February 7, 2011 · 8:13 pm

The Maddow Blog – Why you just keep working more

Interesting…

Companies have tons of cash on their balance sheets, but aren’t hiring or ramping up.  Instead, they are preserving profits.

President Obama today more or less pleaded with American companies to hire more people. In a tough economy, if the government won’t goose hiring through a public economic stimulus, then it’s up to companies. Mr. Obama, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

“Today, American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets. And I know that many of you have told me that you’re waiting for demand to rise before you get off the sidelines and expand, and that with millions of Americans out of work, demand has risen more slowly than any of us would like.”

“We’re in this together, but many of your own economists and salespeople are now forecasting a healthy increase in demand. So I just want to encourage you to get in the game.”

But here’s the thing — those companies are in the game already, and a lot of them are winning. Profits are up, even if hiring’s not. Part of what makes that possible is that workers have been doing more; productivity was growing at an annual rate of 2.6 percent at the end of 2010. So if you feel like you’re working harder, if you feel more tired than usual at the end of the day, there’s solid evidence that you’re not just low on vitamins and/or minerals.

via The Maddow Blog – Why you just keep working more.

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February 7, 2011 · 8:02 pm

Koch brothers: Charles and David Koch in Washington’s Republican spotlight – latimes.com

Seems the GOP is bought and paid for…

These are also the guys funding the Tea Party…

Reporting from Washington — The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington’s political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil, contributing $279,500 to 22 of the committee’s 31 Republicans, and $32,000 to five Democrats.

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. Of the six GOP freshman lawmakers on the panel, five benefited from the group’s separate advertising and grass-roots activity during the 2010 campaign.

Claiming an electoral mandate, Republicans on the committee have launched an agenda of the sort long backed by the Koch brothers. A top early goal: restricting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Kochs’ core energy businesses.

The new committee members include a congressman who has hired a former Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff. Another, Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, won a long-shot bid to unseat a 14-term moderate Democrat with help from Americans for Prosperity, which marshaled conservative activists in his district. By some estimates, the advocacy group spent more than a quarter-million dollars on negative ads in the campaign. “I’m just thankful that you all helped in so many ways,” Griffith told an Americans for Prosperity rally not long after his election.

via Koch brothers: Charles and David Koch in Washington’s Republican spotlight – latimes.com.

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February 7, 2011 · 9:07 am

Southern accent in danger? Raleigh News and Observer.com

Interesting…

A new dialect is forming in Raleigh, and Scarlett O’Hara it ain’t.

There’s a gradual shift toward a less distinctive regional accent, and our vowel sounds are leading the way.

“Language is always changing, always in flux,” said Robin Dodsworth, an associate linguistics professor at N.C. State University. “Over time in Raleigh, the Southern variant is disappearing.”

Since 2008, Dodsworth has collected recordings of native Raleighites, analyzing their vowel sounds to uncover how the local accent has changed through time.

The major difference is in something linguists call the “Southern vowel shift,” the way of speaking that makes words like “bait” sound more like “bet,” and turns “bed” into a two-syllable word. Those Southern quirks of speech are less noticeable with each generation Dodsworth interviews.

You could try blaming the influx of Yankees over the past couple decades, but the regional quirks of, say, New York- or Chicago-area speech patterns aren’t being picked up locally, Dodsworth said. Rather, the Raleigh dialect is becoming less traditionally “Southern,” smoothing out into an accent that is recognizably American but difficult to place.

via Southern accent in danger? – Education – NewsObserver.com.

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February 7, 2011 · 8:43 am

AOL Buys The Huffington Post

Could this be the beginning of the end of one of my favorite sites?

It’s not proven to be a good thing when a corporation buys a Media Outlet.  Especially one as inept as AOL.

I keep thinking of how Time Warner ruined CNN when Ted Turner sold out to them….

Time will tell…

“This is truly a merger of visions and a perfect fit for us,” said Huffington. “The Huffington Post will continue on the same path we have been on for the last six years – though now at light speed – by combining with AOL. Our readers will still be able to come to the Huffington Post at the same URL, and find all the same content they’ve grown to love, plus a lot more – more local, more tech, more entertainment, more finance, and lots more video. We are fusing a legendary and powerful new media brand with a vibrant, innovative news organization, known for its distinctive voice, a highly engaged audience, an expertise in community-building, and a track record for demystifying the news and putting flesh and blood on the data while drawing our audience into the conversation.”

