands investment," Romney explained. "The dollars of taxes
remained exactly the same. There was no tax savings at all. And the
conduct of the trustee and making investments was entirely consistent
with U.S. law and all the taxes paid were those legally owed and there
was no tax saving by virtue of those entities."
And we can be assured of that because... he says so! Do you suppose he
realizes he's adding to the reasons why we should be interested in those
tax returns he's clutching tighter than a barnacle on a boat? We are
so interested in what all you're hiding, Mitt!
I'm wondering who in the audience remembers
George
LeRoy Tirebiter's campaign for dog-killer and his campaign slogan:
"You can believe me, because I'm always right, and I never lie."
Works in mysterious ways
So, thanks to the forecasting of one of our great federal government
entities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the GOP
decided
to cancel Monday and make the other three days of their convention
33% more fun.
"Emergency management officials had plans in place to evacuate the city,
which is prone to flooding. Heavy rains could bring three to five feet
of water."
The last time a hurricane rejiggered GOP convention plans, it was sort
of optional. This time, maybe not so much? (As one wag
tweeted,
"The people who scheduled a convention in Florida during hurricane
season. They want to run things.")
Under the overall theme of "a better future" (sounds good to me!), they
also had daily themes (as
catalogued
by Wikipedia of "We Can Do Better," "We Built It," "We Can Change
It," and "We Believe in America."
Not sure how they'll mash those up to make three. Just skip doing
better? While indisputably popular among Romney backers and Obama
haters, it's not clear how the "We Built It" theme and t-shirts rise to
"better," being based on a deliberate misinterpretation, but with
a
speaker who benefited handsomely from government aid
(and who told others they should go and do likewise), and a gathering
in
a stadium built with $86 million of the public's money, and a public
airwaves noise machine touting it as
nothing
short of brilliant, the hypocrisy is forecast to be three to five
feet deep, too.
But this just in:
the
latest coastal watch/warning for Isaac shows a track further west
and headed for New Orleans. The Florida Keys are getting whacked, but
Tampa may do no worse than the edge of "tropical storm" after all, and
a lot of Republicans will be left twiddling their smartphones on Monday
instead of on agenda.
Sometime during the week we're sure to hear thanks be to God that he
spared the good Republicans, and instead chose to punish Haiti and
Louisiana again.
25.Aug.2012
Disaster as usual
That's the western view, smoky on the ground, and
striking
from a satellite of fires not abating out west. That image was taken
on Thursday, westerly wind, but before the dry cold front had cleared
the air—for just one day. Overnight, the wind clocked around to
the east and the Trinity Ridge plume came and filled up the Treasure
Valley (that light greenery above the "Tr" and on west to the Snake R.
headed north).
The three big ones—Trinity Ridge,
Halstead and the
Mustang Complex—are
all more than 100,000 acres, and 11% or less contained. Projected
dates for full containment are end of September to mid-October.
Northern California's fires are substantial as well, but nowhere near as
big and more to mostly contained, as of
NASA's
Aug. 24 snapshot and report.
The Mutt Romney Blues
Here's Ry Cooder, still singing songs and stirring up trouble,
channeling
the family dog and reporting the Koch brother's deal with the devil.
What's not to like? If you haven't worn out your welcome at the NYT you
can play two of the songs from his new album, "Mutt Romney Blues" and
"The Wall Street Part of Town." Woof woof woof.
"It just seemed we should hear from the dog, you know. Quite a useful
character, a dog is, when you view it in the light of the blues. Like a
servant, a yardman, someone very low in the social order. He's just
begging to be let down [from the car roof]."
Is it a disaster yet?
Let's hear from all those guys (and gals?) who like to interpret the
hand of God moving in things such as
hurricane
Isaac postponing Mitt Romney's GOP nomination. And then, I don't
know, if anything bad happens, quick action by FMEA, and maybe a visit
from President Obama to reassure the inhabitants of Florida that things
are going to be just fine.
What she said
Hmm, it used to be "Questions" and now it's "Talk," but either way, a
little Q&A, condensing and editing can paint a nice self-portrait in
caricature. This week's is
Jan
Brewer. What she said: "As the saying goes, there are lies, damned
lies and statistics." Followed soon after by this tidy gem, somehow
apropos of concealed weapons and bars and bartenders:
"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people that are gun owners are
very responsible."
All I can say is, who knew. Very responsibility runs higher in that
demographic than generally, it seems.
Best tweet of the day
Mitt Romney was JK of course, but
this
from Kevin Marks:
"No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate" is a pretty succinct
statement of white privilege.
The audience all got a jolly laugh out of it too, and maybe the
Democrats overreacted by saying Mitt's a birther now... but still.
No one's ever asked him to pull over because he was Driving While Black,
either.
H/t to Sisyphus, the best retweeter I know.
