God Told Me To:

2006-01-18T07:38:00.000-05:00

Selfish Republicans strike again. Science and learning always seem to take a back seat to the Republican's wants.

Scorched Earth

By ROBERT L. PARK Op-Ed Contributor
Published: January 15, 2006
College Park, Md.

NASA has quietly terminated the Deep Space Climate Observatory, citing "competing priorities." The news media took little notice. Few Americans, after all, had even heard of the program. But the entire world may come to mourn its passing.

Earth is growing warmer. Even the most strident global-warming deniers have taken to saying that a little warming is a good thing. If the trend continues, however, it will have catastrophic consequences for life on this planet. Correctly identifying the cause could be the most important problem facing humanity.

Most scientists link global warming to unrestrained burning of fossil fuels, which shrouds Earth in a blanket of carbon dioxide, trapping the Sun's energy. Others, backed by industries that spew pollutants into the atmosphere, insist that greenhouse emissions are not the problem. They prefer to attribute warming to natural variations in solar output. Scientists are skeptical, but they don't deny the possibility. The issue cries out to be resolved.

Even in a world wracked by wars, battles are not fought over scientific disagreements. In science, nature is the sole arbiter. Disputes are resolved only by better experiments.

The better experiment when it comes to global warming was to be the climate observatory, situated in space at the neutral-gravity point between the Sun and Earth. Called Lagrange 1, or L1, this point is about one million miles from Earth. At L1, with a view of the full disk of the Sun in one direction, and a full sunlit Earth in the opposite, the observatory could continuously monitor Earth's energy balance. It was given a poetic name, Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor aboard Christopher Columbus's ship who first sighted the New World.

Development began in November 1998 and it was ready for launching three years later. The cost was only about $100 million. For comparison, that is only one-thousandth the cost of the International Space Station, which serves no useful purpose.

Before Triana could be launched, however, there was a presidential election. Many of the industries favored by the new Bush White House were not anxious to have the cause of global warming pinned down. The launching was put on hold.

The disdain of the Bush White House for Triana goes much deeper than just a desire to avoid the truth about global warming. Triana began life in early 1998 as a brainchild of Al Gore, who was then the vice president. Mr. Gore, the story goes, woke up one morning wondering if it would be possible to beam a continuous image of the full Earth back from space to inspire people with the need to care for our planet. The 1972 portrait of the full Earth, taken from the Moon, had inspired millions with the fragile beauty of our blue planet. Why not beam the image live into classrooms, allowing students to view weather systems marching around the globe?

Scientists had dreamed of such an observatory for years. They hoped Mr. Gore's influence would make it happen. Mr. Gore's support would end up destroying it. Those who hated him, hated Triana. His dream of inspiring environmentalists and schoolchildren served only to trivialize the project. It was ridiculed as "Gore's screen saver."

Triana is terminated, but global warming is not. Someday, there will have to be an observatory at L1. Perhaps the most important lesson from our exploration of the solar system is that the most terrible place on Earth is a Garden of Eden compared to the best place anywhere else. We must find out how to keep it that way.

Robert L.Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is the author of "Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud."

Don't you just love how the Repubs turn a serious scientific endeavor into a joke?

2005-12-31T17:34:00.000-05:00

Howdy doo. Just a little end of year note to let you know that I haven't forgotten about my little blog and it's handfull of readers. I've been trying to come up with something good to write about for Christmas but I couldn't and now that Christmas has passed it seems silly to write anything about Christmas.

So here we are, a few hours away from the beginning of the New Year and I still can't come up with something I like. I refuse to not write something, even if it comes out a bit lame.

While this has nothing to do with New Year's I just have to mention it. Little Yappers Attack Officer. On Friday, 30 Dec 2005, a police officer in Fremont Ca was attacked by 5 nasty little rat dogs. I guess they didn't like that their owner was being escorted home by a police officer. Can't help it, this just sounds like the start to a bad joke.

Earlier this week I was going to do another on-line vacation. It was going to be about roller coasters around the world. Seems like this would be a good on-line vacation. Guess what, it really isn't. Looking at pictures of roller coasters and amusement parks really isn't all that interesting. Maybe if I was a roller coaster rider the pictures would make me think of roller coastering fun that I already had. 2-D pictures just don't cut it.

You can check out Google to see what I mean about looking at roller coaster pictures.

The Skyrail roller coaster toy looks like fun though.

The other day when I was going through the pictures there were more links to physics classes relating to coasters. That was kind of neat. Perhaps you would like to Bring Physics to Life with Roller Coaster Physics.

The joy of Googling is that you may find better pictures than I did.

I wanted the last post of the year to be more interesting but that just hasn't happened. In less than six hours the East Coast will be into 2006 and more than likely I will be asleep or pretty darned close to it. That should explain why this last post of 2005 is not something deep or very interesting.

Well, Happy End of 2005 and Happy 2006!
Hope the New Year's ups and downs are fun and don't make you puke! :-)

2005-12-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

You know, if so many people are really worried about the sanctity of marriage then maybe they should go after nitwits like these first.

ONE WIFE AT A TIME

Another South Carolina deputy had a lapse of judgment, too, but his was of the matrimonial variety. Sumter County sheriff's deputy Jay Follin was fired for being married to two women at the same time. Follin, 27, was separated from his first wife when he married his second, according to a department investigation. His second wife, the investigation revealed, was already married to another man at the time. Everything became known when the husband of Follin's second wife filed a complaint with the sheriff's department. The couple was separated at the time.

Maybe the sanctity of marriage folks figure that if they can’t make the straight couples tow the proper marriage line how will they ever control the homosexuals.

2005-12-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

It’s been some time since we went on an on-line vacation. Today, I’ve decided that Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is the place to go.

Hidden far into the Middle East, neighboring such countries as Saudi Arabia and Oman there lies a young and prosperous country called the United Arab Emirates. It was all desert 40 years ago, but someone discovered oil there. A lot of oil. Now, the country has more money than it knows what to do with. Dubai is a city in the UAE and it's being made into a very, very, VERY amazing place. The tallest hotel in the world, the tallest building in the world, the largest mall in the world... all in one city! All are scheduled to be reality in the next few years.

So let’s start and remember to wander around and enjoy your vacation.

Hey! Let’s start by skiing Dubai! According to BBC World, it’s the largest indoor ski slope and it’s connected to a mall. They provide everything you need to ski with including a ski coat. I only costs $35 to enjoy the slopes. (Volume warning! Turn down your volume before clicking on the link, on my computer it’s pretty loud.)

Before going to ski, make sure to reserve a spot for the breakfast buffet with Santa.

It gets hot in Dubai , so be sure to make time to go to the Wild Wadiwater park. Heck of a waterslide.

Afterwards we can head over to Mall of the Emirates and meet up with a couple of guys that we don’t know. Here’s a pretty picture you can buy. You can get it in malls anywhere but with this you can say you bought it in Dubai.

If money is no object then you can stay at the Burj al Arab Hotel in the Royal Suite. Since you are traveling via the internet you can afford to visit all you like.

You can get a room during the middle of March for approx. $1,89.20
Room Type: KG BED-170SQM-SEA VIEW-JACUZZI-DINING FOR 4 DVD PLASMA TV-LAPTOP-FAX-WORK DESK-PRIVATE BAR

Or maybe you’d rather stay in this suite, which has many more sqare feet then my house, for approx. $1906.11
Room Type: KG BED-225-315SQM-SEAVIEW-DINING FOR 4-JACUZZI DVD-PLASMA TV-LAPTOP-LIVING AREA-WORK DESK (This room is more that twice the size of my house, it's over 2,400 sq ft. The smaller suite is bigger than anywhere I've ever lived.)

If you get into trouble here’s the US Embassy in the UAE but somehow I don’t think you’ll need any government help during your armchair travel abroad.

Well, lunch is done so no more travelling, I have to go back to work. More travelling another day.

2005-11-29T13:21:00.000-05:00

You know, I just don’t know how I learned anything without the internet.

In the news today is an artricle about American Heart Association changes for performing CPR. So, I looked up “new cpr”on Google so I could find an article that I could easily copy and paste from. (Yahoo news gives me such a hard time.) Among the results was this article from 2003.

The new CPR: flip the patient

By Ben Wyld June 28 2003

Flipping a patient over and performing heart massage on their back could be a better way of restoring blood flow than the standard resuscitation method, according to research that may challenge decades-old orthodoxy.

A study of reverse cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on six critically ill intensive care patients found significant increases in their blood pressure. The patients' hearts had stopped and they had failed to respond to standard resuscitation

After 45 minutes of standard CPR without response, doctors at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre turned the patients on to their stomachs and gave them a further 15 minutes of CPR applied to their backs. They found the systolic blood pressure improved dramatically, compared to that measured in the final 15 minutes of the standard technique. Blood flow through the arteries also increased.

None of the patients survived, but the researchers claim the results demonstrate, for the first time, that CPR applied to the back may have distinct benefits. The technique is already used when patients suffer an arrest while they are face down for surgery. But it has never been directly compared to standard CPR.
. . .

Dr Weisfeldt believes the technique allows for firmer compression of the heart muscle. This is because the spine is less easily damaged than the sternum and ribcage.

Thinking about it, it makes sense that there would be more pressure applied to the heart by doing CPR on the back. The spine is meant to flex so it would be easier to press the spine and put more pressure on the heart easier. The breastbone and the ribs aren’t really supposed to move that much. Seems to me too that as long as they can flip the victim over safely then a weaker person would be able to do the compressions.

Now after finding the above article in the Google results I then found this article on MSNBC from earlier this year. Dr. Gorden Ewy, director of the Sarver Heart Center at the University of Arizona says that there is a better way to do CPR. He’s convinced city of Tucson, Ariz., the fire department and the paramedics that his was the right way to do CPR. Dr. Ewy’s way is to skip the rescue breathing entirely and do 100 chest compressions per minute.

Ewy says the big problem with CPR as it is currently practiced is those breaths to the mouth, which interrupt chest compressions. During that interruption, he says, the critical flow of blood to the brain also gets interrupted.

And more important, surveys show most people won't blow into a stranger's mouth.
. . .

"The paramedics in the field are reporting that it's an easier way to resuscitate code arrests and they are seeing a lot better response from the patients," says Joe Gulotta, deputy chief of the Tucson Fire Department.

And from this article, New CPR method improves results 500%

Dr. Arthur Sanders from the Sarver Heart Center, says "We improved survival from 13% for people receiving ventilation and compression, to 80% survival rate where they were getting continuous chest compressions."
. . .

Richard White from the Southern Arizona Red Cross says, "They are learning [at Red Cross classes] tried and true tested techniques internationaly respected that have been saving lives for more than 50 years."

Funny thing about what Richard White says, it’s completely opposite from information I’ve gotten from various CPR teachers. In fact my last CPR teacher pretty much said “most people stay dead when you do CPR” but it’s better than doing nothing. Look at the statistics, 13% saved the conventional way or 80% saved with the continuous chest compressions. Perhaps it’s time to change things a bit?

I think one of the important things about the new CPR guidelines is that they say it can be taught in about 20 minutes instead of the 4 hour class.

The study found that just five minutes of training on defibrillator use and 20 minutes of instruction in CPR was as effective as the standard four-hour course.

I think the Red Cross will miss some of the money the 4 hour classes brought in but if they can teach more people faster in a way that can be remembered then that’s a good thing. The last CPR class I was in took about 4 hours but only about an hour was used to teach the important part, the CPR. The CPR portion, including using the defibrillator, was taught at the end of the class when everyone was tired and bored. I can’t help but think that more was forgotten that day then was remembered.

Now if they can come up with an automated external defibrillator (AED) that can be used with clothes on. That’s my problem with using it. You have to cut off the top and bra, if you’re working on a woman, to use it correctly. I’m just not comfortable with stripping someone in public, even if it is for a good cause. If there’s ever a need, I hope I can get over it

2005-11-15T12:58:00.000-05:00

"The rejection of ballot measures in three states that would have rolled back taxes or limited spending may indicate a cooling of American voters' ardor for tax cuts."

Taxpayers love their tax cuts. Maybe the difference here is that politicians are trying to cut programs that the voters think should be paid for with their tax money. Head Start. I’ll help pay for that. Social Security. I’ll put in my share. Clean air and water. No problem, I’ll pony up my portion. There are lots of things that taxpayers will be happy to pay for.

Washington voters succumbed to warnings that roads and bridges were crumbling and that the gas tax was needed to avert disaster.
. . .

. . . for the past several years voters had been willing to increase taxes or approve bond issues when they were designated for tangible improvements.

On Tuesday, voters in Maine, New York and Ohio approved bond issues totaling nearly $5 billion to pay for transportation projects, water systems, college buildings and research programs.

If I had my choice I’d stop paying for corporate welfare and that high-tech bridge in Alaska among other things.

Why can’t lawmakers just shift the wasted money to projects that taxpayers approve of?

2005-11-07T12:40:00.000-05:00

Drunk Death Row Escapee Captured in La.

”You know who I am,” Thompson told officers when asked his name. Asked again, he identified himself as Charles Thompson, Martin said. Police said Thompson was too drunk to be interrogated Sunday night.

Cleaves Acquitted of Rape Charges

Prosecutors claimed Neal, 21, and Cleaves, 23, raped the visiting University of New Haven player, who was finishing a one-week stint as a La Salle basketball camp counselor, as she vomited in a sink after drinking eight shots of high-proof alcohol.

Here we have a drunk who had already been found guilty of murdering two people and even though he’s drunk, he’s quick enough to say “You know who I am.” The police can’t interrogate him; he’s under the influence. Next we have a 19 year-old student, vomiting into a sink after multiple drinks and the guys who had sex with her claim that she wanted to have sex with them, while she was vomiting. SAY WHAT??

The worst part of this is that a majority of the jury went along with the consensual sex claim.

Now really, think about it. The last time you were puking up your guts, did it make you want to have sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of puking fetish out there but I’d lay odds against it being widely practiced.

All I can figure is that the majority of the jury decided to blame the victim. You know how stupid people can be, she was dumb enough to drink with strangers so she must have been asking for it. This just doesn’t make sense.

I have a co-worker who was on the jury and didn’t go with the majority. I really don’t want to bring up my coworker’s gender since so many people decide that gender is the deciding factor on how people will view this kind of case. My co-worker said this case “put women’s safety back 50 years. It’ll make more girls afraid to standup for themselves.”

All I know is that there is something really wrong when a drunken convicted double murderer gets more consideration than a drunken innocent student

I don’t like Philadelphia quite as much as I used to. Oh, and the La Salle Brothers need to teach more ethics.

2005-11-04T12:51:00.000-05:00

Simply, Amir Taheri is a male gossipmonger. To read his account of the riots around Paris this past week, it is all the fault of one woman.

Why Paris is Burning

How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of youg boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars.

Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not bee present in that suburb for years.

The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something -- which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.

Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths -- who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years -- got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in the cordoned-off areaa housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.

Seems to me the problem came when a bunch of kids weren’t taught right from wrong. Seems to me the problem came when a citizen expected the police to do what they should have been doing for years.

Can’t help but wonder if the author of the article would have said a ‘male’ busybody. There was no reason to point out a gender or make a judgement on what kind of person would, God forbid, call the police when they see a crime taking place. Amir needs to go back to remedial writing class.

2005-11-02T07:32:00.000-05:00

This almost seems like a ‘no duh’ moment and someone I know will probably read this and say “Yup, that’s me.”

Tongue has built in taste for fatty food.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The tongue may indeed have a taste for cheesecake, french fries and butter cookies, according to study published Tuesday.

In experiments with rodents, French scientists identified a receptor on the tongue that appears to detect dietary fat. This counters the traditional view that the taste buds pick up only five basic flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and "umami," — a flavor associated with the food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG).

The fact that the tongue harbors receptors for fatty acids could shed new light on appetite control and obesity, according to the researchers, led by Philippe Besnard of the University of Bourgogne.

They report their findings in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Scientists have speculated that the tongue may have a receptor designed to detect fat, but this study is the first to pinpoint one, according to Besnard and his colleagues. The receptor, a protein called CD36, is already known to exist in many tissues and is involved in fat storage, among other jobs; it is also goes by the name of fatty acid transporter, or FAT.

Rats and mice, not to mention many humans, have a natural preference for fatty food, and rats have already been shown to have CD36 proteins in their taste buds.

To see whether CD36 might be the tongue's fat detector, Besnard and his colleagues studied rats and mice that were either normal or had the gene for CD36 "knocked out," inactivating the protein.

They found that while the genetically normal animals naturally opted for fattier fare when given the choice, the CD36-deficient mice had no such preference. And when the researchers put fatty acids on the tongues of the normal animals, this alone triggered a release of fat-processing substances from the digestive organs. Again, the same was not true of mice lacking CD36 activity.

Though the body's regulation of fat intake is complex, these findings point to the importance of CD36 receptors on the tongue, Besnard told Reuters Health.

2005-10-31T15:07:00.000-05:00

Every now and then on the news I’ve been hearing about people in Florida complaining about not having enough food and water and that the electricity has not been turned back on yet. People are annoyed, tired and hungry.

Hurricaine Wilma hit a couple of weeks ago, zipped over the state in about a day and really didn’t do much damage in comparison to Katrina/Rita damage. Katrina hit at the end of August-beginning of September. Rita hit the morning of September 24th.

New Orleans battles to recover 10/28/2005

Electricity has been restored to 60% of the city and gas service to only 46%. A boil-water advisory is still in effect for residential neighbourhoods in eastern New Orleans and the devastated Lower Ninth Ward.

Removal of storm debris remains a "major challenge," Nagin said, and garbage pickup has been "spotty at best".

I want to know why the media are covering Florida so much when it’s no where near as bad there as in Louisiana and Mississippi.

2005-10-28T13:36:00.000-04:00

I’m a real sucker for this kind of stuff. A guy finds cameras with film still inside. He devlops the film, makes prints and puts them on the internet.

This is why I think the internet is so wonderful.

I'm sure at least some of these people once asked, "I wonder what happened to those pictures Uncle Harry took."

Well, this guy from Massachusetts bought Uncle Harry's camera in 2004. He used a machine to break down the photos into 1's and 0's and put the photos on "the internet" so everyone in the world could see them in an instant.

Yeah, right.

And look! In the picture, it’s President Lincoln!

2005-10-27T20:56:00.000-04:00

Felt like adding a picture. This is from the Cape May-Lewes Ferry on a grey 2002 day.

And did you notice that the big empty space is now filled with stuff? Blogger came through and showed me how to fix it. Yeah!! Now there's just a blank space next to the picture. Oh well, one thing at a time. :-)

2005-10-18T07:04:00.000-04:00

Yet another reason to stop smoking.

Scientists Study Bone Recovery in Smokers

WASHINGTON - Smokers' broken bones take a lot longer to heal. But scientists now are studying whether giving up cigarettes for even a week or two after a fracture might make the difference between a speedy recovery and months of easy-to-reinjure mushy bones.

"There's a window," predicts orthopedic specialist Michael Zuscik of the University of Rochester.

If he's right, it could dramatically change orthopedic practice for the nation's 48 million smokers.

Bone damage is arguably the least publicized of tobacco's harms.

The first time many smokers ever hear of the problem is if they need spinal fusion, a back operation that surgeons often won't perform unless patients kick the habit — with a urine test to prove they quit. That's because the surgery is far more likely to fail in smokers than nonsmokers.

Smokers who break a leg require 62 percent more time to heal.

Then there's the silent toll smoking can wreak by contributing to bone-thinning osteoporosis.

