You'll never believe what SF Pride CEO Earl Plante tells KTVU-2 News. Plus I love the chants.
Court Martial or Grand Marshal? Why did SF Pride Ban Bradley Manning? 7 May 2013 YouTube posted on May 10, 2013 by MayaMediated
YouTube info: "Well, there's a couple of reasons for that!" What ARE the reasons Bradley Manning was barred from becoming Grand Marshal of San Francisco Pride 2013? You'll be happy to know they're very simple. Read below the fold...
Adapting a comment I made over at NC: Realize that the administration is now in full campaign mode on ObamaCare during the rollout, and will likely be through 2014 at least.
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Therefore, you should treat every single statement on ObamaCare -- every single statement -- uttered by administration officials, Democratic think tanks, career "progressives," and Obots generally as carefully engineered and centrally co-ordinated bullshit,* exactly as if we were in the midst of a political campaign. Read below the fold...
Here is the start of my edible forest: One of my three filbert trees in its nano-climate.* I bought them last year at the Fedco tree sale, and they survived the winter!
The problem twigs seem to be dead; I scratch them with my thumbnail, and there's no green. So what to do? Does the tree fix that all on its own? Or do I cut back 'til I find live wood? The leaves on lower branches seem fine, but I have this image that hormones at the tips of the branches lead the tree upward toward the sun, so if the tips of the branches are dead, that could be a problem! Read below the fold...
Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has. " During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.
The sociopaths rise to the top of power by clawing, bullying, intimidating, lying, charming, betraying their ways.
They rise to the top by being enabled by the bullied, the craven, the stupid, the naive, the opportunistic, the distracted, the brainwashed, and/or by crony bullies.
A Message from the [current] resident of Cooper Union 5-11-13
There has been a concern on campus that some guards may be armed. Vice President Westcott periodically hires security guards for events or when crowds are expected, because Cooper has only a minimal security staff. These are NYPD-trained security personnel, who have received the best training in safety and legal procedures available in New York City. We were unaware that some carried concealed weapons, and regret the needless apprehension that was caused when a guard was asked if he was armed and responded in the affirmative. It is not uncommon for security guards in New York offices to be armed. Nevertheless, Vice President Westcott assures us that, since becoming aware of this, no guards will carry arms.
"Forget the Pride committee. The community has spoken: Bradley Manning IS Grand Marshal."
Bradley Manning is Grand Marshal! Pride Meeting 7 May 2013 YouTube posted May 9, 2013 by MayaMediated
YouTube info: Includes the only photos from inside the meeting! "They say court martial! We say grand marshal!" Why did Pride cancel making Bradley Manning Grand Marshal of Pride 2013? Why did they ban the press from their meeting? Sure looks like the corporate sponsors want a nice, squeaky clean party with no reminders that Pride is about fighting for human rights and that the celebration honors a RIOT. Forget the Pride committee. The community has spoken: Bradley Manning IS Grand Marshal.Read below the fold...
It looks like young Ezra (and, to be fair, everybody else) missed a major policy change in Obama's shift to the new, shorter (for individuals*), final version of the basic application.** As it turns out, the issue (or at least one of the issues; gawd knows what other time bombs are buried in the thing) wasn't only the length and complexity of the form, though that was and is bad enough; the issue is the actual content of the form. Here's what I'm talking about. It's right in plain sight. I'm using a screen dump of the new, shorter, finalized form from Ezra's article:
Figure 1.
Yes, Equifax (a private "consumer reporting agency") could be affecting your eligibility for ObamaCare (a Federal program). Now, this is a major policy change, or perhaps a policy determination. Here's the equivalent language in the draft 26-page "Single Streamlined Application." As you can see, the language had not then been finalized:
Figure 2.
Alrighty then. Let's break out the old lawyerly weasel-wording parser and actually compare what the two forms say. Read below the fold...
Yves Smith and Bill Black have a post this morning describing the potential problems with the Brown/Vitter bill. There's a lot of detail and I won't try to summarize it, but there are two points I wanted to highlight.
The first is the concept of tight coupling. Basically, a bunch of extremely interconnected small institutions can pose as much systemic risk as a handful of behemoths, so a reform that turns the latter into the former is esentially a cosmetic one. The second is the concept of systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs. SDIs are institutions that are large enough on their own to trigger a cascade of failures if they themselves fail.
So there are two characteristics to be concerned with here: tight coupling and dangerous size. Why not tweak the nomenclature a bit to include both of those? We could call these institutions Systemically Tight and Dangerous, or STDs. That seems a bit more colorful and descriptive than SDIs, don't you think?
If it catches on, we could even end up with the bonus fun of seeing legislators try to come up with a bill title that's an acronym for penicillin. Read below the fold...
It can be difficult to write about activism in an open-ended effort like the one against fracking. It isn't like a campaign where all the activity is geared toward election day, at which point everyone will know who won and who lost. It's different even from an issue like the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a single (continent-spanning) contiguous piece of infrastructure, and which will ultimately get a definitive yes or no.
Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern. Read below the fold...
