What about McCain's gambling ties? What happened to the big NYT article -- it sank without a stone.
How much does McCain gamble? How often? Does he have unpaid debts? How much is he in thrall to the gaming interests? What does his gambling habit reveal about his decision-making process?
etc. etc. etc.
Clip from the 9/28/08 NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/us/politics/28gambling-web.html
As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.
“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming†is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.
As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.
Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.†Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.
Please read The Field Negro's guest blogger, Tim Wise, on Sarah Palin and white privilege..
In fact, I'd recommend reading The Field Negro regularly.
AccKK! I send my sincere hopes for a full and speedy recovery.
Happy birthday to all born yesterday.
Wednesday, I made a decision about my house-for-sale that made me giddy with happiness. Yesterday, still giddy, I spent the early part of yesterday morning writing a review of Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Review partially done, I went to meet the Bad Moms for coffee. While there I suddenly realized I had forgotten an assignment due at 4 pm for the Mild and Moderate Disabilities class, so scampered home, wrote like a monkey on performance enhancers, and drove over the San Mateo bridge to the Oakland hills for said class.
Returning home across bridge, the bay was that beautiful dark steely blue of twilight. I'd like a trip to the tropics. With boat, if possible.
I continued the normal by writing my nephew Jesse Robbins a birthday salute.
I don't go to church any more, I'm pretty much an atheist, but I do miss the communal Peace that is part of the Episcopal rite.
So I'll send it out anyway: "May the peace of the Lord, which passes all understanding, be with you".
On eucalyptus: Sometime in the last2nd-to-last century, some bright boy thought to start a pulp-paper industry by importing one species of eucalyptus from Australia. Our climate works for them, but they don't work well with our fires.
From an interview with my great-grandfather
A Tree Missionary
On arriving in Santa Maria valley I observed that the land showed great fertility, but that it was treeless and windswept. At the close of the dry year of 1877 I engaged in the sale of trees and seeds for a San Francisco house.
Unfortunately a shipment of treees arrived at Port Harford while the railroad was disabled from washouts and I lost the trees. I spent 1878 and a part of 1879 in paying up my losses.
Incidentally, I planted over forty thousand eucalyptus trees in 1879 and 1880, some of which still stand. The giants in front of Frank McCoy's Santa Maria Inn were planted the first of June, 1879.
If you would like to keep track of California wildfires, I recommend http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_current, from the state department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and Cal Fire News, which appears to be an amateur effort, but with good access.
Although small (630 acres) the Trabing fire (Watsonville) was really nasty and fast-spreading because of the dense stands of eucalyptus, which is notorious for sending burning brands for miles.
The original reports suggested a motorcyclist had been setting fires by the roadside, but more recent reports say "under investigation".
Yes, there was a thunderstorm (with lightening strikes) on Saturday over the Santa Cruz mountains, which appears to have started the Hummingbird fire.
The Indians fire (near Big Sur) has been burning since June 8..
Wildfires Today has national coverage.
BTW, many of the sites are very slow-loading, so be patient
@ #29: cameras that don't look like cameras for taking pictures
They're called cell phones.
My daughter and I are currently 3,000 miles apart. We've emailed each other cell phone photos of possible purchase items (garments, houses) etc.
Even in the "no photography allowed" venues like department stores the cell phone photos get by.
Of course, they aren't careful compositions like Patrick's, but the essential information is captured.
My message today is that family rifts can mend. One that has lasted more than 25% of my darling daughter's life shows signs of narrowing....for which I am deeply thankful.
I hope you & yours have the peace and hopefulness of this season.
Born in late 1951. Very earliest memory is June, 1954, when my parents brought my sister back from the hospital (what did they do that for? It is boring and cries).
My earliest political/national memory is the Kennedy-Nixon debate...or is it? Am I "remembering" seeing film clips later? I don't know. The same is true of the Sputnik launch -- I don't trust my memory, because of so much exposure later.
