Another late set of tubes. Sigh. Not sure why I am having trouble writing again, but if I can just make myself do these Tube Diaries, it helps. I picked the tubes days ago, but have been enjoying a bit of nice Minnesota weather for a change;~J (it is 54 degrees right now!) However, I am watching the only two shows on CNN I like; Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour; so I thought I would hit the tubes and spin them out.
The Onion is in with some terrific advice for women, who are affected most by the recession.
So sick, and yet so very funny. An Onion a day helps keep the stalkers away;~J
Michael Steele is talking again. He is beginning to compete with Michele Bachmann in teh crazy department.
“Moo, moo.” As I said the other day, he has a way with words.
The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades – or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States – more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.
The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America’s increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it’s mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.
How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It’s to the credit of both governments – for now – that those tensions have not boiled over.
The Great Spirit gave seeds of corn to his people. At harvest time, he returned to see what they had done with the corn. There was nothing to see. The people told him that no corn had been planted. When asked why they said they were afraid the birds would eat some.
The Great Spirit asked them what they had done with the corn. He was led to a covered storage pit. The people pulled back the cover to show the Great Spirit the golden kernels of treasure he had given them. His wrath ws great when He saw that rot had ruined it all.
The people protested that they had only been trying to protect what they had been given. They were afraid to lose any of it. Their pleas for understanding went in vain.
The Great Spirit looked on them and said, “How do you know I didn’t give you the corn to see that the birds would be fed? Did you think this great treasure was only for you? If you had planted the corn then both you and the birds would have been feed. So would have been the deer and the squirrel. Your fear and your covetousness has lost you the chance to have corn. From this day forth, the birds and animals will be fed thistle seed. Everywhere you plant crops a thistle will grow.”
The highlight (lowlight) of today’s news was a brat in a balloon (or, as it turns out, NOT in a balloon). It was vaguely reminiscent of the OJ chase…though, this time I was not hoping for a spectacular crash to end it.
Going with Gary Gnu’s theory that “No gnews is good gnews”…it just feels like an Open Thread sort of night.
Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long, and notes that the mother of the boy who was believed lost in a balloon accident looks a little bit Asian to him.
“The dad is a plain old white guy,” Bardwell said. “Not latin-white, or even Italian, more like British-white – maybe with a bit of Kraut. None of those southern European countries like Greece (not really sure you’d call them ‘white’, anyway), and he doesn’t really have the lilly-white you find in Scandinavia either, so I’d place his breed more mid-latitude. Could be some Welsh in him, he’s got the hair for it.” Bardwell said that he’d only marry Balloon-boy’s dad to another mid-European, “but I’d marry the mom to any slant-eyed guy, they’re pretty well all the same over there. Bless their hearts.
“I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves,” Bardwell said. “In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer.”
Justice Bardwell claimed that he isn’t a racist. “I have an Asian friend in town – Chinese or something. And I ate sushi a couple months ago and really liked it.”
Bardwell has also been making waves recently in his efforts to ensure the purity of the black racial strain. Or at least to keep it from diluting the white strain.
“It’s not even a website” snip “It’s a new tool to communicate the new GOP.” LMAO. A website that doesn’t work. A total metaphor for the new GOP.
Here he is at it again.
What does that even mean? To me, it sounds like he wants a bunch of cops to beat the shite out of the black guy. Would that be President Obama or just Democrats in general?
While Washington is glued to the drama over health care, over the past few days, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been in Beijing meeting with Chinese leaders including Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao. In a series of communiqués, they celebrated the “strategic partnership” between the two countries and charted a course of future close relations.
Among others things, Putin – Russia’s man behind the curtain who has also been spending considerable time in front of the curtain – signed off on six billion dollars worth of trade deals Chinese counterparts, including moving ahead with a natural gas pipeline to open up the vast Chinese market to Russia’s equally vast supply of natural gas. The two sides also discussed policies to contain and manage North Korea. Trade between the two countries is approaching $60 billion a year, and while that is a faction of the more than $300 billion a year between China and the United States, it is hardly negligible.