Yet tobacco's nicotine provokes a powerful addiction; it can take repeated attempts to succeed in quitting. Those who do often use nicotine patches or gum to wean themselves.

Here's the rub: Zuscik's early research suggests nicotine may be a key bone-damaging culprit — and that it does its dirty work almost immediately by affecting stem cells stored in the bone marrow, called mesenchymal stem cells, that move in to begin healing an injured bone.

"The most important steps that occur involving these mesenchymal stem cells happen during the first days and weeks of the healing process," Zuscik explains. "The whole thing is kind of derailed."

Now, armed with a new $1.4 million grant from the Defense Department, Zuscik is out to prove that theory, and whether going cold-turkey for a short time after breaking a bone or undergoing bone surgery might help smokers heal faster.

It's of interest to the military because surveys show up to 34 percent of troops smoke, compared with about 22 percent of the general population, and bone damage, particularly to the arms and legs, is common among soldiers injured in combat.

While the link between smoking and bone harm is clear, no one knows why it occurs, says Dr. Thomas Einhorn, chairman of orthopedic surgery at Boston University. Nicotine may not play the only role; there are lots of toxins in cigarette smoke.

But the Rochester team's theory is plausible, he says. And it's crucial to pursue because if they're right, using nicotine patches or gum immediately after a bone injury would likely be as bad as continuing to smoke.

Stem cells are building blocks for tissue, and the first step toward bone healing is for mesenchymal stem cells to transform into cartilage-forming cells. They build a scaffolding over the fracture, which gradually fills in and hardens into bone. It takes about three months. Stress a healing fracture before then and the still soft cartilage can break again easily, causing lasting pain.

Put nicotine onto those stem cells and they go into overdrive, making an enormous amount of cartilage, Zuscik discovered in tests with mice.

"Too much of a good thing is a bad thing," he explains. "What you end up with, we hypothesize, is a situation where the healing process ends up taking longer."

Nicotine seems to do that by parking in receptors on the stem cells' surface that are intended for acetylcholine, a chemical that helps nerve cells communicate. If the stem cells turn into nerve cells, they'll need those receptors. If they turn into cartilage-forming chondrocytes, the receptors quickly disappear. Zuscik's preliminary data suggests they're gone in a week.

So the nicotine has only a short time to jump into those cellular docking sites. Hence Zuscik's theory that this is a window during which smokers should heal more like nonsmokers if only they could abstain.

It will take a few years of additional animal research before that theory can be tested in smokers, he says, although there's no down side to people trying to kick the habit in hopes it will help heal their bones.

Indeed, there's some indirect evidence that quitting helps: In 2000, Kentucky researchers reviewed the medical records of 357 spinal fusion patients. About three-quarters of both nonsmokers and those who kicked the habit while healing recovered well enough to return to work, compared with just half of the smokers.

2005-10-06T14:36:00.000-04:00

I sure hope the chance of an avian flu pandemic is wrong but the World Health Organization seems to think it’s just a matter of time.

Responding to the avian influenza pandemic threat: recommended strategic actions

As the present situation continues to evolve towards a pandemic (my emphasis), countries, the international community, and WHO have several phase-wise opportunities to intervene, moving from a pre-pandemic situation, through emergence of a pandemic virus, to declaration of a pandemic and its subsequent spread. During the present pre-pandemic phase, interventions aim to reduce the risk that a pandemic virus will emerge and gather better disease intelligence, particularly concerning changes in the behaviour of the virus that signal improved transmissibility. The second opportunity to intervene occurs coincident with the first signal that the virus has improved its transmissibility, and aims to change the early history of the pandemic. The final opportunity occurs after a pandemic has begun. Interventions at this point aim to reduce morbidity, mortality, and social disruption.

. . .

Influenza pandemics have historically taken the world by surprise, giving health services little time to prepare for the abrupt increases in cases and deaths that characterize these events and make them so disruptive. Vaccines – the most important intervention for reducing morbidity and mortality – were available for the 1957 and 1968 pandemic viruses, but arrived too late to have an impact. As a result, great social and economic disruption, as well as loss of life, accompanied the three pandemics of the previous century.

The present situation is markedly different for several reasons. First, the world has been warned in advance. For more than a year, conditions favouring another pandemic have been unfolding in parts of Asia. Warnings that a pandemic may be imminent have come from both changes in the epidemiology of human and animal disease and an expanding geographical presence of the virus, creating further opportunities for human exposure. While neither the timing nor the severity of the next pandemic can be predicted, evidence that the virus is now endemic in bird populations means that the present level of risk will not be easily diminished.

Second, this advance warning has brought an unprecedented opportunity to prepare for a pandemic and develop ways to mitigate its effects. To date, the main preparedness activities undertaken by countries have concentrated on preparing and rehearsing response plans, developing a pandemic vaccine, and securing supplies of antiviral drugs. Because these activities are costly, wealthy countries are presently the best prepared; countries where H5N1 is endemic – and where a pandemic virus is most likely to emerge – lag far behind. More countries now have pandemic preparedness plans: around one fifth of the world’s countries have some form of a response plan, but these vary greatly in comprehensiveness and stage of completion. Access to antiviral drugs and, more importantly, to vaccines remains a major problem because of finite manufacturing capacity as well as costs. Some 23 countries have ordered antiviral drugs for national stockpiles, but the principal manufacturer will not be able to fill all orders for at least another year. Fewer than 10 countries have domestic vaccine companies engaged in work on a pandemic vaccine. A November 2004 WHO consultation reached the stark conclusion that, on present trends, the majority of developing countries would have no access to a vaccine during the first wave of a pandemic and possibly throughout its duration.

. . .

Pandemics are remarkable events in that they affect all parts of the world, regardless of socioeconomic status or standards of health care, hygiene and sanitation. Once international spread begins, each government will understandably make protection of its own population the first priority. The best opportunity for international collaboration – in the interest of all countries – is now, before a pandemic begins.

2005-09-28T12:11:00.000-04:00

Guys, if she says she doesn’t feel like making dinner then you should try cooking it yourself or pick up the phone and order a pizza.
Her refusal to cook dinner led to fatal quarrel, police say

Wednesday, September 28, 2005
By Cindi Lash, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

David Joseph Krzyzanowski wanted dinner.

His wife told authorities that she didn't feel like cooking, and she told him so.

By her account, Beth Theresia Krzyzanowski's refusal provoked an argument Sunday that led her to fatally shoot her spouse and leave his body lying in their driveway overnight, then shove it into a cistern behind their rural mobile home, Armstrong County District Attorney Scott Andreassi said.

. . .

"She indicates that it was all over his demand that she prepare dinner," Andreassi said.

. . .

She gave troopers a statement in which she admitted shooting her husband at about 9 p.m. outside their home, he said.

"She indicates that she and her husband were involved in a dispute," Andreassi said.

During the quarrel, Beth Krzyzanowski said she grabbed a .357-caliber handgun and fired it once, striking her husband in the chest, Andreassi said. Her husband fell dead in the driveway, and she told investigators that she left him there and went back into the trailer to sleep for the night, the district attorney said.

The next morning, Beth Krzyzanowski got up and, at some point in the late morning or early afternoon, dragged her husband's body behind the mobile home and rolled it into a cistern, according to her statement. She then telephoned a friend around 1 p.m. and told him what she'd done, Andreassi said.

A hearing is scheduled Oct. 4.

2005-09-26T12:39:00.000-04:00

My father died a little over a month ago and my mother a little over a decade ago. I have never really written anything about either life or death. I don’t think I now how.

After Life

Philippe Ariès, in "The Hour of Our Death," points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the "Chanson de Roland" is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, "gives advance warning of its arrival." Gawain is asked: "Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?" Gawain answers: "I tell you that I shall not live two days." Ariès notes: "Neither his doctor nor his friends nor the priests (the latter are absent and forgotten) know as much about it as he. Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left."

You sit down to dinner.

"You can use it if you want to," John had said when I gave him the note he had dictated a week or two before.

And then - gone.

4
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his 85th birthday and my mother a month short of her 91st, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry.

I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch.

I would still remember to renew my passport.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves." Erich Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940's and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: "sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain."

Tightness in the throat.

Choking, need for sighing.

Yes, a need to sigh, a tightness in the throat, weakness. Waves of it. Sometimes you feel like nothing has happened then the wave hits, knocks into you. Leaves you a bit disoriented. You sigh, you swallow hard then you eventually catch your breath, muscles gain strength and you move on until the next wave.

I still haven’t written anything about my parents deaths, have I?

Joan Didion: This article is adapted from "The Year of Magical Thinking," to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next month.

2005-09-10T15:15:00.000-04:00

Here's an even better link explaining the various parts and ages of the brain.
Your "3-Brains-in-One" Brain

2005-09-09T12:51:00.000-04:00

I've heard the term "lizard brain" used but never knew exactly what it meant. I could make a general guess but was never 100% sure. Now Suzanne on Comcast’s CN8 channel is talking about the ‘lizard brain’ so I figure I should check it out. Can’t have Suzanne know more than me.

Addiction comes from the lower brain, from the viscera, the gut. We call this part of the brain the "limbic system" or “ lizard brain ." "Limbic system" means the part of our brain where our basic, primitive urges and feelings reside. This is the part of the brain that evolved long before humans developed the capacity for rational thought. That’s why we call it "reptile brain."

By the way, Suzanne is the wife of Ralph Roberts, the Chairman of the Board of Comcast who is on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. Could there be a little lizard brain at work here? “Ralph honey, I want my own show. When can I have my own show? Give me my own show.”

Anyways, I was going somewhere with this but can't remember where that was. While checking out the lizard brain stuff I found this article, The Twelve Biggest Secrets About AA and it threw me completely off of what I had been thinking about.

Also not where I was going originally, the more I read about the brain the more I think the intelligent design people are so far off track and completely goofy. The brain is basically newer parts built on top of older parts. If the design of the brain was truly intelligent and thought out ahead of time wouldn't the various parts work more harmoniously. If the various parts of the brain worked together then there shouldn't be addictions. The rational part of your brain that knows how bad alcohol or drugs can be should not have to compete with the irrational part that gets pleasure from alcohol or drugs. The angel on one shoulder telling you to be good and the devil on the other telling you to be bad wouldn't be there.

2005-08-12T12:57:00.000-04:00

Mother Nature is saying,
“Stop messing with me. I brought you into this world and I can take you out!”

It's a long article but it helps you understand why scientists are so up in arms about the worldwide increase of a couple of degrees.

Warming hits 'tipping point'

Siberia feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting

Ian Sample, science correspondent, - Thursday August 11, 2005
The Guardian

A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.

Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.

The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.

The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.

Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.

Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

In its last major report in 2001, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicted a rise in global temperatures of 1.4C-5.8C between 1990 and 2100, but the estimate only takes account of global warming driven by known greenhouse gas emissions.

"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then. They had no idea how much they would add to global warming," said Dr Viner.

Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.

Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.

The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.

But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.

It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said the finding was a stark message to politicians to take concerted action on climate change. "We knew at some point we'd get these feedbacks happening that exacerbate global warming, but this could lead to a massive injection of greenhouse gases.

"If we don't take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide," he said. "There's still time to take action, but not much.

"The assumption has been that we wouldn't see these kinds of changes until the world is a little warmer, but this suggests we're running out of time."

In May this year, another group of researchers reported signs that global warming was damaging the permafrost. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, told a meeting of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that her team had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia. At the hotspots, methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.

Last month, some of the world's worst air polluters, including the US and Australia, announced a partnership to cut greenhouse gas emissions through the use of new technologies.

The deal came after Tony Blair struggled at the G8 summit to get the US president, George Bush, to commit to any concerted action on climate change and has been heavily criticised for setting no targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

2005-08-10T07:33:00.000-04:00

And now for something just a bit different.

Parasite Pals!
Taking the world by storm!

I’m not sure I would want to visit Holly Hostess’ home especially if she’s got all her parasite friends around. Eeeewwwww!

2005-07-27T09:14:00.000-04:00

Picture test. This is Mt St Helens being attacked by a fly.

You can check out a current shot of Mt St Helens by clicking on the link to the right.

2005-07-27T07:30:00.000-04:00

This is one of the reasons why Ricky “It Takes a Family” Santorum is wrong. He’s got some goofy idea that a mom and dad automatically make a perfect family and are best for the child. He seems to forget that kids are more likely to be abused by family and friends.

French sex case verdict imminent

ANGERS, France (AP) -- A court Wednesday was to deliver its verdict in a vast pedophilia trial that scandalized the nation after 65 defendants -- including relatives and acquaintances of some of the victims -- were charged with molesting, raping and prostituting infants and young children in western France.

Prosecutors said 45 children between the ages of 6 months and 14 years were raped and abused by their parents, grandparents or acquaintances in a working-class neighborhood of Angers from 1999 to 2002 -- at times in exchange for small amounts of money, food, alcohol or cigarettes.

And no, just because this happened in France doesn’t mean it can’t happen here. Parents are human beings and can have, and often do have, the same kind of mental dyfunctins that unmarried childless people can have. By the way, perverts and unbalanced people want to have kids too.

I once worked with a woman who had one child just "to prove" that she could; it proved she was a woman. Like a trip to the gynecologist couldn't have done that faster and cheaper. She also told the child that when she turned 18 that she had to be out of the house. Mom had done her "job" and wanted the house back. This is the mom talking, her words were "prove" and "job." Don't get me wrong, I'm not using this woman as an example of pervert or unbalanced but she sure had a child for, what seems to me, to be wrong reasons.

Anyways, if I’m supposed to help pay for other people’s kids, like Santorum says, then I should have a say in how things work, why should he be the only to decide those things. I think no one should be permitted to have kids until they go to classes and take tests to prove they are mentally, physically and financially fit enough to have kids. Reversable vasectomies should do the trick. They get to stop shooting blanks when they're in a stable relationship and go to classes and prove all that stuff.

I know that parents wouldn't like having to take their young boys in for an operation; probably would have to be done by the age of 10 or 11. The parents have to understand that it's for the good of the country, just like Santorum said on The Daily Show. If he can say that a federally mandated one man, one woman marriage is good for the country then I can say that federally mandated vasectomies all around are good for the country too.

Then parents will have to continue their federally mandated-no child left behind job by teaching their children in the proper federally mandated way. If the parents don’t act as proper federally mandated role models then they lose the kid. If they don’t teach the kid to respect other people, particularly no child left behind teachers, then they lose their kids. The parent breaks the law, they lose the kid. They don’t pay for their kid’s schooling, they lose the kid. The parent teaches the kid that the government owes them, they lose the kid. You get the non-federally mandated idea.

2005-07-20T08:21:00.000-04:00

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart

Oh! My! God! I love this guy!

JIM SINEGAL, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. "You got to try this; it's delicious," he said. "And just $9.99 for 38 ounces."
. . .

He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."
. . .

Mr. Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation. "On Wall Street, they're in the business of making money between now and next Thursday," he said. "I don't say that with any bitterness, but we can't take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now."

I didn’t think anyone built a business to stay in business anymore unless it’s a local neighborhood business. It seems that some business owners are in it to make max profits as they drive the business into the ground. They and the shareholders make bundles of bucks and screw everyone else in the process.

I see so many businesses these days and wonder what happened to the concept of “ongoing concern?” Every business class I’ve been in touts the idea of a business that lasts longer than the person or people who started the business. The business is supposed to take on a life of its own and live as long as possible. There’s been a few businesses lately that seem to have been born with defects or cancer and have no chance to grow up. And the their mamas and papas are fine with it as long as they come out a whole lot richer in the end.

. . .

IF shareholders mind Mr. Sinegal's philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco's stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart's has slipped 5 percent. Costco shares sell for almost 23 times expected earnings; at Wal-Mart the multiple is about 19.Mr. Dreher said Costco's share price was so high because so many people love the company. "It's a cult stock," he said.

Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.

I need to find a Costco. I want to support this business.

. . .

Despite Costco's impressive record, Mr. Sinegal's salary is just $350,000, although he also received a $200,000 bonus last year. That puts him at less than 10 percent of many other chief executives, though Costco ranks 29th in revenue among all American companies.

"I've been very well rewarded," said Mr. Sinegal, who is worth more than $150 million thanks to his Costco stock holdings. "I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."
. . .

"Jim has done a very good job in balancing the interests of the shareholders, the employees, the customers and the managers," said Mr. Price, now 89 and retired. "Most companies tilt too much one way or the other."

Mr. Sinegal, who is 69 but looks a decade younger, also delights in not tilting Costco too far into cheap merchandise, even at his warehouse stores. He loves the idea of the "treasure hunt" - occasional, temporary specials on exotic cheeses, Coach bags, plasma screen televisions, Waterford crystal, French wine and $5,000 necklaces - scattered among staples like toilet paper by the case and institutional-size jars of mayonnaise.

The treasure hunts, Mr. Sinegal says, create a sense of excitement and customer loyalty.

This knack for seeing things in a new way also explains Costco's approach to retaining employees as well as shoppers. Besides paying considerably more than competitors, for example, Costco contributes generously to its workers' 401(k) plans, starting with 3 percent of salary the second year and rising to 9 percent after 25 years.

ITS insurance plans absorb most dental expenses, and part-time workers are eligible for health insurance after just six months on the job, compared with two years at Wal-Mart. Eighty-five percent of Costco's workers have health insurance, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart and Target.

Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.

Workers seem enthusiastic. Beth Wagner, 36, used to manage a Rite Aid drugstore, where she made $24,000 a year and paid nearly $4,000 a year for health coverage. She quit five years ago to work at Costco, taking a cut in pay. She started at $10.50 an hour - $22,000 a year - but now makes $18 an hour as a receiving clerk. With annual bonuses, her income is about $40,000.

"I want to retire here," she said. "I love it here."

I want to shop there. A business that wants to stay in business is a place I can support.

2005-07-15T15:03:00.000-04:00

The name of the web site speaks for itself.
Looks like fun, if you're a squirrel.

http://www.squirrelcircus.com/

2005-07-14T08:34:00.000-04:00

Obesity Tougher On Men

WEDNESDAY, July 13 (HealthDay News) -- Adding a new spin to the battle of the sexes, researchers say severely obese women outperform their male counterparts when it comes to both physical fitness and their ability to properly digest carbohydrates.

"Society is putting much more calories in food today than 50 years ago, and people are getting more and more overweight. But we found that the women were better able to handle the obesity than the men," said study co-author Dr. Emile F. L. Dubois, from the department of pulmonary diseases at the Hospital Reinier de Graaf Groep in Delft-Voorburg, The Netherlands.

The study found extremely obese women displaying better endurance and respiratory capacity during exercise than similarly heavy men.

The men also fared worse than women in terms of a condition called "carbohydrate intolerance." Unable to utilize carbs as the high-energy fuel source they are meant to be, people with this condition typically store unprocessed, excess carbohydrates as body fat.

Taken together, this lack of fitness and inability to handle carbs places severely obese men at a higher risk than equally sized women for developing "metabolic syndrome," a precursor to diabetes and heart disease, the researchers said.

. . .

Dubois suggested a range of potential explanations, including the possibility that women are naturally more efficient at energy storage due to the role they play as a food source for newborns. Another theory is that hormones produced by fat tissue -- including estrogen -- might partially explain gender differences. Men could be more negatively affected than women by the release of these hormones, Dubois speculated.

But the most promising explanation might be linked to the distribution of fat around the body. Men, he noted, tend to store it in the upper parts of their bodies and directly inside muscle tissue, whereas women store fat in the lower body area. This may lead to a relatively greater diminishment in lung capacity among men, because abdominal muscles are compressed under the weight of stored fat.

. . .