Vivid, trustworthy memories of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis--mom stocking dad's closet with food & water, the stupid and frightening "duck and cover" drills, etc.
It occurs to me that my very early memories are strongly visual. As television wasn't wide-spread in the late 1950s, that might skew my memory.
Once upon a time, I thought I was a pretty good navigator, with an inborn sense of direction.
Then my daughter enrolled in a college in Massachusetts, and we rented a car at Logan and embarked on a voyage of....the damned. Several times.
Turns out I navigate well when (a) the sun is visible (b) there are landmarks, as there are in "hills to the west, bay to the east" -- you are on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Anyway, on daughter-delivery-to-college in August, we rented a car with a Garmin GPS system. Worked great for the airport to general vicinity of college, but since college town was having a spasm of surface road re-working...couldn't get there from here.
Eventually we learned (a) by direct reckoning, how to get from motel to dorm and (b) if buggered up on other expeditions, pull over, find the local street address, and re-set the danged thing.
Back home in California, Tom-tom works great except in downtown San Francisco, where the high-rises block satellite access. And Tom-tom doesn't have the world-weary voice that announces "recalculating" if you don't perform as expected.
Stepson #1 bought a house. Stepson's mother & I have agreed family celebrations should now be hosted at stepson's house. He and his girlfriend are not quite up to the whole production, so turkey (plus potatoes and dessert) is being cooked at his mom's house and shlepped 10 minutes. I'm producing the obligatory tangy Brussels sprouts, grilled baby squash, and the traditional romaine lettuce+avocado+mandarin orange salad.
Derocking the turkey: Brooks at #5 and Greg at #14, as Terry at #21 implies heat transfer is all.
Flashback to 1998. I'm 9 months pregnant, and for some insane-pregnant-lady reason I am obsessed for hosting Thanksgiving for about 25 relatives, many of whom are....inflexible. Meal -24 hours. Go to pick up the free-range, never-frozen, always had a fancy life turkey from the meat market. NO TURKEY! They'd sold my reserved turkey to somebody who had a name similar to mine (and go figure that one out). They did have a similar, but frozen-rock-solid turkey. Bring it home. It is good to have an engineer spouse. Remove turkey from plastic casing, enrobe in a heavy-duty plastic bag. Run bathtub full of tepid (70 degree) water. Insert turkey. Setuselessculinarily-challenged houseguest to swish thebowling ballturkey through the water, and monitor water temperature, adding more hot water if water temp falls below 62 degrees. After 120 minutes, turkey is sufficiently thawed to claw out the giblet packages. Reformulate turkey packaging to "turkey condom", allowing warm water to circulate into body and neck cavities. Determine that stuffing the turkey is a bad idea, and figure out how to get that nice bread pudding texture for stuffing cooked outside of the turkey. After 6 hours (at bed time), the turkey's somewhat thawed inside and out, with a thick layer of frozen meat on the breast. Put it in the refrigerator and hope for the best.
Next morning: still a rock-like layer between surface and ribcage. More tub swishing. Decide to roast the bird breast-down at 325 degrees, adding about 50% to the estimated time, and stuff the cavity with a coarse mince of apples, pears, onions and celery, and baste frequently.
Outcome: one of the better versions. Stuffing was pretty good too, baked in casseroles covered with a plate with a brick on top to emulate the can't expand features of a turkey cavity.
Dena at #4. I like the rainbow-food tradition, but really blue food is hard to come by. When my kids were little (before blue potatoes or corn chips were available) I cheated and used blue food coloring on various iterations of mashed potatoes. There's also "confetti rice" or "jewel rice". the basic idea is that you cook rice (I like basmati) with about 10% extra water, and then toss the watery rice with diced dried fruit, which allows the fruit to partially rehydrate. Either allow to steam for a few minutes, or cool and serve cold with a mild vinagrette for a rice salad. I haven't made it with just blueberries, but I think it would be good.
