June, 2009 archive
Movable Fees 0
Have cake, eat it too (emphasis added):
“What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate,” Bosworth said. “Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”
How Bad Is It? 0
This bad:
Since they do not have authority to change their own salaries–the law prevents them from voting on their own pay–they say they will accomplish this by returning money to the country treasury.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
New unemployment down slightly.
They’re running out of persons to lay off, plus it was a short week:
Also, from the same story,
The number of people staying on the benefit rolls after collecting an initial week of aid fell 15,000 to 6.74 million in the week ended May 23, the latest week for which the data is available.
15,000 is 00.2% (in fractions, that’s two thousandths) of 6,740,000. This is grasping at straws statistics.
Traditional Marriage 0
is a great thing. That must be why I’ve had two of them.
But which tradition? From a letter to the Philadelphia Shrinquier:
I can remember when being homosexual was a crime. Persons got arrested for it, and because of that, homosexuals were driven underground. And so on.
More and more, science shows that homosexuality is not a choice; it is simply a state of being, not asked for, not chosen, just there.
As I have said before, my position on gay marriage is a resounding “I don’t care.” That’s why it’s a subject I have seldom addressed here. Nevertheless . . .
Neither of my two marriages crashed and burned because of what other persons did with each other in other houses.
Frankly, I think the political battle about gay marriage is over. It is a done deal.
What’s left is just the mopping up.
Why?
Because, as more and more persons realize that they daily deal with gay folks–folks they never would have thought were gay–they realize that gay folks are not monsters. They are persons. And, like straight folks, some of them are nice and some of them aren’t. But that has nothing to do with their being gay. It has to do with being persons.
As I said to a friend of mine the other day, if gay folks want to know the joys of divorce court, I say, “Let ’em.”
Internal Contradictions: The Dialectic of Republicanism 0
From Kiko’s House:
That, it seems to me, is a central contradiction of today’s GOP, and while it might have been a winning formula during the Reagan Revolution, that political movement was never what it was cracked up to be and has long had a stake through its heart despite the frequent evocation of the Gipper by party elders longing for the good old days. In other words, winning elections.
I would take things a step or two further than Gates and suggest that today’s GOP is not just about generating personal wealth, but about keeping it from anyone who does not march to its own beat. These include a strangled middle class, people who lack the resources to get well when they fall ill, and that rising immigrant class, many of them illegals.
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has revealed the Republican Party at its most crass, hypocritical and vulnerable.
Landmarks 1
Second Son turned 21 today.
I expect his friends will pour him through the door sometime this evening.
In Union There Is Strength 0
In reponse to wingnut ignorance, TPM is compiling a list of successful unionized US companies.
Check it out.
Condemned To Repeat . . . 0
William Astore on education:
(major snippage–all the way to page two)
Perhaps I’m biased because I teach history, but here’s a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.
We don’t have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history — not when they never learned them to begin with.
In the course of my short and largely-unnoticed stint in Blogistan, one of the things I’ve observed is how many persons know little or nothing about (in this case) American history, freeing them to say most sincerely outrageous and outrageously false things, such as “America was founded as a Christian nation.” That is just not true. It is not just unsupported by the historical record, it is directly counter to it. It is a historical–and a historic–lie. But the ignorant of history may believe it sincerely.
Earlier in the article, Astore discusses the current emphasis on teaching tech. It’s flashy, exciting, and, most of all, quantifiable. Persons like numbers. They are nice and concrete, unlike writing skills. “How many computer labs” is ever so easier to advertise than “how much thought goes on.”
Now, I think tech is a wonderful thing. I spend a good part of my day messing about with tech.
But here’s the kicker: Tech changes. History doesn’t (although historiography does, both as new information is discovered and different perspectives are employed).
I remember in the early days of computers when the educational system was all a-gaga over “computer literacy” (whatever that is–there never was an accepted definition*). A number of outfits decided to make students “computer literate” by teaching them how the program in BASIC.
No one programs in BASIC any more. In fact, no one was programming in BASIC five years later. Hours wasted. Teaching today’s tech does not prepare one to use tomorrow’s tech.
A half-semester class in Boolean algebra, which is the underpinning of programming, would have been far more useful. (Boolean algebra, by the way, is math, not tech.)
I am a trainer by trade (and a historian by training). When persons ask me the difference between training and education, I tell them that
The goal of training is to teach someone how to do. The goal of education is to lead someone how to understand.
Someone who can understand will be able to do. Someone who can do may not be able to understand.
_________________________
*”Computer literacy” seems to boil down to being able to do whatever the person using the term thinks you should be able to do, whether or not you’ll ever have to do it in your real life.
We Need Single-Payer Health Care 0
The only persons the currrent system benefits are the insurance companies, with their armies of faceless bureaucrats charged with figuring out how to deny paying for care.
The majority of people with health insurance, about 160 million Americans, receive it through their jobs.
“American families with employer-based coverage were worse off in 2007 than they were in 2004,” said Jon Gabel, lead author of the study that was published in a June 2 Health Affairs Web exclusive. “This is during a period of time when the economy was expanding.”
Vigorish 0
Maybe there’s some hope for action against the fine-print Fagins:
Now, maybe, borrowers might catch a break. There is serious talk in Congress and the White House about creating a Financial Products Safety Commission, charged with protecting consumers and the country from the depredations of irresponsible lending.
The whole thing is worth a read.
They Fail Words 0
The Nation on the wingnut reaction to the Sotomayor nomination:
“Are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er…,” asked the now Worst Person-ed Mark Krikorian, a National Review blogger and the executive director of the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies. “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English,” he went on, “and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.”
Krikorian. Yup. Sounds like a name that came over on the Mayflower to me.
Stray Thought 0
California is proof that the ballot initiative is a bad idea.
Twits on Twitter 0
The Guardian:
The volunteers will use Twitter, the instant messaging service, to try to pinpoint the whereabouts of Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, in a supernatural version of the children’s game Where’s Wally?
Predictable. And Predicted. (Updated) 0
Martha Goldberg writes at the Guardian:
(snip)
Conservatives howled in protest, complaining that the government was demonising their ideology. But the DHS was on to something. Experts who study the far right saw the rhetoric in various extremist movements ratcheting up. Brian Levin, director of the centre for the study of hate and extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, is a former cop who often consults with law enforcement. For the far right, he said, Obama’s election signaled that “the country has now become the cesspool that they’ve been warning about. When people feel so disenfranchised, or an event has taken place that for an extremist is considered so pivotal, it makes sense that we look at what these extremists are saying, because someone is listening.”
Addendum:
Dick Polman:
Actually, the fatal bullet fired Sunday by suspect Scott Roeder has pierced the heart of the anti-abortion credo. The underlying premise of the movement is that the alleged immorality of abortion is more important than its legality. The movement perceives abortion to be a sin against God (as they interpret sin, as they interpret God), and the rights of those who disagree with them are immaterial. In other words, they didn’t care that Tiller was operating within the law, because their concept of the law is more spiritual (as only they define it).
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Not.
John Cole on rage with guns.
I will add that this act, though some would describe it as “terrorist,” doesn’t seem to have been done with any political goal in mind and, baring additional information, fails the definition of “terrorism.”