"We've known for years that women tolerate obesity better than men, and our guess is that it's hormone-mediated," said Fujioka. "It's mainly because men store fat centrally around the organs and in the abdominal area, while women store it in their hips and thighs. And essentially when you increase the fat in the abdominal area, insulin levels have to rise, and you increase pressure on the abdominal cavity. So I'd have to say they're right. It'll be harder to intake oxygen and breathe."

. . .

And it’s my guess that overweight women still do most of the work around the house. They do the cooking and cleaning and the wash and the food shopping. In and out of the house, up and down steps, carrying laundry and groceries. Overweight women may not get enough exercise but they probably get more exercise than overweight men. Seems like that should make a difference too.

The researchers also don’t seem to have looked to see if the women were already doing anything different than the men. The study was done on a group of men and women getting ready to undergo bariatric surgery to help them lose weight. Is it possible that the women were trying to exercise more in anticipation of the surgery?

The world may never know, or caare for that matter.

2005-07-13T13:12:00.000-04:00

I don't know what's going on here. I keep getting this huge space between the date and the post. Eeeeeeee! How do I make it stop?

2005-07-13T12:56:00.000-04:00

Study Great Ideas, but Teach to the Test

By MICHAEL WINERIP---Published: July 13, 2005
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.

BECKY KARNES, a high school English teacher, recently completed a graduate-level writing course that she loved at Grand Valley State University.

"The course taught us better ways to teach writing to kids," said Ms. Karnes, a 16-year veteran who is finishing up her master's degree. "It showed you ways to stretch kids' minds. I learned so much, I had my eyes opened about how to teach writing."

. . .

"We learned how to develop good writing from the inside, starting with calling the child's voice out," said Ms. Karnes, who got an A in the university course. "One of the major points was, good writing is good thinking. That's why writing formulas don't work. Formulas don't let kids think; they kill a lot of creativity in writing."

And so, when Ms. Karnes returns to Allendale High School to teach English this fall, she will use the new writing techniques she learned and abandon the standard five-paragraph essay formula. Right?

"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test" (the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, known as MEAP).

"MEAP is not what writing is about, but it's what testing is about," Ms. Karnes said. "And we know if we teach them the five-paragraph essay formula, they'll pass that test. There's a lot of pressure to do well on MEAP. It makes the district seem good, helps real estate values."

I didn’t know that going to school was primarily to help prop up real estate vaules.

In Michigan, there is added pressure. If students pass the state tests, they receive $2,500 college scholarships, and in Ms. Karnes's middle-class district, families need that money. "I can't see myself fighting against MEAP," she said. "It would hurt my students too much. It's a dilemma. It may not be the best writing, but it gets them the money."

In this fashion, the five-paragraph essay has become the law of the land: introductory paragraph; three supporting paragraphs, each with its own topic sentence as well as three supporting ideas; and summary paragraph.

. . .

The National Council of Teachers of English has warned that standardized state tests mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law, as well as the College Board's new SAT writing sample, are actually hurting the teaching of writing in this country. For their part, the makers of these tests emphasize that they don't mandate a writing formula, and they, too, say it would be a mistake if schools taught only by the formula.

. . .

"If you give kids the formula to write an essay, you're taking away the very thinking that a writer engages in," she said. "Kids are less apt to develop a writer's thinking skills." And it is spreading downward. In preparation for the fourth-grade state writing test, she said, she sees third-grade teachers pressed to use the five-paragraph formula. A teacher in Dr. Patterson's class described her frustration over a practice essay test in her district asking third graders to "defend or refute from a patriotic standpoint" whether a friend should go to a Memorial Day parade. "For 9-year-olds?" said Dr. Patterson. "Defend or refute?"

. . .

RECENTLY, Kristen Covelle, 24, has been going on interviews for English teaching jobs. She mentions exciting things she's learned from Dr. Patterson. "The interview will be going great," Ms. Covelle said, "and then MEAP will come up. They want to know will I teach to the test, that's what they're looking for. They asked how I feel about using "I" in writing. Would there ever be a case when "I" is appropriate in an essay. I knew the answer they want - you're not supposed to use it. But I couldn't say that. I said there could be times, you just can't close the door. They didn't say anything but it was definitely the low point of the interview."

Ms. Karnes isn't totally against the formula. "For kids struggling, if you can give them a formula and they fill in the blanks, some will pass the MEAP test who wouldn't otherwise," she said. "But it turns into a prison. It stops you from finding a kid's potential."

She loves the last month of school, when state tests are over, she said. Last spring she did lessons on poetry and writing short stories. "I found interests and talents in those kids I didn't know were there," she said. "It would have been nice to have a whole year to build on those things."

E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com

I fought the formula and the formula won.

Ok, the teacher sort of won and lost and I sort of lost but kept my voice. My last English teacher was big on the formula and I don’t think she even realized it. She would have us write then we would have to rewrite it the way she would have written the paper. Generally the way she wanted it written was by the formula. Write a paragraph on how your topics work together then write about your first topic then back it up with a few of examples then move on to the next topic and back that up with a few examples then move on, end with a summary pulling your topics together. The more pages she wanted the topics and examples you needed.

Initial summary + {number of topics + (number of topics x 3)} + final summary = completed paper.

So, if she wanted you to write 5 pages, you knew that one page could be filled with the initial summary and the final summary (not on the same page). That left 4 pages to fill. Figure one topic and three examples per page. Three examples were the minimum if you wanted credit for being thorough. Then you knew you needed four topics and twelve examples total. If you couldn’t come up with four related topics you could do three but then you would need to pad out your nine examples or add an example to each topic. Padding out the essay was about the only way you could get away with getting your own way of writing into the paper. Of course, if she didn’t think your examples were strong enough then out they went.

She didn’t want the student’s voice. Mainly she wanted the formula in her voice. I got a B since I wouldn’t make the changes that she would have made.

I used to hate English class and particularly writing. The one thing in English class that I liked everyone else hated; diagramming sentences. That was like math to me and I could do it. Too much of English seemed like there were no real rules. I know, there are a million rules but there are about the same number of exceptions to those rules.

At least when I was in school, for some reason teachers seemed to think that their students could read minds. “In your book report, tell me what the story was about not what the story is.” Huh? To me, what the story is is what the story was about. Then they would tell you to write the report in the formula form.

For the longest time I just didn’t understand what writing with your own voice meant. I didn’t understand why readers would insist on there being meaning behind everything a particular author wrote. Why did author so-and-so have to be writing about society and its dark under belly? And foreshadowing really got on my nerves. Why couldn’t the story just be a story, a nice diversion.

It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I had two teachers who could explain it. I was in the Humanities Enrichment Program, HEP. It made me hep to English and History and writing. The class had two teachers and taught two subjects at the same time, in my case English and History. These were two subjects that used to make me cringe. I was almost kicked out of high school when I was doing badly in History. I was just average in English. My stomach would turn when it was time for a student-teacher conference. Most of the time I didn’t understand what the teacher wanted from me and they couldn’t explain anything worth a damn.

The HEP class changed that. I really enjoyed having Cindy and Doug teach, I had never looked forward to going to an English or History class in my life. Unfortunately, after Cindy and Doug, it was back to reality and the formual teacher I described above. It’s kind of sad that they push formula writing when you’re in college then complain when the students can’t think.

2005-06-24T11:56:00.000-04:00

The Founding Fathers could have left this a little less to the imagination.

Article [V.]
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

What I want to know; are the 87 year old woman and her neighbors going to be compensated for the old inexpensive home in the lousy neighborhood they are being moved out of or will they be compensated for having to move into a more expensive home?

Justices Uphold Taking Property for Development

By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: June 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 23 - The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in one of its most closely watched property rights cases in years, that fostering economic development is an appropriate use of the government's power of eminent domain.

The 5-to-4 decision cleared the way for the City of New London, Conn., to proceed with a large-scale plan to replace a faded residential neighborhood with office space for research and development, a conference hotel, new residences and a pedestrian "riverwalk" along the Thames River.

The project, to be leased and built by private developers, is intended to derive maximum benefit for the city from a $350 million research center built nearby by the Pfizer pharmaceutical company.

New London, deemed a "distressed municipality" by the state 15 years ago, has a high unemployment rate and fewer residents today than it had in 1920.

The owners of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, including one woman who was born in her house 87 years ago and has lived there since, had resisted the plan and refused the city's offer of compensation.

After the city condemned the properties in November 2000, the homeowners went to state court to argue that the taking would be unconstitutional. The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the use of eminent domain in a ruling last year.

Can’t buy them outright, just condemn them and take them away. It’s nice to know that the government is still taking property away from property owners just like they did the American Indians.

In affirming that decision, the majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens resolved a question that had surprisingly gone unanswered for all the myriad times that governments have used their power under the Fifth Amendment to take private property for public use. The question was the definition of "public use."

The homeowners, represented by a public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, which has conducted a national litigation campaign against what it calls eminent domain abuse, argued that taking property to enable private economic development, even development that would provide a public benefit by enhancing the tax base, could never be a "public use."

In its view, the only transfers of property that qualified were those that gave actual ownership or use to the public, like for a highway or a public utility.

But the majority concluded on Thursday that public use was properly defined more broadly as "public purpose." Justice Stevens noted that earlier Supreme Court decisions interpreting the public use clause of the Fifth Amendment had allowed the use of eminent domain to redevelop a blighted neighborhood in Washington, to redistribute land ownership in Hawaii and to assist a gold-mining company, in a decision by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1906.

How handy, let’s just redefine “public use” to mean “public purpose.” It’s fine as long as some of the public is helped by taking people’s property and a happy coincidence that a large corporation like Pfizer is helped by poor people being removed from their homes.

Just wondering, why can’t PFizer pay to compensaate these people? Pfizer is going to own the building and private developers are going to rent out other property. What chance is there of the city coming along later and making Pfizer move or make the private developers give up their property? Industrial parks are a type of urban blight too.

"Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government," Justice Stevens said, adding, "Clearly, there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose."

”Traditional and long accepted” huh? That’s interesting. During the previous BRAC the government said it wasn’t their business to assist communities economically. If jobs went away and the community went under when bases were closed, it was up to the community to deal with it and fix it. The government wasn’t in the business of economic development a few years ago.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor objected that "the words 'for public use' do not realistically exclude any takings, and thus do not exert any constraint on the eminent domain power."

Justice O'Connor said, "Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded."

Justice Stevens, examining the New London plan in light of the majority's general analysis, said the plan "unquestionably serves a public purpose," even though it was intended to increase jobs and tax revenue rather than remove blight.

He described the plan as "carefully formulated" and comprehensive. Sounding a federalism note, Justice Stevens said that state legislatures and courts were best at "discerning local public needs" and that the judgment of the New London officials was "entitled to our deference."

I guess Justice Stevens has never heard of the “old boys club” and “pay for play” among other games people in government play.

I’m sure that no one has ever come up with an economic plan that just happens to give preference to friends and party financers? Do I hear someone saying “Haliburton?” I know there’s lots more but I can’t think of them right now. Maybe you can add them to the comment sections. I’m sure there are bunches I’ve never heard of.

Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter joined the majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, No. 04-108. Justice Kennedy also wrote a separate concurring opinion to emphasize that while there was no suggestion in this instance that the plan was intended to favor any individual developer, "a court confronted with a plausible accusation of impermissible favoritism to private parties should treat the objection as a serious one and review the record to see it if has merit."

Justice O'Connor's dissenting opinion was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. She wrote that rather than adhering to its precedents, the court had strayed from them by endorsing economic development as an appropriate public use.

"Who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive use of her property?" Justice O'Connor asked.

She added: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory."

Both Justice O'Connor and Justice Thomas, who also filed his own dissent, said the decision's burden would fall on the less powerful and wealthy.

"The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more," Justice O'Connor said. "The founders cannot have intended this perverse result."

Justice Thomas, who called the decision "far reaching and dangerous," cited several studies showing that those displaced by urban renewal and "slum clearance" over the years tended to be lower-income minority residents.

"The court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution," he said.

In the majority opinion, Justice Stevens said, "The necessity and wisdom of using eminent domain power to promote economic development are certainly matters of legitimate public debate."

Ok, I can agree that using government ". . . power to promote economic development are certainly matters of legitimate public debate." The problem is that the debate is rarely public. People who don’t have the money and influence are usually kicked out of the debate or not even given a chance to debate. A small number of well-to-do people, like the Supreme Court get to make the decision and the people effected are for the most part left out of the debate.

Let’s face it, Justice Stevens would be screaming bloody murder if state officials came along and said they want his property so a business can use it for a new facility and access roads. Oh, and there’s a good plan that shows the local economy will prosper , so he and his family should just move on out.

The court did not "minimize the hardship that condemnations may entail," he said, despite the fact that the homeowners will receive "just compensation."

Justice Stevens said that states remained free to place restrictions on their own use of eminent domain power through their own constitutions and laws, as many have; California, for example, has a law restricting to blighted areas the use of eminent domain for economic development.

That’s handy for Justice Stevens and all wealthy land owners. I’m sure they don’t live in a “blighted area” so they will never have the specter of eminent domain bothering them.

Scott G. Bullock, the lawyer who argued the case for the New London homeowners, said in an interview that his organization, the Institute for Justice, would accept the court's invitation and "continue the fight in the state supreme courts." As a result of the decision, he said, "we are going to see more eminent domain abuse and a growing grass-roots rebellion against this type of government action."

Allan B. Taylor, a partner in the Hartford law firm Day, Berry & Howard who filed a brief on New London's behalf for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and organizations of cities in 31 other states, said an opposite outcome in this case would have ushered in an "extraordinary revolution."

If the court had not upheld the Connecticut Supreme Court, he said in an interview, "it would greatly limit what cities and towns all over the country could do." Mr. Taylor said he read the opinion not as a green light for the wholesale use of eminent domain, but as "a green light for continuing to do careful and responsible planning."

The decision was a clear defeat for the long-term effort by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia to limit government control over private property. Although a series of decisions from the mid-1980's through the early 90's had appeared to indicate a major shift in the court's traditional deference to government land-use policies, that effort has stalled in recent cases.

By the same token, the decision was the latest success for Justice Stevens, the 85-year-old senior associate justice, who appears to be having one of the most productive terms in his 30 years on the Supreme Court.

The New London case was among the final decisions the court was expected to make in this term. The court indicated that Monday would be the final day of the term.

I know it’s just the way I read the Fifth Amendment but it doesn’t say anything about your basic citizen. Most of it is about a person accused of a crime. Could it mean that an accused criminal should be compensated for seized property. Like I said, the Founding Fathers could have made that a little more clear.

2005-06-22T08:34:00.000-04:00

Here we go again. Someone going to try to make birth control for men. I was told in high school that there would be birth control for men within about 5 years. 25 years later it’s still at least 5 years away.

Team Working on Birth Control for Men

The Associated Press --- Tuesday, June 21, 2005; 8:20 AM

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Four decades after the birth control pill became available to women, researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of Kansas Medical Center are working to develop a similar contraceptive for men.

The researchers plan to test about a half-million chemical compounds to find a pill that does not involve hormones that men could take weekly or monthly. They also hope to find something that is close to 100 percent effective and has no risky side effects.

The research is being conducted with a $7.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Scientists will test compounds at a high-tech laboratory on the university's Lawrence campus.

It will be at least five years before clinical trials could be conducted on men.
. . .

"Half of the population has been ignored," said Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

Only 27 percent of women who practice contraception rely on their partners to use condoms or have vasectomies, according to data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

"I think some couples would like to have that option," said Gunda Georg, lead researcher on the project. "There's been a shift in attitude. Some men would like to share more in that responsibility."
. . .

Male contraceptives being tested in China and Europe are hormone-based, involving either large injections of a male hormone similar to testosterone or a combination of testosterone and a female hormone.

Preliminary studies have shown hormonal contraception to be effective and that men regain their fertility after several months, said Douglas Colvard, associate director of Conrad, a nonprofit organization at Eastern Virginia Medical School that promotes research on reproductive health. But testosterone injections raise concerns about side effects, such as elevated cholesterol levels and promoting cancer growth, Colvard said.

The Kansas researchers are looking for a male pill that does not affect hormones. Instead, they are looking for chemicals that can disable a handful of enzymes that scientists have identified as critical to male fertility.
. . .

"Obviously, the goal is 100 percent effectiveness," Tash said. "The female pill is 95 to 99 percent effective. We hope to at least meet that level."

What I want to know is when are researchers going to come up with a non-hormonal pill that has no nasty side effects, like raising cholesterol or high blood pressure, for women?
Birth control pills have all kinds of annoying side effects for women including decrease in libido. What’s the point of taking a pill that lowers your interest is why your taking the pill in the first place? And what about increased chance of blood clots and heart attack?

Men don’t want to take the chance of side effects but women have to if they don't want to get pregnant. 73% of women who use contraceptives don’t expect their man to be involved with birth control, so they take the pill and deal with birth control and the side effects themselves. Essentially the birth control pill hasn't changed in 40 years; same hormones, lower strength.

I guess somebody thinks there will be a profit in birth control pills for men. I just wish researchers had the same type of side effect goals in a pill for women that they have for the male pill.

2005-06-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

I’ve been considering going to a new dentist. My supervisor told me about her dentist. So, being too lazy to get up out of my chair to find a paper phonebook, I went on-line to find out about this guy. I found his address and phone number and an interesting website.

Dr. Oogle

What I need now is for everyone to go to Dr. Ooogle and review their dentists, then pass the website on to your friends and family and have them do reviews. Then maybe I’ll be able to find a new dentist. Thank you for your support.

2005-06-17T07:38:00.000-04:00

I don’t know why but this song and video is addictive.

2005-06-08T07:34:00.000-04:00

Chilling statistics: 103,000 dead, 1 out of 20 made ill each year.

Isn’t this country supposed to be the most germ-phobic on the planet? So how come doctors, nurses and other folks who work in hospitals and who have been taught to know better, can’t stop passing disease around?

This is an interesting article especially if you or someone you know is in or going into the hospital. The one big thing this article taught me is that the 5-second rule DOES NOT count in a hospital. If it hits the floor use a tissue and toss it.

I didn’t want to cut anything out of the article so I’ve just bolded the really interesting stuff. If you just want to get the gist of it then you just read it. If you want more then read the bolded stuff and if you want everything read it all. Interesting stuff.

Coming Clean

By BETSY MCCAUGHEY --- Op-Ed Contributor
Published: June 6, 2005

INFECTIONS that have been nearly eradicated in some other countries are raging through hospitals here in the United States. The major reason? Poor hygiene. In fact, hygiene is so inadequate in most American hospitals that one out of every 20 patients contracts an infection during a hospital stay. Hospital infections kill an estimated 103,000 people in the United States a year, as many as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.

And the danger is worsening as many hospital infections can no longer be cured with common antibiotics. One of the deadliest germs is a staph bacteria called M.R.S.A., short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which lives harmlessly on the skin but causes havoc when it enters the body. Patients who do survive M.R.S.A. often spend months in the hospital and endure several operations to cut out infected tissue. In 1974, 2 percent of staph infections were from M.R.S.A. By 1995, that number had soared to 22 percent. Today, experts estimate that more than 60 percent of staph infections are M.R.S.A.

Hospitals in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands once faced similar rates, but brought them down to below 1 percent. How? Through the rigorous enforcement of rules on hand washing, the meticulous cleaning of equipment and hospital rooms, the use of gowns and disposable aprons to prevent doctors and nurses from spreading germs on clothing and the testing of incoming patients to identify and isolate those carrying the germ.

