AdamSmith

To comment on one thing I actually know a little bit about, wonders never cease, Romney is stridently on record as opposing the auto industry bailout. Even after it demonstrably worked, he argued GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy without any federal meddling. Steve Rattner, who ran the bailout under Obama in its crucial early stages, demolished that argument in a withering piece in the WSJ, detailing how he and his team scoured the earth for private financing to support restructuring of the car companies, but came up empty-handed -- understandably so in the investment climate of early 2009. Without government intervention, GM and Chrysler would have gone into liquidation. Besides the hundreds of thousands of job losses at the two companies, the knock-on effect would have pulled down much of their supply chain. Those suppliers being in turn crucial to many other industries besides, the damage to the entire U.S. manufacturing economy would have taken decades to repair, and would have eliminated us as competitors altogether in many segments. As Bush himself defended the bailout to a Republican gathering after leaving office, "Sometimes reality gets in the way of philosophy." / End of rant.

She's autistic. The paintings shown in the article are truly something. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/09/world/the-extraordinary-art-of-autistic-five-year-old-monet/?cid=homepage-ob-gc&iref=obnetwork

Holding this ticket in my back pocket feels probably just about as good as using it would.

http://www.sickipedia.org

Jealous! Never been to Corner Pocket.

Barack Obama: the end of a love affair Six years after offering hope and change, polls show the American public has fallen out of love with their president so where did it all go wrong? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/11150023/Barack-Obama-the-end-of-a-love-affair.html

Truly stunning. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/11151503/Breathtaking-Aurora-Borealis-timelapse.html

You come here worrying about that?

Who wants to go first?

Why Do People in New Orleans Talk That Way? The origins of the accent. By Jesse Sheidlower If you've been listening to coverage of Katrina's devastation on the radio, you've no doubt heard the distinctive New Orleans accents of victims, officials, and rescue workers alike. Some of them speak with a familiar, Southern drawl; others sound almost like they're from Brooklyn. Why do people in New Orleans talk that way? New Orleans has long been one of the most diverse cities in the country, and it has a correspondingly rich level of linguistic diversity. Founded by the French in the early 18th century, the city was ruled by Spain from 1763 to 1803; in the 1760s, the Acadians, or Cajuns, arrived from Canada speaking a variety of French quite unlike Parisian French. In 1803, English-speaking settlers began to arrive in significant numbers, and throughout the 19th century the city saw heavy immigration from Germany, Ireland, and Italy. As the major port city in the South, New Orleans was also a gateway for the slave states, which brought in speakers of a variety of African languages. The slave trade also brought New Orleanians into contact with speakers of Plantation Southern English from the East Coast. And Midland English reached the city through river traffic headed down the Ohio and into the Mississippi River. The language of New Orleans reflects this hodgepodge. There is substantial borrowing from French in banquette for "sidewalk" (now old-fashioned) and gallery for "porch," not to mention a large number of food terms including beignet, étouffée, jambalaya, praline, and filé. French-derived idioms include make the groceries for "to buy groceries; to shop for food" and make ménage for "to clean the house," both from the French faire; for, meaning "at (a specified time)" ("the parade's for 7:00"), is from French pour. A lagniappe, "a small gratuity or gift; an extra" is from Louisiana French but borrowed from Spanish, which itself took it from Quechua, an Indian language of South America. Similarly, bayou is from French but ultimately from Choctaw, and pirogue, a dug-out canoe or open boat used in the bayous, went from the Caribbean-Indian language Carib to Spanish to French to English. Gumbo is from French but ultimately from a West African language. New Orleanians also use many Northernisms, including chiggers for the biting mites that nearby Southerners usually call red bugs, and wishbone for the chicken part more usually known as the pully-bone in the South. Despite the intrinsic interest of New Orleans speech, the city has not been extensively studied by professional linguists. Locals, however, are self-conscious about the language and take a fierce pride in it, making careful distinctions about the speeches of different neighborhoods and ethnic groups. (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is regarded as particularly accurate.) One of the better-known varieties is spoken by the "Yats," lower- and middle-class white New Orleanians. (The name derives from "Where y'at?" a local greeting.) The Yats have a strong Irish heritage, and several features of their speech recall stereotypical Brooklynese—"dese," "dem," "doze" for "these," "them," "those"; "berl," "earl," and "ersters" for "boil," "oil," and "oysters"; and "mudder" for "mother." Uptown whites, and blacks, use different pronunciations. Some of these are characteristically Southern, such as the diphthongization of vowels in all and task (sounding something like "owl" and "tyask," respectively). But in other cases, New Orleans English does not reflect usual Southern forms—it retains the "i" diphthong in words like hide and my (usually pronounced "hahd" and "mah" in the South), and maintains a distinction between the vowels in pen and pin or ten and tin (usually pronounced like the second item in each pair). There are also a number of unusual pronunciations with unclear origins, including the first-syllable stress on adult, cement, insurance, and umbrella, and the fact that when you rinse your hands, you "wrench" them in the "zink." Explainer thanks Bill Kretzschmar of the Linguistic Atlas of America, native New Orleanian Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Joan Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional English. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2005/09/why_do_people_in_new_orleans_talk_that_way.html

