Which comes first, bipartisanship or tackling the big problems? Krugman knows:

American politics is ugly these days, and many people wish things were different. For example, Barack Obama recently lamented the fact that “politics has become so bitter and partisan” — which it certainly has.

But he then went on to say that partisanship is why “we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions. And that’s what we have to change first.” Um, no. If history is any guide, what we need are political leaders willing to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition. If all goes well, we’ll eventually have a new era of bipartisanship — but that will be the end of the story, not the beginning.

Or to put it another way: what we need now is another F.D.R., not another Dwight Eisenhower.

You see, the nastiness of modern American politics isn’t the result of a random outbreak of bad manners. It’s a symptom of deeper factors — mainly the growing polarization of our economy. And history says that we’ll see a return to bipartisanship only if and when that economic polarization is reversed.

After all, American politics has been nasty in the past. Before the New Deal, America was a nation with a vast gap between the rich and everyone else, and this gap was reflected in a sharp political divide. The Republican Party, in effect, represented the interests of the economic elite, and the Democratic Party, in an often confused way, represented the populist alternative.

In that divided political system, the Democrats probably came much closer to representing the interests of the typical American. But the G.O.P.’s advantage in money, and the superior organization that money bought, usually allowed it to dominate national politics. “I am not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers said. “I am a Democrat.”

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It works only to protect Big Business:

At the Federal Communications Commission, reports were altered, and studies were blocked from release that showed local ownership was beneficial for local news coverage. The panel is still withholding hundreds of pages on media ownership research from release to the public. So says the Associated Press:

When the government decided to take a hard look at how well broadcasters were serving their communities, two economists at the Federal Communications Commission got a research idea: They would look at whether locally owned TV stations produced more local news than stations owned by companies based outside the area.They found that local ownership resulted in more local news coverage. They also realized they had turned up what one of the researchers, economist Keith Brown, called “inconvenient facts.” The findings were at odds with what their agency, under heavy lobbying from the broadcast industry, had endorsed.

The months-long study was spiked by the agency with “no plausible explanation,” Brown says. He suspects it was because the conclusions were at odds with the shared position of the FCC and the broadcast industry: that media ownership rules were too restrictive and should be loosened.

From TPMmuckraker:

Prosecutor Purge Is Illegal, Lawyer Argues
By Paul Kiel - January 25, 2007, 4:39 PM

An Arkansas lawyer has risen to challenge the law which allows the administration to circumvent Senate approval when installing new U.S. Attorneys.

On behalf of his client, an alleged crack cocaine dealer who’s accused of killing a man he’d robbed to prevent him from talking to the police, Little Rock lawyer John Hall has challenged the appointment of Timothy Griffin, the recently-appointed U.S. Attorney for eastern Arkansas with close ties to the White House.

Griffin’s resume is long on Republican bona fides and short on the sort of law experience usually expected of U.S. Attorneys. He was installed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and thanks to a measure slipped into the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act last year, may never face Senate confirmation.

Hall’s motion argues that because Griffin’s appointment circumvented Senate confirmation, it was unconstitutional — thus rendering the prosecution of his client invalid. “Contrary to the [Justice Department], I’ve actually read the Constitution a few times,” Hall told us. You can read his entire motion here.

We’ve excerpted the best part below the fold.

From the filing:

An example [of how the Attorney General could use the new law to circumvent Senate confirmation], one that might be called extreme but is not the slightest bit implausible, is this: The President appoints a qualified “strawman” (or woman) as a United States Attorney that the President knows will be confirmed by the Senate at the beginning of the President’s term of office. The Senate advises and consents to the appointment, and the U.S. Attorney is sworn in. Shortly after that, the Attorney General removes the U.S. Attorney and appoints a replacement who never has to face the Senate, and it turns out that the replacement U.S. Attorney is inexperienced or unqualified for the job or a blatantly political appointment that no one can understand would qualify as “the principal federal law enforcement officers in their judicial districts.” Conceivably, under the Attorney General’s interpretation of his appointment power in § 546(c), an incompetent or a blatantly politically appointed* U.S. Attorney could hold office like this for seven and a half years, or even longer, assuming the President is re-elected, without ever facing Senate confirmation over his or her qualifications.

*The footnote reads: “As has been suggested here because of Mr. Griffin’s connection to Karl Rove and the President’s 2000 Florida recount case that assured his election.”

From AmericaBlog:

Markos reports the following, then read on because I have more and it’s good:

In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ “

Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, ” ‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”

Oh, it’s better than that. When I was on the Hill on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told us (on the record) the rest of the story. Apparently, Pelosi’s final come-back to the president was the following:

PELOSI: He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice. I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’

BUSH: Because I told them it had to.

