inkbluesky

Despite Promises To ‘End Earmarks,’ Giuliani’s Law Firm Sought Millions In Pork For Clients

GIULIANI: Oh, you have to end earmarks. I mean, the idea of anonymous spending of billions and billions and hundreds of billions of dollars is totally undemocratic and creates total unaccountability. You have to end earmarks.

But Giuliani’s own law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, has contributed to this explosion of spending. Bloomberg News reports:

In all, Bracewell & Giuliani sought federal earmarks for 14 companies this year, 11 of which hired the firm after Giuliani joined in March 2005, Senate records show.

That Giuliani day in and day out lies like a cheap rug at a flea market isn’t especially shocking. Yet at the same time its like he lives in a bubble where he thinks his lies will just stay his and his supporter’s little secret. The “internets” and the ability to fact check every claim he makes is as easy as typing a few words into your favorite search engine. The above isn’t a small lie either. It’s a two parter. he says that earmarks are bad when he and his clients have been all to happy to lobby for them. The second part is the assertion (at the link) that earmarks have gotten worse since Democrats gained a slight majority in the House of Representatives. Actually they’ve gone down 33%. Not perfect, but progress. What does it say about someone’s character and qualifications to hold the highest elected office in America that instead of simply saying that we’re making progress on earmarks, but we could do better, he uses a hypocritical fabrication and a blatantly false smear against the opposing party.

beach birdhouse 

I would might be tempted to think I’m against lying in all circumstances all the time. Don’t be silly. Lying is part and parcel of being human. The Truth About Lying - Our Lives Are Filled With Untruths. But Why Do We Lie, And How Can We Tell When Others Are Full of It? 

Take your average 10-minute conversation between two acquaintances. In that span, the average person will lie two to three times. That’s not cynicism. That’s science. And it’s ingrained in us at a young age, when we’re whipsawed between “honesty is the best policy” and “no matter what, tell Aunt Barbara you like her gift.”

“We’re always telling children you should tell the truth, and yet we’re also giving them the message that it’s absolutely fine to lie,” says Robert Feldman, associate dean at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts. “At a very early age we’re getting these conflicting messages about honesty, and for some people it makes them more prepared to be deceptive later in life.”

The writer uses an example like I would have used. If I’m having one of my life is absurd and meaningless mornings and you ask me how I’m doing, I’m not going to tell you the truth. I’m going to force a little smile, say fine and ask how you’re doing. Telling the truth in that situation would have consequences that would involve me feeling even worse for burdening someone with all that existential baggage when they just wanted to be nice. This still doesn’t let Rudy off the hook. Presidents make life altering decisions, nation altering decisions. Even a president you like isn’t going to make great decisions all the time or tell the truth all the time, but the kinds of lies that he has told over and over again cross the lie from polite everyday lies to reflections on his judgment. The judgment, the set of principles he draws on to make decisions that will effect millions of Americans and others around the world. I don’t think you can take all the lies out of politics anymore then you can out of our daily lives, but politicians have to get them down to mole hill level rather then the Mount Giuliani level.

Dahon launch “lightest ever” folder

The Mu XL has just about everything you would want in a city bike, including plush suspension, lighting, luggage capacity, puncture resistant tires, and style to spare.

Its on my wish list. Well more like my fantasy list since I won’t be shelling $899 for a cool little foldable bike anytime soon.

winter illustration with sleigh. this one and the next both have a little oil paint texture.

winter illustration with snowman wallpaper

Holocaust Denial, Bush Style

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don’t believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

Could be one of the reasons that violence in Iraq has gone down a little, there are fewer people left to kill. Sanctions against Iraq might not have been the perfect solution, but when one goes to war the bottom line was that you do so to accomplish more good then harm.

tree tops minnesota

What’s the difference between envy and jealousy

* Envy is pain at the good fortune of others. (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk II, Chapter 10)

* Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another’s vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person’s real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival.

* Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person’s affections); and the envious person’s locus of concern is the rival. Hence, even if the good that the rival has is the affection of another person, there is a difference between envy and jealousy.

Its interesting that the author notes historically some ancient philosophers thought that envy to some degree propelled the desire for the development of formal systems of justice. On a logical level that doesn’t make sense, but on an emotional level, the level on which ancient philosophers premised much of their view of the world, its easy to see. Its that phenomenon that lurks around team oriented business organizations. Everyone suddenly thinks that someone who is especially smart or attractive or whatever is getting special treatment, making mental lists of said special treatment that they themselves have received. Though there is probably more that goes on, but repressed in traditional business and warehouse settings. I wonder too if jealousy isn’t more primitive, part of our evolutionary psychology; of the two the one we’re much more likely to act on. Jealousy also seems more likely to lead to destructive and self destructive behavior. If someone said they envied you, wouldn’t that just seem odd. While if someone expressed real jealousy that would be disturbing.

november mist

It looks at this hour as though Australia’s version of G. W. Bush has been given the boot, Howard ousted as Labor and Rudd sweep to victory. Maybe Mr. Howard can now find something more productive and less destructive to do.

Firms asks women to work in their undies

A Taiwanese lingerie company encouraged all its female office staff to go to work in their undies for the day.

[ ]..And Liao Wenshen, 30, added: “The men were red-faced all day, and were becoming so polite to us. It’s so funny!”

Apparently this is legal in Taiwan as long as the employer doesn’t threaten those who don’t wish to participate.

“Proust Was a Neuroscientist”

Did novelist George Eliot anticipate the ability of the brain to grow new cells? Did chef Auguste Escoffier foretell the science of the palate? Jonah Lehrer thinks so.

Lehrer’s ponderings about Escoffier are trivial. His writings about novelists including Proust, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot are disastrous. His treatment of Eliot serves an apt example, since he credits her with anticipating an especially surprising discovery about the brain: neurogenesis, or the ability to grow new neurons. Like the dogma of four flavors, the belief that the mature brain is cellularly complete was long taken for granted, only to be refuted by a scientist working at the margins of her discipline. In this case, the heroine was a postdoc named Elizabeth Gould, who observed rat brains healing themselves. Following years of diligent experimentation, Lehrer writes in his boilerplate Horatio Alger prose, “[t]he textbooks were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself.” Which makes him think of Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” in which characters have the startling ability to develop, becoming, by the end of the book, different from who they were at the beginning. “[N]eurogenesis is evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving,” Lehrer writes. “Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning.”

As Jonathon Keats documents in his review is rather easy to look back and mistakenly conflate some artistic insights in humanity with some kind of weegie board vision into discoveries of natural science. It does a disservice to the artists and their heightened powers of observation and artistic gifts as much as it diminishes the discoveries of modern scientists and the frequently small, sometimes tedious incremental steps it took for scientists to make their breakthroughs. It reminds me of the people that read Nostradamus and where there are predictions filled with tons of ambiguities they see eerily accurate predictions.

village first snow

John F. Kennedy (D), Naval hero and the youngest president in our history was assassinated on November 22, 1963.