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http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/monsanto-sues-pennsylvania-farmer-for-saving-seeds.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/us/saving-seeds-subjects-farmers-to-suits-over-patent.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

I can find you literally HUNDREDS of articles about farmers getting sued by GM seed makers. Only a raving lunatic would say "they dont sue farmers"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/europe/despite-drop-in-borrowing-rates-italys-economic-travails-remain-acute.html?hp&gwh=EDDD7B35BB09C81DDA0899E0B59BC09C
changes to
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/europe/despite-drop-in-borrowing-rates-italys-economic-travails-remain-acute.html

Bam, all the free New York Times content you want.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/europe/despite-drop-in-borrowing-rates-italys-economic-travails-remain-acute.html?hp&gwh=EDDD7B35BB09C81DDA0899E0B59BC09C
changes to
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/europe/despite-drop-in-borrowing-rates-italys-economic-travails-remain-acute.html

Bam, all the free New York Times content you want.

Is this

The guidelines say we're eating too much salt and we're all going to die of heart disease and high blood pressure, but there's no heart disease at all in my family, and my own blood pressure has always measured either normal or low -- and I eat a LOT of salt.

According to my doctor, who also teaches at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), sodium is only really a problem for those individuals who are biologically disposed to have a problem with it. Otherwise, unless the intake is severely excessive and/or fluid (water) intake is severely low, it's not a problem. Your body will excrete any excess sodium. Apparently, your body doesn't (presently) have a problem with sodium. That may not always be case should you develop some illness, etc... In any case, however, less is probably better.

To add to the confusion, here are two (seemingly) contradictory articles:

• Sodium-Saturated Diet Is a Threat for All
• Less Salt Isn’t Always Better for the Heart

Note: I am not a doctor, you mileage may vary,void where prohibited by law, blah, blah, blah...

The guidelines say we're eating too much salt and we're all going to die of heart disease and high blood pressure, but there's no heart disease at all in my family, and my own blood pressure has always measured either normal or low -- and I eat a LOT of salt.

According to my doctor, who also teaches at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), sodium is only really a problem for those individuals who are biologically disposed to have a problem with it. Otherwise, unless the intake is severely excessive and/or fluid (water) intake is severely low, it's not a problem. Your body will excrete any excess sodium. Apparently, your body doesn't (presently) have a problem with sodium. That may not always be case should you develop some illness, etc... In any case, however, less is probably better.

To add to the confusion, here are two (seemingly) contradictory articles:

• Sodium-Saturated Diet Is a Threat for All
• Less Salt Isn’t Always Better for the Heart

Note: I am not a doctor, you mileage may vary,void where prohibited by law, blah, blah, blah...

Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive field work in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping. “To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”

I suspect the "spine-tingling" part might have to do with the Permian-Triassic extinction (90%+ of all species wiped): A rise of a few degrees in temperature led to massive release of methane which brought a total 6-degree rise, which led to total mayhem for life on Earth, and which best current explanation is:

The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO2 from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago.

That sure seems an extreme scenario, easy to swipe aside because of its extreme nature. Problem is, we can't, in all intellectual honesty, really dispel it. Replacing the "Siberian Traps" with the "burning of fossil fuels" means we are currently on a path toward a future in which that scenario has a higher likelihood, whatever it is. Unfortunately, the laws of nature don't care about the personal worldview and state of mind of each of us, and no amount of sarcasm has ever been able to counteract the natural laws, the (relatively short in geological time) human historical record is clear on that.

Was he promising any particular ship date? Or does the eBay ad suggest (or not deny) it would ship after January 9?

I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of the NY Times feature on "Bad publicity is a good thing" "marketing" technique from November 2010. Essentially, through negative association, get your link to the top of the Google results of people searching for something, and let the stupid/ignorant customers continue to buy from you, ignoring the many red flags.

- RG>

"The banning of model rockets is not something Democratic Party candidates run on."

But the big driving force behind the changes that limited model rocket propellants being shipped were Schumer and Lautenberg.

See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/us/threats-responses-new-regulations-rocket-bill-stirs-debate-potential-for-terror.html

Somehow, I doubt you'd accept your own argument if the parties involved were reversed.

seems you are asking a sincere question, so my take is that someone like Al Gore is the prototypical "liberal elite." He talks about saving the environment, helping out the poor people, and yet he flies all over the world in his private jet and probably doesn't know anything about being poor. Obama is another example, he is so out of touch that when he wants to commiserate with poor people he complains about the high price of arugula. This sort of observation is often coupled with the idea that, "government should stop messing with us and leave us alone, they don't know what they are doing." That is the concept of the liberal elite.