PELOSI: Why didn’t you tell them that the other two times?

McClatchy Washinton Bureau reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney put “constant” pressure on the Republican former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel’s Democratic chairman charged Thursday.

In an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said it was “not hearsay” that Cheney, a leading proponent of invading Iraq, pushed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to drag out the probe.

“It was just constant,” Rockefeller said of Cheney’s alleged interference.

Cheney said in response to Rockefeller’s charge that he believes Sen. Roberts “was a good chairman” of the Intelligence Committee, spokeswoman Lea McBride said.

Roberts’ chief of staff, Jackie Cottrell, said in an email statement it was Democrats’ fault the investigation remains incomplete more than two years after it was begun.

“Senator Rockefeller’s allegations are patently untrue,” she said. “The delays came from the Democrats’ insistence that they expand the scope of the inquiry to make it a more political document going into the 2006 elections. Chairman Roberts did everything he could to accommodate their requests for further information without allowing them to distort the facts.”

Roberts chaired the intelligence committee from January 2003 until the Democrats took over Congress this month.

Rockefeller’s comments were among the most forceful he has made about why the committee failed to complete the inquiry under Roberts.

The panel released a report in July 2004 that lambasted the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for erroneously concluding that Saddam Hussein was concealing biological, chemical and nuclear warfare programs.

It then began examining how senior Bush administration officials used faulty intelligence to justify the March 2003 invasion.

Robert promised to quickly complete what became known as the Phase II investigation. After more than two years, the panel published only two of five Phase II reports amid serious rifts between Republican and Democratic members and their staffs.

Rockefeller recalled that in November 2005, the then-minority Democrats employed a rarely used parliamentary procedure to force the Senate into a closed session to pressure Roberts’ to complete Phase II.

“That was the reason we closed the session. To force him” to complete the investigation, he said.

He said that Cheney’s intervention with Roberts was part of a White House effort to orchestrate the work of the Republican-led Congress.

Republicans “just had to go along with the administration,” he said.

The most potentially explosive of the three unpublished Phase II reports was to compare top Bush administration statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and ties to terrorists with what they were seeing in top-secret intelligence reports.

Alert Reader points out this Raw Story article:

(Click here to read the full timeline of the decades-long buildup to Iran)

The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

The motivations for an Iran strike were laid out as far back as 1992. In classified defense planning guidance – written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney by then-Pentagon staffers I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, World Bank Chief Paul Wolfowitz, and ambassador-nominee to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad – Cheney’s aides called for the United States to assume the position of lone superpower and act preemptively to prevent the emergence of even regional competitors. The draft document was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and caused an uproar among Democrats and many in George H. W. Bush’s Administration.

In September 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) issued a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which espoused similar positions to the 1992 draft and became the basis for the Bush-Cheney Administration’s foreign policy. Libby and Wolfowitz were among the participants in this new report; Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent figures in the Bush administration were PNAC members.

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the report read. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. . . . We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Carpetbagger:

For the last few years, congressional Republicans would cry “obstructionism!” at the drop of a hat. Any effort to stand in the way of the president’s agenda in Congress was outrageous, offensive, and possibly even unconstitutional. What mattered, more than anything, was preserving the notion of majority rule. To filibuster was to be un-American.

That was then. Have you noticed how the GOP has suddenly rediscovered its appreciation for standing in the way of the majority?

Back when he was in the Senate majority, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell thought it was pretty outrageous that Democrats were using the threat of filibusters to set up a 60-vote requirement for the confirmation of a handful of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. McConnell called the Democrats’ tactics an “ugly denial” of “fundamental fairness” that was “unprecedented in the history of the country” and would cause “great damage” to the U.S. Senate.

Now that the Republicans are in the minority, it turns out that using filibusters to force 60-vote cloture votes is nothing other than standard operating procedure. The Senate is set to debate competing anti-escalation resolutions next week, and McConnell tells MSNBC that all of them “are likely, as virtually everything in the Senate is likely, to be subject to a 60-vote threshold.”

Remind me, what was that the GOP was saying about “obstructionism”?

Yesterday, Republicans filibustered a minimum-wage increase, even though a majority of senators supported it, the House already passed it, and the measure enjoyed broad bipartisan support across the country. No matter, GOP senators said, this was no time for an up-or-down vote.

Soon, many of those same Republicans will also explain that they’re afraid of a non-binding resolution on the president’s escalation policy, so this can’t have an up-or-down vote either. Again, bipartisan support isn’t enough — McConnell & Co. want 60 votes.

