2015 archive
A Bit More Hope 0
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. . . an anonymous donor just buoyed it (the S. S. United States–ed.) with $250,000.
“We’re singing from the rooftops – or whatever a maritime version of that would be,” Susan Gibbs, executive director of the SS United States Conservancy, said yesterday.
The massive ship (it’s as long as the Comcast Center is tall) remains docked at Pier 82 on the Delaware River. The owners constantly stave off the threat of the ship being scrapped. The monthly maintenance costs stand around $80,000.
Gibbs believes that donations like this could spur more of the same.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Demonstrate your politeness to your neighbors.
Officers spoke to 25-year-old Mark Hayes, of Sparta, who stated he was handling a pistol when he accidentally discharged the firearm. Luckily, the victim was not home at the time the shooting occurred and no one was injured.
This story is notable in that the gun was not reported to have fired itself.
The Galt and the Lamers 0
In the Bangor Daily News, Bloomberg’s Noah Smith exposes Rand Pauls ignorance of accounting. He cites three points on which Paul gets stuff exactly backwards. Follow the link for his explanation of each point.
Paul’s first error was in his understanding of leverage.
(snip)
His second error was his definition of bankruptcy.
(snip)
The senator’s third error came from his calculation of the size of the Fed’s liabilities.
The Snaring Economy 0
Robert Reich asks,
Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable — odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours — and patch together barely enough to live on.
Follow the link for his answer.
The Actualization of Potentialities Manifests Itself in Imperative Fashion 0
In my local rag, Bernadette Kinlaw takes on corporate doublespeak. A snippet:
CNN provided us with a wonderful yet horrifying example of gobbledygook.
Management had plans “to leverage internal efficiencies by enlisting external resources, thus driving a reduction in operating costs, thereby enhancing shareholder value.”
How would you interpret that?
We’re laying off people to save money and please our stockholders.
I worked in corporate America for a long time and I learned that long words and convoluted language meant one or both of two things: emptiness and treachery.
Do read the rest.
Afterthought:
You can rephrase the title of this post loosely as “git ‘r done.”
The Climates They Are a-Changing . . . 0
. . . but you didn’t hear about it on your telly vision . . . .
The Doctor Is (Almost) In 0
This should be fun:
So he is maybe possibly thinking about throwing his hat in the ring.
On the bright side, he would be a better candidate than Donald Trump. So far as I know, he hasn’t gone bankrupt four times, at least not monetarily. “Intellectually” is another matter.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts claiming that Brian Williams’s fantasies of being embattled in Iraq don’t matter because, as the reasoning usually seems to go, “Who cares?” I disagree.
I gave up on television news three decades ago, when broadcast news morphed from being a “service” to being a “profit center.” I long before had realized I could read four times as much information in half an hour as I could passively have poured into me from television (and without the commercials). Nevertheless, Williams’s perfidy, intentional or not, matters greatly.
At Psychology Today Blogs, Denise Cummins discusses this; here’s a bit:
We already have one major “news” network dedicated to spreading propaganda and falsehood to poison public discourse. We need trustworthy–not error-free, which is an impossible goal, but given in good faith–reportage so as to make informed decisions.
Otherwise, the country will go to hell even faster than it already is.
“Facts Are What People Think” 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., explores the mania for “secret knowledge”:
(snip)
Bad enough the Secret Knowledge drives our politics (Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya), our perception of controversy (Trayvon Martin was a 32-year-old tough with tattoos on his neck), our understanding of environmental crisis (there is no scientific consensus on global warming) and our comprehension of tragedy (9/11 was an inside job). Apparently, it now drives healthcare, too.
Read the rest.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Exercise courtesy on the roadways.
Bimmer Boy is in custody.
Diligence 0
Not even bothering to go through the motions.
Anti-Vax Facts 0
The Deseret News skewers the notion of “religious objections” to vaccinations.
But the world’s major faiths — Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam — have no explicit prohibitions against oral or injected vaccines. At times, some followers or preachers within a given religion or sect may have spoken against vaccination, but researcher John D. Grabenstein of Merck Vaccines, writing in the scientific journal Vaccine in April 2013, could find no sustained teaching against the practice in any major faith community.
According to the story, even Mary Baker Eddy said that vaccinations were okay.