24.Aug.2012
Getting to know Paul Ryan
When Romney's pick for Veep was still fresh, Media Matters collected
some things
Wisconsin
journalists want you to know about Paul Ryan. The consensus seems to
be that he's an ambitious Washington insider who hasn't done much for
his district other than what was needed to get re-elected every two
years.
"The way to understand him is he is Dick Cheney, he is a guy who went to
Washington as soon as he could, rooted himself in the establishment, got
himself elected as soon as he could and became a major player," said
John Nichols, an associate editor at the Capital Times in Madison. "He
is Dick Cheney with very good hair."
He wasn't in charge of finding a candidate vice-president and picked
himself, though.
Paul Krugman digs in to the Ayn Rand angle:
Galt,
Gold and God.
"In 2005, he told the Atlas Society, which is devoted to promoting
Rand’s ideas, that she inspired his political career: 'If I had to
credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.' He also declared
that Rand's work was required reading for his staff and interns. And the
Ryan fiscal program clearly reflects Randian notions."
Somebody comes first, we're not sure who
Presser from the Idaho GOP complaining about a radio ad
from the opponents of the Idaho education reform bills that are going to
be subjected to voter approval this fall; they're
complaining that
the
"unfunded mandate" claim
goes to far. The Legislature did too provide funding, $2.5 million.
That glosses over the reality that funding for public schools in Idaho
is a zero sum game. There's no "new" money, the question is how we're
going to divvy up the existing funding, which is constrained by (among
other things) by the legislators consistent lowballing of revenue
estimates. Oh, and the program will eventually cost tens of
$millions so the 2.5 is just getting started.
But never mind all that. What struck me about the press release
(besides their flogging the "Students Come First" moniker the
proponents so love to use) was this:
"We are disappointed with the teachers' union," said Chairman Barry
Peterson. "If the teachers' union is willing to delude the truth about
the funding of these bills, then we have to question their motives and
whether they really have the interest of our youth at heart. ..."
Delude the truth. Or, um, dilute it? Or perhaps delude
voters? Still working on that education thing. And not to put
too fine a point on it, the Idaho Republican Party has its own issues
with delusional thinking.
Day late and a dollar short
And you have got to be kidding us, Mitt:
releasing
(more) tax returns would violate your religious privacy? Why not
just tell us your dog peed on them.
Your dad set a good example for you. Follow it. If there's something too
sooper secret in there (and, ahem, how much you gave to church
doesn't qualify) and you don't want to, fine. But why are you talking
about this, and reminding us that you haven't done the upstanding
thing?
I may already be a winner
Down at the bottom of the mundane political spam asking for a teeny,
tiny contribution ($3 is somehow a magic number) to let them know "we've
got a live one!" there is a bold-faced, capitalized sentence:
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN A PRIZE.
I assume this is legally required in some or all target venues? But it's
nice, there's a hyperlink if you want to enter by making a contribution,
and another if you don't. Click
here.
They took the trouble to add some code between me and that click to
mittromney.com with a stop at click.targetedvictoryemail.com to drop off
a coded token telling them which message succeeded, and to whom it was
addressed, AND (this is the sweet part) to obfuscate that fact with an
HTML title tag on the hyperlink. (My browser, Firefox v14.0.1, still
shows the coded link down in the status line, but it would be easy to
miss if the title popup catches your eye, as it's designed to do.)
But I'm OK with that. Enter me in the drawing! It's not like I need to
worry about getting more spam, they're already larding my account.
(I did, um, obfuscate my phone number, because please, no more
robocalls.) "Making a contribution does not increase your chances of
winning," they assure me, so let's see if I can win
one (1) round-trip coach class plane ticket within the continental
United States to the Tampa, Florida metropolitan area ("Destination") on
a date to be determined by Sponsor, with an approximate retail value of
$750; one (1) two-night hotel stay at the Destination, with an
approximate retail value of $500; ground transportation at the
discretion of Sponsor, with an approximate retail value of $50; and a
credential for Convention Hall access, with no ($0) retail value.
Approximate total retail value is $1300.
and fly into a hurricane and or Destiny. I also entered the drawing to
go to Ohio, but I didn't quite understand why I'd want to go there.
Still, that irrestible lure: no purchase necessary.
23.Aug.2012
Indeed, we wish they would
Day one theme for next week's GOP con in Tampa is
reported
to be "We Can Do Better." There are certainly plenty of elected
Republicans already in office. When do will they start?
Everybody wants a piece of us
To make up for the lacunae in summer postings due to offline travel,
here's an item I wrote while we were en route from Boise to Grand
Rapids, July 5th, mostly in the "original" style I usually smooth out
before publication.
Everybody wants a piece of us going by. No seat assignment, would you
like to purchase a nicer seat? (nicer than NO seat, that is.) check in
at the front desk? No—we're going to stretch you out as long as
possible. They started boarding without calling us up to the gate
desk, I went up to see wtf. Oh yeah, your boarding passes are right
here.