They’re off to a good start, aren’t they? Less than a month into the 110th Congress, the GOP caucus has delivered two high-profile filibusters on two measures with broad support, both of which would pass if brought to the floor for a vote.

If I didn’t know better, I might think the Republicans were suddenly afraid of majority rule. That couldn’t be, could it?

We’ve seen it many times before, of course. Remember how the GOP shouted from the rooftops that Supreme Court nominees deserved an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor until, when Harriette Miers was nominated, suddenly it all changed?

If I’m not mistaken, for the DoD to spy on civilians in the US is illegal. But maybe Bush did a signing statement. The Eldest passes along this news report:

At least 186 antiwar protests in the United States have been monitored by the Pentagon’s domestic surveillance program, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which also found that the Defense Department collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in a single anti-terrorism database.

The documents were obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request filed last February.

“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 antiwar protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU, said in a statement. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”

The internal Defense Department documents show it is monitoring the activities of a wide swath of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice, which is spearheading what organizers hope will be a massive march on Washington this Saturday.

“This might have a chilling effect on some groups,” United for Peace and Justice’s Leslie Cagan told OneWorld, “particularly among high-risk communities like immigrants who don’t have their papers yet and U.S. citizens or people with green cards who are of Muslim or South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. They’ve already been targeted by the government and they might feel like, with this, it’s just too dangerous to come out and protest.”

“It seems pretty par for the course,” said Daniel Fearn of the group Veterans for Peace. The eight-year Marine Corps veteran is helping to organize an event in Washington Thursday ahead of the larger march January 27th.

“What do you expect from an administration that thinks torture is a way to get accurate information?” he said. “It’s the same thought process that says ‘we’re going to get good information from torturing somebody’—that same flawed process leads to spying on peace activists.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Good review of interesting Web 2 software.

AmericaBlog has a very interesting word-cloud analysis of Bush’s SOTU addresses (all of them, by year) and Webb’s response to the SOTU address. Go look.

I know several people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), and it’s no fun—they really lose energy and interest during the dark months. (Hmm: wonder if Vitamin D deficiency contributes.) Light therapy can help some, but research continues:

While many people believe that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) amounts to feeling gloomy in the winter, a University of Rochester research review emphasizes that SAD is actually a subtype of major depression and should be treated as such.

Lead author Stephen Lurie, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, also noted that SAD is sometimes missed in the typical doctor’s office setting.

“Like major depression, Seasonal Affective Disorder probably is under-diagnosed in primary care offices,” Lurie said. “But with personalized and detailed attention to symptoms, most patients can be helped a great deal.”

New, preliminary studies link SAD to alcoholism or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, not all people with SAD will have ADHD, according to the review article for the American Academy of Family Physicians.

“The important message here is that if you are a patient who has been diagnosed with a mental illness of any kind, don’t just assume that any new mental or emotional problem is due to that illness,” Lurie said. “Specifically, if you have ADHD and you feel worse in the winter, don’t just assume it’s your ADHD getting worse. It could actually be SAD — and you should see your doctor because ADHD and SAD are treated entirely differently.”

Although SAD has only been studied in adults, parents of children with ADHD should be sensitive to seasonal patterns of behavior and report any changes to a doctor, Lurie said.

Emerging evidence also shows that a pattern of seasonal alcohol use or abuse is associated with SAD. Patients might be self-medicating to cope with an underlying depression, researchers said.

Treatment for SAD includes light therapy, medications such as antidepressants, and cognitive behavior therapy. Each option seems to be effective, Lurie said, but none has been proven superior.

For some patients, SAD is precipitated by darker days causing a shift in 24-hour hormonal rhythms. The loss of natural light outdoors can be replaced with treatment by indoor light-therapy units designed for SAD. Light therapy is best delivered in the morning, when it can regulate the daily pattern of melatonin secretion, the review said.

Treatment with cognitive therapy has been shown to improve a person’s dysfunctional thoughts and attitudes and other symptoms in patients with major depression, but no large studies have established whether this type of treatment is effective for SAD.

Doctors often prescribe antidepressants such as Zoloft for SAD. But most of the clinical studies have compared the drug therapy to a placebo pill rather than to light therapy, making it difficult to determine if one treatment is better, the review said.

Now it remains but to do it—probably against a strong anti-science movement.

An analysis of 123 schools participating in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program shows improvements in student proficiency in mathematics and science at the elementary, middle- and high-school levels over a 3-year period.

