Category: Blog

Very interesting article – especially considering that The Economist endorsed Bush when he ran in 2000.

Assessing the Bush years – The Economist

Lack of curiosity also led Mr Bush to suspect intellectuals in general and academic experts in particular. David Frum, who wrote speeches for Mr Bush during his first term, noted that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House”. The Bush cabinet was “solid and reliable”, but contained no “really high-powered brains”. Karen Hughes, one of his closest advisers, “rarely read books and distrusted people who did”.

Interesting article…

NYTimes.com

Human actions are increasing the rate of evolutionary change in plants and animals in ways that may hurt their long-term prospects for survival, scientists are reporting.

Hunting, commercial fishing and some conservation regulations, like minimum size limits on fish, may all work against species health.

Well, maybe “woot” is too much. After all, it should have been this way the whole time. And, yeah, some songs will cost more, but now when I buy a song, I’ll actually own it to do with as I please.

Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes – NYTimes.com

In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them.

…to put it mildly. Is there any way one administration can fix this during a 4 year term? No matter how good that administration is?

Record Deficit Forecast as Obama Weighs Alternatives – NYTimes.com

If the forecasts are remotely accurate, the deficit would obliterate all previous postwar deficit records not only in nominal dollar amounts but also in the way economists consider most accurate: the deficit as a share of the nation’s economic output.

The agency said the deficit would equal 8.3 percent of gross domestic product, obliterating previous postwar record of 6 percent, reached in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan.

What a mess! I don’t understand how crap like this can happen.

NYTimes.com

With home prices in free fall and mortgage delinquencies mounting, pressure to modify troubled loans is ratcheting up.

But lawyers who represent candidates for modifications say the programs are hobbled by the complexity of securitization pools that hold the loans, as well as uncertainty about who actually owns the notes underlying the mortgages.

Problems often emerge because these notes — which are written promises to repay the full amount of a mortgage — weren’t recorded properly when they were bundled by Wall Street into pools or were subsequently transferred to other holders.

How can a loan be modified, these lawyers ask, if the lender cannot prove that it actually owns the note? More and more judges are asking the same thing about lenders trying to foreclose on borrowers.

Digital Domain – NYTimes.com

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. Does where you live affect your personality?

WSJ.com

Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Hey, they were only off by a few million cubic yards. I mean, that’s pretty close, right? And it’s just 2.8 million cubic yards more than they said the pond actually held. Hmmm…wonder if that pond was a bit over-stuffed and that’s why the retaining well said “screw it.”

NYTimes.com

A coal ash spill that blanketed residential neighborhoods and contaminated nearby rivers in Roane County, Tenn., earlier this week is more than three times larger than initially estimated, the Tennessee Valley Authority said on Thursday.

Coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal, contains toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium that can cause cancer and neurological problems.

Authority officials initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond breached, but on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep. The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the Authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.

I’m not sure if “useful” is the word I would have used when contemplating a naked Kissinger and Ginsberg.

NYTimes.com

Then Ginsberg upped the ante. “It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television,” he said.

I never knew such a train existed – interesting story.

CNN.com

The Orphan Train movement took Stanley Cornell and his brother out of the city during the last part of a mass relocation movement for children called “placing out.”Watch Cornell share ups and downs of his family story

Brace’s agency took destitute children, in small groups, by train to small towns and farms across the country, with many traveling to the West and Midwest. From 1854 to 1929, more than 200,000 children were placed with families across 47 states. It was the beginning of documented foster care in America.

“It’s an exodus, I guess. They called it Orphan Train riders that rode the trains looking for mom and dad like my brother and I.”

“We’d pull into a train station, stand outside the coaches dressed in our best clothes. People would inspect us like cattle farmers. And if they didn’t choose you, you’d get back on the train and do it all over again at the next stop.”