Later On

Via Queerty:

Via No Impact Man:

Interesting:

Pimp This Bum tells the life changing events of Tim Edwards, a Houston man living on the streets. After being approached by a father/son marketing team about a unique charity idea, Tim agreed to participate. The agreement: fly a cardboard sign at a busy intersection with the words, "All Major Credit Cards Accepted www.PimpThisBum.com." What erupted from this internet experiment was a media campaign that traveled the globe in a few days. Donations came pouring in and within two weeks, $70,000 had been raised to help Tim get off the streets. Pimp This Bum tells the inspiring story of Edwards life in the wake of this unexpected turn of fortune and his courage to begin a new life.

You wouldn’t think so, the way the term is avoided, yet it clearly fits the definition. Americans have a hard time recognizing domestic terrorists, but we have ‘em. Timothy McVeigh leaps to mind, as well as the Atlanta pipe-bomber and various abortion-provider assassinations. Yesterday’s event was another terrorist. Glenn Greenwald:

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto.  Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants).  All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

Despite all that, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though — as Dave Neiwert ably documents — it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term.  The issue isn’t whether Stack’s grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition.  But as NBC’s Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism:  there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen."  Fox News’ Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials:  "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."

All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.  The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity.  It has really come to mean:  "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies."  That’s why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist:  he’s not a Muslim and isn’t acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition."  One might concede that perhaps there’s some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized:  it’s not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way."  We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it’s not people named Joseph Stack.

Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims…

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Yesterday WordPress.com was down for 10 minutes short of two hours. This is the worst outage in years, and they are going to great lengths to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The report from Matt of WordPress:

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

Tangerine & Spearmint today, as you see, and it produced a great lather with the Omega synthetic Lucretia Borgia brush. I used my ebony-handled Elite Razor because yesterday’s shave was so good, I thought I’d work my way through all my razors that share the same Merkur Classic head: a bit like using the same razor each day, which some find important. And indeed I got another very fine and flawless shave, this time thanks to a previously used Astra Keramik blade. And Oriental Spice is one of my favorite Booster aftershaves.

This recipe sounds really good. I’m making it.

Maybe this was already done in Vista, but when I print a multi-page single-sided document on my DeskJet printer in Win 7, the last page prints first and the others in order so that when I take it from the printer the document is already collated. That’s very pleasant—and I’m surprised that they didn’t do it long ago.

I recall the fights I had with programmers in my last job, trying to force them to print lists sorted in columns rather than across the page. Some people just don’t want to spend the effort to do the job right.

Here’s a somewhat detailed post that will be of particular interest to AGW denialists: the post carefully dissects the errors found in the IPCC report. It begins:

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.  Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC.  The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort.  The three working groups are:

Working Group 1 (WG1), which deals with the physical climate science basis, as assessed by the climatologists, including several of the Realclimate authors.

Working Group 2 (WG2), which deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc.

Working Group 3 (WG3) , which deals with mitigation options for limiting global warming, as assessed by energy experts, economists, etc.

Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007.  Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record.

Errors in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)

As far as we’re aware, so far only one–or at most two–legitimate errors have been found in the AR4:

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How are you doing? They also don’t pay much tax. Ryan Donmoyer in Business Week:

The average income reported by the 400 highest-earning U.S. households grew to almost $345 million in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, Internal Revenue Service statistics show.

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Each household in the top 400 of earners paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1992, the statistics show. Their average effective tax rate was about half the 29.4 percent in 1993, the first year of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when taxes were increased.

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

The top 400 earners received a total $138 billion in 2007, up from $105.3 billion a year earlier. On an inflation-adjusted basis, their average income grew almost fivefold since 1992, the data show.

Political Ammunition

The data may provide ammunition for President Barack Obama and Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California who say they intend to increase the capital gains tax rate and let tax rates for the highest earners increase in 2011.

Almost three-quarters of the highest earners’ income was in capital gains and dividends taxed at a 15 percent rate set as part of Bush-backed tax cuts in 2003, the statistics show. Of the 400 earners, 289 paid a total effective federal tax rate of 20 percent or less in 2007, the last year for which figures were available, the data show…

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By email from the Center for American Progress:

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the day that President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, i.e. the stimulus) into law. "One year later, it is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second depression is no longer a possibility," said Obama. "So far, the Recovery Act is responsible for the jobs of about 2 million Americans who would otherwise be unemployed. These aren’t just our numbers; these are the estimates of independent, nonpartisan economists across the spectrum." Indeed, as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt detailed, "perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs." The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, estimates that the stimulus saved or created between 800,000 and 2.4 million jobs. The gross domestic product also grew at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 5.7 percent last quarter, much of which can be attributed to the stimulus package. "The economy has shed some three million jobs over the past year, but it would have lost closer to five million without stimulus," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com and former adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign. "The economy is still struggling, but it would have been much worse without stimulus." However, Republicans are using the Recovery Act’s anniversary as an opportunity to continue making false claims and clouding public perception regarding its effectiveness.

