Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has defended jailed killer "Carlos the Jackal" and several world leaders he says are wrongly considered "bad guys". - Mr Chavez also hailed Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8372250.stm

these just get more and more amazing:

Lavelle Stewart, of ACORN in South Central Los Angeles, tells us she thinks we have to hook up with “someone who’s on that international sex business level,” that “14 and 15 year olds been traveling overseas for years,” that she can do independent research for us, and that she has had meetings with Porn magnate Larry Flynt. As for laundering the sex money into my faux political campaign, Lavelle says, “there are ways, people do it all the time. Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California.”

- http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/19/the-la-story-part-iv-program-for-torture-victims/#more-34026

Nearly two years into the recession, opinion about which political party is responsible is shifting - CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday morning indicates 38 percent of public blames Republicans for the country's current economic problems. In May, 53 percent blamed the GOP. - 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May, and 27 percent now say both parties are responsible. "The bad news for the Democrats is that the number of Americans who hold the GOP exclusively responsible for the recession has been steadily falling by about two to three points per month," said Keating Holland, CNN polling director. - Thirty-six percent of people questioned said that President Obama's policies have improved economic conditions, with 28 percent feeling that the president's programs have made things worse, and 35 percent saying what he's done has had no effect on the economy.

- http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/20/poll.recession/index.html

another obama article of faith gone: No hospital savings seen with electronic records - Study: Administrative costs rose despite switching to computerized files
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34061386/ns/health-health_care/

Electric car maker Tesla reportedly to go public - Initial public offering would be first for U.S. auto company since Ford in ’56
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34068058/ns/business-autos/
[ wonder how they will deal with unions? ]

good point about s.e.i.u. against boy scout: "And I love this arrogant a** Balzano's comments: 'we'll probably let it slide,' 'we decided to let that go,' etc. How merciful of him to not go after a 17-year-old kid for doing something nice for his community. Anyone have suggestions for something I can volunteer to do here in Seattle that will piss off at least one union?"
- commenter in http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/b.html

Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy - team of NPR reporters unearths the truth about health care - it's just what the evil right-wingers have been saying
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDlhOWMxMWM0NjI0Y2RmYTUwNzQ4YmJjMTIyYTA5MWE=

black mag says: like the antagonist in a horror flick who refuses to die or reaches out from the beyond the grave as soon as the credits begin rolling, Rev. Jackson clawed back into the spotlight on Wednesday, directing offensive remarks toward a black congressman who had the temerity to vote against health care reform.
http://www.thegrio.com/2009/11/jesse-jacksons-race-baiting-is-doing-the-president-no-favor.php

toshiba floats chair into space for ad - this is real, not cgi!



http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/11/20/2133259.aspx

( links for 11-21-09 pt 3 )

Angry Congress lashes out at Obama - President's allies in the Congressional Black Caucus, exasperated by the administration's handling of the economy, unexpectedly blocked one of his top priorities, using a legislative maneuver to postpone the approval of financial reform legislation by a key House committee.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34057664/ns/business-washington_post/

intriguing: Using evolutionary psychology as a theoretical framework, it is argued that conspicuous consumption serves as a means by which men communicate their social status to prospective mates. Accordingly, men’s endocrinological responses, particularly their testosterone levels, are responsive to fluctuations in their status as triggered by acts of conspicuous consumption. Study 1 reports that men’s testosterone levels increased and decreased partially (directionally), after driving an expensive sports car and an old family sedan, respectively. Additionally, the location of the drive, either a busy downtown area or a semi-deserted highway, partially moderated this response. Study 2 demonstrates that when men’s social status was threatened by the wealth displays of a male confederate in the presence of a female moderator, their testosterone levels increased. This is suggestive of an evolved mechanism for responding to intra-sexual challenges. Collectively, these constitute the first set of studies to measure hormonal outcomes in consumer behavior.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WP2-4WNGD8X-1&_user=10&_coverDate=11/30/2009&_rdoc=4&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%236978%232009%23998899997%231548116%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=6978&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=10&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8f23e58949ea349c1303690f7c3abfc5

Women 'should bare 40 per cent of their bodies to attract men' - For the purposes of the study, each arm accounted for 10 per cent of the body, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent. - Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up. - However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that showing too much flesh puts men off because it suggests they might be unfaithful.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6586031/Women-should-bare-40-per-cent-of-their-bodies-to-attract-men.html
[ note to self: see my thoughts over past few years re. evolutionary check against promiscuity on the part of a potential long-term partner ]

?! Sandra Tsing Loh, SF Democrat, Likes Palin’s Book
http://neveryetmelted.com/2009/11/20/sandra-tsing-loh-sf-democrat-likes-palins-book/

