1/6/12

Mitt Romney and The Weekend Ahead

Mitt Romney Dunce - Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com: "Oh Dear. Where Are the Republicans Going to Find a Candidate Who Can at Least Think? I Have Never Had that High an Opinion of Mitt Romney but After Watching This Video Any Scintilla of Respect Has Gone with the Wind"

'via Blog this'

If he performs as badly as in this video from a while back he may lose everything in two debates.

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Michelle Obama Is on OUR Side

Michelle Obama’s Evolution as First Lady - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

To love your neighbor seems a strange request

Abba's Way: 51. On Love of Neighbor:

To love your neighbor seems a strange request;
We think of neighbor as the one next door.
We also counsel love of enemy;
Both equally confound us more and more.

'via Blog this'

The opening quatrain above should entice anyone similarly confounded to investigate further. These meditations are meant to have some relevance to today's world.

We need a reification index and other ramblings

Reification is treating persons as things
To reify is ti thing-ify
Funny when corporations are seen as people 
Corporations treat US as things
This is not some late gripe
It's been happening for some time
It touches me whenever a service is suspended
Whenever barriers are put out that tell me I cannot cross the street here
And most pervasively when an automated voice engages me on the phone
It touches me when Gillette comes out like clockwork with a new blade
Then makes older ones unusable of too costly to bother with
We need a  reification index to record the
Degree to which we are turned into things
By society

Bureaucracy is essentially reifyiung
Do is using our data to advertise to us

We are paying million dollar salaries with our data
Maybe we should charge for it

PS
I am aware I have narrowed the definition of the term reify
It is too good a word not to use to mean what I say it means

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Just when I started listening to NYT podcasts

IP finance: The New York Times and Diminishing Derivative Works:

'via Blog this'

I found out the Times is discontinuing podscasts. Transition-pains? I found out more by perusing the lament above.


The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Romney is an unknown quantity for sure and a major risk

Bain, Barack and Jobs - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border."

'via Blog this'

"It's hard to get by just upon a smile..."

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Ample justification for Obama anti-obstruction moves

Games and Gimmicks in the Senate - NYTimes.com: "It is this transparently obstructionist tactic to which President Obama said “enough,” striking a badly needed blow for checks and balances with strong support both from the text and the original purpose of the recess appointment clause.

Its aims, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 67, included facilitating appointments “necessary for the public service to fill without delay.” Although the main concern in 1789 involved difficulties of travel that kept a recessed Senate from acting swiftly, the broad imperative retains modern relevance, even when the Senate engineers its own unavailability."

'via Blog this'


The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Equal Condition - Occupy Anthem Candidate (Video)



The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Six people would possess 59% of the wealth

ShortFormContent at Blogger: Continuing Lightning in A Jar:

'via Blog this'

Six people would possess 59% of the wealth, and they would all come from the USA.

80 would live in poverty
70 would be illiterate
50 would suffer from hunger and malnutrition
1 would be dying
1 would be being born
1 would own a computer
1 would have a university degree

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Continuing Lightning in A Jar

ShortFormContent at Blogger: . . . And Another Thing: Lightning in a Jar:

If you could fit the entire population of the world into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all the people living on Earth ... There would be

52 women
48 men
30 Caucasians
70 non-Caucasians
30 Christians
70 non-Christians
89 heterosexuals
11 homosexuals

'via Blog this'

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

. . . And Another Thing: Lightning in a Jar

. . . And Another Thing: Lightning in a Jar:

"If you could fit the entire population of the world into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all the people living on Earth, that village would consist of:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 Americans (North, Central and South)
8 Africans

There would be

52 women
48 men
30 Caucasians
70 non-Caucasians
30 Christians
70 non-Christians
89 heterosexuals
11 homosexuals"

'via Blog this'

Someone went to the effort to turn image to text and help circulation of what is a devastating bunch of stats worth being aware of. Continiues



The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

The human rights struggle never ends

ACLU: Sign the Pledge: I Stand With the ACLU in Fighting the NDAA:

'via Blog this'

This bill needs radical revision. Our President is already detaining at least one American citizen on charges that are quintessentially unjust. So when he revises this hopefully soon, he should also pardon Bradley Manning. Any male honest enough to admit wishing at times he was a woman deserves praise not incarceration.

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

A simplistic notion of educational reform

Students of Virtual Schools Are Lagging in Proficiency - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

The problem is we are not doing online right
Most teaching needs to go online so we can get the best of the best going to every classroom
It is the classroom that is the problem
And the simplistic either or that obtains
We do not need virtual education
We need face to face
Radical face to face
The kind that will only come when we have redone our social structure so we have cyber-communities
Walkable
Face to face
Fully integrated because America is fully integrated
The best education is destratification
But all these thoughts are beyond the pale at this point
We need to cut through the false realities
To the real

All idols are but values we once made To mask our sad mistrust of Abba’s way.

Abba’s most sacred freedom is to be
Potential within every being made.
To help each one on earth to live by choice,
To lead all souls to drink from crystal springs
Abba within holds close your freest heart;
Abba within gives you your freest truth.
All idols are but values we once made
To mask our sad mistrust of Abba’s way.

Will Boehner ever gnash his teeth?

U.S. Adds 200,000 Jobs - Unemployment Rate at 8.5% - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Will Boehner ever gnash his teeth
Repenting of his sins
Along with all the GOP

Rezoning, Redesign & National Security

If we did a study that integrated accidents, weather emergencies, fire and flood
We might find that the biggest threat to national security is living as we do
While we lavish our best minds on gadgets and apps
We lavish money on making a crumbling infrastructure last
Meanwhile banks sit on three trillion

I have a proposal

Rezoning - 
Encourage a mix of residence, work, play, commerce,  education, social gathering

Redesign -
Design whole communities looking beyond the obsolete single family house and the defective high rise
Make such communities dense enough for a vibrant local economy
Make them car free
Make them like cars - people can choose the skins they live in 

National Security -
Building new cyber-communities from scratch
Enables location away from shores and cyclone corridors
And design calibrated to smart safety
And even explicit protection from likely threats from weather, etc.
Not to mention eco-sanity and energy independence

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

Gingrich is running smart in New Hampshire

Gingrich Takes On Romney - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

In addition to not exploding or otherwise following the media narrative, he is packing in good groups and drawing valid contrasts. I believe Santorum will not gain traction. I stick by my sense that Romney will decline from poll highs and that Newt will come in ahead of Santorum. The upshot will be a tepid victory for Romney that will totter the media consensus that he will be the inevitable nominee. At which point of course the media will switch to third or fourth party talk.


The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

How Santorum Got Bought By Crony Companies

After Santorum Left Senate, Familiar Hands Reached Out - NYTimes.com: "Within months of leaving the Senate, Mr. Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year. He also became a consultant to Consol Energy, after years of advocating drilling and extraction policies helpful to the company, a Pennsylvania gas and coal producer. And he consulted for the American Continental Group, a lobbying firm whose clients won earmarks he sponsored."

'via Blog this'

No choir boy he.


The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

The answer to children's play is rezoning

Politicians should look closer to home for solutions to play-deprived childhoods « Policy for Play:

Cap Tip Alice

'via Blog this'

The answer to children's play is rezoning - zone cars out of residential areas and zone businesses, institutions, kiosks, squares, parks, clinics, small scools and so-forth in. Streets should become walkways. Cars relegated to parking areas beyond an immediate community. Communities define=d by their car-freeness.

The Cap Tip Club - note to friends and followers

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press