Of course, liberals have their own take on the elites, rich capitalists who support Republicans and step on the backs of the poor.

An interesting twist on the theme is the idea that the country is divided into the elite political class, and the rest of us. The political class thinks it can use government to run things for us, and the rest of us want to run things ourselves. The idea rejects that the major division in America is Democrat/Republican, but rather political class/democratic class.

Sure, you can replace THOSE teachers with a powerpoint presentation - after all, powerpoint makes you just as dumb.

If you want to fix the system, you don't do it with iPads - you can start by testing the teachers and firing those who fail.

Of course Russia is selling billions of dollar's worth of weapons to Iran (and Iraq before that)

[citation needed]
#1 Iraq did not have weapons, ergo Russia did not sell weapons to them

Wrong. Here is your citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/world/europe/12moscow.html

#2 If Russia already sold weapons to Iran, they already have them, therefore their "proliferation" is a done deal.

Wrong again. Iran is continually trying to get its hands on more offensive and defensive gear from Russia: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11388680

Please stop making shit up.

No sir. You stop making shit up. Stop making assumptions about whether other people's points are sourced until they reply.

The real issue is that there is significant international pressure for Iran to stop its nuclear program for civilian (power) purposes.

What "civilian" purposes? I'll repeat my question in case you missed them the first time around:

Why does Iran need nuclear energy program when it has enough oil to meet domestic use for over 100 years?

First off, Iran is quite correct in that this is unfair as they are have signed the NPT, and have cooperated with the IAEA. Secondly, now that such crippling sanctions are in place against them, why should they stop? They are rightly convinced that the world will view them as a nuclear threat whether or not they stop their civilian program, and they now need that civilian program more than ever due to the sanctions.

The NPT entitles Iran to start a civilian energy program *if* and only if they declare their intent to do so ahead of time and provide full transparency throughout the process. Why then did Iran conceal their nuclear program for years? Why then did Iran boot out IAEA inspectors? Why did the UN catch Iran in possession of schematics for outfitting a nuclear warhead on their missiles? Why then did Iran use computer modeling to study the a core of a nuclear warhead? This and more curtsey of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15643460

Economic sanctions are a precursor to war. The American propaganda machine wants war with Iran. When have you ever known the American's to let the truth stand between them and one of their holy wars.

Right, because Obama some crazy yahoo with a track-record of declaring wars. Give me a break. You have one of the most left-wing Presidents in power and even he cannot deny that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The facts are stacked against your twisted reality. On the one hand, there is no reason for Iran to develop a nuclear energy program. On the other hand, it has a long record of training, funding and outfitting terrorist groups to attack its enemies. They don't even deny doing so. To add insult to injury, they slaughter their own civilians in the streets. Why are so many bleeding-heart liberals exerting more energy defending dictators than working to remove them? Who do you think is helping Syria slaughter its people? http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/uk-iran-syria-kidnap-idUKTRE7BK0S620111221

If you carry your wallet in your back pocket, then you are probably going to eventually get back problems.

All of which were set back about 1000 years by the dark ages and the mentality that still pervades.

To further your point: The US has shot itself in the foot by impeding the progress of medical science. All the vehement arguments about stem cell research that caused the US to outlaw accessing the best source of stem cells has resulted in Belgium coming up with a cure for AIDS, instead of the US.

Here's a link to the NYTimes story. Please keep in mind while reading it that the story seems to have a massive "sour grapes" slant, deeming the procedure "impractical" due in part to the fact that the patient's immune system must be destroyed prior to the procedure... which seems laughable to jeer about, since AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) destroys the patient's immune system, causing death from such agents as "the common cold". Doing the same thing in a controlled fashion, allowing the patient to be in a controlled environment for the duration of the procedure, seems a lot less "impractical".

The gist of the matter is that the American populace has been told "it's expensive, and might kill the patient" in lieu of telling them "it's expensive, and might kill the patient, but this will actually rid the body of HIV, instead of making the patient take dangerous drugs every day for the rest of their life".

Think of the lives that could have been saved if the American research facilities had come up with this idea first. If that doesn't motivate you enough, think of all the money that the US has just lost because they shortsightedly allowed the "moral implications" of acquiring research material from non-viable fetal tissue to justify outlawing an entire field of research that just panned out... for someone else.

