A national epidemiologic study finds a strong, consistent correlation between adult diabetes and particulate air pollution that persists after adjustment for other risk factors like obesity and ethnicity, report researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston. The relationship was seen even at exposure levels below the current EPA safety limit.
I would be for Initiative 1098, even if it cost me money.
Initiative 1098, which would create an income tax for the state’s wealthiest residents, has led to some odd fissures among the state’s business and technology titans. The most obvious example is the opposing positions taken by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who gave money to defeat I-1098, and Bill Gates, Sr. (father of the Microsoft co-founder), a chief proponent of the income tax. But there’s another notable split in the tech community on this issue, between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, an initiative opponent, and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, one of Amazon’s earliest backers and a staunch supporter of the tax. Hanauer, who returned my call while on a plane to Istanbul, had some choice words on the matter.
Hanauer, when I talked to him today, was extremely passionate on the issue.
“None of the people who are investing money to oppose I-1098 would have the courage to actually move themselves to a place with limited government, no taxation and no regulation,” he said, adding:
Should Mrs. Ballmer or Mrs. Bezos need to move their families to another country, they would absolutely choose a country like Canada or New Zealand or Germany or France with higher rates of taxation, more regulation and more activist government than we have in the U.S. Mrs. Ballmer and Mrs. Bezos would not move their children to the Congo or Afghanistan, countries with low rates of taxation, no regulation and limited government.
Amen.
Last night, I got Sylvia in from the outside. She has found some places where she can sit outside and not get rained on and she likes to be outside. It is less boring than inside. I went to my bedroom, brushed my teeth and crawled into bed. I had a magazine to read and opened it. The other pillow, covered in a plaid flannel pillowcase was down near the foot of the bed. Blitz liked to sleep on it, but I got tired of her walking across my pillow to get to it, and put it down on the foot of the bed. I had glowered at her for crossing my pillow, so she took to waiting until I was asleep before sneaking up to the head of the bed, then walking across my pillow. I got tired fo being woken up, so I moved that pillow down to the foot of the bed.
After I moved the pillow, a lump under the covers moved. Blitz was sitting on the corner of my dresser watching me, so this must be Sylvia. This was new behavior. Sometimes Sylvia comes into the bedroom when Blitz isn’t watching and sits behind the wheel of my bicycle. But under the covers was new. She moved closer to my leg. That was nice. She was under the comforter, on top of the blanket. I lifted the comforter and there was Sylvia’s big grey striped butt.
I looked up and saw Blitz looking down the hallway. That was odd. I was waiting for her to find out that Sylvia was already in the bedroom and was hiding under the comforter. But Blitz was looking down the hallway like she was actually hearing something. Cats can hear a mouse fart in the next county, so I wondered what was up. I lifted the comforter again, and there was Sylvia’s butt. But Blitz was not noticing that Sylvia was already in the bed. What is wrong with this picture?
I lifted the comforter again and there was Sylvia huddled up against my blanket covered leg. Except that it wasn’t Sylvia. In place of the white coloration around her muzzle, this cat was grey striped throughout. What the hell? Then I remember that at around 6.30, Blitz had been hanging around the front door so I opened it to let her out. The weather has been humid but warmish (65 F) , so I left the front door open while I sat on the couch and wrote code. At some point, I had noticed that Blitz was back inside the house, sitting on the top corner of the couch looking back through the kitchen. I had left the chicken on the counter to cool, so I got up, put that in the refrigerator and closed the front door. I walked through the house, but didn’t see anything out of place, so I went back to the couch and started watching a movie.
I have had cats wander into this house when I have left a door open. There was a cat from the apartment complex in back of my house that came into the house a couple of times. That cat tried to dominate my cats, but when I realized there was a cat in the house, she tried to flee. She ran up the hallway, through Bookzilla’s room and made a flying leap at the window above Bookzilla’s bed. The window was closed, and she bounced off the window, landing on the floor. She was running for the light. As I approached, she made another running leap at the window, bounced off, back to the floor. Jumped again, bounced again.
She jumped up onto the window sill and made a mournful cry, so I closed Blitz and Sylvia up in bedrooms and opened doors to give her many exit opportunities. I positioned myself behind her so she would run out of the room. She fled, disappearing out the back door. I don’t know why I checked but I looked at the windowsill where she had been sitting and found a puddle of urine. It must have been traumatic for her.
There was another cat, a largish grey tom cat we called Rodney that would sneak into our house if the doors were open. But this cat was not Rodney. So I closed Blitz up in my bathroom and tried to get Sylvia into a room, but she ran away. I closed the doors to all the bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchen but opened the door to the closet with the furnace. That door would act as a gate across the doorway to the living room. I opened the front door, and Sylvia ran back out. There was a channel from the bedroom to the front door. But I still had to get Sylvia back inside again.
I went back into my bedroom and the lump was still under the covers. I peeled the comforter back and got a look at my grey visitor. It was a tom cat with a collar. He growled a bit, more out of fear than anything and burrowed back under the comforter. I was talking in a soothing voice but he would not look at me. I didn’t want him to get he idea that he could come into the house whenever he wanted, but I didn’t want to terrorize him. Could I pet him? I didn’t want to get bit. There were a couple of tags on his collar. He was someone’s cat. I had seen a cat in the area in the last few days. It had been in the front of the house, in the cul-de-sac, so I figured he lived in a house to the west of mine.