Just came across this cute SF/horror/camp (redundant! ) film blog: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/ Sample content, on 2 flicks I adore... Surcease of Sorrow We trundled ourselves up to St. Louis on Sunday to attend the Vincentennial showing of The Raven and The Abominable Dr. Phibes. In truth, this would not have been my choice (the Laura/Dragonwyck double tonight would be more to my liking), but it's what fit our schedule and, well, it's an event that we wanted to support. Plus, I had never seen any of the Corman Poe films on the big screen, and feel poorer for it. The Raven came after the initial flurry of films when Corman was beginning to burn out on Poe. The director used the film as a kind of rearguard action to maintain his interest by taking the elements of the Poe films and turning them into a comedy. The story here wanders pretty far from the text of The Raven, but that's not surprising. There actually IS a raven in the movie, and they read the poem at the outset, so it's truer to Poe than, say, The Haunted Palace (which wasn't intended as a Poe film). Most of the virtues of the Poe films are on screen here, from Price's neurasthenic aesthete to Daniel Haller's eye-deceiving sets to Corman's penchant for weird light shows. It's fun watching the director navigate a film that cries out for elaborate special effects without spending any money on them. Corman's main special effect is the jump cut. The story here finds gentle wizard Erasmus Craven pouring over a quaint and curious tome of forgotten lore, all the while mooning for his lost wife, Lenore. Soon, a raven comes a-tapping, and the raven turns out to be one Dr. Adolfus Bedlo, who has been turned into a raven by the head of the Society of Wizards, the sinister Dr. Scarabus. Bedlo, on being transformed back into a human, notes that he saw Craven's dead wife at Scarabus's castle and soon, Craven, Bedlo, and their entourage are off to confront Scarabus. Lenore, it turns out, is very much alive, having faked her death and taken up with Scarabus. Scarabus, for his part, is after the secrets of Craven's gestural magic and has set the whole thing up as a trap, with the participation of Bedlo, it turns out. The movie climaxes with a wizard's duel in which Craven and Scarabus test each other to the death. Frankly, The Raven plays a bit like a kiddie movie. It's mildly amusing, and mainly of interest for its actors. Price is Craven, of course, while Boris Karloff is the wicked Dr. Scarabus. The movie is stolen by Peter Lorre's Bedlo. Hazel Court's treacherous Lenore and her plunging decolletage is what keeps the movie from actually being a kid's movie, I guess. On the whole, it plays better on the big screen than it does on home video. There's something to be said for being bigger than life. That burning barn footage from House of Usher gets re-used again at the end of The Raven and it's surprisingly effective, in spite of its over-familiarity. Corman's Poe films had a paucity of imagination when it came to endings, which has to be chalked up to the director himself. Screenwriter Richard Matheson has never had problems with endings on his own. I've written about Phibes before, but this time through, I was struck by the weird way it seems to exist out of time. I'm presuming that it's set in the 1920s, based on the automobiles, and that's of a piece with the roots of the character in French serials like Les Vampires. The art-deco design sensibility really pops on the big screen (this is the first time I've ever seen Phibes on a big screen), and its emphasis on deformity and design makes it very much of a piece with horror movies made between the World Wars, with their emphasis on design and deformity. Both of these films poke some gentle fun at Price himself. They both feature scenes of the actor cooking, sending up his fame as a gourmet. Phibes goes it one further and needles the actor's fame as an art collector, too, when Phibes lingers on a painting in the house of one of his victims just long enough to sniff at it. It's a good moment. Otherwise, whenever I watch Phibes , I come away from it with my usual desire to change my usernames all across the internets to "Vulnavia." http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2011/05/surcease-of-sorrow.html