I lived in a converted shipping container in 1982-1984, in California. It had some upsides (cheap) and some downsides. The biggest downside was the width -- a standard container's interior dimension is 7'8". My living quarters had interior drywall added, leaving an interior width of 88 inches.
Given the configuration of my space, I had to put the bed on the long wall, instead of across the short wall. I had a queen bed (75 inches wide) -- leaving only 15 inches of space between bed and wall.
The next episode of shipping-container architecture was at a friend's, who arrange 3 in a u-shape, with a covered patio between them. Much more satisfactory.
I first saw stacked containers as office space at a European sporting event in the early 90s.
I am a 4th generation Californian, and the sight of freaked me out for a moment --don't those people know about earthquakes?!? --then I realized space was the problem in Holland, not seismicity.
Finally, the mystery of the enormous wait for burritos at odd times, at my favorite joint, is revealed!
They know that we’re phoning in their order to Mountain View the moment they walk in the door, and they know we’ve done everything in our power to keep them from waiting. A lot of restaurants are happy racking up a few days’ supply in the burrito cellar, but that’s not the same as getting a fresh burrito straight from the tunnel - you can taste the difference.
Mountain View is home to Burrito Real and La Costena Market. They're busy filling the Burrito Tunnel at New York City dining times.
I just got a new version of the same old, same old, this time in Amazon flavor.
Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.
Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.
Please follow the link below: https: [backslash] [backslash] www.amazon.com[backslash]execobidos[backslash]sign-in[dot]htmland update your account information.We appreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place.
Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.
Other news: I have more than one email address, all of which are forwarded into my main account. My ISP uses postini, which so far is only catching about half of these, which have various subject lines that all include "problem" but have various forms ("work problem"; "re: work problem"; "office problem" "re: office problem" and so on.
Hi, I hate to be the one to mention this, but people continue to talk about your weight issue and it just disgusts me. Whether you know it by now, people are always chattering about each other at work but you come up more than enough.
Andrew Schlafly on the Arboreal Octopus Page Talk Page:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Pacific_Northwest_Arboreal_Octopus
I took a screen shot.
Here is what he wrote:
I had no role in this prank. But I am amused by it. Apparently this entry is a conservative parody of environmentalists. However, liberal blogs intent on mocking this website failed to get the joke. They fell for it hook, line and sinker. Now, I don't like to fool anyone, and I wasn't behind this. But I can't deny being amused by thousands of liberal bloggers trying to ridicule Conservapedia based on a joke about themselves.
Their mockery rose to such levels that a Wired News reporter called me this afternoon to interview me about Conservapedia, and specifically about this entry. Really, this is too funny even to describe further.
When the Soviet Union fell and was auctioning off many things, I think Christopher Buckley circulated a (phony) news story about auctioning off the body of Lenin. One or all of the major news networks fell for the joke. Now perhaps that shouldn't be funny and there were angry words afterwards. But sometimes we all need to lighten up a bit.--Aschlafly 18:56, 27 February 2007 (EST)
I suppose I am a "liberal blogger" by ASchlafly's lights.
I observe that:
ASchlafly cannot, or will not, use a search engine to discover the real origins of the page (to teach media literacy to 6-12th graders).
ASchlafly cannot understand the disconnect between Conservapedia's stated mission with the continued, uncommented presence of the arboreal octopus page. OK, it is funny, leave it up and leave a clue as to the joke!
Peter Erwin: I am not sure that there is data to back up the New Scientist claim. I live in California and am an amateur school-data-collection geek. Comparing two crude instruments (estimates of school-aged children vs. public + private headcounts) -- the "school exodus is small.
What I will say is that the Exodus Movement folks are public relations geniuses.
And as far as Patrick Henry College and its ability to take over the world goes --it seems to have imploded in May of 2006
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/mayweb-only/120-12.0.html
A contentious debate at Patrick Henry College that began over theological differences, the interpretation of Scripture, and academic freedom has prompted 5 of the school's 16 full-time faculty members to announce they will not be returning to the conservative, Christian college next year. The announcements bring the total number of departing professors to nine in the past year, not including two adjuncts, as well as four senior executives who left in the past 18 months, departing professors say.v
As to the banning homeschooling.