We went through this pas de deux a few times, where I would peel the covers back and he would look around, then burrow further under them. I had run out of comforter and he was looking at the floor. I didn’t want him under the bed, because that would add a level of complexity that I did not want to undertake while I was in my jockey shorts. I risked picking him up where I thought I would not get bit. I held him in front of me and started toward the front door. He didn’t complain and took off when I put him down on the front porch. Sylvia was not around the front of the house, so I started going around the house, checking doors and she came in the side door.
I went back and checked my bed for cat urine and didn’t find any. I guess this cat hadn’t been that traumatized.
I had one too many cats in my bed.
I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, but I found this advertisement touching. Our planet was not made for the Industrial Age and it is being reshaped for it, whether we like it or not. It is not clear where Man will fit in once the reshaping is done.
I got a pack of black t-shirts for each one of the kids at Costco. $12.99 for four shirts. What a deal. Bookzilla started wearing hers right away. JMan didn’t want them. I put them into his drawer anyway.
This morning, he was asking for a t-shirt. I got yesterday’s laundry out of the dryer and he started to paw through it looking for a t-shirt. I told him that he had that pack of black shirts. I continued folding laundry and I could hear him opening the pack in his bedroom. It seemed to take a while, but then I heard him running around in joyful, whooping, happy celebration. He liked the shirts. I had just finished the folding the last item when he finally got back to help out. ”I wanted to help.” I could only laugh.
How about that socialist government that the Republicans like to trash? It doesn’t stop the mostly Republican states from larding it up on the gravy train.
Throughout the year, economists and both houses of Congress have debated whether to extend unemployment insurance for another 13 weeks, or 26 weeks, worried that the payments would bloat the deficit or, worse, actually cause people to stay jobless. All along, however, millions of Americans without work have quietly continued to cash a federal check every month. They don’t show up in the unemployment statistics—not even as “discouraged” workers—and their benefits won’t stop after 99 weeks.They are the recipients of Social Security’s Disability Insurance, a somewhat obscure federal program that nonetheless eats up nearly $200 billion a year. SSDI began in 1956 and was intended to provide benefits for people between 50 and 64 who’d been in the workforce but had developed “any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or to be of long-continued and indefinite duration.” At the end of the first year, there were 150,000 Americans receiving SSDI benefits. As Congress serially widened the eligibility criteria—by age, by type and duration of impairment—that number began to grow. Enrollment hit 1 million adults in 1966; by the end of 1977 it was 2.8 million; and today it’s more than 8 million ex-workers, plus another million adult disabled children and disabled widows and widowers.With the annual commitments now at about $180 billion, SSDI represents, as the authors of a 2006 economics journal paper put it, a “fiscal crisis.” Equally distressing, it also represents public policy run amok. Over the last few decades, a program that was designed to help a relatively small group of people who were fatally sick or permanently unable to work has evolved into a backdoor welfare program in which a huge number of people are paid not to get jobs. How huge? Nationwide, we’re talking about well over 4 percent of the adult population. In some states—Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia—the rate exceeds 6 percent. These millions of workers extricated from payrolls represent untold lost billions in tax revenues and all manner of desperately needed economic activity (consumption, home purchases, etc.).
Russian security forces are using software piracy as a pretext for harassing opposition groups.
It was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness The group, Baikal Environmental Wave, was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had polluted nearby Lake Baikal, a natural wonder that by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.
Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government. As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.
Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
Sounds like it is time for Linux, since Microsoft software does not run on Linux.
A very good friend of mine uses the expression “data free analysis” to describe people who build logical structures without accompanying data. Sort of like I’m about to do.
Washington state executed a man for raping and murdering a woman.
Brown confessed to killing the 21-year-old Washa during an interrogation in California for an alleged assault on a woman there. He later led authorities to Washa’s battered body, which was inside the trunk of a car. He met Washa near Sea-Tac airport in Washington when he helpfully pointed to Washa’s rear tire, indicating a problem. When she stopped to check it out, he carjacked her at knifepoint. For the next 36 hours, Brown robbed, raped and tortured Washa, before stabbing and strangling her.
My thought was, “What if some men instinctively don’t like women?” By instinctively, I mean a physiological imperative. What if some men are just not drawn emotionally to women? A compounding factor in this anxiety and unease is the overriding cultural imperative to downplay homosexual inclinations.
My question is this: does our society perpetuate violence against women because we deprecate homosexuality?
Brown confessed to the killing while being questioned by Palm Springs, CA, police for an assault on another woman there.
His demeanor – that’s what struck us. And his lack of remorse,” said Lt. Al Franz of the Palm Springs police department, one of the investigators who first interviewed Brown in California. ”This is a violent individual, and he was just very, very calm while he was telling his story,” Franz said. “The lack of remorse was pretty incredible to me. The way he spoke about his victims, they weren’t people to him.” Brown, who is from San Jose, Calif., had a history of violence against women, including a 1977 conviction in California for assaulting a woman with a knife at a shopping center. He also served 7 1/2 years – the minimum sentence – for assaulting another woman in Oregon in 1984.
This is very troubling. Gay is not an excuse for sociopathic behavior. But if there are men who are deeply conflicted about their gender attraction, it would be better if they had a resource to turn to and more acceptance from the rest of us.