My sister calls herself the "Fat Witch With A Gun". Besides being heavily into books, one of her missions in life is to convince other women to learn how to use guns and to carry them around should the need to use one in self defense ever arise.

Should she ever hear you teasing your cute girlfriend about her love handles, the best that you can hope for is that you'll be turned into a newt then released into a cold yet refreshing Idaho mountain stream. Your only alternative would be puzzling over how to put your brain back together after you found it spattered all over the wall.

Don't Piss Her Off.

I sent my sister, my mother and my mother's twin sister this email just now. My sister is heavily into computing but Mom and Aunt Peggy are quite computationally challenged. However all three of them as well as myself regard libraries as one of the most valuable public services any government or school could ever hope to provide.

If you feel as I do that the word needs to be gotten out about what follows, please forward this email to anyone you might feel would be interested in or would benefit from it.

Something came up on one of the web sites I like to hang out on that is of vital importance to anyone that cares in any way about the continued existence of public libraries.

The Looming Library Lending Battle
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/25/2117232/the-looming-library-lending-battle

Publishers vs. Libraries: an eBook Tug-of-War
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/business/for-libraries-and-publishers-an-e-book-tug-of-war.html?_r=2

Book publishers have NEVER thought highly of public libraries, but it is only recently that they've gotten the idea of getting every public library in the land completely shut down. This isn't the first I've heard of that effort, but is the most serious threat to libraries that has come up since the publishing industry started working to put a stop to the free lending of books.

When a library purchases or is given a book printed on paper - what computer geeks call a "dead tree book" - it has the perfectly legal right to lend that book out as many times as readers want to check it out. If we could come up with books that never wore out, in principle every library book could be repeatedly lent out until The End of Time.

However I am sure you have heard that with the widespread availability of reference information, entertainment and reading material available on the Internet, traditional printed book libraries have suffered. When I was in school and was assigned to write a research paper, I would perform all that research from "dead tree books" in a library.

Today's students do the vast majority of their scholastic research on the Internet, at websites such as Wikipedia, without ever setting foot in a library. That has resulted in the loss of public support for libraries, as well as fewer people ever visiting one. Because libraries, like most government services, argue for the continuation of their funding by keeping records of the public's use of their services, public funding to libraries has been cut back drastically. Branches are being closed everywhere, with those that do remain open having to cut back on hours, staff and the purchase of new books.

However, just in the last couple of years libraries have found new relevance by - among other ways - lending out what are called "eBooks" or Electronic Books.

They aren't books in the traditional sense, but they are electronic documents just like the documents you save on the Desktop of your iMac. One always requires some kind of electronic computing device to actually read them.

I love how Anonymous hates on everything related to the US, the West, police, etc., and utterly ignores things like China jailing or disappearing human rights activists, Beijing requiring bloggers to register their real names, or the over 5,000 people the Syrian government has murdered this year, instead posting tired, lame anarchist diatribes predicting the downfall of Capitalism.

I hope that Anonymous one day gets what it wishes for, if only so they could witness how horrible that world would be.

Japan wasn't under the control of an autocratic government like China is, nor is their history full of autocrats and strict living.

Are we talking about the same Japan? The one that has a centuries history of strict living culture? The one of which was said "THE Government of Japan is paternal, more autocratic in the power of her Emperor and ruling class than any of prominence now existing."

That's a pretty well known delusion among parents.

Thanks, that was a pretty good article. I found the comments especially interesting (which I guess must be moderated because they all contributed to the discussion).

A rebuttal to your money can't buy happiness notion. While it is true that other things are important in life, having a baseline amount of money to afford the necessities such as food, rent, and utilities will damn sure make you much more likely to be happy. For a disturbing amount of people in the US (about 46 million), they face a choice between paying the rent or paying the utilities.

So go on and tell them money doesn't buy happiness when they are being evicted, or sitting in the dark because the power was shut off for non-payment. I am sure they may have a few choice words of wisdom to reply back.

Both Krugman and Nocera had good pieces on this subject this week.
I don't know if there is a solution... (perhaps "trust but verify"?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/krugman-the-post-truth-campaign.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-big-lie.html

Both Krugman and Nocera had good pieces on this subject this week.
I don't know if there is a solution... (perhaps "trust but verify"?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/krugman-the-post-truth-campaign.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-big-lie.html

But I will tell you watching my 4 year old draw pictures or make up stories or sing songs is WAY more rewarding than even fixing that niggling bug no one has been able to track down

That's a pretty well known delusion among parents.