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Sebastian Jones in the Nation :

President Obama spent most of December 4 touring Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting with local workers and discussing the economic crisis. A few hours later, the state’s former governor, Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. There were “modest things” the White House might try, like cutting taxes or opening up credit for small businesses, but the real answer was for the president to “take his green agenda and blow it out of the box.” The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”

Editor’s Note: The online slideshow Faces of the Media-Lobbying Complex, which accompanied this March 1 cover story (Sebastian Jones, “The Media-Lobbying Complex”), initially began with an image of Governor Howard Dean from his appearance as a guest host on MSNBC’s Countdown. The slideshow featured lobbyists who appeared on TV news as analysts without disclosing their corporate affiliations, and in that context it may have created the false impression that Dean is a lobbyist or that he used his Countdown appearance to promote his law firm’s clients. Neither is true in Dean’s case. The article included only one sentence about Dean, whose law firm consults for pharmaceutical companies, and did not suggest that Dean had done anything unethical. But MSNBC, by having him host Countdown without disclosing his firm’s consultancy, created a potential conflict of interest of which viewers were unaware. As the article points out, the practice is commonplace at all TV news networks, which bear the ultimate journalistic responsibility.

As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Moments earlier, retired general and “NBC Military Analyst” Barry McCaffrey told viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional “three- to ten-year effort” and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone. The government had just granted DynCorp a five-year deal worth an estimated $5.9 billion to aid American forces in Afghanistan. The first year is locked in at $644 million, but the additional four options are subject to renewal, contingent on military needs and political realities.

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Megan Carpentier in the Washington Independent:

In an early roll-out of what is likely to be part of the financial industry’s regulation-busting public relations strategy, JPMorgan Chase analysts issued a report stating that any government efforts to prevent future financial meltdowns will cost them money. Naturally, they have no intention of losing a cent of the profits they planned to make by being undercapitalized and engaging in trading activities to the detriment of their depositors, nor will they pay a cent more in taxes to cover the losses to taxpayers for the various bailouts.

So how do the banks plan on covering the cost of making themselves stable and taxpayers whole? Why, by raising fees, of course!

“In order to return to similar levels of profitability as per current forecasts, we estimate that pricing on all products (retail banking, commercial banking and investment banking) would have to go up by 33 percent,” [JPMorgan head of research Nick] O’Donohoe said.

Despite the fact that the biggest proposed tax doesn’t come anywhere near one-third of profits, despite the fact that “increased capitalization” only means they need to have enough money around to prevent abject failure, and despite the fact that, in the days before banks were allowed to engage in both retail and investment banking, fees for services were actually lower, those legal changes will result in a one-third fee increase for customers.

It sounds like banks are just trying to use the specter of fee increases to scare consumers out of wanting reform — and, if that doesn’t work, they’ll use those increases to fund even higher profits than they would have generated without regulation. No wonder nobody trusts their bank anymore.

Take a look—and the post’s worth reading as well, especially if you like Michael Pollan.

From a very good James Fallows post that should be read in its entirety, this parenthetical remark:

I am sitting in an airport lobby where every five minutes the PA system delivers the news that "the current threat advisory as established by the Department of Homeland Security is ‘Orange’." Tell me, please oh Lord, who on Earth is made safer or more secure, or which evil-doer anywhere is more hindered, by repetitive broadcast of this moronic boilerplate? What does the "current" level mean, if it never changes? Why is it the same in Washington DC, which someone might want to blow up, and rural Mississippi, which is probably under less imminent threat? What am I supposed to do or think because it’s "orange"? Is there any conceivable reason this system is still in place – other than the fact that no political official dares take the risk of recommending that it be lowered?

Much more effective than the previous president. Steve Benen:

We learned this week about the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top military commander. Baradar was the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the war began, making this a key success story.

Better yet, it was the start of an apparent trend.

Two senior Taliban leaders have been arrested in recent days inside Pakistan, officials said Thursday, as American and Pakistani intelligence agents continued to press their offensive against the group’s leadership after the capture of the insurgency’s military commander last month.

Afghan officials said the Taliban’s "shadow governors" for two provinces in northern Afghanistan had been detained in Pakistan by officials there. Mullah Abdul Salam, the Taliban’s leader in Kunduz, was detained in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, and Mullah Mir Mohammed of Baghlan Province was also captured in an undisclosed Pakistani city, they said.

When combined with the Baradar arrest, the developments represent "the most significant blow to the Taliban’s leadership since the American-backed war began eight years ago." It also points to an unprecedented level of cooperation between U.S. officials and the Pakistani government.

And it gets better still.

Pakistani authorities using U.S.-gathered intelligence arrested up to nine al-Qaida-linked militants in a series of overnight raids in the southern city of Karachi, officials said Thursday. [...]

They said eight or nine militant suspects were arrested. One was identified as Ameer Muawiya, who the officials said was in charge of foreign al-Qaida militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal regions near Afghanistan and was an associate of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Go ahead, Republicans, tell us again about why we should question the Obama administration’s approach to national security and counter-terrorism.

