Cao boi (pronounced “cowboy”) had a different meaning to Vietnamese than Americans though both got their “knowledge” from a flim (movie). Since my father lived in the land of Hoa Thinh Don (Washington) and Hollywood [a Vietnamese map I had from the time gave both equal prominence] it didn’t affect him but it did me. I was never invited back.
December 2007 archive
Dec 23 2007
Quick Bites
 Y’amal (flickr Creative Commons) |
A roundup of tasty items that caught my eye the past few days.
- Global Orgasm Day h/t Unqualified Offerings
The Second Annual Global Orgasm for Peace was yesterday, December 22, at 06:08 Universal Time (GMT). Did you feel the earth move?
The world is full of men with axes to grind and weapons to fire in displays of their superiority over others. It is time to spare the planet from Alpha Male concepts of ‘progress’, ‘growth’ and Manifest Destiny, which are endangering all of us. True partnership between the Masculine and Feminine that is within all women and men may enable our species to survive in relative harmony. The Global Orgasm for Peace is one attempt to begin that process.
- from Daily Kos, updated Gilbert & Sullivan – I am the Very Model of a Bush Attorney General by Briseadh na Faire. Bloody brilliant. First verse below, go sing the rest.
I am the very model of a Bush attorney general
I prosecute all Democrats with charges quite ephemeral
I know the things I say are legal metaphorical
With logic that defies Supreme Court rulings quite historical. - Tbogg, now at Firedoglake, has fun with Romney’s idiotic statements in I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…but only in a figurative sense
Mitt explains the MLK march hallucination. Dude, we told you to stay away from the brown LSD…not LDS.
“The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights,” he said, “and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership.”
“I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can be,” he continued, smiling firmly. “If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term ‘saw’ includes being aware of — in the sense I’ve described.”
The questioning did not relent. “I’m an English literature major,” he insisted at one point. “When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there.” (He meant the Super Bowl, of course.)
(via msnbc)
btw, Firedoglake got a radical makeover a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t been there in a while so I was kind of surprised. Not sure I like it yet but the banner is nice. emptywheel is part of the blog too. - via Neatorama, The Galactically Hot Women of Star Trek. Click the pic for more space chicks. Some of the comments on flickr are pretty funny.
Poletti flickr photo set
Dec 23 2007
The Next Economic Revolution: Economic Growth and the Steady State
Crossposted from The European Tribune to Docudharma …
… because the world can’t end today, its already tomorrow on Docudharma.
Early this month I finished Justinian’s Flea, which looks at the reign of Justinian the Great as the pivot between “late antiquity” and the rise of medieval Europe … and the central role in the drama played by the Plague of Justinian, the first clearly documented outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.
Which was one more addition to the mix of things involved in my reaction (s) to the diary [NB. at the European Tribune] by Jerome a Paris, Hostility to the notion of limits to growth … and the question of what was so special about the Industrial Revolution.
I’ll start with what is normal, then with what has been peculiar in the past couple of hundred years, and then how that peculiarity must have warped our economic institutions … and to get back to normality, we will have to unwarp them.
OK, “tell them what you are going to tell them”. Check. Make it clear as mud. Check. “then tell them”. That’s after the fold.
Dec 23 2007
Blog Voices go MTV – 12/23/07
Will young people in this country engage in the political change process? They will if Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican and Kyle at Citizen Orange have anything to say about it.
These two powerhouse voices of the diversosphere have been chosen by MTV to be part of the Street Team ’08 that inlcudes 51 young vloggers who will cover the presidential election through next November.
The presidential candidates can run, but it will be hard for them to hide from the horde of citizen journalists tapped by MTV’s Choose or Lose ’08 to cover the race for the White House. A group of 51 youth reporters – one from each state and Washington, D.C. – will follow the 2008 elections and deliver weekly multimedia reports tailored for mobile devices.
Using short-form videos, blogs, animation, photos and podcasts, the reports will be distributed through MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com, more than 1,800 sites in The Associated Press’ Online Video Network and a soon-to-launch Wireless Application Protocol site. The Street Team ’08 reporters were carefully selected after an extensive nationwide search, and they represent every aspect of today’s youth audience – from seasoned student-newspaper journalists to documentary filmmakers, the children of once-illegal immigrants and community organizers.
They are conservative and liberal, from big cities and small towns, but all are tied together through a passion for politics and a yearning to make the youth voice heard during this pivotal election. The correspondents will begin reporting early next month after an intensive MTV News orientation in New York, during which they’ll be armed with laptops, video cameras and cell phones and challenged to uncover the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states.
Dec 23 2007
Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective
Dec 23 2007
Docudharma Times Sunday Dec.23
This is an Open Thread: Read Then Go Shopping
USA
Republicans opt for new worldview
The candidates try to distance themselves from the president’s foreign policies but try to not alienate Bush loyalists.