The most recent data, for 2004-2005, show continued increases since the MSP program was established in 2002. Students showed the most significant improvements in mathematics proficiency, with a 13.7 percent increase for elementary, 6.2 percent increase for middle-school, and 17.1 percent increase for high-school students. Science proficiency at each level showed marked gains as well, with a 5.3 percent increase for elementary, 4.5 percent increase for middle-school, and 1.4 percent increase for high-school students.

The most dramatic increases were documented by elementary grade students in mathematics, where 7.2 percent more students achieved or exceeded proficiency from 2002-2003 to 2003-2004, followed by an increase of 6.5 percent from 2003-2004 to 2004-2005.

“The overall pattern of results continues to provide encouraging news about the work of NSF’s MSP projects,” said Diane Spresser, senior program coordinator for MSP at NSF. “While these results from the sample of schools that have been reporting data annually since 2002-2003 are very promising, much more is yet to be learned, especially as the larger data sets are analyzed from MSP schools that began their participation after 2002-2003.”

African-American, Hispanic, and white students showed significant improvements in elementary level mathematics, as did students designated as special-education or as limited English-proficiency students.

The proficiency data also reveals a correlation between teachers who participate in MSP professional development and their school’s change in student achievement. The correlations are positive in both mathematics and science at all grade levels (elementary, middle and high school) and are statistically significant for both elementary and high-school mathematics and science.

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We’ve been wanting this:

For decades, many scientists have criticized string theory, pointing out that it does not make predictions by which it can be tested. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University; the University of California, San Diego; and The University of Texas at Austin have developed a test of string theory. Their test, described in the Jan. 26 Physical Review Letters, involves measurements of how elusive high-energy particles scatter during particle collisions. Most physicists believe that collisions will be observable at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is set to turn on later this year at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, commonly known as CERN.

“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a nontrivial way,” explained Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon.

Rothstein and colleagues Jacques Distler, professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin; Benjamin Grinstein, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego; and Carnegie Mellon graduate student Rafael Porto developed their test based on studies of how strongly W bosons scatter in high-energy particle collisions generated within a particle accelerator. W bosons are special because they carry a property called the weak force, which provides a fundamental way for particles to interact with one another.

When the LHC turns on later this year, scientists will begin to investigate the scattering of W bosons, which has not been possible with other particle accelerators. Because the new test follows from a measurement of W boson scattering, it could eventually be performed at the LHC, according to the authors.

“The beauty of our test is the simplicity of its assumptions,” explained Grinstein. “The canonical forms of string theory include three mathematical assumptions — Lorentz invariance (the laws of physics are the same for all uniformly moving observers), analyticity (a smoothness criteria for the scattering of high-energy particles after a collision) and unitarity (all probabilities always add up to one). Our test sets bounds on these assumptions.

“If the test does not find what the theory predicts about W boson scattering,” he added, “it would be evidence that one of string theory’s key mathematical assumptions is violated. In other words, string theory — as articulated in its current form — would be proven impossible.”

“If the bounds are satisfied, we would still not know that string theory is correct,” Distler said. “But if the bounds are violated, we would know that string theory, as it is currently understood, could not be correct. At the very least, the theory would have to be reshaped in a highly nontrivial way.”

String theory attempts to unify nature’s four fundamental forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces — by positing that everything at the most basic level consists of strands of energy that vibrate at various rates and in multiple, undiscovered dimensions. These “strings” produce all known forces and particles in the universe, thus reconciling Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the large) with quantum mechanics (the small).

Proponents say that string theory is elegant and beautiful. Dissenters argue that it does not make predictions that can be tested experimentally, so the theory cannot be proven or falsified. And no particle accelerator yet exists that can attain the high energies needed to detect strings. Because of this technical limitation, tests of string theory have remained elusive until now.

“Since we don’t have a complete understanding of string theory, it’s impossible to rule out all possible models that are based on strings. However, most string theory models are based upon certain mathematical assumptions, and what we’ve shown is that such string theories have some definite predictions that can be tested,” Rothstein said.

This story makes me realize why foods that fight inflammation* are also cancer preventives:

A team led by biochemists at the University of California, San Diego has found what could be a long-elusive mechanism through which inflammation can promote cancer. The findings may provide a new approach for developing cancer therapies.

Normal dialogue between cell defense and development (left) and chronic inflammation leading to hyperactive developmental signaling that may promote cancer (right). (Credit: Alexander Hoffmann, UCSD)

The study, published in the January 26 issue of the journal Cell, shows that what scientists thought were two distinct processes in cells—the cells’ normal development and the cells’ response to dangers such as invading organisms—are actually linked. The researchers, who were also from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, say that the linkage of these two processes may explain why cancer, which is normal growth and development gone awry, can result from chronic inflammation, which is an out-of-control response to danger.