And one of the two agents was writing down the seat numbers of the
boarding passes as people showed them to get in the jetway. No three
card monte at this gate, baby!
But off we went, right on time, with smaller bags that didn't have to
be gate-checked—through!—on our regional jet. North
American region? It's actually a pretty good hop from Boise to
Minneapolis people, "approximately 1,142 miles" as our crew told us we'd
get on our SkyMiles account. Plate tectonics, I guess.
WiFi on board, that's woot. But it ain't free woot; got a tenner on you?
If not, just the "customized" gogo experience. Flight tracker is cool.
Latest headlines from People magazine, mmmnot so much.
Smoothly landed in the Twin Cities, the monitors show an earlier flight
to GRR, but we'd have to bust across the terminal... We ambled to our
gate, closer, and asked the not-busy gate agent. Yes, 7 seats available.
You got $50 on you? ($50 EACH, natch.) Meh. We're not on the freemium
list, and our flight's not overbooked, sucks to be us. There were still
free (soft) drinks and a "snack": our choice of peanuts, pretzels or
cookies, each in a minimally recognizable-sized package.
For our three hour layover then, the lovely sack lunches we brought, a
nearby TV tuned to CNN (ugh), and no, the WiFi is not free. You're not
from around here, are you?
Too bad I'm not on assignment, I could see how MUCH it would be possible
to spend on a short trip. First Class, anyone? Maybe the wifi would be
included with that. Upgrade to a suite. Get the snoot lounge pass. Skip
the three hour layover.
No escape
I've been a fan of Google from back when only a couple hundred thousand
techy insiders knew that they'd solved the search problem, and continue
to use a ton of their software even though as a giant conglomerate
including the likes of DoubleClick, there's a lot to be dubious
about. (Not so much that I'm tweeting "Hate google" as I saw someone do
yesterday, however.)
They seem to be taking a bad page from Facebook's playbook though, in
freely morphing user interfaces to suit themselves, for various and
usually inexplicable reasons. (One example: if you use iGoogle, you may
have noticed that it "will not be available after November 1, 2013,"
maybe even followed their hyperlink to
Learn
more about it. Seriously? You're taking away something jolly and
useful, and plan to remind everyone about that for umpteen months?)
And like most giant corporations, their support policy boils down to
"don't call us, we'll call you" wink, wink, nudge, nudge, actually we're
not going to call you, and you know that. Soooo... nothing to do but
wail here on my blog.
"Vim is a professional tool. Once mastered, you will achieve a much
higher productivity as compared to what can be done using a more
conventional text editor."
--
ported to
iOS, for its 20th birthday
Today while using my relatively new keyboard for my relatively new new
iPad thingie from that other gigantic computer conglomerate, I noticed
there was no [Esc] key, and wondered if that was a "feature" foisted
upon all of Apple-world by a fussy notion of Steve Jobs'. It hasn't been
a problem for me, but it did immediately make me wonder how you'd work
around that if you were using my most
favorite text editor that I use dozens of times a day. Back home,
I asked the Google oracle if you can even get vim on the iPad?
Sure enough, there's
an app for that!
And here, a Google Group on the more general topic,
vim_mac.
I joined, tried to post a reply to a relevant message, and see that it's
offering to CC my reply to no fewer than five addresses on
vim.org, all at once. Ugh. My remarks weren't going to be that special.
Which of them to accept, if any? The Google UI has elided part of the
addresses... for compactness? (Nope, doesn't matter how big I make my
window.) Or confidentiality of the recipients? So pick none or more
of
- vim-an...
- vim...
- v...
- vim...
- vin-mu...
The first one is "announcements," I bet. Pretty much no idea what any
others are, and no obvious way to find out. The gmail-ish "show
original" reveals that the obfuscation runs deep. In the original's "To"
line, choices are
- vim-annou...
- vim-...
- v...
- vim-...
- vim-multib...
Guess I'll just CC none while I wonder "what were they thinking?" and
whether some backoffice DB and code would unobfuscate those addresses
for my reply.
22.Aug.2012
The remarkably big lie
Being hammered hard on the campaign trail by Mitt Romney and his boy
wonder, Paul Ryan: Obama "raided" Medicare. The recitation in a retail
solicitation for campaign funds echoes Ryan's script today:
"It's mind-boggling to hear President Obama and his liberal cronies
level deceptive and desperate claims about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's
plan to protect and strengthen Medicare.
"It's ironic, because some four years ago, Obama campaigned against
'drastic cuts in Medicare.' Yet, President Obama turned Medicare into a
piggy bank for Obamacare—and he raided $716 billion from Medicare to
pay for his Obamacare monstrosity."
Given that Ryan supported the same reduction in the next 10 years'
Medicare spending, it's a remarkable display of chutzpah and
disingenuity for him to put on a show of indignation. But
facts
that take (ever so slightly) more than 15 seconds to explain are
harder to grasp than cronies, deceptive, desperate, drastic and (my
favorite) monstrosity.