Too few hospitals in the United States are using these precautions, though where they are used they are highly effective. In a pilot program, the veterans hospital in Pittsburgh reduced M.R.S.A. 85 percent, and the University of Virginia Medical Center eradicated it. Unfortunately most hospitals have not shown the will to defeat infections.

More than half the time, doctors and other caregivers break the most fundamental rule of hygiene by failing to clean their hands before treating a patient. Gloves are not the answer because pulling them on with dirty hands contaminates the gloves.

Nearly three-quarters of patients' rooms are contaminated with M.R.S.A., which, according to experts, can be found on everything from cabinets to bedside tables. Once patients and caregivers touch these surfaces, their hands become vectors for disease. Ordinary cleaning solutions can kill these bugs, but surfaces need to be drenched in disinfectant for several minutes, not just sprayed and wiped quickly.

Frequently, stethoscopes, blood-pressure monitors and other equipment are contaminated with live bacteria. Yet doctors and nurses almost never clean the stethoscope before listening to a patient's chest.

Astoundingly, most hospitals in the United States don't routinely test patients for staph bacteria. Studies show that 70 percent to 90 percent of patients carrying M.R.S.A. are never identified.

Clothing is frequently a conveyor belt for infections. When doctors and nurses lean over a patient with M.R.S.A., their coats and uniforms pick up bacteria 65 percent of the time, and carry it to other patients.

Contaminated clothing is believed to be the culprit at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital, which has recently struggled to control another type of infection called Clostridium difficile. This common and seldom life-threatening infection is often caused by fecal material from one patient entering another patient's mouth. Doctors at the hospital suspect that this infection spread because clinical nursing assistants wear the same clothes while doing two jobs: emptying bed pans and delivering food trays.

Hospital infections can be stopped, but most hospital administrators have not made prevention a top priority. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also to blame. While the C.D.C. has made some efforts to curb hospital infections, they have failed to ask hospitals to follow the rigorous precautions that are working in other countries and in those American hospitals where they have been tried.

In 2003, a task force for the Society of Healthcare Epidemiologists of America chastised the C.D.C. for this failure, but the C.D.C. has still not acted. Every year of delay is costing thousands of lives.

Many hospital administrators say they can't afford to take the necessary precautions, but they can't afford not to. Infections erode hospital profits because rarely are hospitals fully paid for the added weeks or months that patients must spend in the hospital when they get an infection. Studies show that when hospitals invest in these proven precautions, they are rewarded with as much as tenfold financial return. These infections add about $30 billion annually to the nation's health costs. This tab will increase rapidly as more infections become drug-resistant.

In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that it will not support the growing demand to make hospital infection rates public. That's a shame because if you need to be hospitalized, you should be able to find out which hospitals in your area have the worst infection problems. This secrecy may allow some hospitals to save face, but it won't save lives or money.

Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, is the founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

If hospitals and doctors want to avoid lawsuits then they can’t afford not to take precautions and clean up their acts.

By the way, gloves are one of those things that people seem to trust in without thinking about how they are used. Where I work, the cleaning staff wear gloves for everything. They pick up trash and clean the bathrooms then put their gloved hands on doors handles, tables, chairs, their cell phones and even food. I’m still amazed that they don’t get sick often. I guess they’ve really toughened their immune systems.

2005-06-03T15:01:00.000-04:00

Contrary to popular belief, I have not forgotten about blogging. Heck, lately I haven’t been online much except for work and looking up medical stuff.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with various family members’ health and hospitalizations, my dental work and trying to get the garden to look less weedy. Too many hospitalizations and way too many weeds and I just hate going to the dentist. My dentist is very nice; the torture devices he uses are not.

I did find this story about oxytocin yesterday but figured it would be all over the news anyway so I didn’t bother to blog it yesterday and yes it was all over the news. Today I have to bring it up.

I swear they don’t read the whole story when they cover stuff like this on TV news. The research was done with a small amount of money, “Each participant was given 12 ‘points’, which was equal to about 50 cents.” That didn’t stop the local health news reporter from saying something like “people were willing to give away large amounts of money.” That was the reporter's emphasis not mine. She read something different from what I read.

As a long-winded aside, I’d like to say that I’ve learned a variety of things in the past couple of weeks.

That coumadin and a large variety of other medicines in an 83 year old man can be very very bad.

The Whipple procedure can be survived by a 70-something year old but the cancer will probably get you in the end.

You can get meningitis from a sinus infection.

That when you are going to have surgery on your hand and the doctor finds out that you’ve had a heart attack previously that you didn’t know about, that the doctor won’t tell you about the heart attack. He will say for you to go to your regular doctor to find out what the surgeon didn’t want to tell you. Oh, and you won’t get the surgery.

Kidney stones can cause lots of annoying problems and surgery.

Codeine can cause nightmares that make you dream about “a band of Mexicans” chasing you. Yes, I know it doesn’t say nightmares on the codeine page but I’ve been told on good authority that it happens.

There is no guy suing a "famous drill company" to make them take responsibility for his using a drill to get to an itch in his nose. The picture is kind of gross.

I also learned that there is no floating reef of condoms somewhere in the South Pacific. Snopes.com is a wonderful thing. :-)

I have rhododendrens in my yard and still can’t spell rhododendron correctly.

There are weeds and there are weeds and if I go by the definition of weed from this weed site:

The definition of a weed is "a plant out of place."
OK, if that's true, think about this for a second....
If a dandelion is a weed in a home lawn,
grass is a weed on a dandelion farm!
(where they grow dandelion greens)

There are weeds; the plants that must go like dandelions, and there are weeds; the plants that just need to be moved.

It has been a busy fun filled couple of weeks.

2005-05-26T13:20:00.000-04:00

Time to play cryptograms!

Cryptograms are so much easier to do on the computer, don’t neeed an eraser.

Hint: If the first line has " T- " then word after is ‘shirts.’

2005-05-23T07:18:00.000-04:00

I’m looking for a way to tie my sneakers so that the heel isn’t loose. I know there’s a way. A few years ago there was an article in the paper showing various ways to lace your sneakers to get a better fit. I moved awhile back and can’t find the article at home. Thought for sure that I could find something online.

I found Ian’s shoelace site. His recommended Ian knot is one I’ve done since I was a kid and he takes credit for. I don’t use it often since it doesn’t stay tight enough for me so I only gave it an average rating. I've never rated shoelace knots before today.

I’m still looking for a way to lace my sneakers but Ian’s site was an interesting stop.

2005-05-23T07:09:00.000-04:00

"I'm very concerned about cloning. I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable." - PRESIDENT BUSH

And I worry that someone will clone W.

Two W’s, what a scary world that would be.

2005-05-18T07:44:00.000-04:00

Well, no duh-uh!

Study: Blogs haven't displaced media

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Web logs, or blogs, may be a powerful new force in U.S. politics but they have not displaced traditional media in terms of information and influence, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project revealed on Monday.

Is this really a big surprise? It seems to be a suprise to the mainstream going by all the fuss they’ve made lately about blogs.

The last study I read late last year said that only 4%of people in the web read blogs. It’s a nice a number of people but not really enough to make a huge difference publicly. I think most people take the easy route when it comes to news on the web; they go to the same folks they pay attention to on television and radio. There is no blog tv or blog radio so people don’t know about it so they don’t look it up on the internet.

What bloggers do is raise a ruckus. They tend to be active talky people with opinions, news and information they want to share. When they see or hear something interesting they share it fast and furiously by whatever means are at hand. They blog, link, repost, email and phone anyone and everyone who might be interested. This tends to make the media and the target of all the ruckus sit up and listen. In the end it’s still only a small number of people who’ve made the fuss.

I wrote the previous prior to actually reading the article, boy was I did pretty good.

Charting the discussion of issues during the 2004 presidential campaign, the study found political blogs -- online opinion and information sites -- played a similar, but not greater role, as the mainstream media in "creating buzz" around the candidates' campaigns.

The study dispels the notion that blogs are replacing traditional media as the public's primary source of information, said Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at Pew.

"Bloggers follow buzz as much as they make it," said Cornfield. "Our research uncovered a complicated dynamic in which a hot topic of conversation could originate with the blogs or it could originate with the media or it could originate with the campaigns.

"We can say that if people still have that idea that the bloggers are the new fifth estate, that the bloggers are the new kingmakers, that's not the case."

The study charted 40 blogs, online message boards and forums as well as newspapers and television in the last two months of the race between Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

It followed topics as they were discussed in the various outlets.

For example, it showed the Bush campaign paid more attention to an Osama bin Laden tape than did the blogs. At the same time, the Kerry campaign made more mention of missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than the blogs. The mainstream media made more mention of Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter than either the blogs or the campaigns.

Political bloggers' power "waxes and wanes" depending on factors like what information is available and what other outlets are doing, said Cornfield.

"What political bloggers are doing is following stories and then amplifying the hell out of them," said Dan Gimor, author of "We the Media."

The results showed blogging functions alongside traditional media, said David Sifry, a software developer at the forum.

"It's not about 'either/or.' It's about 'and,'" he said. "That's why I still read 'The New York Times.'"

Funny, I just thought about what I’ve read prior to today and pretty much came up with the same results as the article. I wonder how much money I would have saved by not doing an actual study. Oh well, the studies are good for the economy; they give jobs to researchers, statisticians and writers.

2005-05-12T13:03:00.000-04:00

Bloggers' conference emphasizes tools of reporting

Monday, May 9, 2005 Posted: 1447 GMT (2247 HKT)

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- Bloggers -- those Internet-based writers without rules -- are fighting back against criticism that their work is unreliable, libelous or just poorly done.

More than 300 bloggers came to town Friday for a two-day conference that was heavy on teaching techniques used by journalists in what bloggers term "the mainstream media." One class taught students how to access and analyze government statistics.

Conference organizer Bill Hobbs called blogging "citizen journalism."

"If freedom of the press belongs to those who have the press, then blogging expands ownership of the press," Hobbs said.

Right now, more than 8 million people write blogs, said Bob Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. Blogs, short for Web logs, are running commentaries on whatever their authors are interested in. Content often focuses on politics or media criticism and usually includes feedback from readers.

Participants such as Shelley Henderson said they want to expand their research capabilities to strengthen their commentaries. Henderson, of Los Angeles, dedicates her blog to keeping the Internet unregulated.

Blake Wylie of Nashville was among the participants who took exception to criticisms from politicians and mainstream media pundits that their work is often inaccurate.

Wylie said bloggers often provide links to let readers go directly to their sources of information.

Hobbs noted that blogs entries are corrected more thoroughly and prominently than in other forms of media.

"We write and then our readers edit us," Hobbs said.

Linda Seebach, a columnist for The Rocky Mountain News, said traditional media outlets are experimenting with involving bloggers in their news reports. Her newspaper this week launched a series of 40 community-oriented blogs to serve the Denver area.

Hobbs said bloggers and the news media are linked because bloggers use them for source material and that the relationship could grow closer.

The prevalence of blogs seems certain to expand even more as people explore ventures such as global blogger news services. Hobbs said the usefulness of such projects was shown when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck last year and some early accounts and pictures from the area came from bloggers.

Anymore, mainstream media equals big business. Big business rules aren’t necessarily the rules that I want governing what news I see.

A few months after the Exxon Valdez had it’s little accident in Prince William Sound, Exxon bought out the local newspaper. Somehow I don’t think it had to do with the locals being able to get correct timely information about the accident and what was being done about it.

Those who control the news control the people. I’d rather get my news from a variety of sources. I figure it ups the chances that I’ll see more good information and understand more. Leads to an informed opinion, not something BB wants.

I’m reasonably sure that the big businesses own so much so they can make a bundle of money. I’m also reasonably sure that being in control of the info is in a dead heat with making money.

By the way, it’s been 16 years this past March since the Exxon Valdez accident. Clean up was stopped after four summers and some beaches have not been cleaned up and remain oiled including the beach where the ship hit. Never did see anything on the news about that. Gee, I wonder why?

Off Topic: I really like the Harper’s Index, you can get all kinds of interesting info.

Number of the 535 free subscriptions Hustler offered members of Congress last year that were rejected: 16 [Hustler (Los Angeles)]

I also like this one, also from July 1998:

Number of words in the 1999 Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary whose “offensive” designation will be italicized: 200 [Merriam-Webster Inc. (Springfield, Mass.)]

Gotta make those words easy to find. You know, I don’t think I know 200 offensive words. Maybe I’ll pick up one of those dictionaries and learn some new words.

2005-05-11T12:49:00.000-04:00

White House, Capitol briefly evacuated
'All clear' later given; Cessna reportedly entered airspace

BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 12:23 p.m. ET May 11, 2005

WASHINGTON - The White House and the Capitol building were emptied in a frantic evacuation Wednesday, and initial reports said a small plane had entered the restricted airspace around the capital.

You've got one minute," one officer yelled to a group including NBC correspondent Chip Reid. A few minutes later, officials gave the "all clear" signal.

As soon as the alert went out, a motorcade stormed out of a side street next to the White House, NBC correspondent Norah O'Donnell reported from a cell phone as she evacuated.

As military jets scrambled over the area, officers also rushed through the Supreme Court building and told staff to get into the basement. At the Treasury Department, people were moved across the street.

Initial reports said a Cessna aircraft had entered the restricted airspace, then turned away but returned back.

It was not clear whether the aircraft inadvertently entered the restricted area, but such incidents have happened before.

Two weeks ago, an evacuation was ordered when a radar hit suggested a plane had entered the area. The hit turned out to be clouds.

My stars! I feel safe now. The White House was evacuated because of clouds!

I thought U.S. military technology was better than that.

2005-05-05T12:35:00.000-04:00

I haven’t blogged in a week. I used to have no problem finding interesting things to blog about but lately I can’t find good stuff. I did find some bloggable material today though.

Having trouble figuring out what that license plate in front of you says, try Dictionary of Custom License Plate Terms .

My sister told me about The Grocery List Collection The author of the site says, “. . . the internet is a great place to do stupid things.” Good call. I have to say that it’s more interesting that you would think at first. I like this grocery list. The site even includes grocery store related articles.

Maybe you’d like to read a little background on the Family Channel show, Garden of Love. I now know why it’s always dress down day for most of the family.

Here I go with the web cams again. Getting ready to go on a cruise, go here to check out the view from your ship. Just remember, you’re seeing what’s going on now not when you’ll be on the ship. The pictures I looked at were pretty boring. Some shipes are showing docked cruise ships showing views of docked cruise ships.

2005-04-28T11:02:00.000-04:00

I don’t agree. and I will not sit down and shut up.

I received the following email from a co-worker.

This is by a daughter of a murdered couple in Raytown who had a Bible and Bookstore on 63rd street. Just one more example:

When I had to testify at the murder trial of my parents a week ago, I was asked to raise my right hand. The bailiff started out "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"

I stood there and waited but she said nothing. She said "Do you?" I was so stunned I blurted out "What happened to "so help me God'?" She came back with "Do you?" I replied yes, but I was perplexed. Then the judge said "you can say that if you want to." I stopped, raised my right hand, and finished with "So help me God!" I told my son and daughter that when it came time for them to testify, they should do the same. It's no wonder we have so many problems in this country. If I'd had my wits about me I'd have told them that taking God out of the courtroom is only going to result in more criminals and murderers like him being in there! I don't know what can be done about it, but it's time we stepped up and did something.

CNBC this morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls and the percentage was the same as this: 86% to keep the words, 14% against. That is a pretty commanding public response.

I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't. Now it is your turn... It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!

If you agree, pass this on, if not simply delete..

I was ready to delete it and forget it but then thought “Isn’t that the equivalent of ‘sitting down and shutting up?’” I decided to have my say.

First, it’s half a hoax. Check out Snopes for the full story. The murder is true but the daughter and the story in the court room are false. Snopes theory is that someone used the story to push their own view of why we need god in the court room.

“Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth the whole truth?”

It’s a simple straightforward question. It’s insulting that people think everyone needs the fear of god to make them tell the truth. I thought that was what having a conscience was all about. Tell the truth because it’s the right thing not because you might burn in hell.

People who lie have a reason to lie. Being made to say “So help me God” isn’t going to stop someone who doesn’t want to go to jail from lying about whatever he or she needs to lie about.

By the way, that 14% means that approximately 1 out of 10 people you meet each day will not agree with the author of the email. Are you willing to tell your friends, family, co-workers, the nice counterperson who gets your coffee and muffin, that their views are meaningless because they don’t agree with you? I’m not. Everyone has a point of view. Sometimes there needs to be compromise on those POVs. This is one of those cases.

Any time I’ve had jury duty, we had the option of saying “So help me God” or not saying it. God in the courtroom will not make a diifference in the number of crimes. It hasn’t yet.

These ‘force god into your life whether you want god there or not’ people need to sit down and shut up until it’s time for them to speak then sit down and shut up so others can speak their piece too. That’s my view. Others of course don’t agree. Too many people believe they have the right and might of god on their side and the folks who don’t agree need to be silenced.

When will people realize that holy wars are the most unholy wars of all?

2005-04-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

This doesn’t suprise me a bit.

More Casino Workers Accused of Ogling Women via Security Cameras

Four more surveillance camera operators at Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino have been accused of using the equipment to ogle women, according to a complaint filed Tuesday.

In December, the same casino was fined $80,000 for incidents involving two camera operators who trained their in-ceiling cameras on low-cut blouses and revealing clothing.

The hidden cameras are required by law in New Jersey casinos to deter and prosecute theft, embezzlement, cheating and other crimes.

According to the new complaint filed by the state Division of Gaming Enforcement, the four Caesars employees aimed their cameras on “selected parts of the anatomy” of female gamblers and employees over a three-day period in October.

”Obviously, we take this kind of issue very seriously,” said Robert Stewart, spokesman for Caesars Entertainment, which owns the casino:

“We will be conducting a through investigation and will be dealing with the matter appropriately.”

In a 2001 case, two women told the state Division of Civil Rights that they were fired by Caesars after complaining about voyeuristic camera work by surveillance department co-workers. Caesars paid $95,000 to settle that complaint.

It's this kind of activity that makes me feel that security cameras watched by people are more or less a waste. I know they can be handy during a busy time but when security gets bored, that's another story.

People like to snoop. They want to see what they want to see. They're being paid to watch what they're told to watch. Then they get bored with work and minds wander and next thing you know, "Hey! Look! Get a load of THAT!"

I wonder how much crime was missed while security oogled.

2005-04-26T07:31:00.000-04:00

Woo hoo! :-)

Site Meter is showing 1,001 hits! It only took about a year to get to that number. I know at least 10% are probably from me looking to see how many hits I have, but hey, I still like the number.

Thanks to everyone who gave me the other 90%!

2005-04-26T07:20:00.000-04:00

Just wondering.

I watched Jeopardy last night. Years ago I had teacher who was on Jeopardy. She came back to class saying that the contestants were told not to correct Alex, ever.

Now I’m wondering, how well would Alex Trebec do if he was a contestant and didn’t have the answers right in front of him?

2005-04-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

". . . I, with some of my comrades who were in the battle of the White plains in the year `76, one day took a ramble on the ground where we were then engaged with the British and took a survey of the place. We saw a number of the graves of those who fell in that battle; some of the bodies had been so slightly buried that the dogs or hogs, or both, had dug them out of the ground. The sculls [sic] and other bones, and hair were scattered about the place. Here were Hessian sculls as thick as a bomb shell; ---poor fellows! they were left unburied in a foreign land; ---they had, perhaps, as near and dear friends to lament their sad destiny as the Americans who lay buried near them. But they should have kept at home, we should then never have gone after them to kill them in their own country. But, the reader will say, they were forced to come and be killed here; forced by their rulers who have absolute power of life and death over their subjects. Well then, reader, bless a kind Providence that has made such a distinction between your condition and theirs. And be careful too that you do not allow yourself ever to be brought to such an abject, servile and debased condition."

