Month: August 2008

Undecided about how you will vote if there is a federal election this fall? New research suggests you may not know your own mind. Yes, we may be able to hide our vote from ourselves!

But I just completed an online test sponsored by Harvard.

You have completed the study
Thank you for your participation. In this study you answered questions about yourself and about the 2008 United States Presidential election.

You also completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) measuring associations between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and John McCain and Barack Obama. Your results for the IAT are reported below.

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Barack Obama compared to John McCain.

Markus Feldenkirchen at Spiegel writes:

If Barack Obama accomplished one thing in Berlin, it was to make it painfully obvious just how uninspiring German politicians are.

And our crop of politicians are picayune too. It’s audacious to seek leadership without the will and the skill of taking us to a better place.

The ‘technocracy’ of this 2008 election annoys me. McCain will tweak a tax policy, a healthcare rule, and appoint pro-life department heads, grumping into the future under a herald of cynicism and war! Who cares?

A leader inspires. We carry out the work. Obama is asking us to choose a better future.

The Italian Vanity Fair has interviewed a half-brother of Barack Obama who is living on a $1 per day in Nigeria. Born to Obama’s father who left when Obama was two. [story]

The Minnesota Star-Tribune reports:

When Cindy McCain talks about growing up, she usually refers to herself as an “only child” — a phrase that ignores the existence of her half-sisters.

“It’s terribly painful,” Kathleen Hensely Portalski said. “It is as if she is the ‘real’ daughter. I am also a real daughter.”

Portalski said she stood quietly by for decades while her father lavished attention on his second family. But the past few months — with Cindy McCain’s repeated references to being her father’s only child — finally became too much. “I was his family, too,” she said from Phoenix.

Cindy McCain has another half-sister, Dixie Burd, by a previous relationship. [story]

This is probably as important as picking up a cigarette butt to keep the earth green, but it’s a note about creative merchandising.

Selling one’s vote is prohibited by federal law and also by most states.

So in order to penalize a 19-year-old student who, in May, posted his vote for sale on eBay for a bid of 10 dollars, state authorities in the northern state of Minnesota resorted to a law passed back in 1893, and actively enforced during the Prohibition Era years later, to punish people who tried to sell their votes against alcohol.

“When we see these listings we definitely take them down,” said England.

The eBay site records about seven million new articles for sale each day and on average posts about 112 million items for sale at any given moment. Given that volume of activity, patrolling for illegal posts presents a challenge.

“It’s possible that someone would put a listing up, it’s possible to be up for a couple of hours before we catch it. It’s possible that for a brief period of time something might actually be visible on the site,” she said.

“We are very clear, if you engage in illegal activity on our site, we absolutely will share information with law enforcement. We provide testimony in court.”

The Minnesota man was charged with corruption and solicitation, criminal charges that could have cost him up to five years in jail and a 10,000-dollar fine. But he was sentenced at the end of July to just 50 hours of community service.

More recently, a Maryland resident posted his vote for a starting bid of 3.99. [story here]

Next thing you know because bacteria lives longer in a petri dish of reversatrol somebody will be selling life extension pills.

Methinks love goes places.

Have you ever done skunk?
There’s a Gulag in every skunk.
Tonight’s my third lifetime imprisonment.

My Spaniel Lucky was sprayed tonight. I can say now that I’m damn near professional. When I’m older I’ll tell somebody each of the stories.

Dr. Caceci of Texas A&M University knows there is a great de-skunk discovery for removing skunk odor:

Forget what you have heard about tomato juice–vinegar— it doesn’t work.

Skunk spray is mainly composed of low molecular weight thiol compounds. (“Thiols” are compounds with the “-SH radical” attached to a carbon atom.) In industrial applications, alkaline hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is used for scrubbing similar compounds from waste gas streams.

Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, when combined, become a “chemical engine” for churning out oxygen. The soap breaks up the oils in the skunk spray, allowing the other ingredients to do their work.

Rinse well.

Odor’s gone!

The Skunk Remedy Recipe

In a plastic bucket, mix well the following ingredients:

1 quart of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide

1/4 cup of baking soda

1 to 2 teaspoons liquid soap

Discovered and first tested by Paul Krebaum, Last Update: 10/08/02

StylishWeb posts three dozen pics of monkeys.

It’s an experience.
Faces and expressions.
Provocative and interesting.

And, of course, every kid under 100 will have fun too.

Top CEOs Give 10 Times More To McCain Than Obama; McCain Promises Huge Tax Breaks For Them In Return

McCain has cultivated support from mega-corporations by promising to dole out huge tax breaks in return should he win the presidency.

McCain’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent would yield $45 billion in tax breaks for the 200 largest corporations:

Eight companies — Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Bank of America Corp., AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Microsoft Corp. — would each receive over $1 billion a year.

McCain would deliver about $4 billion in tax cuts to the five largest oil companies.

He would also hand over $2 billion to the top 10 health insurance companies.

Editor, International Herald Tribune:

Here is a crazy idea to address the United States’ gaping fiscal deficit: Persuade corporate America to start paying taxes.