While I am sympathetic to the *headdesk* response (let me tell about the k-5 teacher who was worried about the incoming Hindu student because "they worship the devil, don't they, Hindus?")
The right to homeschool in the US should be preserved on several counts:
1. Most importantly:
So some some homeschoolers are being taught worldviews and doctrines you (and I) don't agree with. In our country, they have the freedom to do so. Imagine the shoe on the other foot: would you not like to preserve the freedom to teach your children the doctrines in which you believe?
2. Saying "homeschooling" is like saying "vehicle". Are you talking about a coupe or a sedan? An SUV or a Prius? A 4 wheel drive or front wheel? A light truck or a commercial truck?
You want to ban them all because why? There is a problem with one?
I'm out here in Silicon Valley. I admit I do not have hard data, but my sense is that most of the homeschool families in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties are secular, come from families who cannot afford both a SV mortgage and private school tuition, and are homeschooling kids who just don't fit into the test, test, study for the test, test some more pressure cooker of contemporary schooling.
Most of the local highschool age homeschoolers I know (other than those with Down Syndrome or other intellectual deficits) are taking community college courses and/or distance learning courses.
Arggk. This response has gone on long enough.
And somebody has been up to naughtiness (I suspect minions of the internet tube thingies' most ardent cephalopodophile). I'm posting the whole thing here because it is sure to disappear shortly.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Pacific_Northwest_Arboreal_Octopus
About The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are Amphibian, spending only their earliest life stages and mating seasons in their aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and their well designed skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming dried out for prolonged periods of time
Facts
Armspan: 2-2.5 ft
Habitat: Temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest
Diet: Insects, snails, frogs, occasionaly small mammals.
Colour: Mottled Greenish Brown, but may changes color based on moods
[edit]
Psychology
An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusc), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations designed for the three dimensional environment have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. Being well designed for the challenges and richness of this environment means that the tree octopus shows very advanced behavioral attributes.[1]
Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (actually closer to "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it.[2]
[edit]
Physiology
Tree octopuses have complex and well designed eyes, almost comparable to humans. Besides allowing them to see their prey and environment, it helps them in inter-octopus relations. Although they are not social animals like us, they display to one another their emotions through their ability to change the color of their skin: red indicates rage; white, fear; while they normally maintain a mottled brown tone to blend in with the background.
The reproductive cycle of the tree octopus is still linked to its roots in the waters of the Puget Sound from where it is thought to have originated. Every year, in Spring, tree octopuses leave their homes in the Olympic National Forest and migrate towards the shore and, eventually, their spawning grounds in Hood Canal. There, they congregate and find mates. After the male has deposited his sperm, he returns to the forests, leaving the female to find an aquatic lair in which to attach her strands of egg-clusters. The female will guard and care for her eggs until they hatch, refusing even to eat, often dying from her selflessness. The young will spend the first month or so floating through Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, and as far as North Puget Sound before eventually moving out of the water and beginning their adult lives.[3]
[edit]
Why It's Endangered
Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and perrigrine falcon. The few that make it to the Canal are further hampered in their reproduction by the growing problem of pollution from farming and residential run-off. Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory.
The possibility of Pacific Northwest tree octopus extinction is not an unwarranted fear. Other tree octopus species -- including the Douglas octopus and the red-ringed madrona sucker -- were once abundant throughout the Cascadia region, but have since gone extinct because of threats similar to those faced by paxarbolis, as well as overharvesting by the now-illegal tree octopus trade.
I have wasted more than an hour reading these comments, laughing so hard my danged cough came back, and hitting the random pages link at the source of all the hilarity.
This is extra-fine:
Communism
Communism is government in which the state owns everything and the wealth is divided evenly among the citizens. Communists believe that if they share everything, no one will ever have to work. It is an atheist government not believing in God and only in the "state" as the supreme thing on the earth. The most famous communist government was the USSR or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an official government starting in 1922 and ending in 1991.