Huffington continued, “By uniting AOL and The Huffington Post, we are creating one of the largest destinations for smart content and community on the Internet. And we intend to keep making it better and better.”

Kenneth Lerer, The Huffington Post’s Co-Founder and Chairman, said, “The Huffington Post team has created a potent brand with the proven track record of knowing how to grow traffic, inform and entertain its readers and build a one-of-a-kind online community. Add that to the powerful scale and resources of AOL and you have the perfect combination for today and the future. Together these two companies will be a premier online content provider. From local citizen reporting through AOL’s Patch, to The Huffington Post’s national reporting on politics, business and culture, consumers will have access to everything they want whenever they want it.”

AOL has agreed to purchase The Huffington Post for $315 million, approximately $300 million of which will be paid in cash funded from cash on hand. The Huffington Post is privately owned by its two cofounders, as well as a group of investors. The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of government approvals. The boards of directors of each company and shareholders of The Huffington Post have approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the late first- or early second-quarter 2011.

The Huffington Post over-indexes on educated, affluent users, reaching the key decision makers in C-suites around the globe. The Huffington Post speaks to this influential audience via a host of prominent voices on its group blog. Among those who have blogged on The Huffington Post are: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, Diane Sawyer, Buzz Aldrin, Nora Ephron, Bill Maher, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Katie Couric, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Senator Russ Feingold, Senator Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Harry Shearer, Senator John Kerry, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Madonna, Lawrence Summers, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Craig Newmark, Alec Baldwin, Aaron Sorkin, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Russell Simmons, Sean Penn, Bill Gates, Norman Lear, Charlie Rose, Elizabeth Warren, Tavis Smiley, Sheryl Sandberg, George Clooney, and former President Bill Clinton. And the audience speaks back, generating four million comments a month***.

The Huffington Post’s affluent, influential audience, that is growing at a rate of 22 percent (December 2009 vs. December 2010)****, when combined with AOL’s massive scale, video offerings and local expertise, will represent an incredibly desirable demographic for a broad range of advertising partners across the board.

MORE:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/07/aol-huffington-post_n_819375.html

 

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February 6, 2011 · 8:04 pm

Ethan Nichtern: Mindful Social Networking: Going Online Without Losing Your Mind

Interesting…

I struggle with the fact that I spend so much time on line, but justify it by having given up television and making the shift towards exploring writing and commentary as a possible side job at some point in the future.

Being a Libra, I’m in a constant struggle for balance anyway…

And we are really good at justification of questionable behavior…

 

The Social Network is an amazing phenomenon, an amazing opportunity to see the truth of interdependence, that none of our lives occur in an isolated vacuum. Social networking is also, possibly, the most widespread addiction on our planet right now, sucking billions of hours we’ll never get back again. On a recent meditation retreat, I asked assembled students to share their favorite “evasive maneuvers” from the present moment, the ways we all hide out from having to be here with the direct simplicity of right now. People said all kinds of funny and not so funny things. In a discussion group later in the weekend, one student wondered why nobody had brought up Twitter and Facebook. Another student joked “Ethan asked us what our individual evasive maneuvers were, not our shared ones. Everyone’s addicted to Facebook. That just goes without saying at this point.”

From the Buddhist standpoint, the best framework to analyze social networking is a concept called “coemergence.” Coemergence refers to the ability of any particular phenomenon or experience to manifest as either wisdom or confusion, helpful or harmful, a weapon or a prison. From this standpoint (which is sometimes considered an advanced framework for working with meditation practice), phenomena are in themselves neither positive nor negative, but they only become helpful or harmful according to how the mind attends to them and fixates upon them. Enter the social network. Is it the greatest tool for connection and camaraderie the world has ever seen? Or is it a dangerous time-suck, isolating us in bubbles of anxious voyeurism? Well, it’s both.

What make the distinction? Whether or not you view your time online as a practice or an escape makes all the difference in the world. At the same time, recognizing the truth of coemergence is a great way to develop compassion and overcome guilt about our actions. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself seems like quite the coemergent dude.

via Ethan Nichtern: Mindful Social Networking: Going Online Without Losing Your Mind.