That crazy ol’ GOP. Steve Benen:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would, by all accounts, like to see the Senate take up a jobs bill when members return to the Hill on Monday. Senate Republicans intend to block Dems from even bringing the proposal to the floor for a debate, and Reid does not yet have the votes to stop them.

But the amazing part of this is that Republicans actually like what’s in the modest jobs bill. GOP leadership aides met behind closed doors yesterday with more than 100 corporate lobbyists to discuss strategy, and according to Roll Call, Republicans are leaning on waffling members to block consideration of a stripped down, $15 billion jobs package for reasons that have nothing to do with its merits.

Given the divisions within the GOP Conference — and the fact that Republicans have largely backed most of the bill’s provisions in the past — leadership aides told lobbyists that the GOP plans to attack Reid’s bill over process, rather than policy.

More than 100 lobbyists representing the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and other associations attended the meeting with staff from the offices of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Thune (S.D.), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Grassley.

"The feeling is they aren’t going to say anything in opposition to the bill, except to say it’s incomplete," a lobbyist who attended the meeting said. "They are not opposed to the bill, they just believe their rights as the minority have been abridged."

The GOP’s willingness to reject the ideas they support continues to be almost impressive in its scope.

Reid wants a clean bill and an efficient process, so he’s pushing for a vote on a jobs bill with no amendments. Republicans have decided that Reid’s approach hurts their feelings, so they’d rather play partisan games.

It’s worth emphasizing that GOP opposition is not yet unanimous, so it’s still possible to see some constructive movement on Monday. But like everything else in the Senate that Republicans broke, this is looking awfully ugly.

Sounds very good. Take a look:

GM has made a huge leap into the 21st Century by pursuing the Volt. If ever this company needed a new car on which to hang its future, the time is now, and the Volt is it. This car and its future offspring should win back the attention of the motoring public — and we say that genuinely!

40 Vancouver electric vehicle enthusiasts test drove pre-production Chevy Volts.  Guest blogger John Stonier has this (semi-)exclusive look at GM’s new plug-in hybrid EV, in a post first published at evworld.com, whose goal is “to provide a human face to the topic of sustainable transportation.”

General Motors issued a very special invitation to the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association last week to drive the two Chevrolet Volts visiting the city for the 2010 Winter Olympics. GM generously offered 40 of the Association’s 210 members a unique opportunity to learn more about the car while it is still in pre-production. The event also allowed GM to get feedback from enthusiasts with years of electric car driving experience.

GM has produced 80 third generation pre-production prototypes, two of which came to the Olympic city. This version of the Volt should be close to the final production car due to roll out of a Detroit facility later this spring. Of the 80 cars, most are used for testing and development purposes, but these two vehicles were finished for public display and will be prominently featured during the Olympic Games over the next few weeks. According to GM officials the first production cars will be available in Washington DC, Detroit and California later this fall. Canada should see our first Volts in showrooms later in 2011…

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From economists at E3 Network: Eban Goodstein, Kristen Sheeran, Director, Peter Dorman, Jonathan Isham, and John Laitner. Their post:

I. Addressing Climate Change Can Lead to Net Job Growth in the United States

Many economists believe that due to the global downturn, the US will experience high rates of unemployment (>6%) for a number of years to come. However, a steady shift toward climate protection will likely boost net job growth in the US:

• Reduced oil imports would create jobs. Reducing oil imports can save hundreds of billions of dollars each year on imported oil. Rather than send this money abroad, it can be spent at home, creating jobs. We have the potential to create 900,000 new jobs in the US for very $100 billion decrease in oil imports2.

• Carbon solutions invest in labor intensive domestic jobs and domestic resources. The solutions to climate change—ranging from  renewable energy, to high-speed rail, to smartgrid investments, to sustainable biofuels—depend more on domestic resources, and also use more labor per dollar invested, than do fossil fuel alternatives. One recent study suggested that a switch towards carbon-reducing investment could create 1.7 million near term jobs (Pollin et al. 2009).

• The United States can create jobs by re-assuming technology leadership. China is moving aggressively to capture leadership in solar, wind, high-speed rail, and other key clean energy solutions. But as recently as 1995, the US was the technology leader in wind and baseload solar”—solar thermal. US utilities today are purchasing these technologies from China, Denmark and Spain. By reassuming technology leadership, and adopting a policy framework to support clean, homegrown energy industries, the US can create new jobs by selling into an emerging, massive global market.

• Investment in clean energy can mobilize capital to end the recession. The current downturn, resulting from the collapse of an asset bubble, is the hardest type from which to recover. In these types of recessions, self-corrective mechanisms are weak. Concerned about lack of future demand, businesses scale back investment, which has a multiplier effect, holding back recovery. A sustained national effort to rewire the country with clean energy, including a cap and trade system as a central driver, could mobilize large-scale private sector investment and initiate a positive feedback process: investment –> jobs –> income –> investment –> jobs –> sustained growth.

II. Addressing Climate Change Will Not Result in Significant Job Loss

In spite of heated rhetoric claiming that past episodes of environmental regulation have been “job-killers”, numerous independent studies show: …

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Eventually we’ll be back outside, the winter a dim memory. At that time, these tips on how to grill a steak should come in handy.