This is a passage from the book A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, part of a review on Amazon. It’s a first hand account of a man who served during the Revolutionary War.

Makes me think of life here and now. Makes me think about our fellow citizens in Afganistan and Iraq.

2005-04-20T07:42:00.000-04:00

I have a desk calendar that has little words of inspiration and nice pictures of beaches around the world. I sit at a desk all day and need to see something nice in front of me so I bought the calendar with the pretty pictures..

Today’s inspirational words made me do a double take.

Let yourself be neutered by all that is beautiful in this world.

It actually says “nurtured.”

Boy am I glad of that.

2005-04-15T07:11:00.000-04:00

As my Maxine calendar says,

Got your taxes done?
Or are you counting on that free time in prison to finish up?

2005-04-14T07:44:00.000-04:00

This is not your Father’s China. And they better watch out, the “feeble old women” are gonna rip ‘em a new one.

Rural Chinese Riot as Police Try to Halt Pollution Protest

By JIM YARDLEY - Published: April 14, 2005

BEIJING, April 13 - Thousands of people rioted Sunday in a village in southeastern China, overturning police cars and driving away officers who had tried to stop elderly villagers from protesting against pollution from nearby factories, witnesses said Wednesday.

By Wednesday afternoon, the witnesses say, crowds convened in the village, Huaxi, in Zhejiang Province to gawk at a stunning tableau of destroyed police cars and shattered windows. Police officers were reported to be barring reporters from the scene, but local people reached by telephone said villagers controlled the riot area.

"The villagers will not give up if there is no concrete action to move the factories away," said a Mr. Lu, a villager who said he had witnessed part of the confrontation. "The crowd is growing. There are at least 50,000 or 60,000 people." He would not give his full name.

. . .

A reporter for an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, The South China Morning Post, visited the riot scene and described overturned buses and shattered cars, adding that "a police uniform is draped over one car - a trophy." The reporter, whose account was published on Wednesday, was detained by the police after leaving the village and released after her notes were confiscated.

. . .

But the riot described in Huaxi is more a symptom of the widening social unrest in the Chinese countryside that has become a serious concern for top leaders. Last year, tens of thousands of protesters in western Sichuan Province clashed with the police over a dam project. Smaller rural protests are commonplace and often violent.

Huaxi is a few hours' drive south of Hangzhou, the provincial capital of coastal Zhejiang. It is a short distance from the Zhuxi Industrial Function Zone, the local industrial park that villagers say is home to 13 chemical factories.

"The air stinks from the factories," said a villager, Wang Yuehe. She said the local river was filled with pollutants that had contaminated local farmland. "We can't grow our crops. The factories had promised to do a good environmental job, but they have done almost nothing."

Ms. Wang said villagers had pooled their money for two years and sent representatives to file complaints at government petition offices in Zhejiang Province and in Beijing. "But there have been no results so far," she said.

On March 24 a group of elderly people, mostly women, set up roadblocks on the road leading to the factories. On April 2 the government temporarily shut down the factories. But by Sunday local officials had dispatched police officers and workers to break up the protest. Villagers said as many as 3,000 officers had arrived in scores of cars and buses.

The fight apparently erupted after officers had already taken down the tent city. Villagers said thousands of people had hurried to the scene after the police attacked some of the protesters. The mob then surrounded workers and officers, said witnesses and the newspaper account.

Some local officials who had retreated to a nearby school were reported to have been attacked when they tried to leave on foot. "I saw over 10 bodies on the ground, both officials and villagers," Mr. Lu said.

Several villagers said local officials owned shares in various local factories. But according to the article in the official newspaper, local officials "paid great attention" to the environmental problems and had paid compensation for past discharges of pollutants into the river.

The article also said that officials decided to break up the protests on Sunday because they were worried that "the coming of cold air and dramatic temperature drops threatened the health of feeble old women."

The irony here is that these people, including the feeble women, have lived with the land and weather all their lives. They farm for a living. The “feeble women” are probably much stronger physically and emotionally than the “officials” are or ever were.

The sad part, if they can’t grow crops now then the ground is probably too contaminated to be able to use for years.

The officials are learning that if you mess with people's livelyhood then the feeble old women get pissed and do something about it.

2005-04-13T12:53:00.000-04:00

I had a teacher once say that webcams were going to take away privacy completely because people are just putting them everywhere. Sometime that’s a good thing.

Smile! You're on webcam

A man is attacked in Bournemouth. The crime is reported by a teenager sitting in front of a computer in Bombay. Danny Bradbury logs on to an unexpected internet phenomenon

13 April 2005

It's not every day that you get rescued by a group of voyeurs that you've never met. But when Bev Holzrichter found herself badly injured and unable to move, it was webcam watchers who saved her life.

Holzrichter, the owner of KB Hilltop Stables in Charlotte, Iowa, was helping a horse give birth when it kicked her, shattering her right leg. Unable to move, and miles from her nearest neighbour, the badly injured Holzrichter was saved by people who had been watching the birth on the stable webcam. Seeing the accident, several people quickly found the number for the Charlotte rescue services and alerted them. "There were calls from England, Australia and around the world," she says.
. . .

I like webcams. I don’t think I’m being a voyeur. I work in an office. Sometimes it’s nice to click on a webcam in Hawaii and check out the surf or the sunrise. The odds of me going to Ireland are pretty low but I can go see anyway. You can check out a highway that you travel on to see how the traffic or the weather is affecting it. Or see if Mt Saint Helens has erupted again.

Webcams, the easy and inexpensive way to see the world. It's a way to save a life too.

2005-04-13T12:27:00.000-04:00

This is just one of those stories that makes me say, “What the hell!?”

Labs race to destroy deadly virus

Health experts have begun to destroy samples of a potentially lethal flu strain sent to laboratories around the world by a US testing organisation.

The samples are of Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968.

Testing kits containing the virus were sent to more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries from Brazil to Lebanon.

The World Health Organization said the virus could "easily cause an influenza epidemic" if not handled properly.

. . .

No immunity
Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it - and current vaccines do not guard against it.

"If this virus were to infect one person, it would spread very rapidly," Klaus Stohr of the WHO told the BBC.

The College of American Pathologists sent out kits between October 2004 and February of this year.

. . .

Woopsie! Possibly deadly flu sample just disappeared! Poof! Only to reappear and be sent around the world. Yup, these people know what they’re doing.

We’re supposed to trust the college grads, they is ed-ja-ma-cated. I think there needs to be a better test.

2005-04-12T14:18:00.000-04:00

Keeping the American people in fear seems to be the order of the day for the government. If they’re not playing games with the Homeland Security color code or making veiled threats at legally appointed judges then they are making sure that the folks who want to use guns can get them as easily as possible.

Congress Fetches for the Gun Lobby

Americans stunned at recent sprees of gun mayhem in churches, schools and courthouses should know that Congress is gearing up for action on this issue. No, lawmakers are not rushing through legislation to cut down on the 29,000 gun deaths a year. Rather, the Senate is preparing to revive a craven proposal to shield irresponsible gun manufacturers and dealers from accountability.

The proposal, which failed narrowly last year, is now estimated to have majority support from lawmakers who have been either cowed or bolstered by the gun lobby. It would have stopped such lawsuits as the one that led to a $2.5 million settlement for the families of victims in the Washington sniper shootings. That rifle was traced to a West Coast dealer who claimed that it was one of 238 weapons suddenly missing from inventory. The Senate proposal would shelter such transparently harmful dealers and manufacturers and snuff out more than a dozen other suits now in the courts.

The bill, offered this year by Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, goes further, undermining not just lawsuits but also administrative proceedings to revoke abusive dealers' licenses. Under it, gun dealers couldn't be disciplined for black-market deals involving illegal weapons unless it could be proved that they had engaged in them knowingly - as if general ineptitude or a lack of interest were acceptable. Last year, Congress joined President Bush in letting lapse the 1994 law restricting the availability of battlefield assault rifles. Congress also mandated the destruction of gun-sale records within 24 hours. Lawmakers were only making things easier for potential terrorists and other sociopaths.

2005-04-07T07:49:00.000-04:00

Makes me wonder if Georgie knows how the government works or where all the money comes from. Money has always magically appeared for him before so I guess he thinks it can magically disappear if it suits his agenda.

Shameless Photo-Op

EDITORIAL Published: April 7, 2005

Imagine this: On his next trip to Japan, President Bush visits the vault at the Bank of Japan, where that country's $712 billion in United States government bonds is stored. There, as the cameras roll, he announces that the bonds, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, are, in fact, worthless i.o.u.'s. He does the same thing when he visits China and so on around the world, until he has personally repudiated the entire $2 trillion of United States debt held by foreigners.

Mr. Bush rehearsed just that act on Tuesday, when he visited the office of the federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.Va. He posed next to a file cabinet that holds the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the Social Security trust fund. He tossed off a comment to the effect that the bonds were not "real assets." Later, in a speech at a nearby university, he said: "There is no trust fund. Just i.o.u.'s that I saw firsthand."

Social Security takes in more money than it needs to pay current beneficiaries, and the excess is invested in the Treasury securities that Mr. Bush was discussing. They carry the same legal and political obligations as all other forms of Treasury debt, every penny of which has always been paid in full and on time.

In his speech, Mr. Bush went on to acknowledge that future generations would have to make good on the debt. But the intended meaning of the photo-op was clear. In the hope of persuading people to privatize Social Security - a move that would only add to the growing debt burden for future generations - Mr. Bush wants Americans to believe that the trust fund is a joke. But if the trust fund is a joke, so is the full faith and credit of the United States.

Fortunately, the governments, institutions and individuals who hold United States debt can tell a publicity stunt from a policy statement. Still, casting aspersions on a basic obligation of the United States government is insulting and irresponsible.

As I understand it, as it says in the article, there was money before there were the IOUs that the President brushed off so easily. Social Security takes in money from people’s pay checks. Some money is used to pay out benefits. The extra is lent out to be paid back with interest. That helps keep Social Security and the Trust Fund solvent.

Does the President think the debt doesn't need to be paid back?

The author is right on target, the President of the United States “casting aspersions on a basic obligation of the United States government is insulting and irresponsible.” And one more instance that he makes himself look unqualified for the job he's in.

2005-04-07T07:25:00.000-04:00

Does anyone else see this as sort of wrong?

HOME & GARDEN -
Oscar's Retreat
After winning her second Oscar, Hilary Swank and her husband, Chad Lowe, began reworking their town house as a refuge from the paparazzi and the demands of a rising career. With a slide show.

That’s the headline from the NY Times email. I just love that the article comes complete with a slide show!

I admit that I didn’t read the article. It could be that they were invited to invade the Swank/Lowe residence. I just seems odd to me that they want their house as a “refuge from the paparazzi and the demands of a rising career” then let people to take pictures and then publish them.

2005-04-05T15:35:00.000-04:00

Wow, the French are complaining about the flag being at half mast for two days for the Pope and the lack of separation of church and state.

The flag is being flown at half mast in the U.S. for 7 days. I thought we were the country that started separation of church and state. I could be wrong. Let me know if you know who started this separation of church and state thing.

Lowered flags spark row in France

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- The French government faced accusations of double standards Tuesday over a decision to fly flags at half-mast in honor of Pope John Paul which critics said violated the state's commitment to secularism.

What began as a debate among a few left-wing and Green party politicians spread into the pages of newspapers Tuesday, with letters pages filled with the issue. Some also aired complaints about wall-to-wall coverage from Vatican City by French television.

France's many Roman Catholics are united in grief over the Pope's death. But the order to fly flags at half-mast for 24 hours was too much for some secular French, especially after most French leaders attended a special mass for the pope.

Critics accuse the government of hypocrisy by paying tribute to a religious leader after banning Muslim headscarves in state schools to try to ensure strict observance of the 100-year-old official separation of church and state.

"For five days there has been a hagiography about the sovereign pontiff without any critical spirit," said Jean-Luc Melenchon, a Socialist senator, renewing an attack on the government which he began on Monday.

"We live at a time when we must be very careful about the strict separation between the church and state, especially after adopting a law banning religious symbols in schools."

. . .

Another Liberation reader, Michel Sparagano, asked: "What does a Muslim French citizen think of his flag flying at half mast because the head of the Catholics is dead?"

France, whose 5-million-strong Muslim community is the largest in Europe, banned "conspicuous religious signs" in state schools last year.

. . .

"I understand very well that one can ask questions. The answer is very simple. It's a constant Republican tradition," Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said, noting that France flew flags at half mast to honor other popes when they died.

. . .

There are people who aren’t Catholics in this country but the put upon Catholics will scream bloody murder if you remind them of it. If you tell them that the Founding Fathers weren’t Catholic they have a fit and call you a liar no matter how much evidence you have.
Of course, evidence is only for people who can believe in what they can see.

2005-04-01T11:43:00.000-05:00

This morning a co-worker was asking me why Michael Schiavo didn’t just give up.

My co-worker said, “Why did he keep guardianship? Why didn’t he just let Terri’s parents take guardianship? With all the wackos out there angry about what was going on, why didn’t he just give it up?”

My co-worker went on like this for a bit and it left me time to think even more about a topic that’s been through my head for a week or two now. It finally dawned on me; how would I respond if I was in Michael Schiavo’s place? Would I have the strength to go on against the family and the “wackos out there” if I knew something they didn’t know? How would I feel if I had been told someone’s feelings and wishes, then just stood by quietly not saying or doing anything to make sure a friend or family member got their final wishes fulfilled? How far would I go to keep a promise, even an implied promise? Would I be able to live with myself if I gave up because of wackos' death threats or a vicious senator didn’t like what I knew to be true?

I hate that I’m bringing politics into this post but it’s so hard not to after reading the following article.

Senior Republican Tom DeLay, who leads the House of Representatives, attacked the US courts for allowing Mrs Schiavo to die, calling them "out of control".
. . .

“We promised the Schindler family that we will not let Terri die in vain," Mr DeLay said.

"We will look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president."

During a seven-year legal battle, state and federal judges consistently ruled against the Schindler family's attempts to prolong Terri Schiavo's life.

The US Supreme Court refused to hear their petitions, despite Congress passing emergency legislation and the support of President George W Bush.
. . .

“Arrogant” and “out of control.” This from a man who diagnosed via video tape.

And where the heck did DeLay learn about government and how it works? Hasn’t this twit heard of checks and balances? The only person thumbing their nose here is DeLay and he’s thumbing his nose at the Constitution and every person in this country and at the Founders of the United States!

There seems to be this idea with the Republicans and conservatives that they are trying to bring about a Culture of Life but it looks to me that it’s going to be a Culture of Life in Limbo and a Culture that the Powerful Should Always Get Their Way.

Terri Schaivo is dead now. An annoyed President and a hissy fit from a Senator and the “wackos out there” can’t change this. The people who didn’t know anyone in either family, the “wackos out there” and the vulture media should just go away now and let the Schindler and Schaivo families have some quiet and some closure.

2005-04-01T07:23:00.000-05:00

How to make hospitals safer . . . “cookbook medicine.” You have a better chance of coming home alive and healthy from the hospital if the doctor is following a checklist of what to do with you.

I’ve wondered lately about how well doctors learn and how much they retain from their training. This article gives me a clue. Everybody has a story about a fellow student who crams for every test and never seems to know anything. Why should it be much different for doctors?

A path to safer hospitals
Tue Mar 29, 6:27 AM ET

If you became seriously ill, you'd expect a hospital to provide what the medical profession considers essential care.

At many hospitals, you'd be wrong.

Thousands of patients needlessly die each year because guidelines proven to save lives aren't followed.

Even the most basic lifesaving treatments, such as giving aspirin and other drugs known to help heart attack victims, are forgotten, with fatal results. A study last November of 315 hospitals by the Duke Clinical Research Institute found failure to follow widely accepted heart attack guidelines almost doubled the mortality rate. After seeing the data, hospitals that improved their compliance rates had 40% fewer deaths.

Now, a national system to grade how hospitals meet standards is slowly emerging, using Medicare as the primary leverage, but enticing private insurers as well. It has a lot in common with the carrot-and-stick method used to get a mule to do what you want.

Over time, hospitals will get more money if they follow guidelines, and lower fees if they neglect them. To add a further shove in the right direction, Medicare will post report cards on its Web site so the public can make comparisons.

Until recently, there has been little incentive to measure performance. Unlike most businesses, where those who offer better services or products receive the largest financial reward, health care institutions mainly get paid based on volume of services rather than whether patients get better. Under the perverse reimbursement scheme, avoidable complications that require readmission may actually be more lucrative to hospitals than getting it right the first time.

Collecting and sharing information is the first step to improved care. In 1996, only 30% of patients who needed pneumonia vaccines received them at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals. Once physicians were made aware of that fact, the rate went up to 92%, saving an estimated 6,000 lives. The use of beta blockers, which slow the heart rate and are standard for heart attack patients, went from 70% to 98%.

In a pilot project, Medicare is tracking how 300 hospitals handle five clinical conditions. Hospitals scoring in the top 10% will receive a 2% bonus payment. In the third year of the project, facilities that don't improve will have their payments reduced. Medicare also is starting to track how large-group physician practices meet patients' needs.

There is a risk in this concept: inviting "cookbook medicine," in which individual circumstances are ignored in favor of a cheaper one-size-fits-all approach. For years, that concern has caused many in the health care industry to resist guidelines of any kind. But this effort, at least initially, is focused on such universally accepted practices that it makes resistance look blind and bullheaded.

Tracking quality and rewarding it with better pay can provide the incentive to save not just money, but lives. That's not something anyone should fight.

Why would doctors resist "cookbook medicine?" Maybe because it would imply that our well trained doctors can’t think that well for themselves or maybe retain enough information from their training. Unfortunately, the fact that the study shows a 40% reduction in the number of deaths by following guidelines demonstrates that "cookbook medicine" is very helpful.

It seems to me that "cookbook medicine" would be very helpful especially for women. Women showing up at the hospital with symptoms of a heart attack aren’t treated as aggressivly as men. Medical personnel following a checklist should increase a woman’s chances of getting proper care and surviving.

I hope the "cookbook" is handy when I need medical care.

2005-03-31T08:19:00.000-05:00

I need someone to explain something to me because I have some real problems with this stuff.

On the one hand we have this:

PARIS (Reuters)

- Pope John Paul, now being fed through a nasal tube because of his throat problems, effectively wrote his own "living will" last year in a speech declaring some life-extending treatments a moral duty for Roman Catholics.

The ailing Pontiff sharply narrowed Catholic guidelines for treating patients nearing death in March 2004 when he described tube-feeding as a normal treatment rather than an extraordinary measure that can be stopped if all hope of recovery fades.

This indicates he would want to be kept alive by artificial means even if he fell into a coma or a persistent vegetative state, such as the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in the United States whose feeding tubes have been removed after 15 years.

. . .

"The intrinsic value and the personal dignity of every human being does not change no matter what the concrete situation of his life," he told doctors and ethics experts attending a Rome conference about patients in a vegetative state.

On the other hand:

BOSTON (AP)

-- When 5-year-old Jenny Richardson orders fast food, it's french fries only or a hamburger without the bun. She doesn't share birthday cupcakes with her friends.

And now, because of Roman Catholic Church rules, she can't have part of her First Communion rite, either.

Jenny suffers from celiac disease, which causes her to get sick from eating gluten, a protein in wheat and other grains. She can safely eat rice.