That could be true, but if so, then Apple is incompetent and their hardware and marketing would seem to indicate that they are anything but incompetent. I'm not the only one that theorizes this either. Doing some more research I came up with http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/steve-jobs-tries-to-downplay-the-itunes-stores-profit/ which seems to support some of my assumptions. It should be noted that one of the objections to that article is also wrong as it is possible, even in small quantities to get transaction fees that are purely percentage driven if your average cost is below $2.50. All in all, on every $1 app or song purchased Apple makes around 20 to 30 cents income of which probably around 3 to 5 cents is credit card processing and if they are very incompetent, 1 cent would be server and bandwidth costs to make the system run. That leaves somewhere between 27 and 15 cents of profit. That is a lot of money to have vanish in other costs when you are talking about several billion app, movie, music and book purchases per year.

GM is about inserting genes from etirely different speices, in ways that would be impossible in nature. Or could you think up a way to make a potato and fish breed?

You mean like crossing a human with a virus?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?pagewanted=all

What lab did this?

I'm not aware of any plants that have naturally built man-made pesticides into their DNA sequences...

There are no plants at all, GMO or otherwise that have man-made pesticides built into their DNA sequences. We talk a naturally occurring pesticide from one organism and make another organism grow it. BT, for example, produces a completely natural pesticide. Genes from BT are being spliced with corn and other crops that are attacked by caterpillars.

Stop your pro-GM hysteria. Stop your mega-corporate worshiping hysteria. Let me guess, you own Monsanto stock.

Stop your anti-common sense bullshit. Stop your anti-corporate hatred. Educate yourself before someone else shoots down the entire basis for your views and makes you look like an complete and utter ass you green peace tool.

And no, I don't own Monsanto stock. I despise the company.

And dog cow was 100% correct. "[T]he possibility of random genes collecting in other organisms and working together in completely unforeseen ways" happens in nature all the time. It's called evolution. HERE is a perfect example.

without proof that most people will choose easy-to-guess gestures is just as fallacious as just giving the number of unique combinations

Considering the amount of evidence out there proving that, left to their own devices, a large majority of people already use easily guessable passwords (NYT, 2011 Worst Password Study, and on, and on...), this isn't a stretch at all.
In fact, your non-logic deserves a spanking considering how easy a simple web-search is on this subject. Try a little harder next time.

The Leaf's optional DC fast charge to 80% takes 30 minutes from a 50 kW CHAdeMO charging station. There are 800 in Japan, 150 in Europe and a handful in the USA, though supposedly most Nissan dealers will be installing them.

Some (all?) Model S variants will support Tesla's own 90 kW Supercharger, which will give a 50% charge boost in 30 minutes (150 mile range in a 300 mile pack). Also the Model S pack is swappable, so for a long trip you could borrow a 300 mile pack from a Tesla store (for now Tesla is vague on the details).

Meanwhile some USA and European car makers have endorsed a proposed third DC fast charger, the SAE J1772 "combo-coupler" with two extra fat pins beyond the current plug that almost all plug-in cars for DC charging up to 90 kW. The joy of standards...

30 minutes is still longer than a gas vehicle, but it makes the occasional long-distance trip (on which you didn't take your family's other car, or rent, or fly) more practical. I'm sure it's not enough for you, from your comments you seem allergic to EVs for a host of reasons. But you don't speak or buy for everyone.

Talk about creepy timing.

Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90

In this article they even discuss criticisms of Xerox not commercializing technologies developed at PARC.

When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.

Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.

To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

This is the classical dual-use dilemma. It should be pointed out all the scientists involved are public health researchers and not military trying to make a weapon. Knowing exactly what mutations cause the virus to go airborne and become human to human transmissible would provide a very accurate and effective way for public health workers on the ground to assess in-real time via some sort of PCR diagnostic that could be done in any reasonably equipped hospital lab whether a local outbreak is about to go pandemic or not, and react accordingly.

Interview of the lead scientist in the NYtimes indicates that even if the complete recipe were revealed, it would be difficult to replicate without very sophisticated equipment. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to spell out exactly what you need to do, especially as there are probably analagous things that can be done with other viruses that don't require such a sophisticated setup.

Q. How easy is it to recreate this virus?
A: It is not very easy. You need a very sophisticated specialist team and sophisticated facilities to do this. And in our opinion, nature is the biggest bioterrorist. There are many pathogens in nature that you could get your hands on very easily, and if you released those in the human population, we would be in trouble.

