70 year old book predicts the present

A 70 year old book sums up the politcal feelings of the country. Which has decided to exchange their long term principles for a short term flight from fear.

Letter to the American Spectator

Missed this one from earlier this year. This letter made it to the American Spectator. Looks like they publish every letter sent to them which is pretty cool.

3 New Studies Assess Effects of Child Care - New York Times

Here is an interesting article about a study done on daycare. Part of the conclusion of the article is that kids that go to daycare centers do better in math and reading, than kids that don’t go to daycare, and tend to retain that knowledge in later years. But they found out that they tended to do worse with social skills but that tended to fade somewhat over time.

The overall feel you get from the article is that the amount of damage done socially is overcome as time goes by. But when you look at it they are comparing it to the norm, which are publicly schooled kids. My guess is that if you compared them to home-schooled kids there social skills would continue to show a relative decline. So it may be that the daycare kids are not getting better but in fact all the non-daycare kids might be getting worse by going to school.

FOXNews.com - Politics - Miers Withdraws Nomination to Supreme Court

Before this nomination I suspected that the Bush administration would just throw up a crap nominee and allow the Democrats to fight it and win. Then he would throw up another nominee that would not be fought as hard because the fight was spent on the previous nominee and fighting the second one would just make the Democrats look like cranks.

I thought that the initial nominee would be extreme right wing so as to make the second nominee, who would still be pretty far right, look like a centrist. Who would have thought Bush would have chosen someone who was completely unqualified and then get attacked from the right for being too far left? It still serves the purpose of taking the fight out of the next nominee.

National Geographic prediction

National Geographic's startlingly accurate prediction, of a hurricane hitting New Orleans, from the October 2004 issue.

Wired News: How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan

This article sings the praises of Japan's ubiquitous mobile phones. How a phone is “capable of transforming any space -- a subway train seat, a grocery store aisle, a street corner -- into ‘(one's) own room and personal paradise.’” Yes it does allow people to take their friends and loved ones with them but it does not come without a price. For each bit of intimacy that you give to someone you take it from someone else. I think this is why people get so pissed off when people use a phone in a small space. Even more so then the loudness of the person it is the violation of the intimacy of the environment. Think about a guy on a subway that is talking a little louder than normal to the person next to him. He would not be so nearly as annoying as someone speaking the same volume on a phone. Here is cell phone guy who is sharing a space with us and he doesn’t even have the decency to be here cognitively, he is still at home with his wife or already at the office with his coworkers.

I am in Cincinnati for work and last night I was racking up yet another sleepless night in a hotel room. One tends to bottom out when lying awake in bed and my mind began to wander towards the 90's and what the hell did I do during that decade.

I was born in 1967 so I don't remember the 60's. I spend the 70's basically getting to my teen years; there is a whole lotta shit to remember about that. The 80's saw my teen years and then ended up with my college years, again lots of action. Then we get to the 90's. I worked at some shitty jobs and then got increasingly better jobs (even though work is still primarily shitty), drank decreasingly less, got married and bought a house in there somewhere and then the decade was gone. My son was born in 1998 so I remember what happened after that but the details that I remember from the 90’s are about a tenth of what I remember from the four years of college.

It was then that it struck me that I have been doing things but I haven’t been counting them as things because they haven’t been that terribly exciting and they don’t make that good of a story. But alas this is my life and while I spend so little time doing it I am still somewhat obsessed with documenting it. I thought a good way to do that would be with a graph. Basically a horizontal type graph that showed a variety of things against time. Differently colored sections showing what you were doing in different areas. Where you went to school, worked, lived, who you dated, when your kids were born, pets, vacations even when you met people. Pretty much something to justify what you did with this life that is flying by.

If a website could set up an easy way to do this and then allow people to add diary entries at any point in the timeline you could see what was going on in your life while you wrote each entry. I know this could send the Blog compulsion for many to the geekth degree of documentation where people are not so much writing about living as living to write about it but it could be fun.

USNews.com: John Leo: Can liberalism survive? (3/7/05)

John Leo's March 7th column mentioned, "the liberal agenda consists of wanting to spend more, while conservatives want to spend less". While spending did increase during the Clinton administration, the average Bush budget has seen an annual spending increase three times as great as the average Clinton budget.

If liberalism is defined by spending, then liberalism appears to be very much alive and is residing in the Oval Office and both houses of Congress.

Economist.com

Got a letter in The Economist

Submitted to the Economist:

Sir,

Your recent article on US tort reform legislation mentioned that spiraling medical-malpractice costs are pushing up medical care costs. A January 2004 brief published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) investigated the potential outcome of such legislation. Research of states that have already instituted lawsuit caps found that they did result in a 25 to 30% reduction in claims paid, but since medical-malpractice claims account for only 2% of total medical costs their net result would probably lower health care costs by .4 to .5%. Perhaps most telling is when the CBO compared per capita health care spending between states with lawsuit caps and those without and found no significant difference. Tort reform legislation may temporarily gratify Congress' need to solve all of America's problems but will provide little change in health care costs.

I bought The Bands' "Music from the Big Pink" yesterday online at Barnes and Noble. It is almost impossible to buy an album that is over 30 years old that isn't subjected to the "bonus track." The extra songs added that generally double the album's size and are intended to add value. They are either songs that were not good enough to make the album the first time around or different versions of the most popular songs on the album. The bonus tracks are added to the end so if it is played straight through they can be avoided but if you put it in a multi-disc player and put it on random you might find yourself listening to three versions or "Let's Get It On" in an hour's time. This might be what you want if your Marvin Gaye's nephew but what about the rest of us?

Do people really want this stuff? Are people up in the air between a Rolling Stone's disc and the Beach Boys and the deciding factor was the addition of the “The Sloop John B” in stereo?

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast

Ain't that the truth.