| Fun with names |
[Feb. 6th, 2010|09:48 pm] |
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Ever since I learned as a teen that Giuseppe Verdi's name meant Joe Green, I've had fun translating 'foreign' names into their more familiar English equivalents. But in this case I recently learned, the most familiar 'English' form is actually Spanish: The ruling house of Russia from the 800s through the 1500s was the Rodriguezes. |
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| What Stormlorde said |
[Jan. 27th, 2010|11:25 am] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) stormlorde:If Democrats were Republicans they would take the number of deaths that could be attributed to lack of health care, double it, shout it from the roof tops, put it in every sound bite, and relentlessly ask the opposition party how many American lives are you willing to sacrifice to block health care reform. (Probably with a "you commie bastard" thrown in on top.)
The Democrats will instead duck their heads shuffle their feet and shyly exclaim:
"made poopies" Of course, there are exceptions, but the Democratic leadership and many of its media 'defenders' are aptly described. |
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| Corporate Personhood |
[Jan. 26th, 2010|10:28 pm] |
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When will GE get called for jury duty and have to suspend regular operations for a day? |
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| This is part of a pattern |
[Jan. 18th, 2010|01:22 pm] |
Most of the outraged criticisms from the left (as opposed to the disappointed criticisms from the left) of the Obama administration badly mischaracterize the President, the Adminstration, and the nature of politics in Washington.
But on issues of open government, the Administration seems not only to be failing to live up to its campaign rhetoric, but to have turned solidly against transparency. And it is up to us to be consistent and call them on it. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/16/krugman/index.html |
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| Are Jonathan Schwartz and Joe Franklin the same person? |
[Jan. 16th, 2010|11:37 pm] |
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Actually, I was amazed to just find Franklin was only 67 when his show on Channel 9 ended in 1993. I first saw him in the 1970s and from the beginning to the end of that, he looked and sounded about 20 years older than I now see he was. |
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| Reid was right |
[Jan. 10th, 2010|11:20 pm] |
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Can anyone imagine a candidate who looked or sounded anything like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JinBKqSCSac getting elected? Lott displayed racism—he was talking about what he thought ought to be. Reid was right—he was talking about what America was ready for in 2008. |
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| A sub rosa recommendation |
[Dec. 28th, 2009|10:02 pm] |
One of the better science fiction societies I read this decade was published on Literotica. And yes, it's got explicit sex scenes. It could also use some editing. But it is clearly the work of someone who can put together a long, internally consistent and detailed piece. It's about 160,000 words; most science fiction novels are well under 100,000.
The anonymous author goes by the handle hammingbyrd7 and the story is called The Preacher Man.
It's a shame that it's too much porn to get an SF publisher and editor and it's too much SF to be commercially published as porn. IMO, it's better than most stuff that's classed as either. |
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| NYTimes: Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won |
[Dec. 24th, 2009|08:46 pm] |
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html?hp "The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson." |
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| Nate is letting the cat out of the bag. |
[Dec. 19th, 2009|09:43 pm] |
The reason I've written so little about the health care debate is that for months, the strategy to get as good a bill as is possible with this Congress is to exaggerate its faults and to act like if the bill doesn't get better, liberals will walk away. And most of the people taking that position believe, or in many cases, as Nate mentions and I've been thinking, have convinced themselves, that without those improvements, the bill really isn't worth it.
Of course, the bill is worth it, no matter how disappointing it is that we can't do better. Many, many lives will be saved by people who are now uninsured getting coverage.
I don't like what the insistent, blinkered, war-like mentality is doing to the progressive movement. But it has been useful to have people acting as they have acted. Whether it's been worth the cost, I'm not sure. But calling people on their shit has seemed like it would get me in a lot of arguments to little positive effect. So I've been sort of muzzled.
Nate Silver, who seems never to fear causing a ruckus, discusses some of this at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/extremely-premature-retrospective-on.html |
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| Weird History |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|12:04 pm] |
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According to Wikipedia, during WWII, Andorra was neutral, serving as a smuggling route between France and Spain. However, it had declared war on Germany during WWI and was not included in the Treaty of Versailles, and was technically still legally at war with Germany from that war until 1957. |
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| It's all in the timing. |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|03:17 pm] |
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I guess the problem was that as the old saw goes, people don't start paying attention to the campaign until the World Series is over... |
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