The Archdiocese of Boston has told the family that the church cannot substitute a rice communion wafer for the traditional wheat one, citing 2,000 years of tradition and faith.

. . .

The Vatican takes the matter seriously enough that in 1994, it issued rules for all bishops to follow. Among them: "Special hosts [which do not contain gluten] are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist."

“I think part of the problem is we are so accustomed to all these little round, pre-cut hosts we've lost any real sense we're taking part in one loaf," says the Rev. Austin Fleming, pastor of Our Lady of Christian Help Church in Concord, Mass. "We many are sharing one bread and becoming one with Christ. We can't make different flavors for different folks and maintain that theological reality."

You see, since wheat was the stuff of the bread at the Last Supper, then the wafer cannot be rice. Rice wasn’t the Savior’s grain of choice so it has to be a wheat wafer. (By the way, I’m guessing the Apostles chewed the bread but I was always told not to chew the wafer, that you had to swallow it whole.)

What about "The intrinsic value and the personal dignity" of Jenny?

So can someone explain to me how this little kid can’t have a rice Communion wafer in church but the Pope can have a feeding tube. Jesus didn’t have a feeding tube. As far as know, there weren’t any feeding tubes on the planet at the time of Christ.

So how does the Pope get to have a feeding tube but this little kid can’t have a rice wafer that won’t make her sick or possibly kill her? It’s handy that the Pope gets to make life extending decisions for himself. Infallability, it's a wonderful thing.

2005-03-25T10:25:00.000-05:00

Philadelphia drivers don’t pay attention to red lights or signs.
I don’t know why but I find this really funny and have a bizarre bit of pride in the numbers.
Roosevelt Blvd. Red Light Camera Catches Thousands (!) in First Month

In the first month that red light cameras have been installed at Grant Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard, more than 5,000 drivers have been caught running the red.

Numbers released by the Parking Authority and Pennsylvania house speaker John Perzel show that 5,169 cars were caught on camera running the red light at Grant and the Boulevard over the last 28 days.

Perzel could barely believe it:

“I don't think anybody listening to KYW would have believed that 5,169 people would have still gone through the red light camera, after all of the PR that we've put out to tell people that it's there. There are signs that say it's there. It's inconceivable to me that the number is still that high."

But city and state officials are heartened by the fact that there were only two accidents at Grant and the Boulevard in the month after the cameras were turned on.

The grace period runs for three more months. After that time, warnings turn into real $100 fines.

5,169 people went through the red light. That would have been $516,900 in fines if the red light runners had been fined. Gee, if things stay like that maybe the city can lower the wage tax or the property tax or get rid of the 1% sales tax. Nah, the politicians will just line their pockets more than usual.

2005-03-24T12:14:00.000-05:00

I’m amazed at this, I don’t know what else to say. I do wonder if I would get taken too.

How to sell your self for a song

The chance to win theatre tickets is enough to make people give away their identity, reveals a survey.

Of those taking part 92% revealed details such as mother's maiden name, first school and birth date.

The detailed personal information was gathered by market researchers who asked the questions as part of a fake survey on theatre-going habits.

Dangling the chance to win free tickets was enough to make people surrender everything needed to impersonate them.

'Disturbing' results"

During the course of the survey many people freely volunteered key details such as name, address and postcode.

To elicit other details the questions asked by the market researchers were cleverly put together to make people hand over personal information.

One of the questions was about the way that actors pick stage names. Those taking part in the survey were told that many stage names are created using a pet's name and the actor's mother's maiden name.

When asked what their stage name would be using the same criteria, 94% volunteered information.

Such data is potentially hugely valuable to identity thieves who need it to answer the supplementary security questions many websites impose on those signing up.

By the end of the survey, the fake researchers had everything they needed to pose as those taking part, to take out credit cards in their name and even open bank accounts.

Chris Simpson, head of Scotland Yard's computer crime unit, said the results of the survey were "disturbing" and added: "Preventing the theft of your own identity is relatively simple, but it relies on the individual taking steps to protect themselves."

Mr Simpson said people should share sensitive data with as few people as possible, shred personal correspondence before throwing it away and never share passwords across different computer systems.

The Home Office reports that more than 100,000 British people every year suffer identity fraud.

The survey, which questioned 200 people stopped on London streets, was carried out for Infosecurity Europe which takes place from 26-28 April. .

2005-03-24T08:09:00.000-05:00

Bricks as pets; clean, quiet and . . . well maybe not too much fun. I’m sure that if you try you could have fun with a brick just don't introduce in to vandalism. Bricks are innocent and law abiding but will go bad under poor choice of owner.

Where can I find a pet brick?

New young bricks can be purchased from a local brick store (known euphemistically as a "hardware store") for less than a dollar apiece. However, very few brick stores treat their bricks well, callously leaving them outside in crowded stacks under sun and rain. These bricks tend to have health problems, in the form of chips and cracks. We do not encourage rescuing a brick from such a source, as this will only encourage the store owner to order more from its local "brick mill."

Brick breeders are as yet a rarity, but if you are lucky you may find a good breeder near you. A few fancy brick varieties are available from such breeders.

We encourage adopting. There are many abandoned bricks that desperately need homes, and brick rescue organizations are swamped, as more bricks are abandoned than can be fostered effectively. Contact your local SPCB (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bricks) to see if they have any bricks available for adoption. Alternatively, search in fields and abandoned buildings, and you may find a timid, feral brick among the weeds. With proper socialization, these bricks can be turned into excellent pets.

2005-03-24T08:03:00.000-05:00

And now for something really different . . .

Paw Painting by by Cricket, Snip and Widget.

2005-03-23T13:26:00.000-05:00

From pekin prattles:

I heard today an estimated $4 million dollars were expended by a Congress/President in extraordinary actions, flying back to the nation's capitol, and holding all-night sessions, for this one person.....how SAD! These voting people knew NOTHING of the case. It has been given voice, replayed, and replayed for nearing 15 years....and EVERY decision to date by judges with FULL exposure and knowledge has been the same....The woman is brain dead! YES MRI has been performed and found her brain lobe atrophied and replaced by spinal fluid....THIS IS NOT regenerative!

$4 million dollars! And what good has come of it?

2005-03-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Oh my, what a surprise!

SEX 'BOMB' IS BLOWN UP

A parcel which vibrated and made strange noises caused panic in a post office in eastern Germany.

"The post office worker thought it could have been a dangerous object, even a bomb," a police spokesman said.

Officers in Chemnitz were called and noticed that the sender's address was on the package.

When they confronted the red-faced sender, he explained it was a lifesize inflatable sex doll which he had folded up to send back to the manufacturers because it had failed to have the desired effect.

"He opened the package and expertly removed the batteries," said the spokesman. "It was rather embarrassing for the sender."

The sender is probably trying to forget this but the folks at the post office have a story to laugh about for a long time.

2005-03-23T11:50:00.000-05:00

This sounds like something to buy just for the fun of it. A cat or dog would probably rip it apart.

ULTIMATE ALARM CLOCK

It's the ultimate early morning alarm call for those too tired or lazy to get out of bed.

Scientists have built an intelligent alarm clock that runs and hides after the snooze button is pressed so that the sleeper has to get out of bed to find it in the bedroom to turn it off again.

The 'Clocky' clock does not give the restless a five minute break and then an opportunity to turn it off again for another five minutes by using the snooze button repeatedly.

Instead it zooms into action.

It rolls off the bedside table and uses its wheels drive off and find a hiding place somewhere in the room.

It is also programmed to go to a different hiding place each time it is used so there would be no chance of throwing a pillow at it to cover it up.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston, also claim that their invention will motivate the worst sleep-in offenders whose brain will be forced to become awake and alert.

I’m not sure Clocky is ready for prime time or wake-up time. It looks like it could use some work to look nice on a bedside table but it sure looks ready to be a fun pet toy.

2005-03-22T08:04:00.000-05:00

This is sort of an unfair comparison but it is fitting in the light of what’s been happening in D.C. the past couple of days.

"bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States"

Bush reaction: continue with vacation

Congress passes bill to 'save' brain-dead Florida woman.

Bush reaction: immediately return to DC to sign a bill into law to prevent an act of barbarism.
Comment from a Digby post

Congress's Midnight Frenzy

The sight of Congress and President Bush intruding into the sufferings of the Schiavo family was appalling. Washington had years to properly consider the agonizing dilemmas that cases like this one raise for uncounted, less publicized American families. But the Republican leadership did nothing until the issue ripened to a maximum moment for simplistic political exploitation.

Most Americans appreciate the complicated and sensitive concerns at stake here far better than the politicians. Whatever the range of opinion on the underlying issue, polls show that the public recoiled at the sight of elected officials racing to make hay of this family's private pain. Those findings only underline the hubris of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, and the other G.O.P. leaders. Their egregious pandering was directed not at the bulk of the populace, but at their base vote among the evangelical and fundamentalist conservatives who have been demanding greater deference since working to deliver Republican victories last year.

The political timidity of potential opponents was woeful. No one dared even demand debate in the Senate. In the House, many opponents seemed simply to prefer to stay away. Arguments against the bill were led by Florida Democrats, who had the most reason to be offended by Congress's crude overriding of state government.

Sanctimonious rhetoric rang out about the value of each individual life even as a strategy memo was reported circulating among G.O.P. lawmakers cynically relishing the points to be scored with the right-to-life political machine in next year's elections. The rush to save Terri Schiavo was mixed with the urge to get rid of Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who faces re-election next year.

Who needs ‘reality TV,’ soap operas and dramas when real life is so full of it, in more ways than one.

2005-03-21T12:52:00.000-05:00

Here I go, stealing again. This time from Suburban Guerrilla and Digby.

HYPOCRISY

Digby:
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schivos because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

2005-03-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Explains why I don’t want to do a one topic blog but doesn’t explain why I don’t take the time to write more for myself.

X-celling Over Men

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 20, 2005

Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.

But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.

Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."

Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.

"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."

Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.

So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."

Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.

Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.

"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.

"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."

Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.

The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.

2005-03-20T16:56:00.000-05:00

First, some American History;
First Continental Congress: 1774
Second Continental Congress: 1775
Declaration of Independence: 1776
American Revolution: 1776-1783
Constitution created and ratified: 1787-1789
Washington became President: 1789-1797
Bill of Rights: 1789
First national election: 1796?
And let’s not forget the fun of the Civil War: 1861-1865

The way I see it, the new Iraqi government is doomed to failure particularly if the U.S. government stays on top of them to put together a government as soon as possible. As soon as possible could take some time, and probably should take more time then they are bing given. Look how long it took for the early American colonists to come up with a decent working centralized government. The biggest difference between the Iraqi’s now and the new United States then; then they decided the timetable, now outsiders are deciding and pushing the timetable. The Iraqi people need to learn how to work together. Forcing a schedule decided on by others does not help them. If it is truely to be an Iraqi-made government then Iraqis really need to be setting the schedule and making the decisions.

New governments don’t just happen overnight, much as we would like to see it happen that fast. You have groups who have different wants and needs. For some issues they don’t want to work together and don’t know how. Why do we expect them to have a government in place and working for all Iraqis at the drop of a hat when first generation Americans couldn’t do it quickly?

If they can’t make then they can’t make it. It makes no sense to force things along, all it does is promote bad feelings all around. The best the world can do is support the process that the Iraqi’s decide on and try to keep things stable while the citizens of the country do the best they can.

Now, having written this, I can't help but wonder if the idea behind the forced schedule is that the Iraqis are supposed to fail.

I didn't used to be into conspiracies but lately I just can't help thinking that way.

2005-03-16T15:04:00.000-05:00

I’ve been meaning to blog but I read blogs through lunch instead of posting something. Now I’m trying to slip in some stuff during the afternoon.

Here’s something I found interesting and important. Transplant cures man of diabetes.

A 61-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to be cured of type 1 diabetes thanks to a groundbreaking cell transplant technique.
After receiving insulin-making cells from the pancreases of dead donors, Richard Lane of Bromley, Kent, no longer needs insulin injections.

Here is the mental_floss fact of the day. Interesting magazine, learn lots of stuff that I can’t remember right now.

Another of my favorite things, NBox Comedy, it helps me through my workday. Be careful if you don’t use headphones at work, there’s a good bit of profanity.

2005-03-09T11:54:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different . . .

It’s time for Craft Corner Deathmatch!

Savage Crafters, Start Your Glue Guns!

The world of crafts tends to bring to mind genteel images, like quilting bees, decoupage lampshades and the pre-prison aura of Martha Stewart.

It does not usually evoke chain-link cages, spotlights, rabid fans and a deafening announcer shouting things like "Step away from the glue gun!" and "Shut the craft up!"

But crafting and grudge-match pro wrestling may end up more closely entwined in the public imagination after tomorrow night [9 March at 10pm], when the Style Network introduces "Craft Corner Deathmatch," an unconventional game show in which two amateur crafters go head to head in timed trials, trying to make the best pillow out of old couch fabric or a brooch using only candy.

Viewers who have had their fill of the recent craze for crafting and home-makeover shows may be disappointed to learn that everyone comes out alive from the "death" matches. But one contestant eventually is voted out of the cage by three judges, and the winner goes on to compete against a real craft professional, Jocelyn Worrall, who is known on the show as the Craft Lady of Steel and who once worked for - you guessed it - Ms. Stewart.

Dan Taberski and Jo Honig, the show's creators, also enthusiastically pointed out during an interview that on three occasions during tapings of the show in a studio in East Harlem, competitors had given themselves nasty, if minor, cuts. "Which is fantastic," Mr. Taberski said, his eyes lighting up. "The fact that someone drew blood on a crafting show? It's exactly what the show should be."
"Craft Corner Deathmatch" may seem like a blended-by-committee mixture of recent television trends - equal parts "Iron Chef," "Shabby Chic" and "American Idol" - but Mr. Taberski and Ms. Honig, former producers for "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, said the idea came from a game in which they tried to imagine a show based on two elements so disparate that network executives in their right minds would run screaming. For example, they made a pilot for MTV called "X-tremely Old," in which a strike team of elderly women offered romantic advice and other life help to 20-somethings.

"Instead of trying to give them what they want, we try to do the opposite," Mr. Taberski said. "What doesn't go together? Crafts and gladiators. Old people and MTV. 'Hey MTV, why don't you put some old people on your network?' "

Ms. Honig added: "That poison and babies idea we had really hasn't gone anywhere yet."

Neither has the old ladies' show, which MTV passed on. But when Mr. Taberski and Ms. Honig went to pitch comedy ideas last year to E!, owned by the same company that owns the Style Network, a series of communication foul-ups led an E! executive to think that they were there to propose ideas for home-makeover shows. They did not have any, but threw out the "Craft Corner Deathmatch" idea just for laughs.

"And that was the only idea she liked," Mr. Taberski recalled.

A team of craft experts helped them come up with dozens of competitive projects, like making handbags out of Astroturf, bowls out of rolls of tickets, watchbands using only hot glue and decorative doodads and Barbie clothes using fabric scraps. ("Or as we call them, 'Schmarbie' clothes, because you can't use the brand name on television," Mr. Taberski explained.)

At the beginning, the show's creators worried that they might have trouble finding talented amateur crafters - not simply out-of-work actors pretending to love macramé - who would want to show off their skills in such a ludicrous setting. "It's not a competition type thing," Mr. Taberski said of craft-making.

But they found that crafters were much more rabidly competitive than they had assumed, and also that there were many more than they had imagined in the New York area, where they sought contestants as a way to reduce airfare costs and keep the show's budget low. In two days of open casting, more than 300 applicants showed up for the show's 26 spots, many of them, Ms. Honig said, were "these cool hipsters from the East Village and Williamsburg who are completely into knitting and craft things you'd never expect."

Many were so intent on getting on the show that they tried to sway the producers with craft gifts, including a homemade clock with the logo of Idiot Box, Mr. Taberski and Ms. Honig's production company, that now hangs in their office in Midtown. (In the end, the woman who contributed the clock was not chosen. "She was a bit older," Ms. Honig said. "We were concerned she wouldn't be able to move fast enough.")

Mr. Taberski said the applicants' zeal had encouraged him about the show's prospects. "Anytime that people love something so much that they'll fight for it in a cage," he said, "it's funny."

Maria Schoenherr, an artist and accessories designer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was among those with such a love of craft. She landed a spot on a recent show, beat her competitor but then lost to the Craft Lady of Steel in a cutthroat pillow-making contest. (She lost in spite of receiving a score of 10 from one of that show's judges, Eartha Kitt, who complimented the whipstitch in Ms. Schoenherr's pillow, saying that she envisioned unraveling it and using the lacing "to tie down my man." Even the show's effusive host, Jason Jones, seemed at a loss as to how to respond to this.)

Ms. Schoenherr, 31, said she considered the idea for the game show a bit dumb, but an instructor of hers at the Fashion Institute of Technology talked her into auditioning. She said many friends and colleagues her age were into crafting, though they didn't necessarily think of it as such. "It's not exactly fine art and not exactly design," she said, "but there's a whole lot of homemade gifts involved."

Young craft fanatics also tended to show up in large numbers for the tapings. Joy Figueroa and Dara McLaurine, both 17 and seniors at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side, found out about the tapings from a craft Web site and spread the word to others in their school knitting club. Asked what they thought of the show, they rolled their eyes, but Ms. Figueroa said: "I'm a total geek, so I would probably totally watch it."

Ms. Honig and Mr. Taberski say they hope the show, which has filmed 13 episodes, taps into a huge craft-geek audience and explained that - as lifelong noncrafters - they had to keep reminding each other to make sure that the craft elements of the show were not buried by the comedy. In that spirit, the two have worked hard to adopt a love of crafting. Ms. Honig recently attended a scrapbooking convention in Atlanta, and Mr. Taberski even decoupaged the company's Christmas card. Given several opportunities to make fun of crafters in a recent interview, the two resisted at every turn.

"We are not being irreverent about craft," insisted Mr. Taberski, who once worked as an aide in the Clinton administration and knows how to please a constituency. "We're just being irreverent near it."

2005-03-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

This editorial says so much about how bad privatizing would be if it goes through as planned. I’ve read about having to buy an annuity in another article; your money could be hanging around and out of your control for up to a year while the annuity is being set up. Privatizing is just down right bad for most American workers.

It’s an especially annoying and frustrating plan coming from people who will never have to deal with it in the real world.

Some Inheritance

EDITORIAL
Published: February 23, 2005

As he stumps for Social Security privatization, President Bush always gets a big round of applause for promising that the money in a private account could be passed on to one's heirs.

If those happy clappers only knew the details.

Under the president's proposal, when you retired you would not be able to start spending the money in your private account until after you bought an annuity, a financial contract in which you hand over a lump-sum payment and, in return, get a monthly stream of income for life. The upside of buying such an annuity would be that you'd be protected against outliving all of your money. The downside is that even if you died immediately after retirement, the most your heirs would inherit would be the amount that remained in your private account after you had paid for the mandatory annuity. (If you lived longer, of course, you might well need to spend the remainder to supplement the annuity's low monthly payout. )

The idea of making the private accounts part of one's estate is particularly appealing to low- and middle-income earners, who may not have all that much to leave to their heirs under normal circumstances. But those are exactly the people who would have to use the largest share of their accounts to buy annuities. The government would require that annuities be large enough to keep recipients above the poverty line for life. The less you had to start with, the less you'd have left over after buying the mandatory annuity.

What if you died before you retired? As with many claims Mr. Bush makes about Social Security privatization, the fate of your private account in the event of your untimely death is unclear. But one issue that raises big doubts about whether that money could be inherited is the question of how the trillions of dollars the government would have to borrow to set up a privatized system would be repaid.