America’s back in the Cold War and W.’s back on vacation.

Talk about your fearful symmetry.

After eight years, the president’s gut remains gullible. He’ll go out as he came in – ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 470 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there’s still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

I really like this sentence: “He’ll go out as he came in – ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.”

I think we can chalk this up and just let it go by:

In the beginning, he attracted competent people to his cabinet and promised to tackle longstanding problems, including the spread of madrasas, the religious schools that had become breeding grounds of Islamic extremists.

But the madrasas remained untouched, mainly because Musharraf handed the task to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was opposed to the plan, said Jehangir Tareen, a former minister of industries and special projects in the cabinet.

Musharraf did back some important changes in the news media and the rights of women, his supporters and critics agree. Now, dozens of private television stations exist, many of them with rambunctious political talk shows. He also moved to improve the status of women by pushing for the amendment of strict Islamic laws.

“Musharraf tried to construct a modern, enlightened state,” Tareen said. “But he proved you cannot do this on the structure of a patronage-riven and police-oriented political machine.”

Is there an ‘x’ number of idiots taking up good seats of leadership that one of these days we’ll just fix it? Rambunctious has always been one of my favorite words.

It is not easy bringing new to day.

The most long labor.
The remaining take packages home.

Maybe another Augustine will say this is sin.

Of course it is.

There’s no church, no government, no creed, unless joy.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

General Sir Mike Jackson

I am ashamed of this article and cull this post to point out how lame we are.

How To Fix The World – Forbes.com
“We have to revive a culture of innovation and repair.”

What?! You were doing something else?

India.

Friends.
Just sayin’
Much available.

NBC: He’s 23. Can you tell him what to do?

MOM: We’re collaborative.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is thinking about war, more war, and war forever; the long war [wiki].

Retired colonel Andrew Bacevich carefully tells us this is The American Military Crisis.

Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.

William J. Astore, who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, is warning us our militarists have led us toward “a warrior-state that went berserk in a febrile quest for ‘full spectrum dominance’.”

It seems that too many unappetizing “peacekeeping” tasks, once handled by other departments of the government, are now in the military’s lap, which turns out not to be quite as capacious as once imagined.

The Bush/Cheney administration has taken us to primitive battle. These poor, poor men. They have enabled private armies, invigorated war as an industry and made mercenaries of us all.

And so, McCain. There’s yet to be a solid, point-by-point effort to expose John McCain…

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “This is war,” he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

There is a system out there… making mercenaries of us all.

General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British armed forces, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph:

Georgia is a sovereign democratic state that, like many others, gained its independence in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Strongly supported by the West, it aspires to Nato and EU membership. It also has to contend with two regions – Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both with Russian minorities – that did not, and do not, wish to be part of Georgia.

South Ossetia, in particular, has an independence movement not averse to the use of illegal violence; it is worth bearing in mind that by agreement with Georgia, Russia had deployed so-called peace-keeping forces in south Ossetia long before the current crisis.

Did Russia encourage the South Ossetian rebels to provoke the recent Georgian military action, thereby providing Russia with a casus belli? Did Georgian forces use excessive force in South Ossetia? Did Georgia wrongly calculate that in the face of Western support for Georgia, Russia would not react?

I do not know the answers, but I am clear that the problems arising from minority enclaves in such circumstances are fundamentally political, rather than purely military.

I write not to excuse the Russian actions and behaviour, but rather to explain them. For the West, the challenge is to find the right answer to Lenin’s question: “What is to be done?”

Putin is determined to rebuild Russia’s stature, and he is being much helped in this by the surge in energy prices. There is also evidence that after a decade and more of decline, the Russian armed forces are starting to rebuild and modernise.

For me, the right course for the West – without compromising its own position and values – is to show a greater understanding of why Russia behaves as it does, to accept more willingly Russia’s concerns for its Near Abroad.

While there are actions that we cannot condone, Russian perceptions exist and will take time to change.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats, and citizens: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

I give no support to Putin nor Russia for brutish policies, but our press is pounding drums, selling papers, competing for revenue, taking sides… street-corner stuff as far as I’m concerned.

The purpose of this post is to examine what others are saying. As above, a top military chief.

In another paper, the Times of Johannesburg published a scathing view of us. Sadly I read, “It has been said that at times wars provide clarity.”

And an Israeli paper said:

It has been years since we have had a war in which it is so clear to spectators in the West who constitute the Children of Light and who constitute the Children of Darkness.

It is a matter of propaganda. The U.S. president’s remarks on Friday that the world would not accept bullying and intimidation could only raise a bitter smile.

George W. Bush talking about bullying? The U.S. president talking about intimidation? Who set off to two bullying wars this decade? Who tried to solve problems and replace regimes through intimidation if not our friend in the White House? Which power spilled more blood this decade? Russia or “the leader of the free world”?

“There’s no room for debate on this matter,” said Mr Bush.

