A personal blog by a Jewish guy living in Seattle, working at the University of Washington as a scientist, working on blood vessels while taking pictures, and commenting on science, religion, politics and other taboos.
In response to a Goldy editorial about Frank Blethen, owner of the Seattle Tomes, crying about the loss of ad revenue.
I could give royal turd for Blethen BUT I am concerned that we have not as yet fun d a way to create online media that compete as well for attention as the dinosau traditional media.
One of the best things about the 2008 revolution is that Dean-Obama have found a way around the rich folks owning a campaign. BUT Huff/Slate/Kos/HA/Drudge etc are still little more than rumor shops.
I think Blethen may be part right in that serious reorting requires support and the only useful model for that has been the advert. dollar paid to newspapers and TV.
As a photographer, I am very disturbed by the dreadful LACK of photojournalism in Iraq! Yeh, I hear a lot of excuses but I suspect the bottom line is a lack of the $$$ that were enough, in a past era, to pay Robert Capa and his ilk and to support Life and other media that showed the work of the great social photographers. Other than the snaps from Abu Grave, there has been virtually NO unimportant photography from this war!
It seems that Clinton at the State Department is close to a done deal. But I think we should consider that during her time on the national stage Sen. Clinton has been at the helm in two big undertakings -- had two big executive leadership tasks. One was health care in 1994 and the other was her presidential bid in 2007-08. Each was something of a trainwreck from an executive-level management perspective. And the State Department is a notoriously intractable bureaucracy. I still need some help understanding this decision."
Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D) has ousted John Dingell (D) as Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
That's a hugely big deal on any number of levels -- not least of which is the two men's very different positions on energy policy. We'll have more soon.
Late Update: Here's the reaction from a Republican Hill staffer friend of mine -- very sane good guy, but, you know, still a Republican ...
Dude:
The day Henry got into this race, this result was ordained.
The differences between the 2 are, as you mentioned, HUGE.
But, honestly, the real story here is Nancy Pelosi whacked John Dingell. She put a hit on him, and it was executed.
The rest of the story takes a back seat to that FACT.
For the moment, I'm still going with 'Holy Crap'."
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Bothell) held on to her position as Democratic conference secretary when the Senate Democrats met in Washington, D.C. today, McClatchy’s Les Blumenthal reports.
Conference secretary, the post Murray was first elected to in 2006, is considered the fourth highest position in Democratic leadership.
There was speculation earlier this fall that Murray might ascend to the chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee if Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was stripped of his chairmanship by the Democrats for his outspoken support of 2008 Republican presidential nomine
My roommates and I built the only rooftop sukkah in Beijing, 16 floors above the traffic on Second Ring Road, overlooking Sinopec headquarters and the small Olympic park next door. It was a true Chinese sukkah — made in part with PVC pipes and metal wire from a local construction market. Read more
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Italian counterpart announced on Tuesday that historians from the two countries are to hold a conference next year. The topic will be the hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers that were deported to Nazi Germany during World War II. more...
* Nazi Massacre: Berlin Takes Rome to Court * Remembering Georg Elser: Berlin Debates Memorial for Would-Be Hitler Assassin * Haunted by Nazi History: German Politicians Divided over Anti-Semitism"
Hmmm ... anyone want to bet whether the agenda will include the role of the Vatican?
A new report adds more evidence to the fear of a widening income gap in Germany. The solid German middle class is losing people to the top and bottom of the income scale, while satisfaction with the German system falters. more..."
This is important for two reasons.
First, the erosion of the middle class in a social democracy argues that the problem in the US and China is much more broadly spread then I would have thought. If the goal of capitalism is to optimize the size of the middle class, we may all be in terrible trouble.
Second, Germany's problme could represent the drag down effect of America's trickle down economics. While German social policies are far more rational than ours, the US economy is likely to still be seveal of the cylinders in the German and world engine, As long as the US is run by voodoo economics, it ,may be impossible for a social democracy to NOT be affected by our maliase.
