Yostivanich

“As Pres­i­dent Obama and Con­gress inten­sify the push to over­haul health care in the com­ing week, the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic force of that indus­try is well rep­re­sented in the finan­cial hold­ings of many law­mak­ers and oth­ers with a say on the leg­is­la­tion, accord­ing to new dis­clo­sure forms.” I can’t say I’m that surprised.

“Up to 100 mem­bers of Iran­ian reformist groups have been arrested, accused of orches­trat­ing vio­lence after the dis­puted pres­i­den­tial elec­tion result.” Depressing.

“That a new infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy could be impro­vised for this pur­pose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama cam­paign revealed in the United States. You can­not stop peo­ple any longer. You can­not con­trol them any longer. They can bypass your estab­lished media; they can broad­cast to one another; they can orga­nize as never before.” Twit­ter is the medium for the next revolution.

“Where Hov­ind is stu­pidly wrong is that he looks at that dia­gram, and baldly claims that the “con­cept of evo­lu­tion has never got­ten passed the Hypoth­e­sis stage”. Ridicu­lous. All those papers being con­stantly pub­lished in the sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture are tests of the the­ory. The pri­mary research lit­er­a­ture is crammed full of tests of evo­lu­tion, and more keep com­ing. You have to be pro­foundly igno­rant of the state of biol­ogy to be able to make such a ludi­crous claim.” Well said.

“Even if we weather this increase, though, the prob­lem won’t go away: unlike past oil spikes, which were the result of sup­ply dis­rup­tions, today’s oil prices are dri­ven mainly by the rise in demand from places like China and India, so, unless the econ­omy falls back into the abyss, they’re unlikely to decrease sharply. What we’re hop­ing for is a Goldilocks solu­tion, where the econ­omy starts to boom again but the price of oil doesn’t. Per­haps we’ll get it. But, rather than leave so much of our fate to chance, we’d be bet­ter off doing what politi­cians always say they want to do: lessen the U.S. economy’s depen­dence on oil.” You think?

“Then I.B.M. declared that it would back Linux with invest­ment, research and mar­ket­ing, and the tech­nol­ogy moved swiftly into the cor­po­rate main­stream. Start­ing this week, I.B.M. is return­ing to the same play­book, intro­duc­ing some ini­tial prod­ucts and ser­vices and a roadmap for its sta­ble of cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment cus­tomers to com­fort­ably embrace cloud com­put­ing.” IBM takes on cloud com­put­ing for the enter­prise market.

“For this is the third time in his­tory that a major econ­omy has found itself in a liq­uid­ity trap, a sit­u­a­tion in which interest-rate cuts, the con­ven­tional way to perk up the econ­omy, have reached their limit. When this hap­pens, uncon­ven­tional mea­sures are the only way to fight reces­sion. To sum up: A few months ago the U.S. econ­omy was in dan­ger of falling into depres­sion. Aggres­sive mon­e­tary pol­icy and deficit spend­ing have, for the time being, averted that dan­ger. And sud­denly crit­ics are demand­ing that we call the whole thing off, and revert to busi­ness as usual. Those demands should be ignored. It’s much too soon to give up on poli­cies that have, at most, pulled us a few inches back from the edge of the abyss.” Krug­man argues for keep­ing up with the Obama plan more or less.

“It’s exam­ples like this that led to the newest project from New York-based pho­tog­ra­phy duo Lor­ef­frey. Their “Nip­ple Non Grata” series fea­tures shots of top­less women whose nip­ples have been dig­i­tally removed in an effort to find out if cen­sor­ing them does, in fact, desex­u­al­ize the women.” Inter­est­ing ques­tion. Some­what NSFW depend­ing on your place of business.

“ASHINGTON — The Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion has long bat­tled Democ­rats who oppose pro­tect­ing doc­tors from mal­prac­tice law­suits. But dur­ing a pri­vate meet­ing at the White House last month, asso­ci­a­tion offi­cials said, they found one Demo­c­rat will­ing to enter­tain the idea: Pres­i­dent Obama.”

“The next leader of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stan­ley McChrys­tal, is due to take over com­mand there. He takes over from Gen David McK­ier­nan, who was sacked by the US defence sec­re­tary after one year and whose time coin­cided with a surge in vio­lence. Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai told Gen McChrys­tal the pri­or­ity would be to reduce civil­ian casu­al­ties.” Fun times.

“When Google rep­re­sen­ta­tives recently invited dozens of promi­nent artists to con­tribute work to be fea­tured on its new Web browser, the com­pany enthu­si­as­ti­cally sold the idea as an oppor­tu­nity to have art­work shown to mil­lions.” Except Google wouldn’t pay. Umm Google, seri­ously that’s dumb.

You addicted to the internet?