Under the president's proposal, when you retired, your traditional Social Security retirement benefit would be cut by an amount equal to all the deposits you had made into your private account plus interest. (The interest would be three percentage points higher than the rate of inflation.) The benefit cut would be each person's contribution to repaying the huge debt the Bush administration would take on to "pay for" privatization.

But if you died before you retired, you would have already used some of that borrowed money to set up the private account and yet would never have made any contribution to repaying the debt. So in that case, how would the government recoup your share of the amount it had borrowed? Well, it could let your share of the debt go unpaid - in effect bequeathing to your heirs and their fellow citizens ever-higher deficits. Or your spouse could inherit your private account and the benefit cut that went with it. Or the government could take its cut from your private account before the money went to your survivors - a grab that could wipe out your stash.

The White House would hotly deny that the last alternative could happen. Nothing freaks out the Bush administration more than the suggestion that the government would ever tap someone's private account - even for money that is owed to the government. It doesn't, however, seem too bothered about gutting your traditional benefits. Go figure.

2005-03-01T09:04:00.000-05:00

Krugman strikes again. The only good reason I’ve so far to in favor of private accounts is that you could pass on the money you don’t use to your heirs. Unfortunately there are so many reasons against private accounts that I just can’t go along with privatizing. The cost of the changeover, all the unknowns that the Administration doesn’t want to talk about like the fees being paid to brokers, and whatever other fees they decide to charge, make the plan of private accounts a bad idea.

At one time I was for private accounts, they made quite a bit of sense during the 80’s when the stock market was doing good. I started paying more attention and reading more and realized that it wasn’t a good plan. The stock market is a gamble and that’s something the Administration doesn’t want people to realize.

It seems to me that Repubs should be against private accounts, it sure seems like they would make government bigger. At least initially we would have Social Security and whatever agency that would oversee the private accounts. Bigger government, lots more workers and more money spent. Personally, I could use a new job but I don’t want anything to do with privatizing Social Security.

Just Say No

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 1, 2005
President Bush's effort to hustle the nation into dismantling Social Security as we know it seems to be faltering: the more voters hear about how privatization would work, the less they like it.

As a result, some Republicans are reported to be talking about a compromise in which they would agree to some kind of tax increase, probably a rise in the maximum level of earnings subject to the payroll tax. They would offer to use the revenue from that tax increase, rather than borrowed funds, to establish private accounts, thereby assuaging fears about the huge debt buildup that would take place under the administration's plan. They might even agree to make private accounts an add-on to traditional benefits, not a replacement.

But it would still be a bad deal. Creating private accounts in the current environment, no matter how they are financed, would be a mistake.

First, think about the fiscal implications. We have a huge budget deficit, largely caused by Mr. Bush's decision to cut taxes while waging war. Any realistic plan to bring the budget deficit under control will have to include tax increases, especially if we want to avoid the harsh cuts the administration is trying to impose on Medicaid and other essential programs.

There may be a place for a rise in the payroll tax maximum in such a plan: AARP, among other groups, has proposed such a rise as one way to improve the Social Security system's long-run finances. Devoting the extra revenue to the trust fund would also reduce the overall budget deficit.

But if the revenue from a rise in the payroll tax maximum was used to subsidize private accounts rather than to bolster the trust fund, it wouldn't address any urgent priorities: it wouldn't help the long-run finances of Social Security, it wouldn't reduce the budget deficit, and it wouldn't support crucial programs like Medicaid.

What it would do, instead, would be to get in the way of any return to fiscal sanity. After all, raising the maximum taxable income would be a fairly stiff tax increase for some taxpayers. For example, someone making $140,000 a year might owe an extra $6,000. And the taxpayers who would be hit hardest by this tax increase would, in many cases, be the same people who will face a growing burden from the alternative minimum tax.

As a result, an increase in the payroll tax maximum would make it much harder to pass other tax increases, frustrating efforts to do something about the deficit.

Furthermore, it's all too likely that any compromise that created private accounts would turn into a Trojan horse that let the enemies of Social Security inside the gates.

This might happen almost immediately, as a result of the legislative process. As you may have noticed, moderates don't run Congress. Suppose that a moderate senator thinks he has struck a deal for fully funded private accounts that don't directly undermine traditional Social Security. Almost surely, he would be kidding himself: by the time the conference committees were done with the legislation, the funding would be gone or greatly reduced, the accounts would be bigger, traditional benefits would have been cut, and the whole thing would have turned into a privatization wish list.

Even if that didn't happen, private accounts, once established, would be used as a tool to whittle down traditional guaranteed benefits. For example, conservatives would use the existence of private accounts, together with rosy scenarios about rates of return, to argue that guaranteed benefits could be cut without hurting retirees.

In short, anyone who wants to see the nation return to fiscal responsibility, wants to preserve Social Security as an institution or both should be opposed to any deal creating private accounts. And there is also, of course, the political question: Why should any Democrat act as a spoiler when his party is doing well by doing good, gaining political ground by opposing a really bad idea? (Hello, Senator Lieberman.)

The important thing to remember is why the right wants privatization. The drive to create private accounts isn't about finding a way to strengthen Social Security; it's about finding a way to phase out a system that conservatives have always regarded as illegitimate. And as long as that is what's at stake, there is no room for any genuine compromise. When it comes to privatization, just say no.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

2005-02-25T13:12:00.000-05:00

These are letters to the editor at the NY Times about Bush’s plan to trash Social Security. My problem with the first letter from the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy is that he doesn’t address the possibility that a private account may not make enough money to cover the life of the owner let alone leave any money for someone to inherit.

Social Security and the Generations (6 Letters)

Published: February 25, 2005

To the Editor:

I take issue with your Feb. 23 editorial "Some Inheritance" regarding President Bush's policy on personal accounts within Social Security.

The president is firmly on record in favor of allowing those who die before retirement to pass on their nest egg to their loved ones.

For those in retirement, the president has said they would not be able to spend their accounts all at once and put themselves in poverty. There are many ways to provide this protection that still allow for an inheritance to be passed on.

In 13 years, the Social Security system begins paying out more money than it takes in. This presents a choice of raising taxes, borrowing money or cutting spending. The president's proposal for fixing the system today will give workers a nest egg, allow them to pass on an inheritance to their children and own a piece of their retirement that no one can take away.

Allan B. Hubbard
Assistant to the President for Economic Policy
Washington, Feb. 24, 2005
•

To the Editor:

Re "On Social Security, a Political Appeal to the Young Draws the Attention of Their Elders" (news article, Feb. 23):

The Great Divider is at it again. The administration's effort to pit older workers against young in the Social Security discussion is just the latest in the politics of division - the art form that George W. Bush is so adept at. Younger workers are being encouraged to think that "their" Social Security funds are inexplicably being given to old strangers and that only privatization will restore the control and ownership to the rightful party.

Younger workers need to understand that people don't get to decide how we want portions of our tax dollars spent. Just because I don't have children, I can't decline to spend my taxes on education. Life is not like that.

Our taxes go to support programs that we need as a society. In the face of the relentless egoism of the Bush administration, we need to remember that our country functions best when everyone is cared for, protected and promised a certain level of dignity and financial security.

Sherry Fyman
New York, Feb. 23, 2005
•

To the Editor:

I am 78, and my wife is 75. We have three grandchildren, aged 15, 11 and 3. It is exactly for their sake that I have been so disturbed by the proposed changes in the Social Security program.

I am old enough to remember the suffering of people in the 1930's after the stock market crashed. Admittedly, there are some protections now in place that did not exist 75 years ago, but those measures do not provide assurance that sufficient money from individual accounts will be there when needed for retirement.

If the Social Security program is really in trouble (a fact that seems to be overblown in this debate), let us find ways to adjust the system other than through private retirement accounts.

(Rev.) William E. Palmer
Los Gatos, Calif., Feb. 23, 2005
•

To the Editor:

Once again, the Republicans are using divide-and-conquer tactics to polarize our country. Their you're-with-us-or-against-us attitude, displayed on so many issues, has created a country more divided and hate-filled than I've experienced in my 55 years. Now they're using these tactics to divide our younger citizens from our older citizens in the Social Security debate.

It is a mean-spirited, cynical approach that weakens us as a country. I long for leadership that seeks to unite our people around issues of deep concern to all of us.

Judith Childs Butler
Arden, Del., Feb. 23, 2005
•

To the Editor:

Never mind that there is no consensus among economists about whether there is a "problem" with Social Security or that President Bush's solution would further deepen the deficit. Future generations will suffer, he tells us, if we do not restructure Social Security now. Nonsense.

What is actually happening is this: George W. Bush is the leader of an increasingly doctrinaire Republican Party that believes that private enterprise solves all domestic problems. Social Security contradicts that premise because it provides assured benefits based on a schedule of taxation proportionate to work and earned income.

In other words, it is predictable and fair. That is why it has worked for 70 years.

But it is not part of the Republican creed of "ownership." So it must be "reformed." Its revenues must be handed over gradually but inexorably to the equities market, which will benefit many of the same Americans who enjoyed the biggest tax paybacks of 2001.

If we fall for that one, we'll fall for just about anything the Bush government sends our way.

Robert Bunselmeyer
Brunswick, Me., Feb. 23, 2005

•
To the Editor:
The Bush administration's strategy for dismantling Social Security begins with divide and conquer, as it does with every other agenda item. The administration goes about this strategy by making every issue one of Democrat versus Republican and liberal versus conservative.

It is time for all Americans to set aside our differences. It is time for Republicans, Democrats and independents to fight to defend our free and just society. The Bush policies are creating a have and have-not society. Fake news and administration propaganda rule the airwaves.

Let's stop calling one another Republicans and Democrats, right-wingers and liberals, and let us join together as decent human beings to do the right thing.

Mary New
Winchester, Mass., Feb. 20, 2005

I can understand wanting to leave money to family and friends. I can understand wanting to have your own money to pay for stuff. I can’t understand why we should dump a program that works. Ok, it seems to be heading towards a rocky patch but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere ready to sink completely. Working with a program that has a good history is usually better, easier and cheaper than starting from scratch. Plus, Bush’s suggestion just leads to so many other questions. What happens if your account doesn’t make enough for you to live on? How much will the changeover really cost? How much money will be made by Wall Street? How much or how little control will people have over their accounts? What if someone can’t get the hang of working with the private account and they lose money? Will they be living on the streets when they can’t work any more? How will current retirees actually be taken care of? Things change, will the current retirees ever be at risk? It already looks like future retirees are at risk.

Geez, there are just so some many things that need to be understood before anything should be changed. What the heck is Bush's hurry anyway? He's already covered for retirement.

2005-02-25T12:25:00.000-05:00

Can’t help it, gotta copy and paste Krugman, “the shape of smears to come.”

Kansas on My Mind

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 25, 2005

Call it "What's the Matter With Kansas - The Cartoon Version."

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

Their first foray - an ad accusing the seniors' organization of being against the troops and for gay marriage - was notably inept. But they'll be back, and it's important to understand what they're up to.

The answer lies in "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Thomas Frank's meditation on how right-wingers, whose economic policies harm working Americans, nonetheless get so many of those working Americans to vote for them.

People like myself - members of what one scornful Bush aide called the "reality-based community" - tend to attribute the right's electoral victories to its success at spreading policy disinformation. And the campaign against Social Security certainly involves a lot of disinformation, both about how the current system works and about the consequences of privatization.

But if that were all there is to it, Social Security should be safe, because this particular disinformation campaign isn't going at all well. In fact, there's a sense of wonderment among defenders of Social Security about the other side's lack of preparation. The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have spent decades campaigning for privatization. Yet they weren't ready to answer even the most obvious questions about how it would work - like how benefits could be maintained for older Americans without a dangerous increase in debt.

Privatizers are even having a hard time pretending that they want to strengthen Social Security, not dismantle it. At one of Senator Rick Santorum's recent town-hall meetings promoting privatization, college Republicans began chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security's got to go."

But before the anti-privatization forces assume that winning the rational arguments is enough, they need to read Mr. Frank.

The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends."

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. "Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization." But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about "Christmas under siege" - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas."

So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

Their first attack may have missed the mark, but it's the shape of smears to come.

2005-02-25T11:34:00.000-05:00

Here’s the pot calling the kettle black.

President Bush warned Vladimir Putin on Thursday against backsliding on democracy in Russia but assured the Russian president he is still a trusted partner of the United States.

Here’s a President who’s spent his whole presidency beating the crap out of Democracy telling someone else to not mess with it. What a lot of nerve he’s got .

From the NY Times, Bush Prods Putin on Democracy But Praises Ties

”Democracies have certain things in common -- a rule of law and protection of minorities and a free press and a viable political opposition,” said Bush, who made spreading democracy around the world a key theme of his second term.

2005-02-24T12:45:00.000-05:00

My sister sent this to me . It’s from an email sent around where she works.

A sum of money was found today on the 4th floor. If you beleive the money belongs to you, please contact HR on X1234. Please be prepared to identify the amount and the location on the 4th floor where the money was lost. Thank you.

Here are my sister’s thoughts on the email.

Oh well.... maybe whoever sent it in the first place will realize how silly it sounds to have someone identify exactly where they lost money....... "oops! I dropped money there! Well, it's lost now.... oh well! Maybe someone will find it and turn it in! " : - {} Heeeeere's your sign!!

”Here’s your sign!” refers to the comedian Bill Engvall and people who should be wearing a stupid sign.

Had to go with the Snopes link, the Bill Engvall
page didn’t give any decent examples of “Here’s your sign” humor. My favorite is when he said he couldn’t stop himself. He saw a guy in a parking lot sticking a hanger in the door around the window. Bill says he couldn’t help himself, blurted out “Locked your keys in the car?” The guy without hesitation says “Nope, I just washed the car and want to hang it out to dry. Here's your sign”

2005-02-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Want to see the International Space Station or the Shuttle?
Go to NASA to see when and where to look in the sky for the best viewing.

2005-02-23T11:16:00.000-05:00

There was one of these flying around Philadelphia yesterday around lunch time. I’m assuming that it was a training flight out of Willow Grove Naval Air Station but then who knows. There was also a huge military helicopter flying around at the same time. The helicopter didn’t look like it was flying low but it was low enough to set off car alarms. I wonder if they’ll be around today.

By the way, isn’t it convenient that right after Doug Wead’s tapes of conversations with Bush, a plot to kill the president is found out? Sorry folks, don’t have time to pay attention to the tapes and hear what kind of stuff Bush was up to, there’s a plot a foot.

All I know is that if it was Clinton on those tapes, the perfect Republicans would be twisting everything Clinton said and doing their best to fry him.

2005-02-22T14:50:00.000-05:00

This says alot about how things are going with the war and how people feel about it.

Iraq or No, Guard Bonus Lures Some to Re-enlist

After missing its recruiting goals, the National Guard is offering a re-enlistment bonus of $15,000 in an effort to bolster its ranks.
. . .

Last year, the Guard attracted 49,210 soldiers, about 7,000 short of its goal of 56,000, reflecting its shifting role from weekend duty preparing for national disasters to defending foreign soil.

Shouldn’t that read ‘oil’ not “soil?”. Anyways, I thought they were supposed to be defending U.S. soil not foreign.

2005-02-22T14:43:00.000-05:00

I just don’t know what to say about these.

The Somerville Gates by the Anti-Christo

Numa Numa This week's Star Wars kid.

2005-02-16T09:19:00.000-05:00

All I can say is that the kid has a point.

"Andy Warhol had a soup can," he said. "Why can't I have a cardboard tube?"

I do think they were a little greedy in their pricing though.

'Gates' Relic Gets EBay Bid, and Seller Gets Complaints

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: February 16, 2005

Sometimes a cardboard tube is just a cardboard tube. But sometimes, as a New York teenager discovered this week, a cardboard tube might be an objet d'art worth $1,200 - to the right buyer.

Last Saturday, Dane Kolomatsky, 15, accompanied his mother and a friend of hers to Central Park to view "The Gates," the public artwork created by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and composed of 7,500 saffron-colored nylon curtains hanging from rectangular frames along the pathways of the park.

Walking by the Loeb Boathouse near 72nd Street, Dane said, he saw a pile of cardboard tubes on the ground. The tubes had served to spool the curtains at the top of the gates. With the curtains unfurled, the tubes were destined to be transported out of the park and recycled.

"I picked out the smallest one, which was seven feet long, and I asked a volunteer if I could have it," Dane said. "And he said, 'Yes, but only one.' "

It was not until he decided to sell the cardboard tube on eBay, the popular auction Web site, that Mr. Kolomatsky become embroiled in an impassioned debate over New York's latest artistic extravaganza.

About 170 items related to "The Gates" have gone up for sale on eBay, including coffee cups, a copy of The Daily News featuring a "Gates" photo on the cover, and dozens of the swatches of curtain fabric that organizers have been handing out free to the exhibit's spectators.

But not all the items were meant to be souvenirs. There was, for example, a six-inch-long self-locking bolt offered by one Brooklyn individual for $2,000. "These bolts were specifically made to hold all 'The Gates' together," the seller proclaimed, but did not mention which gate, exactly, might be missing one of its bolts.

Another individual, who would identify himself only as oldmagazineman, the name he uses on eBay, said workers had given him three of the triangular plastic safety markers placed at the steel base of each gate before the gates were attached to the bases this month.

"I thought it was just a silly piece of plastic until I saw all the hoopla about it," he said in a telephone interview. "I realized that what I had was kind of unique."

But nothing seemed to stir as much controversy as Dane's cardboard tube, which he decided to sell after his mother's friend told him she had once sold an old pair of shoes on eBay. "People are crazy enough to buy anything," he said. "And since this was like a Christo-fest, we figured someone might want to buy it."

Dane and his mother settled on a price of $12,000 - "Should you ever set your standards low?" he asked -and posted a picture of him holding the tube so buyers could see what they were getting. An hour later, a bid for $1,200 came from a collector listed as "killkeny."

Then came more than a dozen angry queries from Christo fans offended by what they deemed an act of theft. One person claimed to have filed a complaint with the Manhattan district attorney's office. Another called him a "moron" and a "lowlife." Yet another accused Dane of stealing a "relic of a public art project" and trying to "hoodwink" art lovers out of their money.

The $1,200 offer was the highest - and only - bid when the auction ended last night, and Dane said he had decided to hold onto the tube for "sentimental value."

A spokesman for eBay was careful to note that stolen property is not allowed on the site. But the spokesman, Hani Durzy, said that "in order for it to be deemed stolen, law enforcement needs to contact us, and let us know that a stolen item report has been filed with them."

So far, he said, eBay has received no such complaints about items connected to "The Gates."

Megan Sheekey, a spokeswoman for the art project, said that workers had been told not to give away any items except the swatches. "The materials, like the cardboard, the bases, the nylon cloths and the vinyl poles - all that is supposed to be recycled," she said.

But Dane suggested that selling the cardboard tube on eBay was merely a way to make a new piece of art from the detritus of an old one.

"Andy Warhol had a soup can," he said. "Why can't I have a cardboard tube?"

2005-02-15T07:37:00.000-05:00

I thouught this was an interesitng article. It made me think about a couple I know. Kind of sad.