“Although there is plenty of evidence that chronic inflammation can promote cancer, the cause of this relationship is not understood,” said Alexander Hoffmann, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at U.C. San Diego, who led the study. “We have identified a basic cellular mechanism that we think may be linking chronic inflammation and cancer.”

Cellular defense is a rapid process compared to cellular development, just as a state’s response to terrorist threats is swifter than the construction of new infrastructure. However, in both settings, safeguarding against threats and building structures have certain steps in common and require similar types of workers, or molecules.

Hoffmann referred to the parallel sets of steps in cellular defense and development as “mirror image pathways.” His team showed that these pathways are not distinct from one another because they are linked by a protein called p100. They found that inflammation leads to an increase in p100, but that p100 is also used in certain steps in development. Therefore p100 allows communication between inflammation and development.

A small amount of dialogue between inflammation and development is beneficial, say the researchers, akin to how information from anti-terrorism efforts could be useful to crews building the state’s infrastructure. On the other hand, the constant influence of defense processes on development is detrimental.

“Studies with animals have shown that a little inflammation is necessary for the normal development of the immune system and other organ systems,” explained Hoffmann. “We discovered that the protein p100 provides the cell with a way in which inflammation can influence development. But there can be too much of a good thing. In the case of chronic inflammation, the presence of too much p100 may overactivate the developmental pathway, resulting in cancer.”

In the paper, the researchers propose that thinking of the processes of defense and development as part of a single large system “represents an opportunity for therapeutic intervention.” For example, it might be easier to break the link between inflammation and cancer by targeting the developmental pathway, rather than the inflammation pathway.

“Many of the developmental signals that cells use are sent outside the cell, so they should be easier to block with drugs than inflammation signals, which tend to be confined within cells,” said Hoffmann. “It’s more challenging to design drugs that will enter cells.”

Because the molecules that play a role in the inflammation and development pathways have been extensively studied for many years, the researchers say that it is surprising to find a new molecule that significantly revises scientists’ understanding about the interactions between inflammation and development. They credit their discovery to an approach that combines biochemical techniques and computation.

“Our mathematical model of inflammation and development includes 98 biochemical reactions,” said Soumen Basak, a postdoctoral fellow working with Hoffmann. “ When we ran the model, it predicted that p100 levels would be elevated for a significant period of time when the inflammation pathway was stimulated. We confirmed the prediction using biochemical techniques with cells in the laboratory.”

“The finding is exciting because it means that p100 provides cells with a memory to inflammatory exposure,” added Basak, who was the first author on the paper.

Foods that fight inflammation: Read the rest of this entry »

Just got a fresh shipment of coffee from Baltimore Coffee & Tea. I waited a little too long to order, so had to nip out for a half-pound of locally roasted beans. Great stuff.

A loyal reader sent this link so I could watch Jon Stewart skewer the State of the Union speech. So I did: very enjoyable.

I keep seeing signs that the Right wants a totalitarian system in this country, and is working vigorously to achieve that. (If you search on “totalitarian” in this blog, you’ll find some posts to that effect.)

Now they are moving fast to create an oath of loyalty to Bush (not to the country): a cult of personality, as the Soviets used to say. Read Glenn Greenwald today.

From Mind Hacks:

I found this on the wall of a Rehab Unit in a London hospital this morning.

Dancing in the Waiting Room
by Angus Macmillan

All our living
is in waiting.
In these moments
we find our myriad selves
anxious, hopeful, trembling,
wishful, fearful, impatient.
All our dancing shadows
are there
flitting in the half light
of unreason
crowding together
in fevers of movement
never still, never one.

Then a voice says ‘Next’
and a new dance
begins.

I looked up the author on the net, and it turns out he’s a Scottish poet who writes in English and Gaelic, and is also a psychologist!

And luckily, there’s some audio of him reading his poems in both English and Gaelic available online.

Link to info and audio from Angus Macmillan.

Via Lifehacker, this post on how to format cells conditionally. (E.g., boldface red if negative, book green if not.)

Making bento box lunches at home and selling through various delis, for example. But how to go about it? Starting a business requires knowledge, and gaining the knowledge by experience… well, “experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other” (B. Franklin). So, you not being a fool, where do you get the knowledge?

Ideal, of course, is to have as a mentor a close friend who started and runs a bento box lunch business in a nearby city. Failing that, these podcasts from the Small Business Administration (your tax dollars at work) would be very helpful.