( links for 11-21-09 pt 2 )

no new taxes: The White House and Senate Democrats have turned to a proposal to tax breast implants, tummy tucks, wrinkle-smoothing injections and other procedures as they search for ways to pay for costly health care overhaul plans. - Vanity was an easy target as lawmakers scraped for cash for the nearly $1 trillion plan to expand health care to millions of Americans who lack insurance. But it's no joke to the drug makers and people who perform the cosmetic nips and tucks. And they're fighting back.
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34048874/ns/health-health_care/

Hollywood - the geographic Hollywood as found on Thomas Guide map page 593 - has received $23,338,327 in grants, loans and contracting. This money has created just 20.57 jobs. That’s $1,134,580.80 per job. And as interviews with recipients reveal, even that tiny jobs claim is clearly false, with many of the claims of newly created positions either impossible to verify or lower than reported. - Not even 20 full-time jobs have been created in Hollywood proper. - In fact, Hollywood’s portion of the stimulus package reveals an important factor of the Recovery Act: The money is not going to areas that would more directly stimulate the economy but instead to provide ongoing life support to deficit-ridden federal, state and local agencies.
- http://www.laweekly.com/2009-11-19/news/hollywood-s-catered-stimulus/
c/o http://community.livejournal.com/conservatism/3256067.html

"progressive" document: How to talk to voters about health care: progressive framing and messages
- http://laborpains.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/conference-07-lake.pdf

$100 million bribe to louisiana senator in health care bill to ensure passage?
- http://volokh.com/2009/11/19/how-many-words-does-it-take-to-say-louisiana/

Major Hasan's E-Mail: 'I Can't Wait to Join You' in Afterlife - American Official Says Accused Shooter Asked Radical Cleric When Is Jihad Appropriate?
- http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/major-hasans-mail-wait-join-afterlife/story?id=9130339

( links for 11-21-09 pt 1 )

Extinction of giant mammals altered landscape - Different plant communities popped up, wildfires increased, study suggests
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34046350/ns/technology_and_science-science/

n.y.t. on climategate - note how they keep the focus on we wacky deniers and, above all, ensure that nothing causes the holy mission of AGW theory to be questioned

- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html

[ thread was re. bank overdraft processing sleaziness ]

i have no doubt there are plenty of bad things going on that we never hear about. you'll note i never defend big corps as blanketly "good" (or slam them as "bad") - at that grain that's meaningless terminology, like saying all people are good/bad/blonde/whatever.

personal anecdote: several years ago chi and i bought a pricey vacuum cleaner - a rainbow - on an interest-free loan through wells fargo. term was either 12 or 24 months - forget which. a provision of the interest-free was that the loan had to be paid off by date X or we'd be assessed all interest that would have accrued on the balance from the beginning. quite a lot.

we always mailed in checks for the monthly payments and they were credited with no problem.

a few days before payoff date, a little intuition pulled at me and i called wells fargo. sure enough: that one payment, of them all, had mysteriously never been received. i fed ex'd a check out to them and made a note not to bank with wells again.

the rainbow was a great buy, by the way - have never regretted it!

- in http://writerspleasure.livejournal.com/754942.html [lightly edited]

is to circle the wagons, identify a few trusted ideologically aligned sources, then snarl at whatever comes from without and disagree with the ... consensus!

- in http://community.livejournal.com/conservatism/3254900.html

vladimir horowitz plays liszt piece inspired by senancour's vallee d'obermann - not his finest performance of the piece, but this is a live non-commercial recording and has the goodnesses of that. i think in this performance horowitz was experimenting with different elements of the interpretation. the version horowitz released on LP is definitive.





[ info on the liszt-series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann%C3%A9es_de_P%C3%A8lerinage ]

who was seeking what chi and i are seeking.

"I have been seeking through all the valleys to acquire some isolated pasturage which will yet be easily accessible, moderately clement in temperature, pleasantly situated, watered by a stream, and within sound of a torrent or the waves of a lake. I have no wish for a pretentious domain. I prefer to select a convenient site and then build after my own fashion, with the view of locating myself for a time, or perhaps for always. An obscure valley would be for me the sole habitable earth."

"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne_Pivert_de_Senancour

the media's tactics of resistance to challenge are too obvious - and too out of step with the times. this is why they're getting left behind.