I Love Them, I Love Him Not

By JUDITH WARNER
Published: February 14, 2005

Washington — YOUR young child shows up at your bedside five minutes before the alarm clock is set to ring. She climbs in. She is warm, her hair is silken, and she nestles perfectly into the curve of your torso.
You experience something like plenitude - until the alarm clock rings and your spouse's arm stretches out to shut it off and comes to rest upon the two of you. That arm is bristly and heavy, and feels, somehow, laden with demand. What demand the poor thing carries is not clear, but whatever it is, it feels like too much on this particular school morning when, after the usual rites of teeth brushing and sneakers and mittens are through, you've got to plan how, on this day of all days, you will most adequately express to your little loved ones just how deeply - and how festively and chocolate-drenchedly - you love them.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The holiday of lovers has been transformed into something very different for many parents these days. That's little wonder: for many couples, love itself has been transformed by the passage into parenthood.

If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)

In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame.

Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage.

That's a sobering thought. And it raises an important question: Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?

It may well be. After all, in an era when Parents magazine can suggest, in its love issue, a "Second Honeymoon with Kids" under the rubric "Fun Time," it's clear that something is very much askew. In many households, the distinctions between married life and family life have all but disappeared.

With the widespread acceptance of "attachment parenting" - family beds, long-term breast feeding and all the rest - the physical boundaries between parents and children have worn away. Marital romance has dried up. Real intimacy has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens. In fact, the whole ideal of marriage as a union of soul mates, friends and lovers that's as essential to a happy family life as, say, unconditional love for the children, has taken a direct hit. And in its place has come the reality of a utilitarian relationship dedicated to staying afloat financially and child-rearing of a sort we tend to associate with frontier marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience - marriages far removed, in time and place, from our lives, our parents' lives and even our grandparents' lives.

Some would say that's not a bad thing. After all, hard work and commitment are much better indicators of marital stability than are passion and that fickle thing, romantic love. The divorce rate is slightly down, to about 50 percent from a high of 52 percent in the early 1980's. Virtually no one believes anymore that the potential "self-fulfillment" that might come from leaving a less-than-satisfying marriage could in any way outweigh the harm that divorce does to children. Indeed, for many couples these days, staying married is not so much the definitive sign of their love for each other but the ultimate expression of their love for their children.

But does this virtuous child-centeredness equal family happiness? Apparently not. For although the divorce rate has gone down, the percentage of couples saying they're in less-than-happy marriages has gone up. According to the National Marriage Project, fewer children are growing up with happily married parents today than a generation ago. From 1973 to 1976, 51 percent of children under the age of 18 were living in a household in which the parents' marriage was rated as "very happy," the study found. From 1997 to 2002, only 37 percent were so fortunate.

Some of that, of course, reflects the declining number of children living in married households. But, according to the National Marriage Project's co-director, David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, there's another reason. Married couples today, he writes, report "significantly more work-related stress, more marital conflict and less marital interaction" than did those 20 or 30 years ago.

This gets to the crux of the problem: the culture of parenthood today is one in which marriages must fight to flourish. This is not because women naturally love their children more than their husbands. Nor is it because motherhood is naturally so exhausting and the world of work necessarily so draining that it's all but impossible for husbands and wives to find each other at the end of the day. It's because the roles we're playing - Supermom and Superdad - are love-killers.

So, this Valentine's Day, resist the temptation to download the directions for a cockscomb Valentine wreath. Throw out the glue gun and don't even think of trying to hand-stitch hearts on construction paper. Hire a sitter. Leave work early and go out on a date with your grown-up Valentine.

Do it for the kids.

Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of"Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

2005-02-09T08:02:00.000-05:00

Happy Chinese New Year!

I’m amazed that anyone can work out when it starts with these kind of instructions to find New Year’s Day each year.

. . . celebrated on the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, which falls on the day on which the second new moon after the day on which the winter solstice occurs, unless there is an intercalary eleventh or twelfth month in the lead-up to the New Year. In this case, the New Year falls on the third new moon after the Solstice.

Happy Year of the Rooster, year 4702.

2005-02-08T08:46:00.000-05:00

Clawback

n : finding a way to take money back from people that they were
given in another way; "the Treasury will find some
clawback for the extra benefits members received"

2005-02-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

Spearing the Beast

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2005

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.

Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.

Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.

Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.

Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.

Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.

The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.

To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.

Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.
You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.

Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.

All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.

I don’t know what “clawback” is so I need to go look that up but it doesn’t sound good. The whole plan sounds pretty lousy though, fees that we have no clue about, your account makes "too much" and you get you money taken away, reduced future benefits.

I don't know what steams me more the part about an account making over a certain amount and you lose money or the bit about future benefits being only 8% versus a current 35%. You put in a lot of your own money and get reduced benefits in the end. From the sounds of things, the best thing you could do with the accounts that Bush is pushing is to put your money into bonds just like the government has been doing for Social Security.

I want to know how long it’s going to take before the people who voted for Bush realize that they made a big mistake.

2005-02-01T13:27:00.000-05:00

Can anyone who has a Monday to Friday job be surprised at this?

The stress of returning to work on a Monday morning can trigger a dangerous increase in blood pressure, according to a study.

The Tokyo Women's Medical University study shows blood pressure readings are higher than at any other time of the week.

It may explain why deaths from heart attacks and strokes tend to peak on a Monday morning.

There are 20% more heart attacks on Mondays than on any other day.

Blood pressure soars on Mondays

2005-02-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

What I like about Paul Krugman, he backs up pretty much all he says. I’ve been thinking for awhile basically what he says in this article.

The numbers presented by the people who are hot and heavy for privatizing just don’t add up. They’ll point to a small bit of market history and say “See. What we’re saying will work.” If you look at history in total it doesn’t. Anyway, market history isn’t an indicator of the future and even the present isn’t doing what these not so impartial experts are saying.

I just think about my insurance agent talking about how he’s looking forward to kids just out of college putting a couple thousand dollars a year into their own little private accounts. Boy, he was looking past me into the distance and he got a little smile. Obviously, the thought of all that money made him happy. There are commissions to be made and he wants a cut!

Something that no one has mentioned is that Social Security is supposed to be just a part of your retirement. You are supposed to be doing something on your own for retirement and SS should be a supplement. The way the White House is talking, you won’t need to save anything else for retirement if the private accounts come into being. I don’t believe it one bit.

Many Unhappy Returns

The fight over Social Security is, above all, about what kind of society we want to have. But it's also about numbers. And the numbers the privatizers use just don't add up.

Let me inflict some of those numbers on you. Sorry, but this is important.

Schemes for Social Security privatization, like the one described in the 2004 Economic Report of the President, invariably assume that investing in stocks will yield a high annual rate of return, 6.5 or 7 percent after inflation, for at least the next 75 years. Without that assumption, these schemes can't deliver on their promises. Yet a rate of return that high is mathematically impossible unless the economy grows much faster than anyone is now expecting.

To explain why, I need to talk about stock returns. The yield on a stock comes from two components: cash that the company pays out in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, and capital gains. Right now, if dividends and buybacks were the whole story, the rate of return on stocks would be only 3 percent.

To get a 6.5 percent rate of return, you need capital gains: if dividends yield 3 percent, stock prices have to rise 3.5 percent per year after inflation. That doesn't sound too unreasonable if you're thinking only a few years ahead.

But privatizers need that high rate of return for 75 years or more. And the economic assumptions underlying most projections for Social Security make that impossible.

The Social Security projections that say the trust fund will be exhausted by 2042 assume that economic growth will slow as baby boomers leave the work force. The actuaries predict that economic growth, which averaged 3.4 percent per year over the last 75 years, will average only 1.9 percent over the next 75 years.

In the long run, profits grow at the same rate as the economy. So to get that 6.5 percent rate of return, stock prices would have to keep rising faster than profits, decade after decade.

The price-earnings ratio - the value of a company's stock, divided by its profits - is widely used to assess whether a stock is overvalued or undervalued. Historically, that ratio averaged about 14. Today it's about 20. Where would it have to go to yield a 6.5 percent rate of return?

I asked Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, to help me out with that calculation (there are some technical details I won't get into). Here's what we found: by 2050, the price-earnings ratio would have to rise to about 70. By 2060, it would have to be more than 100.

In other words, to believe in a privatization-friendly rate of return, you have to believe that half a century from now, the average stock will be priced like technology stocks at the height of the Internet bubble - and that stock prices will nonetheless keep on rising.

Social Security privatizers usually defend their bullishness by saying that stock investors earned high returns in the past. But stocks are much more expensive than they used to be, relative to corporate profits; that means lower dividends per dollar of share value. And economic growth is expected to be slower.

Which brings us to the privatizers' Catch-22.

They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.

Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses.

It really is that stark: any growth projection that would permit the stock returns the privatizers need to make their schemes work would put Social Security solidly in the black.

And I suspect that at least some privatizers know that. Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls "no economist left behind": he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.

But the offer still stands. Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?

I’ve been wondering how much money brokers stand to make when someone dies and the brokers don’t find out about it. They’ll most likely get to hang on to it until someone shows up saying that the owner of the account died and it’s time to pay out or until they notice no activity and go looking. They’ll still make the fees even if you are dead. How much money will be left behind by people who move and don’t update their address?

I’m sure there are a variety of reasons that brokers want privatizing and none of them have anything to do with making things better for future retirees. Brokers will make money regardless of whether your account does. If your account doesn’t make money, they’ll blame it on you for not watching a bit more closely.

2005-01-27T16:21:00.000-05:00

This is one of the reasons why putting social security into the market is a bad idea. Can anybody look at the next paragraph and say that what happened is reasonable or sensible?

EBay Forecast Misses by a Bit, And Shares Fall
By GARY RIVLIN (NYT) 793 words
Late Edition - Final , Section C , Page 1 , Column 5

ABSTRACT - Shares of eBay fall nearly 12 percent, as much as $12 in after-hours trading because its earnings in fourth quarter missed Wall Street's expectations by [a] penny a share--this despite profits that were up 44 percent; company posts profit of $205.4 million, or 30 cents per share, in quarter ended Dec 31, up from $142.5 million, or 21 cents per share, in period year earlier; revenues were $935.8 million, also up 44 percent; chief executive Meg Whitman comments (M)

For some reason there are people who expect the market to respond rationally but it doesn’t, obviously. If what team wins the World Series or the Super Bowl can effect the next day’s market prices then there is a puzzle. How do you keep your money safe from non-business factors? Answer, you can’t, as long as there are people who are swayed by irrational non-business reasons when they are making business decisions.

Here’s something that has always stuck with me since I read it, that playing the market is just like gambling, don’t put in more that you can afford to lose.

I know that the experts say that historically the market is a sure thing but I can’t help but wonder. If it is such a sure thing, why do they have to put that line in market prospectus about history not being an accurate predictor of future gains (or losses). What if you need your money just after the market goes south? It has happened. What then? Will you still be able to retire if all or most of your retirement funds are stuck in the market?

2005-01-24T13:00:00.000-05:00

Published: January 22, 2005
Nautical Nonsense

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?"

"SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!"

"Absorbent and yellow and porous is he ..."

... not to mention dopey and charming and more hugely overexposed than ever, thanks to an anti-homosexual attack from the Christian right. Because of a media fuss ignited by the American Family Association and Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, this cartoon character is well on his way to culture-war immortality, up there with those moral saboteurs Murphy Brown and Tinky Winky.

It's not that Dr. Dobson has a problem with Mr. SquarePants per se. He is angry, rather, about a video made for grade schools by the We Are Family Foundation that features SpongeBob and other TV characters. It doesn't mention sex. But the foundation's Web site says this: "I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own." How could anyone be against that?

Dr. Dobson is. He has denounced the video as a bait-and-switch, one that uses cartoons to legitimize a group that will corrupt children with a homosexual agenda.

We find it strange, actually, that the intolerant Dr. Dobson has not taken aim at SpongeBob himself, who is naughty and rude enough to give many parents pause. After "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie" came out, a Christian family Web site made a long list of worrisome bits, including "cartoon rear male nudity, repeatedly," "pinching of banner staff between nude buttocks" and "suggestion of sadomasochism in transvestitism."

As any weary parent knows, America's children spend billions of hours watching movies and shows like that, absorbing underwear jokes, flatulence gags and mushy messages of tolerance until their brains run out their ears.

There may be a threat in all that, but Dr. Dobson and his allies seem to have missed it entirely.

I wonder if this Dobson guy has a problem with any of the violent videos or the half hour long advertisements thinly disguised as cartoon shows for kids.

He has a lot more faith in what kids remember than I have. "I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own." Most kids can barely remember their homework assignments. I don’t think a lot of kids will really understand the pledge let alone take it all to heart.

And this ”video as a bait-and-switch,” what is that about? The bait I guess is the cartoon and the switch is the pledge? Kids are easy but not that easy, see the previous paragraph. Geez, Dr. Dobson is a goof.

Hmmm, I wonder what he thinks of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. A cartoon about two little kids, one rather diabolical, one a bit stupid, and the Grim Reaper. Pretty funny and a bit sick at times . I guess it’s ok since Grim isn’t gay.

2005-01-14T13:15:00.000-05:00

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favorite books. The most interesting part is her introduction to the story. The story doesn’t make as much sense if you don’t read the intro and remember it.

She writes that she is sometimes asked if her writing is what she thinks the future will be. She says no, that her writing and really all author’s writing is a reflection of what is going on around them when they write a piece even if they don’t notice that fact. That intro has changed how I look at most writing. I try to take what I am reading within the context of what was going on around the author at the time it was written.

That said, I was watching TV yesterday, flipping through the channels not finding much of anything to watch. I clicked on a show for a few seconds where a woman was having needles stuck through the skin of what looked like her leg. There was a male voice trying to calm the woman since she was crying rather hard and looking really uncomfortable. Then the male voice said something that made me wish there was someone who would just punch the bastard in the head. “It’s ok this is the last, biggest and most painful needle.”

What the hell was the point of telling this woman that things were ok and she was fine and trying to calm her if the next words out of your mouth is “This is the most painful" one yet?

So today, my mind drifted to that few seconds and I figure now that it must have been some “reality show.” Yeah right, maybe it’s reality if your reality is being held captive and abused in some psychopath’s basement.

Then it dawned on me, this is a reflection of what is going on around us today. People are being bombed and beheaded. There is Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Car bombs going off and people being mutilated by suicide bombers. The most popular video games are violent and bloody.

We have become so desensitized to pain in others that we have come to see torture as entertainment. Well, not all of us. I clicked past it in the span of 15 seconds or less. In fact, when I thought of it today I got queasy. I can’t see what people get out of this crap. Now that I’ve thought about The Left Hand of Darkness it all makes sense. Pretty damned sad to live with this. I wonder what future generations will think of us.

2005-01-14T07:09:00.000-05:00

From the NY Times Headline email:

F.B.I. May Scrap Vital Overhaul of Its Outdated Computer System
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The computer overhaul is considered critical to the campaign against terrorism but has been riddled with problems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/politics/14fbi.html?th

I have to ask, does anyone know of a computer system for the government that has worked? The IRS system was worthless. The new system being worked on for the Navy is getting ready to be scrapped too.

I feel like Charlie Brown calling out to anyone within earshot.

Can anybody tell me . . . why do all the new government systems suck!

2005-01-13T08:23:00.000-05:00

I just figured out why I will probably never marry.

The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

So here I am, proud of being in the top2% of the population for I.Q. only to find out that only 1% or less of the population may be interested in me and only if I wait on them.

Evolution can really suck.

Here’s the whole article.

Men Just Want Mommy

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 13, 2005

WASHINGTON
A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.

In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.

The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.

As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame."

A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.

As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.

A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.

"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."

2005-01-13T07:34:00.000-05:00

I’ve been wondering about this for awhile.

What if the insugents are not trying to mess with the democratic process? What if they just see Iraq and the Americans there as an easy target? What if they are just messing with U.S. and other country’s troops because they can easily do it? What if the idea is just to cost other countries’ as much money and people as possible? What if the Iraqi elections just happen to be occurring at the same time as it is the easiest to screw the military? Maybe it’s all about revenge and the insurgents aren’t even thinking about the election.

2005-01-11T13:42:00.000-05:00

While looking for more weird vacation pictures, I somehow found this article. It’s probably good that there aren’t any pictures on the off chance that it may harm or degrade the boar.

"The task performed by Rebecca Loos is one that occurs regularly on UK farms. We don't believe the scene was degrading or harmful to the boar."

2005-01-05T13:30:00.000-05:00

I’m still looking for interesting on-line vacation pictures. OK, actually today I was looking for weird vacation pictures. That’s how I found the phone number for the pay phone in tha basement of the Vatican. I don’t know if it really works, I’m too cheap to try it. If it works, let me know.

Perhaps you would like to call Antartica? What I really want to know is who shows up if you call 911.

For more pay phone fun check out the Pay Phone Project.

2005-01-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

Today I want to share a recipe that a friend gave me over the holidays, pineapple dressing. It is sooooo yummy.

1 can of crushed pineapple
3 eggs
3/4 cup of sugar
4 Tbls butter, melted
1/2 tsp Salt
6 slices of bread, cubed
Cinnamon

Mix the wet ingredients and salt well. (You can add a little cinnamon to the wet stuff if you want. I like cinnamon so that’s what I do.)
Add the cubed bread and mix it all together.
Dump it into a greased 8x8 pan. Sprinkle cinnamon on top.

Bake in a 350 degree oven (325 if you use a glass dish) for 45 minutes.

You can double the recipe for a crowd or for leftovers. Use a 9x13 pan and bake for about 1 hour or until set and a little brown.

It’s excellent with ham or just by itself. I figure it would be good with some vanilla ice cream too. It tastes good hot, cold or room temperature.

I’m thinking of trying it with a little cream cheese or ricotta cheese. Kind of a quick short-cut pineapple cheesecake.

2005-01-04T13:53:00.000-05:00

OK, one more vacation picture sure to get some attention. You can tell people about your trip to the San Diego Zoo and how you had to avoid the Rhinos.

2005-01-04T13:45:00.000-05:00

While on your online vacation please take a moment to visit Ireland's Dingle Peninsula to see Fungie the Dingle Dolphin.

2005-01-04T13:30:00.000-05:00

I just haven’t been a very good blogger lately. I’ve been a bit lazy about bloggin or doing much else when my sister and I haven’t been shopping for, cooking and dragging food and goodies to my father’s house for the holidays.

I decided today to look for other people’s vacation pictures today. I found this one. I would like to visit just to see the “Do-It-Yourself Dog Wash.”

This is a shot of Minneapolis. My sister and I went there for a few days in October. Well, really the trip was to go to the Mall of America but we went to Minneapolis and St. Paul too. If my guts weren’t giving me a nasty time I would have seen even more.

You know, if you want you could print the pictures that are online and make up “your own vacation trip” pictures to show friends. Just decide where you wish you went, go online and find pictures of those places and print them and put them in a photo album. When the grandkids ask what you did when you were young you can show them the pictures of all the places you went. You could look like you just travelled for a living. You could even print a shot of your fake parents waiting for you to come home. Or maybe they were your host parents when you travelled somewhere exotic as a teenager.

Here is a shot of your trip to Switzerland. Your stop at the Opera House in Paris. Strange people you took a picture of in a Munich Stadium. Then on the way home you drove by Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox in Minnesota.

Never been to Disney, go here and adopt a family. Print some of these as your trip pictures. Tell everyone that you were the designated photographer and weren’t permitted in any picutes. You haven’t talked to these people since the trip, just because.

Maybe you want something more exotic. How about Morocco. Or you can say you went to Africa to see a total solar eclipse and got to see elephants and other animals and even Zulu dancers.

I must say that web searches are just about the best thing you can do on the web.

2004-12-29T13:55:00.000-05:00

Ya know, collectors are just waaaaaay out of hand with the lovely little goodies they like to collect.

Here is something everyone needs to show off in their homes, the chicken nativity.

There are even more animal nativity sets to enjoy.