WASHINGTON — Last week, after Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee criticized the Bush administration for an “arrogant bunker mentality” toward the world, rival Mitt Romney rose to George W. Bush’s defense. “Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said.But Romney too has criticized the Bush administration, saying the occupation of Iraq was “underplanned, understaffed [and] under-managed,” resulting in “a mess.”
Other GOP candidates have also found things to dislike in Bush’s foreign policy: Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has dismissed the president’s campaign for democracy in the Muslim world as naive and opposed his drive to establish a Palestinian state. Sen. John McCain of Arizona thinks Bush hasn’t sent enough troops to Iraq and has been too easy on Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
McCain closing gap with Romney
In N.H. poll, Obama inches ahead of Clinton
Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination was all but dead this summer, has made a dramatic recovery in the Granite State 2 1/2 weeks before the 2008 vote, pulling within 3 percentage points of front-runner Mitt Romney, a new Boston Globe poll indicates.McCain, the darling of New Hampshire voters in the 2000 primary, has the support of 25 percent of likely Republican voters, compared with 28 percent for Romney. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has slid into third place, with 14 percent. A Globe poll of New Hampshire voters last month had Romney at 32 percent, Giuliani at 20 percent, and McCain at 17 percent.
Among Democratic voters, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has opened up a narrow lead over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, 30 percent to 28 percent. That, too, represents a major shift from last month’s Globe poll, which had Clinton with a 14-point advantage. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina remained a steady third at 14 percent.
Dec 23 2007
Understanding the Subprime Crisis: A Narrative, Part Three
Part Three: The Rise of Long-Term Capital Management and the Superportfolio
This is an extremely compressed version of the story of Long-Term Capital Management, perhaps the most written about corporate failure besides Enron of the last two decades. If you wish to learn more, I highly recommend Lowenstein’s book When Genius Failed, linked below.
John Meriwether launched the limited partnership of Long-Term Capital Management in 1994. Limited partnerships are the actual name of the entities commonly known as “hedge funds”. The name hedge fund is in fact a misnomer; they originally developed that name because the funds were designed to “hedge” against losses by being more conservative than mutual funds, but have developed into the opposite. The appeal of such funds is that limitations on the number of partners and the overall wealth of those allowed to join (no more than 99 people or entities of a total value of over $1 million, or 500 people or entities worth over $5 million – with those worth less entirely excluded) are coupled with a nearly total lack of government regulation. Mutual funds are forced to disclose their portfolios and to maintain certain levels of diversification and leverage; limited partnerships are not.
Joining Meriwether as the partners of LTCM were former Salomon arbitrage group members Larry Hilibrand, Eric Rosenfeld, Victor Haghani, Greg Hawkins, and three very notable additions: economists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, and David Mullins, who was the number-two at the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan and had previously been considered his heir apparent. With such a roster, LTCM launched with capital of $1.4 billion, the largest such launch in financial history. It had such disparate investors as the national bank of Italy and the President of Merril Lynch, and had an elegant and innovative structure, with the company that employed the partners and traders being a Delaware-registered management services company employed by a Cayman Islands partnership (the fund itself) financed by six international dummy corporations from whom investors in different nations would buy their shares.
Dec 23 2007
Survey: What Blogs Do You (Really) Read?
Walking through Barnes & Noble today, one of the things that most struck me was how so many non-fiction books are published to confirm the sentiments of the people who buy them. Obviously, people buying Ann Coulter or Frank Rich’s books are already aware that they will pretty much agree with the author before they read word one. Other books, such as “What’s The Matter With California” are obviously aimed at confirming the views of the only people who would pick up such a tome in the first place.
Which leads me to wonder about what blogs we honestly read, on a weekly basis. Not the ones we admire and will check on sometimes, but the ones we open almost every day, and read nearly every post from. My list is below the fold.
Dec 23 2007
Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 19
(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)
As the helicopters swooped past above him, his heart pulled him forward through the jungle. His body did all it could to keep up, running faster then he had ever run in his short life. He knew who they were and he knew what they wanted. The village he had grown up in was not a hunting village or a farm village or a fishing village….it was a village whose only industry was information. Black Market information.
Dec 23 2007
Saturday Night Music Videos! w/poll!
So we’ve all been doing our shopping, both political and Christmas, and it’s time for something nice and relaxing. So, I ran over to YouTube and thought some of the vids I like might be a good starting place!
Dec 23 2007
Which Side Are You On?
Today I read a lot about the Astor Place Riot of 1849. It’s not exactly holiday reading. But it is a story worth telling here.
The Astor Place Riot occurred May 10, 1849 at the Astor Place Opera House. When it was over 22 people were dead and another 38 were injured. It was a deadly confrontation between the poor and the rich, who controlled the police and militia. The riot was triggered by rival performances of The Scottish Play by Shakespeare.
Join me below.