ATLANTA, Oct. 14 (UPI) — Georgia will stop posting signs along highway construction projects funded by economic stimulus funds, because the signs cost too much money, officials said.
The signs were first considered a nice indication that stimulus funds were putting Georgians to work but they became a target for ridicule and criticism once it was determined that they cost $1,200 apiece, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
In England today there are millions of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras pointed at public places. Fortunately (depending on your point of view), most of them are completely unmonitored the vast majority of the time.
Seeing an opportunity to leverage the voyeuristic inclinations of millions of people at home with time and computers on their hands, a group of entrepreneurs have created a company called Internet Eyes where you can register for free to randomly watch some of these. If you spy someone Doing Wrong (shoplifting, being impolite to a picture of the Queen, what-have-you) you can peck a button and send an alert. If you alert a shop-owner to a crime you can be eligible for an award.
So what do you think? Is this “Crowd Sourced” surveillance a Bridge Too Far into invading privacy, or just a sign of changing norms?
Lately some folks have expressed concerns about the Bible. Are they atheists or non Christians? Nope, just a group of kooks who think the Bible is too liberal and they have decided to remedy the situation.
I have long believed that the right wing Christian fundamentalists, if confronted with the actual ‘return of Jesus’, would promptly stomp him to death.
Andy Schafly and the folks at Conservapedia have formed a group called the Conservative Bible Project in order to “take the text back to its supposed right-wing roots.” As a non Christian, I am not that familiar with the Bible, but I am fairly certain this effort would all but eliminate Christ from the Bible.
And thus Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis, begat the Conservative Bible Project with the mission to expunge liberal language and interpretation from the Holy Book.
The project is foremost these days on Schlafly’s Conservapedia, the three-year-old conservative alternative to Wikipedia that provides “trustworthy” and “family-friendly” accounts of evolution, homosexuality and whatever else strikes the fancy of his team of home-schooled students culled from his online history courses at Eagle Forum University.
Schlafly, in an interview with The Star, details examples of what they’re looking for: the parable of the adultress in John 8:7 of the New Testament is one, in which Jesus warns about casting that first stone. Not exactly family-friendly.
“This is a permissive story used by liberals to oppose capital punishment,” says Schlafly. “It is saying there can be forgiveness without repentence.”
Another comes from Luke 23:24, where the crucified Jesus says “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
“The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing.”
So too the modern translations have taken his preferred 400-year-old King James Bible and diluted it, reducing references to Hell from 54 to a metaphorical handful.
“Hell is there in the Bible as real justice,” says Schlafly. “If people think it doesn’t exist, they think they can get away with anything.” Notwithstanding the sixth commandment.
The current translations of the Bible are laced with “liberal wordiness, compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities,” the project says. To that Schlafly adds the unisex “emasculation of Christianity” that uses gender-neutral pronouns.
He figures the few dozen recruits toiling away at the New Testament book by book should be done within a year. “We may not have as many credentials” as the wildly liberal biblical scholars holed up in universities (“80 to 90 per cent of them voted for Obama,” he says), but they have enthusiasm and energy.
Schlafly’s own favourite Bible passage is the story of the prodigal son because “it conveys a beautiful insight into forgiveness and love.”
Why the prodigal and not the adultress? “God is entitled not to be fair. He asked for forgiveness and the adultress did not.”
Toronto bible scholar Charles Kim, who leads study groups with the United Bible Fellowship at Ryerson University using the New International version, already finds the Bible conservative enough.
“A lot of people experience Jesus’s forgiving grace when they read that passage” about the adultress, said Kim. “The Bible also describes incest in Genesis. In the midst of these shocking stories, we find how God reveals himself.”
The Great Spirit gave seeds of corn to his people. At harvest time, he returned to see what they had done with the corn. There was nothing to see. The people told him that no corn had been planted. When asked why they said they were afraid the birds would eat some. 
