November, 2011 archive
QOTD 0
Abigail Adams, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Spill Here, Spill Now, Hope No One Notices 0
It’s always a “remote chance,” right up until it becomes “who could have predicted?”
Click for the rest.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
Lila Garret interviews Robert Greenwald on Republican keep-out-the-vote efforts:
Facebook Frolics (Updated) 0
This is distinguished, of course, from pictures users post of themselves:
The pictures are reported to have shown up in users’ newsfeeds.
According to the technology site, ZDnet, the material is being spread via a “linkspam virus” which tempts members to click on a seemingly innocuous story link.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said: “[We are] aware of these reports and we are investigating the issue”.
Addendum:
Facebook is blaming a “browser vulnerability” (which browser or browsers are not specified in the article) and claims it was a target, malicious act, rather than random vandalism.
Pederasty U. 0
What John Cole said, especially the penultimate sentence of the middle paragraph.
Quality Construction at a Price That’s Right 0
Naming the ship after a Bush may have had more significant consequences than enshrining Republican idolatry of mediocrity.
QOTD 0
Elizabeth Gilbert, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
Follow the Money 0
At Asia Times, Juan Cole looks at the “Arab spring” in the light of economics, arguing forcefully that the economic causes of rebellions in North Africa and the Mediterranean rim have been under reported.
Here’s a bit:
(snip)
In the global South, countries that gained their independence from European colonialism after World War II tended to create large public sectors as part of the process of industrialization. Often, living standards improved as a result, but by the 1970s, such developing economies were generally experiencing a leveling-off of growth. This happened just as neo-liberalism became ascendant in Washington, Paris, and London . . . .
Egypt and Tunisia, to take two countries in the spotlight for sparking the Arab Spring, were successfully pressured in the 1990s to privatize their relatively large public sectors. Moving public resources into the private sector created an almost endless range of opportunities for staggering levels of corruption on the part of the ruling families of autocrats Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis and Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. International banks, central banks, and emerging local private banks aided and abetted their agenda.
Not that we’ve seen any such corruption and opportunism on our own shores in the last 30 years.
Crashing credit default swaps, Batman, good heavens no.
Race-ing for the Republican Nod 0
Shaun Mullen dissects the Republican Party’s continuing allegiance to its odious “Southern strategy.”
It’s a must-read. (If you don’t have time to read it, the pictures tell the story.)
A nugget:
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but when the Republican Party effectively abandoned its outreach to blacks and extended a beefy hand to Southern whites who once had reliably voted Democratic, the die was cast.
Game On! (Updated) 0
Charlie Booker takes a look at those “blockbuster” video games:
In other words, Modern Warfare 3 would be nothing but a gigantic needlework simulation were it not for the storyline, which is the most homoerotic tale ever created in any medium, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos. Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it’s like a soap opera set in a ballet school.
I’ll stick with Pysol and Tetris clones.
Addendum, the Next Day:
Brain gamed:
For teenagers, parents, and clinicians to make sense of this finding, we need research monitoring brain structure over time”
Dr Simone Kuhn, one of the researchers from Ghent University in Belgium, said the region is “usually activated when people anticipate positive environmental effects or experience pleasure such as winning money, good food, sex”.
The region has been implicated in drug addiction.
The authors said it “cannot be determined” whether this was a “consequence” of gaming or if naturally larger regions led to a “vulnerability for preoccupation with gaming”.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Young relatives should always play politely.
“My baby didn’t want to play at all,” she said.
She said the gun at her father’s house was under lock and key, but the 14-year-old found the keys to the safe where it was stored, Triplett said.
Her 14-year-old brother called her after shooting the boy and said, “‘Sis, I’m sorry I shot your son.’”
QOTD 0
Dwight D. Eisenhower, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
The Bankster Business Model 0
Systematic, computerized three-card monte.
If there’s a similar but more flattering sobriquet for folks who’ve made the bank-friendly mistake of overcharging their debit cards, it’s just been changed – to “plaintiffs.”
Last week, a federal judge in Miami approved a $410 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit involving more than 13 million Bank of America customers. It’s a sordid tale that, upon closer examination, looks even more sordid.
The settlement centers on claims that the banking giant – in the news lately for launching then dropping plans to charge customers $5 a month to use debit cards – tinkered with the way it processed debit card transactions in order to maximize the penalties.</blockquote>
If an appliance dealer pulled something like this, selling customers one washing machine and delivering another over and over and over again, the resulting proceedings would not be in civil court.
No Account Accountancy and the Short Term 0
Bob Burnett cites Steve Benning’s description of how Dell Computers gave away their business to Asus when Asus, a manufacturer of circuit boards other components, proposed that Dell outsource manufacturing to Asus:
Like most American corporate accountants, Dell’s financial people had a simplistic, narrow objective: do whatever would improve the current quarter’s bottom line. Because accountants don’t have a strategic perspective, Dell’s number crunchers didn’t realize the cumulative debilitating impact of the ASUSTeK transactions. Denning observed, “Decades of outsourcing manufacturing have left US industry without the means to invent the next generation of high-tech products that are key to rebuilding its economy.” Parasitic accountants have neutered our entrepreneurs.
But it’s not only high-tech companies that are infected by these parasites; American corporations from all sectors have been hypnotized by the promise of short-term profits. It’s the conventional “wisdom” that accountants and executives are taught in business school. This dysfunctional perspective is reinforced by contemporary corporate monoculture where employees live in a bubble, log obscene hours, and vacation with their co-workers. As a consequence giant corporations are dogmatically insular with their own warped code of ethics and worldview.
The other day, I was discussing the differences between yesterday’s robber barons–the Carnegies and the Rockefellers–and todays–the Jamie Diamonds and John Corzines. Though my buddy had a somewhat kinder view of yesterday’s robber barons than did I, particularly as regards their treatment of employees, we agreed on one thing:
Those folks made money by building things to last.
Today’s robber barons are making their money by tearing those things down.