And therefore we think that if bioterror or biowarfare would be a problem, there are so many easy ways of doing it that nobody would take this H5N1 virus and do this very difficult thing to achieve it.

You could not do this work in your garage if you are a terrorist organization. But what you can do is get viruses out of the wild and grow them in your garage. There are terrorist opportunities that are much, much easier than to genetically modify H5N1 bird flu virus that are probably much more effective.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/health/security-in-h5n1-bird-flu-study-was-paramount-scientist-says.html?pagewanted=2&hp

The US Chamber of Commerce is a lobbying organization -- it's not like they have Industrial Super Secrets. Besides, a high proportion of their clients are Chinese anyway and presumably have pretty good access to the organization already.

True, The Chamber Of commerce also hacks anyone who criticizes their illegal and immoral behaviour. HBGary Federal payback perhaps?

Were the actual plants flooded? Or was it a lack of power(impassable roads, etc.) due to the flooding that caused the shutdown?

Based on the photo in this NYT article it certainly looks like the WD buildings themselves were flooded.

Simple:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/seagate-samsung-acquisition/
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/western-digital-drops-4-3-billion-to-acquire-hitachi-gst-enter/
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/188100939/seagate-wraps-up-maxtor-acquisition.htm

When/if the Hitachi acquisition closes, you only have two vendors in the spinning magnetic disk market. Last time there was a large industry shift to shorter warranties, one or two companies did not and after a few months the rest of the industry moved back. With only two companies in play, it's far less likely someone will retain long warranty as a competitive advantage. Same reason why the flood was so devastating, one company consolidates so much in one location and a natural disaster wipes out half the manufacturing capacity of that industry.

Actually they did jail someone! http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html?pagewanted=all

Or do what Fidesz did in Hungary: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/hungarys-constitutional-revolution/

Being sure that if Watergate happened again it would be exposed and the president forced to resign over it.

Something similar has happened, but this time it's more than just political advantage at stake - many people have died. We don't know if the President was involved, but it's clear at this point that the Attorney General Eric Holder has lied and is lying to congress and Issa, and refused to provide Justice Department documents. John Mitchell served 19 months in prison for the exact thing that Holder has done.

I don't know why the media isn't covering this on a daily basis, maybe the executive is so powerful they can get away with these things now. After J. Edgar Hoover's reign over the FBI ended, then the obstruction witnessed during Watergate, a law was passed barring anyone from being FBI Director for more than 10 years. But the administration and the Senate have decided to ignore that, and Robert Mueller remains director for at least 2 more years. So, I'm sorry, I think the time is over that "if Watergate happened again it would be exposed".

The story just rehashes the press release by AT&T.

And by the time the story got to Slashdot, others have already written decent stories about it - those would have made much better links.

The business perspective .

The regular news

And the tech perspective

perhaps I'm just a cynical bastard.

Well, the easiest way to show you are not would be to provide us with some sort of evidence that such laws have been passed before. Let me give you a hand with that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23cnceavesdropping.html?pagewanted=all

In North America we can't even track which country the meat comes from, let alone which animal.

I heard in Japan it's not uncommon for a farmer's produce to be labelled/displayed with his photo in a supermarket (e.g. vegetables, and stuff like ginger). Read it somewhere[1] and recently asked a friend who is working there.

Anyone in/from Japan would like to confirm/deny or provide more details?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/worldbusiness/11safety.html
By the way, I had to find this using Bing. Google produced tons of unrelated crap for: japanese farmers photos vegetables china "quality control" supermarket.

I might have to switch to trying Bing first, if Google continues being so crap. Yes I know you're supposed to put double quotes around every mandatory keyword in Google nowadays. Fuck that.

This has been done before with a different knockout gene. Alexandra McPherron and Su Jin-Lee created "mighty mice" by knocking out the MSTN gene back in 1997. Same sorts of effects - doubled muscle mass, increased endurance and the like. There is a lot of hope in the muscular dystrophy arena that these types of knockout effects can be replicated via drug delivery mechanisms.

These sorts of mutations also occur naturally. I have a whippet and a naturally occurring mutation occasionally results in a bully whippet, which looks like the Incredible Hulk of whippets. In this case, the muscles don't just double - these dogs can pack on a whole other dog's worth of weight in added muscle. They are absolute freaks of nature - but with the same docile temperament that normal whippets have.

It's a result of a myostatin mutation. If a dog has one copy of the gene, they are incredibly fast runners with just a slight increase in muscle mass - these are the best racing whippets. If a dog is born with two copies of the mutated myostatin gene, they become "bullies". Forget six-pack abs - these guys have an entire case...

