Rand Paul: Obama’s criticism of BP ‘un-American’.
“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'” Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”
The Obama administration has used the “boot heel” phrase to describe its commitment to holding BP accountable for the spill and its cleanup.
-RichardH
Senate – approves – financial overhaul.
Four Republicans — Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine — broke ranks with their party to support it.
Furthermore, Senators Brown, Snowe, and Collins voted for cloture (cutoff of the filibuster).
They deserve our praise and thanks for voting independently from their party and acting in the best interests of our economy.
If you feel so inclined, send them all a “thank you” note. I have.
Note: Regarding the bill itself, it may not be perfect but it is a step in the right direction.
UPDATE: Former allies tee off on Brown.
-RichardH
Follow this link to the article by Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
Among the arguments against conventional wisdom on Iran are the following paragraphs.
Many Washington insiders were shocked last Oct. 1 when Tehran agreed to send 2,640 pounds (then as much as 75 percent of Iran’s total) of low-enriched uranium abroad to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that does medical research.
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The conventional wisdom presented in the FCM today has it that Tehran backed off the deal. True; but that is only half the story, a tale that highlights how, in Israel’s set of priorities, regime change in Iran comes first.The uranium swap had the initial support of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And a follow-up meeting was scheduled for Oct. 19 at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
However, the accord soon came under criticism from Iran’s opposition groups, including the “Green Movement” led by defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has had ties to the American neocons and to Israel since the Iran-Contra days of the 1980s when he was the prime minister who collaborated on secret arms deals.
Strangely, it was Mousavi’s U.S.-favored political opposition that led the assault on the nuclear agreement, calling it an affront to Iran’s sovereignty and suggesting that Ahmadinejad wasn’t being tough enough.
Then, on Oct. 18, a terrorist group called Jundullah, acting on amazingly accurate intelligence, detonated a car bomb at a meeting of top Iranian Revolutionary Guards commanders and tribal leaders in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan in southeastern Iran. A car full of Guards was also attacked.
In case you are wondering about the acronym FCM, it stands for Fawning Corporate Media.
Follow this link to the article posted on the McClatchy News web site.
British Petroleum announced today that it has fired its top engineer for safety design and replaced him with Jody McNamara, age 12, a sixth-grade honors student at the Dwight Eisenhower Middle School in Tulsa, Okla.
On 16 May 2010, UCLA Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman posted The Party of Knowledge vs. the Party of Ignorance.
Not only do the conservative movement and the Republican Party hate new knowledge, they hate the people who produce it. The latest maneuver in the House – where the Republicans used an obscene little trick to kill a bill to provide more funding for research and for science education – illustrates the point.
The bill was ready to pass the House when the Republicans offered a “motion to recommit with instructions.” The minority is allowed one such motion per bill. So the Republicans offered a motion that would have gutted the bill by freezing all the increased funding until the Twelfth of Nev – until the Federal budget was balanced. Easy to defeat, no? Not when the Republicans also included a change to fire federal civil servants who view porn “including child pornography” – at work. (…)
Obviously, the GOP didn’t want to debate science funding on its merits, so they resorted to a dirty trick. And none of the folks involved seems to want to talk to the press about it. The Democrats pulled the bill, and will try to regroup next week.
-RichardH
Follow this link to the article in The New York Times. RichardH just posted the link in comment on this blog.
This article explains numerous ways in which we can be misled by measurements.
When these types of measurement results are the subject of media stories, it leads to another example of Greenberg’s Law Of The Media.
Follow this link to information you’d rather not know about how vulnerable your computer may be. Warning: this article may require some computer expertise to understand (or maybe not).
The Matousec researchers found that common software tools, including Norton Internet Security 2010, McAfee Total Protection 2010, and Trend Micro Internet Security Pro all had flaws that allowed attackers to bypass the protections that these programs offer. The malicious software can do this without even having to run as an Administrator.
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.The researchers found exploitable versions of this vulnerability in every program they tested, including products from McAfee, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky. In fact, the researchers said that the only reason that they found exploits in only 34 products was that they only had time to test 34 products (Microsoft, for its part, believes that its security software is not affected, but is still investigating the issue). Many others may be vulnerable too. They also developed a toolkit dubbed KHOBE (“kernel hook bypassing engine”) to allow the rapid detection and exploitation of such flaws.
As far as I can tell, if your computer does not have a multicore CPU, then it is unlikely that this flaw can be exploited.
Maybe I have good reason for not updating my machine. And to think how often I have complained that I let the salesperson talk me out of buying a dual core machine the last time I upgraded.
Sobering thoughts for us techno-geeks.
On 13 May 2010, Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) wrote The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City”, interviewing Joe Flood on NYC’s 1970’s fetish on efficiency and “how its overreliance on smart guys and computer formulas turned out be a disaster, especially when it came to the withdrawal of fire protection from poorer neighborhoods” with an abundance of fires.
One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? (…) Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that’s what they got.
Quoting Bill James in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball,
“Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn’t. Less than 20% and it’s not very useful, more than 20% and there’s probably something wrong with the numbers.”
Perhaps Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts supporters of subsides for casinos should read Joe Flood’s forthcoming book, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities.
-RichardH
Follow this link to the article by L. Randall Wray.
Here is the tail end of one of his reasons:
I do not know any household that has been able to run budget deficits for approximately 190 out of the past 230-odd years, and to accumulate debt virtually nonstop since 1837.