Speaking of misconceptions
Two Boise State University professors have been
awarded
a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant for their "Synergistic
Approach to Prevent Persistent Misconceptions with First-year
Engineering Students," but the presser doesn't have much detail on
their subject matter. "Math and science concepts" cover a lot of
ground. "Particularly those related to thermo-fluid sciences" is more
specific, but... oh, they plan to start by "identify[ing] which
concepts most often trip up students."
I suppose one can find evidence that misconceptions do persist, but what
if the idea that "it may be too late to repair misconceptions of
fundamental science and engineering concepts by the time students reach
core engineering courses in college" is actually a misconception?
One's study based on the assumption could make it persist.
It sounds like a pedagogical study, and valuable enough. But touting the
technology trimming, as the provost and VP for academic affairs does,
for "exemplif[ying] the modernization of education in a digital age" as
if that were necessarily a good thing seems like... you know.
Illegitimate
It's day whatever of the "legitimate rape" story, and reading this
morning's headline that
Akin's
Faith Is Central to His Persistence, my first thought was "and his
ignorance." Yesterday's non-apology assures us that he's kind of sorry this
blew up, but "the mistake I made was in the words I said" also assures
us that he doesn't recognize that it's the thought that counts.
William
Saletan, writing on Slate, digs deeper into the issue:
"When you look at the three episodes side by side—the 1991 comment about
marital rape, the 2011 specification of 'forcible rape,' the 2012
reference to 'legitimate rape'—it's hard to explain away the pattern.
Nobody uses the wrong words accidentally three times in a row. But if
you watch Akin's
whole interview on KTVI, you'll see that the pattern is actually
larger. He trusts some people more than others. Women who report rape
are among the people he doesn't quite trust."
That interview is an interesting tour of Tea Party nut jobbery.
He's against the school lunch program, but hasn't studied it, much. He
thinks the federal government has "taken over the whole student loan
program," and that Fannie and Freddie destroyed the economy, so connect
the dots. We've been there and done that as far as the Civil Rights Act
goes. Let's go back to the Senate representing states by repealing the
17th Amendment, because... the federal government is too big. And the
snippet that went viral was not taken out of context. The only
surprising thing is that interviewer didn't ask a follow-up when Akin
offered his crazy and insulting notion for why there should be no
abortion exception for rape: "legitimate" rape doesn't lead to
pregnancy, so if a woman says she got pregnant from rape, she must be
lying. Or, deep inside, she really wanted it.
Even though Akin is man enough to defy the "party bosses" and stay in his
race to represent Missouri in the Senate, he has at least acknowledged
that
he
was "medically wrong", and confirmed he's accepting an invitation
to stay away from the GOP convention in Tampa.
State Republican committee member Jonathan Sternberg
"acknowledged that Mr. Akin’s mouth could sometimes get him into
trouble," according to John Eligion's NYT report. "Todd Akin works so
hard and tears himself so ragged," Mr. Sternberg said, "that he has the
propensity to say things without thinking."
That's charming, but it seems far more likely that his problem is a
propensity to actually blurt out what he is thinking.
Now then: do the voters in Missouri want this person representing them
in the United States Senate?
Update:
Maureen
Dowd reminded me of what I heard yesterday: that Akin is a member of
the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Because lunatics
know best about running asylums, apparently.
21.Aug.2012
Oh right right right, that guy
I've heard names popping up about who will and won't be speaking at the
soon-to-be GOP-con (where "history will be made"), but hard to know
what's what in the fluid situation with a week to go. I assume
Wikipedia
will have the facts sooner or later (and get them sorted
alphabetically). So far, no Sarah Palin or Donald Trump, but yes to
Nikki Haley, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, John McCain, Rand Paul,
Condeleezza Rice, Rick Santorum, Rick Scott and Scott Walker!
Jeb Bush is on the list, but hello, not George W. Bush? The 43rd
President of the United States? There must be one hell of a lot
of brush to clear down on the Texas ranch. (Everything's bigger down
there, don't you know.)
Life imitates art, as the purported stunt that didn't happen (removing
the [W] keys from the White House keyboards when Bill cleared out) is
coming soon to a TV near you. Robert Reich:
Erasing W.
"[T]he resemblances between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are too close
for comfort. Both were born into wealth, sons of prominent politicians
who themselves ran for president; both are closely tied to the nation's
corporate and financial elites, and eager to do their bidding; both are
socially awkward and, as candidates, tightly scripted for fear of saying
something they shouldn't; and both presented themselves to the nation
devoid of any consistent policies or principles that might give some
clue as to what they actually believe.
"They are both, in other words, unusually shallow, uncurious,
two-dimensional men who ran or are running for the presidency for no
clear reason other than to surpass their fathers or achieve the aims and
ambitions of their wealthy patrons."
Seriously?