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February 6, 2011 · 6:10 pm

Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV

Excellent article about the real legacy of Ronald Reagan…

This is exactly how I remember it…

Hat tip to PamsHouseBlend.com for originally posting this….

America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent evocations of an imagined man.

In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember “glasnost,”  “perestroika,” and the impact of Levis, Coke and “Dynasty”?) is credited with “tearing down” the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up during his “conservative” presidency is ignored;  “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” still works, even though theory-originator David Stockman says it doesn’t; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the “Great Communicator” – who conned working-class “Reagan Democrats” while catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even before there were trained replacements.

AND:

For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the far different “mourning in America.” And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn’t even bother covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no “AIDSgate” for Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays deserved what they got – they deserved to die.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Patrick Buchanan, Reagan’s Press Secretary, said AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Antigay Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist) away from Reagan:

”[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan’s chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

 

via Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV.

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February 6, 2011 · 4:19 pm

Database to foil yoga copythieves to launch – Boing Boing

Interesting….

From BoingBoing.net:

A open Indian database of all yoga postures will go live soon. It’s intended to serve as a reference for patent and copyright offices around the world who are petitioned by the likes of Bikram Choudhury with patent and copyright applications for individual postures and sequences of postures. The Times of India article is somewhat confusing in that it mixes patent and copyright freely. I haven’t heard of patents being granted on yoga postures, but there have been many stories about the controversial practice of copyright offices allowing registration of choreography copyrights for sequences of postures:

In order to stop self-styled yoga gurus from claiming copyright to ancient `asanas’, like Bikram Choudhury’s Hot Yoga — a set of 26 sequences practised in a heated room — India has completed documenting 1,300 ‘asanas’ which will soon be uploaded on the country’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), making them public knowledge.

Around 250 of these `asanas’ have also been made into video clips with an expert performing them.

According to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research ( CSIR) and Union health ministry’s department of Ayush, “once the database is up online, patent offices across the world will have a reference point to check on everytime a yoga guru claims patent on a particluar `asana’.”

CSIR’s Dr V P Gupta, who created TKDL, told TOI, “All the 26 sequences which are part of Hot Yoga have been mentioned in Indian yoga books written thousands of years ago.”

He added, “However, we will not legally challenge Choudhury. By putting the information in the public domain, TKDL will be a one-stop reference point for patent offices across the world. Every time, somebody applies for a patent on yoga, the office can check which ancient Indian book first mentioned it and cancel the application.”

via Database to foil yoga copythieves to launch – Boing Boing.

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February 6, 2011 · 1:33 pm

Super Bowl Shuffle

Well, I do kind of like this…

The Chicago Bear’s Super Bowl Shuffle from the mid-1980’s…

It’s kind of like “Glee”….

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February 6, 2011 · 1:14 pm

I Don’t Understand the Super Bowl…

I don’t get it…the Super Bowl?

I kind of understand College and High School sports, but I’ve never understood people gathering around the TV or in a stadium to watch over-paid millionaires attempt to destroy each other in order to make more money.

Don’t we see enough of this in Corporate American news every day?

If we are going to do this as national entertainment, we should just be honest and  do it right, like the Romans.

Let’s throw a few financial felons or corrupt politicians who helped crash the economy into a pit with a few lions and let’s see what happens.

That, I could get into….

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Filed under Entertainment, Politics, Scott's Commentary, Social Commentary

February 6, 2011 · 1:04 pm

Chapter 47: Surviving the Sub Debs | My Southern Gothic Life

New post up on my other blog:

I briefly mentioned the Sub Debs in one of my previous posts and said I was not even going to try to explain them. I am, probably foolishly, going to retract that statement and give it  shot.

I remember once trying to explain Sub Debs to a Hollins girl, and soon to be New Orleans Debutante, during a fraternity party when I was at Washington and Lee.  Once I finished the convoluted explanation I am about to attempt again, she looked at me and said:  ”That’s the silliest thing I ever heard of.  Either you are a Debutante or you’re not.  There is no in-between.”

Like most folks, she just didn’t get Danville, Virginia.

via Chapter 47: Surviving the Sub Debs | My Southern Gothic Life.

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