And puffed in vain glory, John McCain sells us a bumper sticker, “We are all Georgians now”. Nonsense. And about Russia he says,

“I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire.”

McCain’s nonsense is inappropriate, shot from the hip, as if to say we’ll soon be in McCain’s 100 Years War with Putin the Czar of Russia. McCain is making headlines too easy to achieve. Aggrandizing for votes by feeding slogans to a profiteering media is 100 years of confrontation we should learn to stop.

I believe too many revel in war.

What a kick!
It’s three paragraphs. The diplomat’s tire went flat, and brass and swords rattle.

“Trouble had been brewing in the disputed South Ossetian region for weeks as Moscow-backed militias skirmished with Georgian troops, yet Russian-brokered negotiations between the Georgian government and the separatists had continued.

“But the first substantial face-to-face talks on August 7 fell through after a farcical chain of events in which the top Russian diplomat claimed he was unable to attend the meeting in South Ossetia because his car tyre had run flat.

“Refusing to take his excuse at face value, the Georgian delegation then assumed they were being lured into a trap, and began the shelling that invited the Russian invasion.”

I’ve been looking for an article such as this for a very long time.

I encourage you to read Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Dr. Bartlett first gave this presentation on “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” in September 1969 and since then has given it an average of once every 8.5 days.

These days are good days to brush up on small percents.

redferret and many, many folks say this is “The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See“. And most folks say it’s boring too. But the man offers critical knowledge. No life should be without these tidbits of awareness.

In the comments at the LATimes’ article about Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous:

My great hope is that he interviews Arthur Blessit, the wild man preacher who was the one who converted “W” into a born again. In the 1960s, of all the crazies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and there were plenty, Blessit was considered by most to be the craziest.

In his traveling revival show in 1984 that was in Midland, TX, one of his followers, a car dealer, brought the then Vice President’s son to be converted and he was in a private ceremony.

The Bush family has had the record revised, as it has on other recorded occasions, and claims it was Billy Graham.

I would love to see Bill Maher interview Arthur Blessit about the Shrub’s conversion.

Craig Unger, author of “The Fall of the House of Bush” and “House of Bush, House of Saud” suggests that Mr. Bush did not become a born-again Christian after talking with the Rev. Billy Graham at the Bush compound in the summer of 1985, as the president recounted in his autobiography, but that he’d already been born again, more than a year earlier in Texas, thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessit.

Blessit once ran a “Jesus coffeehouse” on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, where he preached to “bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men.” [NYTimes]

3-D wireless network coverage
in this case, Salt Lake City,
via Paul Kedrosky

Akkam’s Razor:

Why did the interventions of the New Deal (and our victory in World War II) largely work while the attempts of Johnson’s Great Society fail? What was different?

…
Fast-forwarding to today, particularly through the lens of the environmental crisis, particularly peak oil, the specter of outstripping, the water problem, and global warming, one can easily see how the conditions that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, contributed to the greatness of the country and her people through the New Deal, and Ultimately won World War II and the immediate post-war period appear to be re-manifesting themselves.

We will all be affected by the scarcity of those resources and the effects they will have on our lives.

Our collective cooperation, whether through innovation, conservation, or re-configuration will change us as a people. Once the American people begin to view their lives in terms of kilowatt hours, gallons-per-day, and dollars-per-mile, and begin doing what they have to do to get those costs and consumptions in line, we will have primed the pump for the next great period in American history.

This is what the Republicans fear – a Democratically unified country around these principles undoes how the GOP has done business for all of the 20th century.

Congressional Budget Office has shown, as even Sen. McCain’s advisers have acknowledged, his health-care plan would impose a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years on workers.

Sen. McCain’s plan will count the health care you get from your employer as if it were taxable cash income.

Even after accounting for Sen. McCain’s proposed health-care tax credits, this plan would eventually leave tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes.

In addition, as the Congressional Budget Office has shown, this kind of plan would push people into higher tax brackets and increase the taxes people pay as their compensation rises, raising marginal tax rates by even more than if we let the entire Bush tax-cut plan expire tomorrow.

Who is the great power now?

Not only have we done a Versailles on Russia but we have also found ourselves in the same weak position as the Great Powers found themselves in the early 1930’s.

We have no will or means of standing up to a resurgent Russia. We have not the treasure – we have blown that in the Middle East and the Credit Crisis. We have not the arms – we spent this in the Middle East. We have no moral authority – we spent that too.

Worse. Putin has Europe by the balls. He is the key energy supplier for Europe.

Worse, the west has made a whole series of promises of security to the new states that we cannot keep.

“The Congress is no longer able to articulate the common good.”

Andrew Bacevich:

“The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress… As the Congress has moved to the margins, as the President has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be less effective…

Because of this preoccupation, this fascination with the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics, instead of genuine democracy… We look to the next President to fix things and, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things. So one of the real problems with the imperial presidency is that it has hollowed out our politics and, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We’re going through the motions of a democratic political system, but the fabric of democracy really has worn very thin.”

“No one in Washington knows what they are doing.”

No one in Washington knows what they are doing.