bare minimum, experience and presidential success
July 31, 2008 at 1:28 pm | In history, news, photography, progressive, tech culture | Leave a Comment
Some historians give their take on experience, successful presidents and the not so successful, Experience called poor predictor of presidential success
* “John Quincy Adams understood the world, but he didn’t have a political gene in his makeup,” Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., said of the nation’s sixth president, who isn’t remembered as successful.
* Herbert Hoover was the widely admired U.S. food administrator in World War I, presidential adviser at the Versailles Conference and secretary of commerce in the 1920s.
“Yet his management of the economy was a disaster,” Dallek said of Hoover’s one-term presidency, which began months before the Great Depression
* Abraham Lincoln, whom most scholarly surveys rate as the nation’s greatest president, had no training to be the commander in chief and almost no Washington experience. He served eight years in the Illinois legislature and two in the U.S. House of Representatives, and had been out of office for nearly 12 years before he won the presidency in 1860 with 39.9 percent of the vote.
Raise your hand if you know someone that keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. Much of the time it isn’t intelligence or lack of education its part of who they are. Imagine the web if inexperienced risk takers didn’t dive in and create new new technology and new uses for that technlogy. Being able to make good decisions, knwowing when to take your time and do your homework or knowing when to be quick and decisivecon probably defines people more aptley over the course of their lives then experience.
“If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.” John Maxwell
When the open source community gets together to do some inking you’re sure to find a penguin. I have no idea what the blurred smudge tattoo is about.
Since the UAE is a Muslim country and is now building a nuclear power plant or two does that mean they have WMD.
There is an old joke about shoddy government contractors that ends with ya see what happens when you award the work to the lowest bidder. This is what happens when you have no bid contracts and cronies in high places, Pentagon Attempted To Cover-Up KBR’s Negligence In Electrocution Of U.S. Soldier
booze history, proper placement, when your seal meant something
July 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm | In culture, history, photoshop | Leave a CommentTags: government
The story of booze, hooch, brew and the veritas in vino
Young America unquestionably was a nation of boozers: “In 1810 federal statistics show that the six main whiskey-producing states together distilled twice as many gallons of whiskey per annum as there were people in America . . . . If statistics could predict the effect of drink on a population, by rights Americans should have been languishing en masse in emaciated heaps, their birthrate and life expectancy should have collapsed, and crime should have exploded.”
None of this happened, but these excessive drinking habits led, perhaps inevitably, to the temperance movement, which has been a persistent presence in American life.
1810? Wouldn’t those be the hazy days of hoop skirts, white picket fences and doors that didn’t need locks. Iain Gately who also wrote a history of tobacco, states that Muslims discovered and perfected the distillation of alcohol. Islam was founded in the 7th century. Since the Sumerians that resided in what is modern day Iraq, around the Mesopotamia and Tigris River were fermenting some kind of beer over 2000 years before the 7th century, then its not that Muslims discovered how to get a buzz only how to make a stronger purer liquor. A little ironic that today both fundamentalist Muslims and Christians preach the evils of alcohol.
Present day: Quality assurance are those people that are critical of everything you do and never bother to learn some people skills. It used to be all about the clay seals, The Anatolian Clay Sealing: The First Quality Assurance System of Human History?
At Arslantepe, a team from Rome University headed by Professor Frangipane recently found over 5,000 fragments of clay sealing or “cretulae” in the central magazines of what is considered the “palace” or type of warehouse (3300-3000 A.C.). According to the authors’ hypothesis, in this environment, clay sealing was used as a form of administrative control to ensure that only authorized persons could access public stocks of goods.
If you opened the container and took out some goods it looks as though you were required to inspect what was left and a clay seal was re-affixed to show that the remaining goods were in acceptable condition. Modern day regulations that involve food stuffs and other products seem lax by comparison. 3000 years ago if you miscounted or said (by way of your personal seal) that a products quality was good you were held personally responsible.
DOJ Report: Goodling, Sampson, Williams Violated Law and Justice Policy on Hiring
A scathing new report by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility and DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General found that three former high-ranking Bush appointees at the Justice Department violated federal law and department policy by considering political affiliations when filing career positions at Justice.
I’m not sure why some people find this so confusing. I suspect they’ve decided to be conveniently confused. “Career positions” are civil service jobs where the applicant stays regardless of the administration. A completely different proposition then political appointees which can be screened for their politics.
statins and dementia, let there be filament and light, mccain holding america hostage
July 29, 2008 at 3:41 pm | In graphic art, photography, photoshop, progressive, science | Leave a CommentStatins may protect against memory loss
“The bottom line is that if a person takes statins over a course of about 5-7 years, it reduces the risk of dementia by half, and that’s a really big change,” said Haan, who notes that the study did not look at statins as a treatment for existing dementia, only as a preventative. Statins are drugs that specifically lower LDL or bad cholesterol.
[ ]…”In older people you have so many different chronic conditions, especially in this group, that the chance of any intervention having an effect is fairly limited,” Haan said. “Say you’re 75 or 80 and you’ve got six diseases. How much is a treatment really going to help? This showed if you started using statins before the dementia developed you could prevent it in about half of the cases.”