- http://metaphorsbwithu.livejournal.com/259075.html

attn whoppi goldberg: they're not, y'know, numbers numbers: Stimulus job saving success of the day: California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas - and in 44 other states -"This is not really a real number of people," CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. "It's like a budget number"
- http://www.scrivener.net/2009/11/stimulus-job-saving-success-of-fhe-day.html

stossel: Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. - The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. Taxation is just one way government gets money. The other ways - borrowing and inflation - are equally burdens on the people. (State governments can't inflate, but they sure can borrow.) O'Reilly told me that America is ready for a tax revolt. I hope he's right.
- http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=03789faa-3d0c-45e0-b1e1-eefb4f792f44&t=c

stossel: Even if the jobs really were “saved or created”, that’s not real job creation. There is no new wealth created. All the stimulus did was shift resources to stimulus recipients, at a hidden cost. That money would have been spent or invested privately by other people if it hadn’t been taxed away. It’s Bastiat’s broken window fallacy in a nutshell.
- http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2009/11/17/bogus-stimulus/
c/o http://cafehayek.com/2009/11/stimulating-stossel.html

brilliant point: victor davis hanson: Obama’s Prissy America - Why does Obama’s tolerant, apologetic America seem so very self-centered?
- http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTgzOTFjYmRlMDY4MTg0MjI2MzdjMjM0NDQ3NGNlOGM=

( links for 11-20-09 pt 4 )

Where Are the Doctors to Implement ObamaCare? - A University of California chancellor warns that America could soon look like Massachusetts.
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574539901625102682.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

( links for 11-20-09 pt 3 )

mullah melvin, pt 1 - http://melvin-udall.livejournal.com/777365.html
mullah melvin, pt 2 - http://melvin-udall.livejournal.com/777623.html

The Obama team has apparently unleashed its informal allies, i.e. union organizers, ACORN and its alliances. - On October 28, protesters organized for the third time in front of the New Jersey Blue Cross. On this occasion, protesters were intent on creating a sit-in in the building’s lobby. There were eight arrests and pandemonium broke out when the police arrived. The building was shut down for most of the workday, but what is most interesting is the coordination of these protests in twenty locations around the country.
- http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34462

Democrats are touting a cost of $849 billion, but that number is a fabrication ... we learn that “one Senate Democratic leadership staffer acknowledged that the cost estimate did not even represent an official preliminary score from the CBO but was a representation of “preliminary feedback” that Reid has gotten from the nonpartisan Congressional agency.”
- http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34485

great point: when the freakin' PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES tells the nation that the defendant is guilty before the trial even begins, that's grounds for an aquittal (or at least a mistrial).
- http://community.livejournal.com/libtards/363761.html

nixon and haldeman invented the peoples' internet? well, no. but interesting.
- http://whip-lash.livejournal.com/453082.html
links to: http://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/richard-nixons-outrageous-plan/

( links for 11-20-09 pt 2 )

In [Slate's] reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book: - “The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.” - Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.” - But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ( you guessed it )

- http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzdiYTliN2MwYmJiNWY4OWVlZTA4ZmIwYzJkMjFjOGI=

the Senate bill has an ok CBO rating? - Because the program would begin taking in premiums immediately but would not start paying benefits until 2016, congressional budget analysts have forecast that it would generate a nearly $60 billion surplus over the next 10 years

- http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/is-this-why-the-senate-bill-has-an-ok-cbo-rating.html

right wing insane wingnuts at germany's der spiegel report: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out - Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents. - Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. - Reached a Plateau
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html

in the 1930s, too, "the wounds that can be inflicted by an almost monolithic political Hollywood sensibility:" John said this was all because of the people Scott [Fitzgerald] was surrounded by, all the writers who had suddenly become politically oriented, social consciousness was the cry, and anyone who merely wrote about people and their everyday problems and emotions, was at least a Facist or maybe worse. Poor Scott had been tossed into this whirlpool of Liberalism, and without a political credo to cling to, was drowning in it. He had never espoused causes, nor been very interested in politics; as a writer, Humanity had meant little to him, the Individual everything… “He actually told me he’s ashamed of The Great Gatsby,” John fairly snarled. “Those cursed Do-gooders… they’ve got him believing his work isn’t worth a tinkers damn just because he wasn’t waving a banner or marching in a picket line. They’ve destroyed him, as sure as God made little apples.”
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/ravrech/2009/11/19/patsy-ruth-miller-and-f-scott-fitzgerald-politically-incorrect-in-hollywood/
[ this for those who think accounts of america's red decade were overblown ]

[ x-posted to http://community.livejournal.com/conservatism/3254900.html ]

what does the left make of the fact that the morally-superior e.u. has a non-elected president?

http://timhedges.blogspot.com/2009/11/eu-president.html

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_European_Union ]

[ clearly we should make like those civilized countries and have state legislatures appoint senators again ]

the odd thing is that [media commentators and media analysts in academe] criticize the unbelievable, brain-bending power of advertising - people "find themselves" buying huge consumer item X or Y ... when it's corporations doing the advertising.

yet politicians advertise every moment of every day, and the media and schools advertise for them ... where's all that microfine analysis about that advertising onslaught?

[ i'd point out, too, that most people have primate tendencies to believe what our tribe believes - or what the dominant ones tell us we do/should believe. ]

- in http://community.livejournal.com/conservatism/3254710.html