Blogs

What they did was pretty simple: The House passed a bill, the Senate passed a bill, and the President signed it. Civics 101: "How a bill becomes a law." And now the law is being enforced.*

So Hunter over at the Great Orange Satan (hat tip Atrios) writes this: Read below the fold...

I think this photograph is funny because it shows how two plants approach curvature: Honeysuckle, and the bleeding heart (yeah, yeah). Read below the fold...

Hypermasculinity. The study abstract:

Hyper-masculinity is a gender-based ideology of exaggerated beliefs about what it is to be a man. HM consists of four inter-related beliefs, namely toughness as emotional self-control, violence as manly, danger as exciting, and calloused attitudes toward women and sex (Zaitchik & Mosher 1993). Adherence to HM is linked to a host of social and health problems in North America, such as dangerous driving and violence toward women (Parrot & Zeichner 2003). Advertising is believed to play a role in constructing hyper-masculinity (Kilbourne 1999). In this study, eight U.S. men’s magazines published in 2007–2008, differentiated by readership age, education, and household income, were analyzed for hyper-masculine depictions in their advertisements. Using a behavioural checklist with good inter-rater reliability, it was found that 56 % (n = 295) of 527 advertisements depicted one or more hyper-masculine beliefs. Some magazines depicted at least one hyper-masculine belief in 90 % or more of advertisements. In addition, reader age, education, and income were all inversely related to the prevalence of hyper-masculine beliefs, with HM depictions presented more often in advertisements targeting young, less educated, and less affluent men. Implications of these findings for the well-being of men and society are discussed.

HuffPo's definition of "HM" (not the store): Read below the fold...

The keys are starting to fall off my much-loved MacBook Air. I can snap them back in place, but at some point I'm going to lose or break one. I can't afford to buy a new Mac right now. Can I superglue the keys in place? Read below the fold...

Chris Hedges calls out the “vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying Wikileaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange.”

According to Hedges, on Hans Crescent Street in London is a red-brick building housing the Ecuadorean Embassy and in some of its rooms lives the “world’s best-known political refugee.”

Julian Assange was offered sanctuary there beginning last June. Read below the fold...

Oh my goodness. I've been gone for a few months and Lambert has changed everything wonderfully! I simply was completely overwhelmed with life, we bought a townhouse, moved, had to move everything that was left in the townhouse to move our stuff in, and now of course the endless joys of home ownership which amount to "what is up to be fixed today?" Anyway, I'm back to working part-time, and we are settled in and Spring has been amazing here in central Jersey. So after having abandoned every single thing intertubz, I am back. And Corrente is my first stop.

I have no idea what is going on and will be taking some time to absorb it all, but here is a stab at a plantidote for 2013. Read below the fold...

Globalization has been the ingenious "get out of jail free" card the corporations have played:

As these "savvy businessmen" go global to freely impose the conditions which appalled America a century ago (The number of confirmed dead from the Bangladesh garment factory collapse and fire Is approaching and will certainly surpass 1000,)

I offer this:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 Read below the fold...

Here's an awesome rant -- and by "rant," I mean an extended, aria-like, long form disquisition whose tone and style achieve adequacy to the object of its interest -- from one David Edelberg, MD. You should read it all, because it captures the blandly genocidal_{MR SUBLIMINAL You're exaggerating! LAMBERT No I am so not exaggerating} nature of the health insurance industry very well, but it closes this way:

One physician piped up, “It’s one thing to have a healthy population of patients that never complains, follows all the rules, takes their generic medications, and never questions anything. But what about the non-compliant patients who won’t take the meds, don’t eat well, don’t have mammograms, continue to smoke? And what about super-health-conscious patients who want their vitamin levels measured and want referrals to acupuncturists?”

Another physician answered wearily for the medical director (who didn’t disagree): “You’ve got to fire patients like that. Get the non-compliant and the super-demanding out of your system. They’ll drag your numbers down. Hit your personal bottom line.”

Read below the fold...

Another little known or at least not much used way to contribute to Corrente besides adding blogs to the blogroll:

You can add a logo to the top! (That is, I am no longer a bottleneck. You do not have to go through me to upload graphics to the server. You can create the logo artwork yourself, and it will enter the random rotation.)

Here is an example. (There are no sidebars on this page because the artwork needs to run the full width of the page.) Read below the fold...

I'm noticing good blogs showing up on the blogroll that I didn't put there, so readers, thank you.

The only real criteria for the blogroll are that the writing has to be excellent and frequent enough to make constant checking not a waste of time. (I use Corrente's blogroll a lot when looking for posting topics here, and even links at NC when I have the keys to the car, so by putting a good blog on the blogroll you could be helping your favorite blog's traffic a lot.) But please favor blogs that deserve wider recognition over blogs everybody already knows about (e.g., not Glenn Greenwald, good though his writing is.)

It would sure be nice to have a really good war blogger, just in case Syria really blows up; I just added a "Strategy" category, to encompass war, intelligence, diplomacy, and relations between states generally, and added "Moon of Alabama." But there are surely others! We are also short on "Science," so I just added PZ Meyer's "Pharyngula." "Tech," "Daring Fireball." You get the idea. Read below the fold...

If the Republicans had any sense, they'd do a 180 on this pronto and destroy the Democrats for a generation. People would be so grateful, all generations. A man can dream... Anyhow, the guy's from Utah, of all places: Read below the fold...

Well, on impulse I bought a Trailmate Meteor trike.* The price was very good, so my impulse wasn't too self-destructive. I see it solving two problems at least: (a) getting plants and food back from the Farmer's Market, which otherwise is a forty minute walk each way now, and who has that kind of time, and (b) getting me to the gym. I rode my two-wheel bike to the gym for a few months two years ago, and it was great, but when I fell off it and could have broken my hand, I swore off two-wheeled bikes, because if I break my hand I have no livelihood and, for that matter, no life. However, the Trailmate has a very low center of gravity, so I can't see falling off it. It's a recumbent bike -- upright like in a chair, not one of those weirdo bikes where you're flat on your back -- so I wouldn't have far to fall anyhow! Read below the fold...

Google glasses are like open carry for nerds. Read below the fold...

Here's another color-coded annotation of an Obama transcript (via Kaiser), this one from his news conference right after Senator Max Baucus warned that ObamaCare would be "a huge train wreck". The contrast between Obama working from a prepared text (Inaugural, 2013; Hamilton Project, 2006) and Obama improvising at the podium is quite remarkable; we see no intricate verbal patterning at all.

Whereas the prepared texts are bright with color coding, Obama's health care presser -- and I know this will come as a shock to you -- codes as equivocation (with one neoliberal code word, "market," a little nonsense, and few lies). No secular religion or flights of populism whatever. Nevertheless, for all its banality and woodenness, the presser contains some remarkable passages. Read below the fold...

I brought back this delphinium from the Fedco tree sale and put it in the ground on Sunday, and it was very unhappy. All the signs of soil that's too cold: Wilting, weak stems, general collapse. As you can see, it's more or less recovered, and now it's much happier. The trick? Read below the fold...