Ironically, Reaganomics may be a good thing for the third world! Growth of an affluent class in China or INdia may be a necessary step in the evolution of a poor country.
Just a few weeks before the EU anti-pirate mission is set to deploy, German officials are still unsure how much military force they are allowed to use against Somali raiders. Politicans are frustrated by the indecision and, on Thursday, German commentators joined the fray. more...
This is the beginning of the internationalism I expect to be a core part of Obama's foreign policy. The Indian Oceen needs to be and will be a "world" sea.
The first skyscraper to integrate large-scale wind turbines suspends three 1,200-megawatt units between its matching 787-foot office towers. The turbines, which were completed in April, supply 15 percent of the electricity for the two buildings—roughly the same amount used by 300 homes. [ Read Full Story ]
Daily Kos: State of the Nation: "More than three decades after he first appeared before the panel as a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran-turned-antiwar protester, Senator John F. Kerry is widely expected to be named the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position that will give him enormous influence over international relations.
The pending announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which congressional aides said could come as early as today, would elevate Kerry to the top of the foreign policy establishment and give him a major role in shaping President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy priorities.
Kerry, 64, who was elected to a fifth term in the US Senate from Massachusetts earlier this month, will be officially handed the gavel when the new congressional session convenes in January, according to multiple Capitol Hill sources. He will replace the outgoing chairman, Vice President-elect Joe Biden."
Daily Kos: State of the Nation: "According to data just released by the Minnesota Secretary of State, Al Franken has gained a net of 43 votes on the first day of that state's recount process. Norm Coleman had a lead of 215 voters over Franken in Minnesota's certified, pre-recount tally; that margin is now 172 votes.
Minnesota reports that it has thus far re-counted 15.49 percent of its ballots. If the first day's results are indicative of the pace that the candidates will maintain throughout the recount process, Franken would gain a net of 278 votes over Colmean, giving him a narrow victory. For any number of reasons, however, the results reported thus far may not be indicative of future trends [...]
the precincts that were re-counted today were slightly redder than average, having favored Coleman by an aggregate of 3.3 points during the initial count. No votes have yet been re-counted in Minneapolis (out of more than 200,000 cast), although about 43,000 have been recounted in St. Paul (out of around 140,000 cast on Election Day). Another city which has not yet reported any results is Duluth, traditionally a Democratic stronghold."
The Hindu : Front Page News : Thursday, November 20, 2008: "Indira Gandhi prize for ElBaradei NEW DELHI: Nobel laureate and Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei has been chosen to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2008. An international jury, chaired ..."
The experts extracted DNA from samples of mammoth hair to reconstruct the genetic sequence of this Ice Age beast.
Though some stretches are missing, the researchers estimate that the genome is roughly 80% complete.
The work could provide insights into the extinction of the mammoth and also resurrects questions about the viability of cloning long-dead species.
The scientists were aided in their task by the fact that several deep-frozen carcasses of woolly mammoths have been dug out of the permafrost in Siberia."
Awe who pould have dreamed that tis could ever be done?
US News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, announced earlier this month that it was abandoning print for the Web and the 100-year-old newspaper the Christian Science Monitor announced plans recently to do the same."
Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.
Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs.
Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million (.pdf) for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its students.
Tennessee's measure, (.pdf) approved Wednesday by Gov. Phil Bredesen, was the nation's first in a bid to combat online file sharing within state-funded universities. The law, similar versions of which the Recording Industry Association of America wants throughout the United States, comes as the Tennessee public university system is increasing tuition, laying off teachers and leaving unfilled vacant instructor positions to battle a $43.7 million shortfall.
"This bill, the first of its kind in the nation, addressed the issue of campus music theft in a state where the impact is felt more harshly than most," said Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's chairman and CEO.
Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science | Wired Science from Wired.com: "When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science."
By MIKE ALLEN & GLENN THRUSH | 11/19/08 11:09 AM To satisfy Obama’s vetting team, Bill Clinton is open to giving up foreign sources of income if his wife becomes secretary of state."
