Month: June 2012

She outed her own son to prove her Christianist credentials in a primary election. There are precincts of the GOP base that are now simply, morally rancid. Update from a reader:

She didn't out her own son. The article you link to specifically says otherwise. She is "disappointed that my campaign manager forwarded an e-mail that would include any member of my family in policy discussions." Her campaign did it without her consent. Love the blog, but your comments seem a bit out of context.

A sleepless reader noticed and emailed us at 3.14 am. We do our best to make a point.

A brave scientist took notes on the creatures' sex lives in 1910 – but hid the most outrageous truths from public view. Until now. Yes, they have sex not for procreation! But don't tell the Pope.

Bruce Bartlett tallies it. The damage this single president did to the core of the country's fiscal health – and our ability to weather a storm like 2007 – 2009 – is hard to find parallels with. Money quote:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis – giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare – its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I'm tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it – and remind people that Romney's policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never "to balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

Mitt Romney has no qualms about doing that very thing. And he will, if he is given the chance.

(Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty.)

Creek Stewart, an outdoor survival school instructor, lists many uses for the feminine hygiene product, including water filtering (seen above) and wound dressing:

Tampons are sterile, come very well-packaged in their own waterproof sleeves,  and are designed to be ultra-absorbent — making them the perfect first aid bandage.  They can be opened and then taped or tied over a wound as an improvised dressing.  And, as I’ve already mentioned, they can be used to plug a bullet hole until more sophisticated medical attention can be administered.  Accounts of this use date back to World War I.  Many items in modern society were first developed as a facet of military research — tampons may very well be one of these products.

Aurora Almendral provides several. She recommends asking for a discount, a tactic that often gets her around 20% off doctor's visits:

The trick is to remember that you’re making them do less work because you don’t have health insurance. They don’t have to pay an administrator for filling out insurance paperwork. They don’t have to wait for the insurance company to send a check. They don’t even have to send out a bill. When the office gives you a discount, they’re not just being nice: You’ve saved them from doing a lot of work, and deserve one.

Adrian Holovaty makes a connection:

For years now, Google has been sending Street View cars around the world, collecting rich data about streets and the things alongside them. At first, this resulted in Street View imagery. Then it was the underlying street geodata (i.e., the precise longitude/latitude paths of streets), enabling Google to ditch Tele Atlas and make its maps out of data it obtained from Street View vehicles. Now, I’m realizing the biggest Street View data coup of all: those vehicles are gathering the ultimate training set for driverless cars.

He imagines an endless loop of data-gathering:

The next question is, as Street View data improves the driverless cars, will the driverless cars get good (and legal) enough to eventually gather Street View data without humans, which will then lead to more driving experience, which will lead to smarter driverless cars, which will lead to more efficient Street View data gathering, in a vicious cycle of driving and learning?

More on Street View advancements, including airplanes and backpack methods for gathering images, here.

(Image by Jon Rafman, who searches Google Street View for unusual and incredible images.)

Adds up:

The typical person in a developed country produces about 2.6 pounds of garbage a day. That would mean the average American man, weighing 175 pounds, produces his weight in trash every three months.