This research has been headlined some places as 'Evidence For An Afterlife' etc. Following is a bit less fluffed-up report. Awareness Can Continue For Several Minutes After Clinical Death George Dvorsky i09.com The biggest ever scientific study of near-death experiences shows that awareness can continue for a surprisingly long duration after the brain has shut down completely. The finding suggests that these experiences are more than just hallucinations and that our definition of clinical death should probably be revised. Near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have long been documented. They're particularly common among people who have suffered a cardiac arrest (CA). First responders or physicians are told to make a declaration of death when, after a variable length of time, there's no cardiac output, no respirations, and the pupils have become fixed and dilated. But in those very early stages after a CA, when cerebral blood flow and electrical brain activity are impaired or null, some people experience a wide range of subjective phenomenon. Survivors talk about "seeing a tunnel," a "mystical being," "feelings of peace," a feeling of separation from their bodies, and awareness of things during the episode or event. Life After 'Death' Normally, these accounts are cast aside as being hallucinations or illusions, and that they're not really indicative of true conscious awareness. But to date, objective and scientific studies have been extremely limited. In an effort to correct this, the University of Southampton's Sam Parnia examined the broad range of mental experiences as they occurred around death-like states. And fascinatingly, he also tested the validity of conscious experiences by using objective markers to see if claims of awareness with OBEs actually meshed with real or hallucinatory events. His findings show that these experiences are real and that they should be taken much more seriously, especially by scientists. And remarkably, he showed that a fraction of patients can experience real events for up to three minutes after brain activity has stopped which was thought impossible and that they could recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated. Parnia and his team studied 2,060 CA patients as part of the international AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study. Of them, 330 survived of which 140 (or 42.4%) said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated. Of the survivors, 39% were able to undergo structured interviews. Interestingly, most of them did not have any explicit recall of events, suggesting that more people have mental activity but then lose their memories after recovery (i.e. due to the effects of brain injury or sedatives). Of those interviewed, 46% experienced a broad range of mental recollections that were incompatible with what we consider to be true NDEs, including fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9% had experiences compatible with NDEs and a scant 2% exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE's with explicit recall of seeing and hearing events. But that 2% is a very interesting 2% indeed. One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during CA. A release from the University of Southampton elaborates: So, while it wasn't possible to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of these experiences, it was not possible to discredit them. More work is clearly needed. Here's what Parnia concluded from the study: Rethinking DeathAs noted, this study strongly suggests that we need to re-think conventional notions and definitions of death. As Parnia himself notes: The phrase "a potentially reversible process" jibes well with burgeoning definitions of death definitions that consider factors other than a heartbeat and electrical brain activity. Cryonicists, for example, refer to "information theoretic brain death" the notion that death does not occur until all the information in your brain that's required to resuscitate you (or reanimate you) is irrevocably destroyed. Less conceptually, Parnia's paper suggests that we should push the boundary as it pertains to the declaration of death in consideration of novel interventions, like cold stasis, that may bring people back in the precious moments following a cardiac arrest. Read the entire study at Resuscitation: "AWAREness during CPR: Be careful with what you say!". http://io9.com/awareness-can-continue-for-several-minutes-after-clinic-1643800112?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=wednesdayPM

Couple Arrested For DUI Has Sex In Cop Car Because Why Not P.S. The rest of this web site, jalopnik.com, is pretty cool as well.

