Today ended up being a not-half-bad day in terms of getting school stuff done. I got to bed at a decent time last night and was up early this morning for once. The writing thing seems to work best before noon, so the last couple days of not rolling out of bed until almost noon haven't done much for my productivity. But today, I got a solid eight hours of work in and was able to tick a couple items off the to-do list. Woohoo! Five days left.
Big surprise from the bank stress test: most of the major banks are going to need 10's of billions more to make their balance sheets at least look like they belong to a going concern. This is about as astonishing as the sun rising in the east, but I did find one real gem in the article:
Before today’s news, “there was some portion of the market that was buying into the doomsday stuff, that the banks are insolvent and need massive capital,” said David Trone, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller in New York. “There couldn’t be a wilder swing in sentiment between my client conversations in early March versus my client conversations today.”
All I can say is either David Trone is a moron, his clients are morons or both. Ten out of nineteen banks failed. Ten out of nineteen banks will require 10's of billions of taxpayer dollars in one form or another to be solvent. How is thinking these banks were insolvent "doomsday stuff"? Masters of the Universe indeed.
A fifteen-year-old is being held without access to normal due process under the Patriot Act for supposedly making a threatening phone call from his house while he wasn't home. Good thing we didn't sunset the Patriot Act. Otherwise this dastardly domestic terrorist would have access to the evidence against him, a lawyer, a trial, all the that unnecessary stuff that lets the terrorists win.
[Great. First one of these I've done in months and I have to do a correction. The kid is a dick who was phoning in multiple bomb threats all over the country in exchange for money from students who wanted a day off. The combination of a pathological liar for a mother (who was aware of what he was doing), a dick for a son, the usual bang-up job local news reporters are known for, and my rush to publish and you have this mess. When I do these routinely, I normally don't get around to posting a story for a day or two which would have saved me in this case. That will teach me to pay attention to a local news site.]
I know that evangelicals will be all over Obama not making a big public show of the National Day of Prayer, but frankly I'm a little tired of this game of "let's pretend" we play with our politicians. If a guy isn't religious before he takes office, why do evangelicals try to force him to fake it? I seem to recall some pretty harsh words from Jesus regarding fakers. And of course, no article about religion would be complete without one of the Liars for Jesus crowd making an appearance:
Referencing a remark the president made at a recent press conference in Turkey that Americans "do not consider ourselves a Christian nation," [Shirley Dobson] added: "That was projecting his own beliefs, but not reflecting what the majority of Americans feel. It's almost like Obama is trying to remake America into his own image. This is not a rejection of Shirley Dobson; it's a rejection of the concept that America is a spiritual nation and its foundation is Judeo-Christian."
First of all, "this" isn't about you, Shirley. I know you're going to miss sittng in the front row for the TV cameras like you did at Bush's annual prayer breakfast, but you'll just have to deal. Secondly, I'm never sure whether to laugh or cry whenever Christians employ the Nazi tactic of The Big Lie.
Is Michael Savage so completely and utterly stupid as to think that the US Constitution holds in Britian? The British government deciding to ban an American ass-hat from their country is in no way a "serious threat to free speech."
Our public schools suck. This is one big reason why. Millions of dollars paid to teachers who don't teach because they can't be trusted in a classroom full of children. Perfect. Some parent please explain again why you entrust your children to these people?
Yet-another Kindle product, this one intended to replace textbooks and newspapers. It has flaws, but this is at least a hint of the future. As far as students not being able to buy and sell their textbooks, the publishers have made that nearly impossible anyway. Even back in the 1980's, I could almost never buy a used textbook or sell my new textbook back to the bookstore because new editions were shipping every school year. The biggest obstacle is the $500 price tag. It's going to take an iteration or two of Moore's Law before I would even consider it. The E-Ink folks need to get cracking on a color version as well; I can't imagine a modern physics textbook in black and white. But it will happen, if not from Amazon, then someone else will on a different device. The days of flat dead trees are numbered.
Even though the author is wrong on the level of impact human activity has, he is certainly correct in general: Humans are a part of nature. I've been confused for years by the typical greenie-weenie concept that there is Nature and then there is Man; an idea straight out of old-school fundamentalist Christianity. If humans evolved, then of course we impact the environment just as the environment impacts us. Get over it.
OK; enough rambling. I need to get snuggled into the couch for a movie, then early to bed so I can be up at the crack of dawn writing furiously.
1 comment:
LOL ... I skimmed most of it! ;-)
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