December 2007 archive

It’s the middle of Channukah, Christmas is soon….so, today….books to give and get

If you like to trade books, try BookMooch.

What are you reading? is crossposted to dailykos

I just love watching the news on Fridays.  The most interesting things come out at the very end of the week.  Like this story, broken by the New York Times today,:  

/shaking head in disgust…

Most people, and most experts, tend to feel that the US economy is in trouble.  Many news stories are a significant part of this: the subprime mortgage “crisis”, the falling value of the dollar, the restatements of financial earnings from Wall Street.  But the actual narrative of how this happened is very poorly understood, and rarely explained in its entirety.  And much information which contradicts what we think we know exists as well: that subprime mortgages represent less than 2% of the equity market, for example, or that over half of subprime borrowers are still making timely payments.

Due to the failure of most Americans to understand the narrative of how we got here, most of us don’t understand what the problems actually are, nor do the politicians vying to “solve” the problems feel the need to address the actual underlying issues.  It is my feeling that it is therefore important to try to tell the story of how we got here in a narrative fashion.

Interestingly enough (to me) this will be my 155th essay on DocuDharma.

It’s kind of a little unfair to pfiore to really talk about baseball (which she had suggested as a topic when she asked me to do witr), but that sent me digging and really wishing for a good index search.  Maybe next revision which may come sooner or later depending on how pacified’s open source project is going.

Anyway pfiore remembered an essay where I talked about baseball and the one I think she is after is the one I wrote just before one of our Openings (there were about 6 or 7, as budhy got settled in his new digs).

So Today’s The Big Day!

When I think about blogging as art I see it as halfway between a Magazine and a TV Channel.  You have an audience for the Gilmore Girls and when they tune in they expect to see it.

But also a Community blog is a team effort, the kind of artistry you see on a Baseball Diamond between 9 people who love the game they play.  Sort of a dance, but competitive.

First day of the season.  Home opener.  Score is nothing nothing and anything can happen.

That said I expect we’ll get our asses kicked and be cleaning up the mess for weeks, but I love this game.

It’s a long season, 162 games at least.  I’m not disappointed in the talent, but we’ve never played together before and you can only expect miscommunication and errors.

It’s all good.

As we learn together we will get stronger as a team.  Pretty soon we’ll be turning those double plays and figure out where the bumps in the field are.  We have the pitching to succeed and the bullpen to close.

Now we just have to start scratching out the runs.

hat tip to Kosovian Bob Love

My headline is a paraphrase for the sake of brevity , so here’s the actual context and link..

Judith Dushku is a Mormon feminist and FORMER friend of Romney as well as a member of the same Mormon congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Judy Dushku: Then in 1994, when Romney was running for the Senate, he came out in favor of choice for women — which was surprising to me. I was pleased and called, asking to see him. I told him I suspected that we had our differences, but that maybe I could work with him if he’d come to a really good position on women and childbirth.

And he said – Yes, come to my office.

I went to his office and I congratulated him on taking a pro-choice position. And his response was – Well they told me in Salt Lake City I could take this position, and in fact I probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.

Suzan Mazur: Who’s “THEY”?

Good question! Bad answer.

Just when you thought Bush and Cheney might have to rethink starting World War III, Matt Rotshschild has to spoil your mood.  Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, writes:

Hold on a second here.

The risk of Bush attacking Iran is not yet over.

When the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran came out earlier this week, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that Cheney and the hardliners have lost, and so we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Well, I’m not exhaling at the moment.

Because I still believe Bush and Cheney are going to do the deed.

And he may well be on to something.

If there’s one thing our own, DC-based Axis of Evil learned in the runup to the Iraq war, it’s that if one argument doesn’t work you should just keep making others, until you wear down the resistance and something finally sticks.

And if it turns out later that you were wrong or lying about it, so what?  

Will bombing be enough?  Sending ground troops might be problematic, since most of those available are bogged down in another quagmire at the moment.  And World War III will be a bit of an overstatement when it turns out Iran has no nukes and little ability to fight back.  So maybe, despite Bush’s hype, it’s just another dirty little war.

Rothschild posits that Bush will simply switch gears and find another reason to attack:

“Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” [Bush said.]

Note well that he didn’t say Iran will be dangerous when it acquires such a weapon, but prior to that, when it acquires the knowledge to make one. That’s a big difference, and it shortens the timetable laid out in the NIE, which doubted Iran would have such a weapon until 2015.

Who knows when Iran will have the “knowledge to make” one? Maybe it has that knowledge already and lacks only the technical sophistication…

He reiterated that “Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace,” adding: “My opinion hasn’t changed.” And he remained as macho as ever in boasting that he wouldn’t allow Iran to acquire such a weapon while he’s around.

There’s more.  And it doesn’t read like paranoia.

The Materials Research Society fall meeting at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston has come and gone.

http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/sec.a…

This materials convention features the most advanced research in the creation of tomorrows industrial materials.  Seminars have titles such as”Atomic Layer Depsition-Fundamentals and Applications in Nanotechnology and 3D structures” or how about “Interfacing Quantum Dots, Metallic and Magnetic Nanoparticles with Biology” plus scientific equipment vendors show their wares.  Our lab deals with industrial materials so at the suggestion of my boss several of us went. This particular society and convention was new to me even though in 20 years I have attended many other similar events.

This convention had all of the interests and benefits of any other large scientific show.  Talks with familiar salesmen, scoping out new capabilities and technology used in other industries and in general it was a very good take.

But.

The most eery of all feeling hit me before we called it quits.  

Where is everybody?  This is a major big city, big time convention and attendance seemed to be off.  As I thought back, recollecting recent years the nagging though intensified.  Yes, attendance has been off for quite some time now.

It was an emotional break.  Not so much escaping the lab for a day but escaping the anal retentive accountants and business policies they generate.  These are the things that are increasingly taking the joy out of something pure, the science.

It seems that a lot of people are misunderstanding a specific moment in Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech today.  In a speech nearly devoid of intellectual content, he did say one substantive thing; but unfortunately, rather that paying attention what his words meant, the blogosphere and also the talking heads on TV are completely misconstruing it, indeed flipping its meaning around 180 degrees.

I’m refering to this assertion:

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.

Person after person seems to be taking this to mean that, according to Romney, Atheists can’t be free.  But that’s not what Romeny meant; in fact it’s nearly the opposite of what he meant.  Romney was here interpreting a previously-offered quote from John Adams and asserting a specific thesis on the nature of humanity and political liberty.

Romney’s point was that people, on their own, can’t be trusted with political liberty.  People are too chaotic, too libidinous, too unpredictable, to be granted full autonomy in the absence of an outside  religious check on their actions.  A government that does not impose its will upon the desires of a population requires another institution that will, in order to keep things from spinning out of control.

Let me explain.  Here’s what Romney said.