This Paul Ryan dude is a piece of work. Now he's after another
governmental horror...
that
he voted for, and celebrated afterwards. What a difference a year
makes. Last August, he was all
"What conservatives like me have been fighting for, for years, are
statutory caps on spending, legal caps in law that says government
agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money. And if they breach
that amount across the board, sequester comes in to cut that spending,
and you can't turn that off without a super-majority vote. We got that
in law."
This August, he's all ... confused and snarly. As seen in the
photo there on TPM, with affable Mitt enjoying him having his lead.
Catch-up campaign
Down out of our week and a half in the north woods and Rockies, and
still sorting out the detritus. One significant benefit was having two
dozen news cycles compressed into a 30,000' overview, revealing the
remarkably high noise level, and exposing a Gestalt that might
otherwise have been camouflaged.
The big news was, of course, Mitt Romney's pick for VP, Wisconsin
Representative and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, with most
every pundit having weighed in five ways to Sunday before we got past
the "huh." Lots of people were talking about the "bold" (if you like it)
and "risky" (if you don't) choice, including Nate Silver,
on
his FiveThirtyEight "political calculus" blog.
"When is it rational to take a big risk?
"When the status quo isn't proceeding in a way that you feel is
favorable. When you have less to lose. When you need ... a 'game change.'"
I didn't like what Paul Ryan was up to before he turned into the
presumptive Veep candidate, I thought his DOA political statement of a
budget stunk, I utterly reject the anti-government agenda he's
promoting, and it irks me that he represents (a part of) my home state.
I didn't think much of Romney or his campaign beforehand, and "at least
taking a risk" doesn't improve its appearance.
Having Ryan trot out his 78-year-old mom, to rail against "cuts in
Medicare" (those same cuts in payments to providers that were included
in his last two budgets), blustering about a "board of
bureaucrats" that would be rationing healthcare, that was rich.
Everybody should be able to get all the healthcare they can afford,
right? Mitt and Paul (and Paul's mom) will be just fine, I'm confident
of that.
Just see
here
on this whiteboard where Mr. Turnaround applies the business miracle
of the 2x2 matrix to explain the mystery of life and death. Under Obama,
Next Gen is BANKRUPT and under Romney it's SOLVENT. Any questions?
Ok, I've got a question: can we see some more of your tax returns, now?
The Obama campaign came up with a nice gambit, offering to stop bugging
him if he'd just cough up 3 more years' worth, 2007-2009, that time
while he was wanting to be President. No dice! Romney sniffed that
"the fascination with taxes I paid, I find to be very small-minded,
compared to the broad issues we face."
Never paid less than 13% in the last 10 years, he says, and all you
small-minded people can just SHUT UP because he's not releasing any more
tax returns.
Who doesn't find a cliff-hanger "fascinating"? Will we ever get
to find out the toxic mystery in the Romneys' tax returns? Maybe not
until next season!
Most voters have made their minds; the mythic Undecided voter is as hard
to find as a good rain in August. It's about "getting your base out to
vote," Jackie Calmes said, which ties right into Romney's secret weapon,
GOP
voter suppression tactics.
And by your fundraising ye shall know them. BarackObama.com noted
a week ago that "just 72 hours after joining the GOP ticket, Paul Ryan
is making a pilgrimage to the Sands' Venetian casino in Las Vegas to
kiss the ring of Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who's
already donated more than $35 million to Republican groups in this
election." Sheldon's got millions more to give to anybody-but-Obama.
How nice that
there
was a welcoming committee for him.
20.Aug.2012
The 1% solution
A brilliant, succinct op-ed piece by a professor of medicine, on the
subject of
testing
standard medical practices, in the context of what may be the two
greatest medical errors on record (as he puts it). His suggestion is
simple, but maybe not simply implemented:
"Devote 1 percent of health care expenditures to evaluating what the
other 99 percent is buying."
As someone who's pretty much opted out of the medical system for all but
paying (insurance premiums) and the occasional minor emergency (so far,
and yeah, knock on wood and polish your rabbit's foot), and lucky enough
not to have been swept up in an unnecessary surgery or counterproductive
drug therapy, I'm all for more and better testing instead of just more
procedures.
It made me think of the provision of
the
Affordable Care Act requiring a minimum portion
of insurance premiums (85% for "large employer plans," 80% of individual
and small employer plans) be actually devoted to health care services
and quality improvement.
In the facing of daunting complexity, a simple percentage can get to the
heart of the matter, and make a difference.
8.8.2012
What's an order of magnitude between friends?
Thank goodness someone's chronically
Mitt's
mendacity
so we don't have to struggle to keep up. We're up to volume XXVIII,
just two shy of making comparisons with the XXX Olympics.
There are 28 items in the August 3rd edition, and I didn't go through
them all, but did follow the jump on one.
Remember that sound bite on his trip to Israel about how "culture" is so
important and why Israel has a GDP per capita of $21,000, while
Palestinians' is only $10,000? He called that "a dramatic, stark
difference in economic vitality," which is the one part he got right.
