A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.
Those who work for this president have a fetish for stage managing the news. They never simply trust the facts; or maybe a better way of saying it is that they don’t trust the American people to be able to handle the facts. Washington has been consumed in recent weeks about who, exactly, massaged the administration’s “talking points” on Benghazi. The underlying problem is that there were talking points at all.
But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either. Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?
The "Oh Shit" Clique:
Mostly comprised of new members who are scared out of their minds the moment they walk in. They've heard too much about Crossfit to walk away... but since they have no idea of the "schedule", they show up at a random time. They see 30 people sweating profusely, cursing, jumping or lunging around a spartan gym... while "All I Do Is Win" is pumping out at 110 db. There is but one thought... "WTF?" Luckily, they glom on to each other during Foundations class and relate to each other about their nervousness. Each one laughs self-consciously as the moves they are doing as part of the training hurt like a mother... and create an ungodly soreness the next day. The good ones come back and put themselves through the stress all over again... until they "graduate"!
Unfortunately, this leads to doing their first real Crossfit WOD. They are just like every other person in the class that is supposed to know what is going on... except they don't. What was a clean again? How do I set up for that move? How much does the bar weigh? Except now they feel like they are IN THE WAY... of the LEET (geek speak for Elite) athletes.... and they are.
There’s a very big difference between association and causation. Every person diagnosed with colon cancer used a signficant amount of toilet paper throughout his or her lifetime. Does this mean that toilet paper CAUSES colon cancer, or is just associated with colon cancer?
— “Broccoli has more protein than steak”—and other crap « Eathropology
The Wildlife Restoration Program, prescribed by the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, distributes excise-tax revenues collected in the previous year to state wildlife agencies. The money goes toward programs for hunter training and wildlife conservation, paying for the upkeep of nature preserves, and providing capital to buy and protect new parcels of undeveloped land. Funds distributed by the program, which also draw on a tax on archery equipment, are expected to rise 38 percent this year to $534 million, up from $388 million in 2012, according to the report. That total, though, does not account for sequestration, which could shave $21 million from this year’s disbursements.
Much of the uptick in gun-buying appears motivated by long-simmering fears that the Obama administration will institute tough gun-control measures. Revenues from the 10 to 11 percent firearms tax jumped 45 percent in fiscal 2009, which began just before his election.
…
The money from the program has provided MacCallum’s agency with financial stability as revenues from hunting and fishing licenses have decreased dramatically. Young people in the state, he said, spend less time outside.
— Hunters, Guns, and Money: Firearms Boom Sparks a Boon for Wildlife - NationalJournal.com
The NYU faculty itself is less of a united front than a sprawling United Nations, ranging from the Tisch School of the Arts to the Stern School of Business to the College of Arts and Sciences. An issue that irritates the more classically left-leaning faculty of arts and sciences may not trouble the faculty of the business school or the medical school at all.
Some novels are almost impossible to review, either because they’re deeply ambiguous or because they contain big surprises the reviewer doesn’t wish to give away. In the case of “The Accursed,” both strictures apply. What I wish I could say is simply this: “Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel: E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it. I wish I could tell you more.
— ‘The Accursed,’ by Joyce Carol Oates - NYTimes.com Review by Stephen Kink
Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they?
Nearly every mobile and desktop RSS client syncs with Google Reader today, often as the only option. Getting widespread client support for any other service will be difficult since it’s probably going to be a while before there’s a clear “winner” to switch to. The last thing we need is a format war — with Reader’s shutdown in July, we don’t have time for one. An obvious idea that many have proposed (or already implemented) is to make a new service mirror the (never-officially-documented) Google Reader API.
If you (like many of us at Engadget) are in a state of shock facing the end of Google Reader this summer, there may be an easy replacement. RSS app/service Feedly posts on its blog that it has been anticipating the shutdown of Google’s service for some time, and invested in building its own backend. Dubbed “Normandy” it is intended to be a clone of the Google API running on Google’s own App Engine, set to swap in on July 1st when the service ends. Even better, in the comments Feedly states it will open the API for other 3rd party clients once everything is stable. The only bad news?
— Feedly promises ‘seamless’ transition after Google Reader to its own backend
Last night, I went to meet a group of friends for dinner in San Francisco after work. As I sat down at the table, two of my dining companions asked in unison, with eye-opening looks on their faces, “Did you hear the news?” “Yes,” I replied as I shuffled my chair in and unfurled my napkin. “They picked a new pope, from Latin America.” “No, not that,” they responded. “Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1.
— The End of Google Reader Sends Internet Into an Uproar - NYTimes.com
“I admit that on the night of December 30th 2012, I was beginning to feel the dizzying preliminary effects of influenza (A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, perhaps, or A/Victoria/361/2011 (H3N2)-like), and therefore was prone to have religious-like out-of-body thoughts, as well as shaking and sweats, and I admit that the friend who accompanied me went slightly crazy that night, too, because of the guy with the gigantic head who was sitting in front of us and who made it impossible to see the They Might Be Giants gig at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. But, whatever was the cause, by the time the band got to the last song that night I was in some kind of Tigris-Euphrates prophetic condition, which was the perfectly receptive condition for one of the band’s more recent compositions, namely “The Mesopotamians,” from The Else (2007).”
- Rick Moody
— Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead - The Rumpus.net by Rick Moody
Yesterday…
Is done. Over. Finished.
Cannot be changed, unless you have a hot tub time machine or DeLorean.
Shouldn’t be forgotten, but learned from. What went right? What went wrong?
Was composed of all the habits and choices you’ve made in the past.
Might have been the best day of your life. Remember it fondly, but don’t live in the past.
Might have been the worst day of your life. Move on.
If Roman Catholicism was capable of learning Greek while it was speaking Aramaic, of learning Celtic while it was speaking Latin, now it either has to learn Chinese or ‘ciao,’
— Cardinals Elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as New Pope - NYTimes.com