There's a several infographics around that show how the majority of the deficit is attributable to Bush policies. About 90-95% of it is the tax cuts, the wars, and the unfunded drug plan extensions. Ironically, the Bush tax cuts gave away about the same amount of money as the Bush wars cost. Talk about doubling down on stupidity. Bush should have raised taxes by 3% on those earning more than $250,000 per year and the debt would have grown only by the 1.8 trillion spent on stimulus. Which could be easily be paid for out of the taxes after the wars ended.

The U.S. is more than able to pay for it's programs. However, the people with 40% of the money would rather not.

You idealist you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22herbert.html

What you really mean is. "Throw them to the politicians".

Even for a chaebol, Samsung is pretty corrupt. I will be interested in this book (Think Samsung) by their ex legal officer, if it is ever translated.

The NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/kristof-his-libraries-12000-so-far-change-lives.html?ref=nicholasdkristof) recently wrote about John Wood's opening of more than 12,000 libraries around the world. I have no direct knowledge of his charity (Room to Read), but it sounds worthy.

If you are interested, see http://www.roomtoread.org/.

Well yeah, you'd look a little odd in eyeliner. But lets not pretend the cosmetics industry doesn't target men, and use photoshopped models to do it. That shit can work on us too.

http://www.oldspice.com/
http://www.gillette.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/fashion/02skin.html?pagewanted=all
^ And here I thought spray tanning was dumb.

Over the course of history, cosmetics have been important enough for slaves to riot over. I guess nothing has changed.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/methane-time-bomb-in-arctic-seas-apocalypse-not/

“Fully $100 million of the record-breaking $150 million that the Obama campaign collected in September alone came over the internet via credit card donations,” writes Bill Dyer at Hugh Hewitt’s blog. “The Obama campaign has deliberately turned off the anti-fraud mechanisms available for internet credit card transactions. They have no clue how many millions or tens of millions of dollars have been donated to them in violation of federal election law. And now it turns out that the Obama campaign cheerfully takes even contributions from untraceable pre-paid credit cards, a/k/a ‘the pseudo-credit cards you use when you want to conceal illegal activity.’ ”

"The whole “back-end screening” farce is insulting to anyone with a second-grade education. The Obama campaign cannot possibly have any objective measurement to even roughly estimate how many mistakes and how many episodes of deliberate fraud they’re catching versus how many they’re simply missing, even if one is naive enough to presume their good-faith best efforts."

"Moreover, everything the Obama campaign has yet said about this entire issue utterly ignores the key questions: (1) Who ordered the anti-fraud protections turned off? And (2) why hasn’t Barack Obama already fired every such person, and exposed them for criminal prosecution as aiders and abettors of national and international campaign contribution fraud?"

Mark Steyn, writing at the Corner:

"So two-thirds of Obama’s record haul derives from a website that intentionally disabled all the default security checks that prevent basic fraud like fake addresses and no-name matches .Here’s the bottom line: Two-thirds of the record-breaking haul Obama raised for the final stretch of the campaign comes from a racket set up to facilitate fake names, phony addresses and untraceable cards."

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How many RIAA lawyers work for Justice now?

There's this 1987 EPA report. And there's this report saying fracking likely caused ground water contamination in Wyoming. And then there are the storage ponds that leak. And what about Dimmock, PA? Industry claims that there are no documented instances of groundwater pollution from fracking are a bit like cigarette companies claiming that cigarettes don't cause cancer in the 1950s and 1960s.

There's this 1987 EPA report. And there's this report saying fracking likely caused ground water contamination in Wyoming. And then there are the storage ponds that leak. And what about Dimmock, PA? Industry claims that there are no documented instances of groundwater pollution from fracking are a bit like cigarette companies claiming that cigarettes don't cause cancer in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone"

WASHINGTON, June 27 - The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html

...and why are women suddenly doing better than men?

It's not sudden. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence that there has been any change over time at all in the male-female gap in college success. Women simply do better in school than men in general. Probably always have and always will.

Women enter college with about the same critical thinking and writing skills as men (Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, p. 40). They don't choose easier majors than men ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/womcolge.htm ). But: "Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college[...]" ( http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html ) "[...] in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates." ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?pagewanted=all )

So it absolutely makes sense that women do better than men in most departments at my school, and, yes, it would be a sign that something was wrong if they did worse in one particular department. Women simply do better because they work harder.