But the GDP numbers, not so much. Those are $31,000 and $1,500, a factor
of more than 20 rather than just over 2,
according
to Benjy Sarlin on talkingpointsmemo.
That is some superior culture going on, I guess.
Phaser on overload
What do you get when you amplify noise? Try this: put a microphone
connected to an amplifier and speaker in front of the speaker.
We call it "feedback," and it's just about never what you want to hear.
Still, all sorts of feedback systems are essential to daily life in the
age of technology. The key is to controlling how the output signal is
fed back into the "plant" and allowed to modify the output. Makes for
a
good, basic engineering class.
One of the things you'll learn in such a class is that without some way
to dissipate energy ("damping"), things can quickly get out of hand.
Combine control systems, game theory, undamped greed, and some computer
programming and you get... stock markets gone wild! We're currently
running an extended experiment that's extremely rewarding for some
folks, and largely unproductive for the world economy as a whole.
Perhaps "liquidity" is a good thing, allowing more people to buy and
sell more investments, more easily. But that's about the only argument
in favor, and it's a tenuous one.
Dean Baker, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, has a suggestion:
a
tiny tax would make a big difference for ironing out things like the
"flash crash" two years ago, and the recent Knight Capital episode.
And raise a nice pot of money while we're at it, something in 11 figures
per year.
6.Aug.2012
Kantian traffic
Former NYT Ethicist Randy Cohen weighs in on the subject of
bicycling
ethics with non-satiric mentions of Idaho, where somehow (I really
must learn the story of who made this happen) we have obtained
an
enlightened law that allows cyclists to roll STOP signs and
genuflect at red lights before proceeding if the way is clear.
Unfortunately, his self-satisfied claim to "routinely run red lights"
goes beyond our sensible and permissive law, and it's one of the things
that can annoy both drivers who know the law, and those who don't, even
if it is "ethical." (Not to get all Zen on you, but if a bicyclist runs
a red light when there's no one else to see, that's fine. There's no
ethical consideration. If someone sees him... not so simple.)
The problem with an ethical argument is more than just our demonstrated
difficulty in weighing the dangers we face, though. There's a fairness
issue that fuels the incessant acrimony, and overrides the facts:
"[B]icycles are a tiny threat; it is cars and trucks that menace us. In
the last quarter of 2011, bicyclists in New York City killed no
pedestrians and injured 26. During the same period, drivers killed 43
pedestrians and injured 3,607.
"Cars also harm us insidiously, in slow motion. Auto emissions
exacerbate respiratory problems, erode the facades of buildings, abet
global warming. To keep the oil flowing, we make dubious foreign policy
decisions. Cars promote sprawl and discourage walking, contributing to
obesity and other health problems. And then there's the noise. ..."
Maybe Randy's destined for traffic school, and a reminder that there
are good reasons to keep in mind
two
basic rules: don't be stupid, and don't be rude.
Nannies vs. supersized salesman
Mary Poppins made nannies a class of superhero, but years later,
conservatives have given the category a bad name as they deprecate
what a "nanny state" tries to do to control our lives. Case in point,
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to limit the size of sugar
water dosages in his fair city. Is that crazy, laughable, unreasonable,
unconstitutional, or what?
James
Surowiecki's analysis for The New Yorker makes it sound like
a simply good idea. Choices are easily biased by context, comparisons,
and whatever is presented as the default choice. Just ask Goldilocks
how she feels about small, medium and large when it comes to theft of
services. When you're being sold something, pricing can easily persuade
you to go for the "economy size," not because you needed or wanted that
much, but because see, it's cheaper by the ounce.
Should it be legislated then? Maybe not, but what's even more laughable
than the Mayor's notion to be a nanny is the American Beverage
Association rep's dismissal that "150 years of research finds that
people consume what they want." If only it were that simple.
"NASA, NASA, NASA"
The National Geographic
report
of Curiosity's Mars landing said that's what crowds in Times Square
were chanting, along with "Science, Science, Science." Hear, hear.
A few friends had mentioned the event scheduled for early Monday (CDT
and EDT), and it just happened to be right before our Sunday bedtime in the
Mountain timezone, so I tapped into NASA TV to see the scene in the
control room as the multi-step and
technically
audacious sequence played out, cue by cue. Something about seeing it
in real-time made it possible to share the thrill of the moment,
culminating with "we're safe on Mars!" and the delivery of the first
tiny picture.
Congratulations on a spectacular success, and thanks for "the
transported joy of a vast team of engineers and scientists."
5.Aug.2012
Olympic grandstanding
Not that Marco Rubio's bill to exempt the U.S. Olympic Committee's
payouts to our country's medal winners is anything more than an shot at
unlicensed publicity while the games are on and the days are doggy and
it's time for recess, but the
mostly
faux basis for the outrage fails to consider the fact that once
you're beyond subsistence income, yes, we have an income tax.