Statins are just cholesterol lowering drugs ( brand name drugs include Tricor and Zetia). The processes of memory are fascinating biologically, but they constitute so much of who we are that its easy to see how isolating the combination of aging and dementia can be for the sufferer and their family. If at some point in our lives we were given the choice between loosing much of our memory and mental faculties or be physically incapacitated, I’d chose the later. To be able to get around yet have lost the majority on one’s cognitive abilities seems almost cruel – to be able to walk somewhere, but not recognize the place or people when you get there.
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
from An Old Man’s Winter Night by Robert Frost
let there be filament and light
McCain: I Know How to Capture Bin Laden
Appearing on the Situation Room, John McCain suggested that his record on Iraq and expertise on the geography of the Iraq-Pakistan border region would allow him to succeed where George W. Bush failed in capturing the Al Qaeda chieftain:
“I’m not going to telegraph a lot of the things that I’m going to do because then it might compromise our ability to do so. But, look, I know the area, I have been there, I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden — or put it this way, bring him to justice.We will do it, I know how to do it.”
Since McCain has made this same speech with some variations several times let’s assume that he means what he says. That being the case 1. This means that has known how or has had special knowledge of how to capture Bin Laden since 9-11, but has chosen not to share it with the Pentagon or CIA. The explicit implication is that McCain is thus been criminally negligent and a morally empty suit passing for a man. 2. McCain has this special information, but is keeping it secret or rather holding the information that might save American lives for ransom. The ransom that must be paid is the presidency of the U.S. If not elected he will continue to keep this special knowledge about how and where to capture Bin Laden secret. Once again being negligent and some might even suggest unpatriotic. Possibility #3. McCain is just blowing huge amounts of methane out of his posterior.
wage disparity and education, african wild dog, a man without integrity
July 28, 2008 at 3:01 pm | In economic, news, photography, photoshop, progressive, working life | Leave a Comment
“sometimes ya just fell like sit’n in a big o puddle a’water” – african wild dog.
The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust
seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke
forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a
first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings
and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was
weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance
for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a
tired forehead.
from The Jelly-bean, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age
The water cooler wisdom was that the increasing wage inequality between high school and colleges grads was predominately due to technology. Though the export of manufacturing jobs in fields like electronics and textiles to cheap labor markets in Asia also played a role. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard think its the level of education in general. Most college graduates get jobs that don’t require a high level of technical expertise, Supply-Side Education – What explains the growing gap in wages?
“There was enormous growth in educational attainment between 1900 and 1970,” Goldin says in an interview. “But after 1970, the growth in attainment became much more sluggish. Putting those two parts together, you can explain a large amount of the story of wage inequality in the 20th century.”
“In the past few decades, technology has continued to move forward, but not that differently than in the past,” Katz adds.
Demonstrating that the demand for skill has been roughly constant for a century is a tall order, and it’s the element of Goldin and Katz’s book that is most likely to draw skepticism from their colleagues
What might be a problem is something they didn’t measure ( or its not mentioned in the review) is the disparity between executive and work force in terms of greed and share holder ignorance. According to a study published by WFC Resources in 2005 executive pay was and is 400 times greater on average that of the average employee. The mention of greed may have seemed like it was pulled out of nowhere, but if college degrees versus high school(skill sets) are supposed to explain such huge gaps in wage equality the argument has to be made that executives posses something at least in the neighborhood of 400 times the technological, business, financial or other specialized knowledge of a high school graduate. That seems like a difficult argument to make. Its also strange in terms of the investor’s POV. It is probably the case that many investors don’t care or are not aware that the executives at the companies they invest in are compensated so lavishly as long as they get a fair return on their investment. Yet executive compensation that is not tied to profits ( it usually isn’t) is money that will obviously not find its way into investors or worker’s pockets. It is also money not put into R&D, or invested in other companies to improve the bottom line. Admittedly an extreme anecdotal example, but Exxon, the world’s richest corporation, while it did rake in a profit in 2006 of $36 billion dollars, paid its CEO Lee Raymond a $400 retirement package. I can’t find the link to give credit, but an economist wrote at the time that no one in this world has ever done enough work to actually earn that kind of money. That kind of compensation pay not only defies rational explanation, doggerel about supply and demand, but also negates any attempt to be explained away with the difference between a college and high school graduate. Goldin and Katz are probably correct in thinking that the more college grads we have the less wage disparity in general in addition to having multiple cultural pluses ( as a group college grads commit fewer violent crimes for instance), but it is a far from a complete answer.
McCain’s claim that Obama snubbed wounded troops because they wouldn’t allow him to take cameras with him may be the most scurrilous and dishonorable claim I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate make in a personally-approved ad. – (more here Sen. Hagel (R-NE) Criticizes McCain Ad)
I tried to think of something lower on the integrity scale that has been said/endorsed by the actual candidate and couldn’t. Usually the vile smears are done by surrogate zealots like the Swiftboatersfor Truth, viral e-mail and so forth.
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