“Iran is brac­ing for more protests over its pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results after defeated can­di­date Mir Hos­sein Mousavi called for them to be annulled. His sup­port­ers are plan­ning a large rally on Mon­day, after two days of unrest sparked by the re-election of Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadinejad.”

Hehe, The New Yorker Cartoon’s because you know it’s The New Yorker.

“This year marks the 40^th anniver­sary of Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.”

“Super small & sim­ple plu­gin. When a user clicks a link, the link text changes to “Load­ing…” so the user doesn’t keep click­ing. The link text is the only optional argu­ment.” Use­ful and open source, just the way I like it.

“Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu has announced he will back a Pales­tin­ian state — but only if it is com­pletely demil­i­tarised.
He said a Pales­tin­ian state must have no army, no con­trol of its air space and no way of smug­gling in weapons. In a land­mark speech, weeks after the US pres­i­dent urged him to agree a two-state plan, he said the Pales­tini­ans must accept Israel as a Jew­ish state. Pales­tin­ian lead­ers reacted angrily, accus­ing him of sab­o­tag­ing peace plans.” The part of being demil­i­t­i­rized ok I get, but no con­trol of it’s air space and no way of smug­gling in weapons is going to be hard for any­one to accept.

“The prime min­is­ter of Israel, Ben­jamin Netanyahu, on Sun­day endorsed the prin­ci­ple of a Pales­tin­ian state along­side Israel for the first time, but on con­di­tion that the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­tory is demil­i­ta­rized and that the Pales­tini­ans rec­og­nize Israel as the state of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Respond­ing to Amer­i­can pres­sure and revers­ing his ear­lier staunch oppo­si­tion to Pales­tin­ian state­hood, Mr. Netanyahu, who leads the con­ser­v­a­tive Likud Party, out­lined his vision for peace in a much-anticipated pol­icy speech that was meant in part as an answer to Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s his­toric address in Cairo ear­lier this month.” That’s a huge for­ward step from the right-wing of Israel politics.

“Europe’s new billion-euro Her­schel space obser­va­tory, launched in May, has achieved a crit­i­cal mile­stone. The tele­scope has opened the hatch that has been pro­tect­ing its sen­si­tive instru­ments from con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. The pro­ce­dure allowed light col­lected by Herschel’s giant 3.5m mir­ror to flood its super­cold instru­ment cham­ber, or cryo­stat, for the first time.” The next great tele­scope starts a working.

“The alleged top al-Qaeda financier in Yemen has been arrested, secu­rity offi­cials say.” Impressive.

“Twenty years ago CNN’s cov­er­age of Tien­an­men Square made its rep­u­ta­tion. If in twenty more years it has become con­sen­sus that real-time, online, crowd­sourced media is the best place to keep up with cur­rent events, this inci­dent could be an impor­tant part of that his­tory unfolding.”

“Yet even as word of the urban strife, seem­ingly led by those post­ing to Twit­ter, spread next around the world on news net­works like the BBC, NPR, and the Times, CNN remained mostly mute.” CNN didn’t cover the Iran Elec­tion and the protest­ing thereby fail­ing it’s audience.

6 stages of tech­no­log­i­cal grief.

“Over the past few months, TechCrunch has expe­ri­enced the power of this micro-media first­hand as the per­cent­age of traf­fic we get from Twit­ter has grown to the point that it is now our sec­ond largest source of out­side traf­fic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twit­ter accounted for 9.7 per­cent of all traf­fic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 per­cent six months ago. This is out of mil­lions of vis­its. For us, and I’d argue increas­ingly for other large Web­sites as well, Twit­ter is not just about micro-media. The most pow­er­ful Tweets are those which point else­where. Or to put it another way, the short­ened link may just be the most pow­er­ful type of micro-media there is. Those retweeted links are turn­ing Twit­ter into a social broad­cast media that rivals any other on the Web.” The real poten­tial of twit­ter as a traf­fic driver?

Sell­ing laptops.

“But for many of the area’s non-Amish res­i­dents, the impasse rep­re­sents a test case over whether laws will be bent in the face of reli­gious prin­ci­ples.” This is an inter­est­ing dilemma, I would gen­er­ally say to let them do what they want, but in this case their reli­gious beliefs are effect­ing other peo­ple and their health.

For Reagan’s tax cuts it took about a 15 months before a drop in the enem­ploy­ment (which went in that time from 7.5ish to 10.75ish).

“Tens of thou­sands of peo­ple have joined a rally in cen­tral Tehran to cel­e­brate the re-election of Iran’s Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad. The president’s clos­est oppo­nent in the elec­tion, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has lodged an offi­cial appeal against the result amid con­tin­u­ing angry protests. Secu­rity forces have arrested up to 100 mem­bers of reformist groups, accus­ing them of orches­trat­ing the violence.”