Any athlete worth his or her precious meddle will undoubtedly have more
than a prize's worth of expenses to write off against the campaign.
The supposed
"rebuttal" from Americans
for Tax Reform would not make it through the preliminaries for
serious consideration, never mind a medal round.
"First, the athlete needs to keep records of his expenses. This may
involve issuing W-2s and 1099s to trainers. If any training is
overseas, there can't be any personal pleasure in the trip for it to be
deductible. None.
"Even if a medalist takes a few hours to see, for example, Parliament,
that would disallow all travel expenses from being deductible. ..."
As someone who has prepared multiple tax returns, thank you, I have to
wonder if these yahoos are serious, or just amateurs. If you have
employees, there's a lot more mandatory recordkeeping than
issuing W-2s once a year, whether or not you end up making any money.
You have to report their wage income, and withhold payroll and
income taxes as required. Yes, you have to account for depreciable
property (or use Section 179 to expense it), but no, you do not need to
"itemize deductions" if you're running a business. The claim about "no
personal pleasure" is laughably wrong, as even a cursory review of
pertinent
IRS information shows.
But technical niggling does not address the question of whether the
complaint (or observation, if they were "just saying") is relevant to a
discussion about the price of shuttlecocks in China, or tax fairness.
Is their plan to cherry-pick various sorts of income that should be
exempt from taxes until it all is?
My friend Bryan Jennings, wrote to me with his thoughts about the flap,
and the lucky, talented, and acclaimed teacher he married:
"Wanda won $16,000 on "Teacher Week" on Who Wants To Be a
Millionaire and another $10,000
Disney
Teacher Award for being an outstanding teacher (not that that
compares with being an outstanding swimmer), but she had to pay income
tax on those. Where's the justice there? At this point, 17-year-old
Missy Franklin has won more in the past week than Wanda and I make
together in a year! And she stands to make a whole lot more in years to
come. So I agree: I have no problem with Olympic medal winners paying
their fair share of tax on their income!"
3.Aug.2012
"The audacity of restoring a wild river"
It's not the first successful dam removal project, and it certainly
won't be the last, but it's the biggest so far, and one to celebrate.
Timothy Egan's
Farewell
to Elwha Dam, Hello to Elwha River.
"...the river looks frisky in its gravitational search for old channels.
Another dam, twice the height of the Elwha and eight miles upriver, is
also coming down. With these two concrete barriers gone, about 70 miles
of some of the cleanest, coldest water on the planet will tumble through
the park at the edge of the continent."
"The park" being
Olympic National Park in
Washington state, where Jeanette and I went to honeymoon 31 years ago
this month. The NPS site has a feature for
the
Elwha River Restoration, started last fall and proceeding ahead of
schedule.
The unfriending
I've been through a lot of flamewars over the years, rounding out three
decades of various sorts of electronic interactions with friends,
coworkers, family, friends-of-friends, and strangers of various
sorts.
"Stranger" is an interesting term to me this morning.
Not all of the past is tinged in sepia, fading and vignetted into
nostalgic tones. People with whom I was once connected have moved on
through life, made decisions, married, divorced, married again, had
children, who knows what.
Facebook has provided the means for some of us to find each other, 20,
30, even 40 years later. I don't know if you've been around the whole
time, but either way, 40 years is a long time ago now. In most
cases, there is a jolly catch-up exchange, and then not a whole lot more
to say, except that the medium provides a way to restart conversations,
maybe make new connections between like-minded souls.
And some not so like-minded.
It was actually pre-Facebook that one of my high school friends tracked
me down, read my website, and started an email conversation that became
more detailed than most, enough to have a folder in his name to collect
it all, more than 150 messages, I see. Most of it was at the end of
2004, through the election, and over the course of the next year,
discussion of the interests we still shared, and thoughtful
give-and-take on political subjects where we had little common ground,
but were willing to consider each other's opinions. In April 2006, when
McCain's immigration bill was being debated, I asked him for his
opinion and we heard each other out. In 2007, we exchanged emails about
guns and the NRA and he wrote "I'm surprised to learn that someone on
the Left might be having rational thoughts regarding the danger of
gun-free zones."
It was back in my 3rd email to him in September 2004 that I found it
"interesting about a number of your responses is how willing you are to
infer what's in someone else's head."
We all do that. We all have to do that to get along in the world,
but it's dangerous territory at times. Among the hazards is having the
keen ability to detect one's own faults as they may be expressed by
others. There's a thin line between apparent mind-reading and
self-disclosure.
In 2010, brief mention of a "clumsy blunder into facebook territory" in
one of his emails, I don't remember the specifics, but this week there
were clumsy blunders anew. Under my post of a link to
the NYT editorial
Republicans
vs. Women (about which I'd made no comment, other than extracting
what I saw as the money quote, "the subcommittee's anti-woman work
product is a statement of Republican policy"), he derided my talking
points, and their being "unsubstantiated." Which was confusing, because
I hadn't made any. The confusion deepened when his recitation of the
sequence of events included "you then offered an editorial to support
your statement." And so on, to the point where he suggested "a steady
diet of left-wing drivel" might be "accelerating the shrinkage of your
hippocampus."