A relatively well-educated sixth-grader could do better than that.
To be fair, I remember fooling around with Wikipedia in its infancy, and it was pretty sparse--and some of the entries were equally lame.
(forgive me if this essay is well-known to you all.)
Thanks to BadgerBag
Pam Noles' essay on the whitewashing of Earthsea, Shame
Robert Halmi, Sr. said this: "Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries, was cast completely colorblind, as any of my productions have been. We searched for the right actors for the roles and brought in diversity to the cast as a result. There was no decision to make Ged blond and pale-skinned." — Interview on Scifi.com's Ask Robert Halmi, Sr. feature on its 'Legend of Earthsea' website, July 20, 2004.
Pam Noles writes:
Sometime in spring 2004 I saw the first casting notices about the SciFi Channel's "A Legend of Earthsea" miniseries blurbed in a film industry trade. What I read was hurtful to my heart. I wonder how many other FoPs (Fans of Pigment) lunged to their bookshelves and snatched down their copies to make sure they didn't imagine what they had read all those years ago. Did they also make character charts on a legal pad, three columns labeled "Character," "Original Color," "Hollywood Color"? And when they finished filling out the boxes, did they sit there staring at it, stunned at the truth? Those Hollywood People took all of the key heroic players and shifted them down into the paler end of the spectrum. And they were obvious about it. Yes, they knew enough about the rules to keep at least one Magical Negro around to help the newly blond haired, blue eyed surfer Ged through his Journey Of Transformation To Save The World, because lord knows white boys can't do something like that on their own.
[snip]
Le Guin isn't the one who should have raised the stink about what The Hollywood People did to the racial stance she deliberately made in her books. In her Dec. 16, 2004 commentary on Slate Magazine, she termed this "The Whitewashing of Earthsea."
The genre news outlets should have been out front on this story. Their silence during the months SciFi Channel's adaptation was in production was appalling.
We admit that Fan often equals Obsessive. So you are not surprised to hear that from the day I spotted that first blurb in a Hollywood trade, the one that said We Made Them All White, I began tracking the genre news outlets. I expected they would bring what Le Guin also hilariously called "Earthsea in Clorox" to the editorial pages. But I found only scatterings of comments from other fans on the occasional message board and blog. In the genre news outlets, there was nothing. Except for the ones that were running "A Legend of Earthsea" contests in collaboration with Scifi.com.
This is what it feels like to put your fingers in a gob of spit on your face so you can wipe it from your eyes: Eeewwww.
Do go read the whole thing...this is just a snippet.
email from the head of Tulane's hospital, posted at GruntDoc's Blog
"This event is just below a nuclear catastrophe in its degree of magnitude, and it's clear we're not ready and if we don't do better the next time a really hard rain's a-gonna fall."
GruntDoc: Tulane Hospital
A letter that's making the EMS rounds (two quotes):
"our busiest day we off loaded just under 15,000 patients by air and ground"
"i have meet so many people while down here. people who were at ground zero at 9-11, people who have done tusanmi relief, tours in iraq and every one of them has said this is the worst thing they have ever seen. its unaminous and these are some battle worn veterans of every kind of disaster you can imagine."
Full text of letter at blogborygmi.
Blogborygmi has another dispatch from a rapid response team, perhaps based in NY:
"But there are good stories, too. Stories of amazing courage. We took a family off a roof - 4 kids and the mother, and there wasn't going to be room for the father. The woman didn't want to go, wanted to wait until somebody came with a bigger boat. The father whispered in my ear, "Go. Now. ". I looked at him, and he looked at me, both of us knowing that nobody else was probably going to show up. The NO cops talk about the "animals" they're trying to control. But here was this guy, probably one of the bravest guys I've ever seen. He had been on that roof for 4 days, and now he was going to be alone. I hope they're telling those stories on the news."
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2007 | 10 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 17 |
| 2004 | 29 |
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