Professor Stephen Hawking credited as guest vocalist on new Pink Floyd album ...On the song Keep Talking, Hawking's computerised voice begins by saying: "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination."... http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-09/stephen-hawking-returns-as-vocalist-on-new-pink-floyd-album/5800286 For RA1: I think this is the coolest thing since Hawking's cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation in a holo deck poker game convened by Data that also included Einstein and Newton. To say nothing of his guest starring on The Simpsons!

One of my favorites -- especially as I myself am now one, or all but -- is alta caca. Old fart. Literally 'old shit,' no?

Very much what Panetta is saying about Obama now: http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/22326-leon-panetta-boiled-down-democrats-criticism-of-barack-obama-to-one-sentence/?p=126709#entry126709

Leon Panetta boiled down Democrats' criticism of Barack Obama to one sentence By Chris Cillizza, Washington Post Former CIA director Leon Panetta was on "Andrea Mitchell Reports" on MSNBC on Thursday for an extended interview about the critiques he lobs at President Obama in a new book entitled "Worthy Fights". The most cutting -- and perhaps most insightful -- portion of the interview was when Panetta told Mitchell about his disagreement with Obama's approach to politics. "Too often in my view the President relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader," said Panetta. That simple sentence encapsulates much of the criticism that I've heard from Congressional Democrats (as well as many in the activist community) about President Obama for years. (That similarity is not an accident; Panetta spent almost two decades in the 1970s and 1980s in Congress as a House member from California.) There is a sense that Obama believes that simply proposing his argument is enough to carry the day. That the nitty-gritty horse-trading of the sort past Democratic presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton were legendary for is simply anathema to how he views politics and his role in it. Take the Affordable Care Act. Once it -- finally -- passed, Congressional Democrats kept waiting (and waiting) for President Obama to take the message reins and sell the hell out of it around the country. While Obama did do some barnstorming in support of the law, it was never to the extent -- or with the intensity -- that Democrats on the ballot in 2010 thought it should be. The losses they incurred -- especially losing control of the House -- were laid at the feet of Obama by many of the people who lost their seats and those Members of Congress they left behind. Since that debacle there has been an ever-present sense that the passion of Obama on the campaign trail in his 2008 election has never been matched while he has actually been in the White House. Obama as diffident -- or indifferent -- to the differences between what is good for him and what is good for the party has been a continuing source of frustration for Democrats in Congress. Not only, they believe, has he not been willing to really fight for his priorities but he also seems to not grasp that when he says things like "every single one" of his policies are on the ballot this fall, it makes their political lives that much harder. Some of this tension is natural -- and transcends parties. Presidents always have a certain way of doing things that they believe works because, well, it got them elected president. And Members of Congress always feel as though the president of their party isn't paying enough attention to them and their needs because he is too focused on his own political life. But, Panetta's comment does strike at the core of what many Democrats don't like or don't trust about Obama. They simply don't believe he understood/understands how Washington works -- Panetta said almost exactly that later in his interview with Mitchell -- and has never truly grasped that a single compelling argument alone isn't enough to change minds. What's fascinating about this gripe with Obama is how much it plays into a) the argument that Hillary Clinton made against him in the 2008 presidential primary and b ) the argument Hillary Clinton will likely make when (sorry, if) she runs for president in 2016. That argument, in short: I have been there and done that. I know what it takes to move the levers of power in Washington -- and I am willing to do whatever it takes to make them move. That's a message that will appeal to many establishment -- and activist -- Democrats who feel as though they have spent the last six years with a Democratic president who didn't understand -- and didn't want to understand -- the realities of getting things done in D.C. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/07/leon-panetta-boiled-down-democrats-criticism-of-barack-obama-to-one-sentence/

Fair question. When I post news without comment, I guess generally it means... - I think it's interesting for one reason or another. - I likely agree with part or all, if it contains opinion/editorializing. Here, I thought: - Generally interesting whenever Carter says something publicly, as he is usually -- a reasonably shrewd observer of people and things -- who tends to speak his mind bluntly, without much concern for the amour propre of whomever he may be discussing. - And I like to look for what the fairly right-leaning Economist 15 or so years ago termed, with strong approval, his post-presidency penchant for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Ah-HA!