To say it was bizarre and unsettling would be an understatement. I
deleted the post, and sent a message explaining why. He retorted (to my
observation that he had barged in and made an ass of himself) to tell
me that no, "I made an ass of you," and that ipso facto, abracadabra,
"I'll leave you to wallow in your bitterness and hate. I want no part of
it."
Well, my goodness. I don't know if this is what bitterness and hate
wallow like, but his message gave me a decided chill. I replied with
genuine concern about his uncharacteristically antisocial behavior, but
also an urge for self-protection motivated by my previous experience
with unpleasant exchanges in cyberspace. The next step was to remove him
from my friends list... but he had saved me the trouble.
I do wish you well, Richard, in spite of what may be intractable
differences between us. I remember both the good old days when we were
foolish teenagers, and the thoughtful exchanges we had as adults.
Perhaps we will find some common ground again one day, some place other
than Facebook.
Shouldn't we make that five loopholes?
In keeping with the trademarked theme, that is, if we're going to
exempt
Olympic winnings from taxes, because...
because... is there a reason, actually? What
Digby
said:
"USA! USA! USA!, that's why. And also they are heroes."
Leave it to the host country's public medium to
examine the
question more calmly, and also explain who gets what from whom: "the
US Olympic Committee awards prize money to its medal winners: $25,000
for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze."
The talking point from some clever anti-tax group taking a unearned
victory lap points out how high the tax bill would be for an athlete in
the highest bracket, which starts at $388,351 this year. That
will hit a few hero-superstars and Ann Romney's horse. Should it win the
horse prom.
Aside from disputing the notion that income tax should apply to income
(and USA! USA! USA!), a more considered reform of our tax system (yes,
I'm joking here) might be to look at this "worldwide tax system" the
U.S. uses, which levies taxes on income made anywhere in the world,
something "only a handful" of countries have. But we are exceptional
after all, and it's almost time for summer recess, so how about a
simple, stupid bill and some August headlines. Done!
The Beeb's sidebar showing how much a gold medal at the Olympics will
get you in different countries is interesting, too. $800,000 if you play
for Singapore, and well into 6 figures for Russia or three of the 'stans.
Prompting doping expert John Hoberman to throw a cigar in the
celebratory punchbowl:
"Cash incentives are just an incentive to cheat."
And not just at the Olympics.
2.Aug.2012
The good, bad, ugly
Must be time to take some time off Facebook, where one bad actor can
spoil more than a whole day. We were friends once, there's an
explanation. If we're "friends" in any way at this point, it's only by
virtue of a distant and now irrelevant past. Apropos of whatever,
and for his own status, he said he wished he could remember the wit who
opined that one should
"Never argue with an idiot—they will drag you down to their level,
and beat you with experience."
From a different direction, after I asked someone else "what's your
point?" he replied, "Point? This is Facebook." What could I say?
Good point.
What else is new? Well, there was some underwater tussling going on in
water polo (yeah, I know, I was surprised too) and a boob sort of
flashed on NBC momentarily! Then they cut away from Bob Costas and
returned to the water polo match.
This brilliant "info" graphic from Fox "News" showed up, and even though
I understand it's so "over" to put "quotes" around the "News," how else
can we lament the fact that there's a giant sucking sound of information
leaving your brain when you watch that channel? (Whoa, if Bush tax cuts
expire, the top tax rate will go up like FIVE TIMES?! Or something.)
You can now get
George Takei saying
Ohhh Myyy! for your ringtone for a buck and half.
I have a cousin who made Staff Sergeant in the Air Force.
Congratulations, Vince!
Libre Congregación Unitaria de México posted a nice
photo of a Biblioburro, and I'm happy to know that such a thing exists
in the world. There's also
a blog, of course.
While we have paved some of paradise and put up parking lots, we are
also
turning
paper mills into data centers which have to smell better. And this
lyrical snippet that's good to keep in mind:
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden
1.Aug.2012
Greenland
Why do they call it "Greenland" when it's covered with snow and ice?
Stay tuned, we
may be about to find out. This summer, the peer-review process
couldn't act quickly enough to keep a team of glaciologists ahead of the
melt, as their prediction that we would see melting across all of
Greenland's ice sheet's surface in summer within a decade came true...
within
a month.
"The melting spread quickly. Melt maps derived from the three satellites
showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet's surface had
melted. By July 12, 97 percent had melted."
There are a few kilometers of difference between surface melting
and the whole shebang oozing into the north Atlantic, and "summer"
still doesn't last all that long at the top of the ice sheet, but yet
another warming claxon just sounded.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Monday, 17-Dec-2012 16:23:49 MST
http://fortboise.org/blog/201208.html