Carter unhappy with Obama’s policies in Middle East By Jim Jones Special to the Star-Telegram Posted Wednesday, Oct. 08, 2014 FORT WORTH — Former President Jimmy Carter put down his hammer at a Meadowbrook Habitat for Humanity project Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview that touched on subjects such as the Obama administration’s use of drones, women’s rights and faith. “I really object to the killing of people, particularly Americans overseas who haven’t been brought to justice and put on trial,” he said. “We’ve killed four Americans overseas with American drones. To me that violates our Constitution and human rights.” In May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged that it had killed four American citizens in drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2009. Carter said it was hard to figure out exactly what President Obama’s policy is in the Middle East. “It changes from time to time,” Carter said. “I noticed that two of his secretaries of defense, after they got out of office, were very critical of the lack of positive action on the part of the president.” Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was the most recent to criticize Obama, in remarks he made to USA Today while promoting his new book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. Carter acknowledged that the ISIS situation is complicated and he thinks the U.S. waited too long to respond. “First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic state build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said. “Then when [iSIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.” Carter sees some hope for the current American policy against ISIS in Iraq where troops on the ground will follow up after air strikes. “If we keep on working in Iraq and have some ground troops to follow up when we do our bombing, there is a possibility of success.” No such ground troops are available in Syria at the moment, he said. “You have to have somebody on the ground to direct our missiles and to be sure you have the right target,” Carter said. “Then you have to have somebody to move in and be willing to fight ISIS after the strikes.” On politics The former president said he and other members of the Carter family supported President Obama’s run for the presidency. “It’s too early to speculate about the next presidential election,” he said. “I think Hillary [Clinton] is a real possibility. Whoever the Democratic candidate is, the Carter family will vote for them.” On Ebola The Carter Center in Atlanta, the human rights organization that Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, founded, hasn’t been working directly on the Ebola crisis, Carter said. “We are working all over Liberia with local chiefs,” he said. “There are about 440 village chiefs very close to the Carter center. So we’ve been getting the chiefs to spread the word [about Ebola] accurately.” Carter said his faith played a big role when he was president and in his present humanitarian work around the world. “My Christian faith has been the foundation of my life,” he said. “I don’t find any real incompatibility in my faith in being a Naval officer, or a farmer, which I was for 17 years, or serving as president.” On women’s rights Carter’s latest book is A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power. “Women are persecuted around the world,” he said. “I think it’s the worst human rights violation on earth right now.” Some verses in the Bible and in the Koran, the Islamic holy book, have been used to affirm that women are not equal to men and that often leads to unequal treatment and abuse, he said. “There are thousands of verses in the Bible,” Carter said. “If you want to believe in slavery you can find verses to support that. If you believe in women not being equal to men you can find that.” In the United States, said Carter, women get less pay for doing the same work and are often deprived of the chance to be leaders of corporations. Women are sexually abused in many areas, including on college campuses and in the military, he said. “Universities don’t want to admit it happens on their campuses,” he said. “So if a girl does report that she’s been raped, they counsel her not to make a big deal of it.” The same problem occurs in the military, Carter said. “The Department of Defense reported last February there were 26,000 sexual assaults [in the military] reported in 2012 and only 1 percent of the accused were brought to justice. They just kind of look the other way.” DFW ‘harmony’ Before talking about world affairs, Carter praised Fort Worth volunteers and others for supporting the Habitat for Humanity project in central Meadowbrook. He noted that contributions mean that 64 homes are being constructed here. The Carters ended their participation in building homes in Fort Worth on Tuesday and will move into Dallas’ Oak Cliff for the rest of the week. Although he recently celebrated his 90th birthday, Carter worked on siding during his two days here, not taking many breaks. “One of the most attractive things I’ve seen in this project is the close harmony I’ve seen between Fort Worth and Dallas,” he said. “Quite often cities so close together are in competition and don’t get along well, but the Habitat groups in both cities seem to be forming a real team.” http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/10/07/6182968/carter-unhappy-with-obamas-policies.html?rh=1