Found via Fec's The Perversity of Fiscal Austerity post:
The collective embrace of fiscal austerity has gone beyond perverse. It’s as if Josef Mengele was reborn as an economist, working on some weird new social experiment to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the maximum amount of people.
The piece at New Economic Perspectives from whence the preceding quote came is titled "It's Time to Panic II."
This dude is truly awesome.
/p>
Esbee is back and blogging. How good is she? Well, she won Smitty's Best Blog category, again, despite being on the DL for the last six weeks.
Great to have you back Lucy.
When I was in college I saw my first fax machine and it literally blew my mind. I just couldn't wrap my head around the concept of how a physical piece of paper could be copied and reproduced hundreds of miles away via phone. From today's perspective the whole idea of breaking an image into bits of data that are then used to reproduce that image somewhere else is downright pedestrian, and understanding how it works goes a long way to helping me (kind of) understand what's going on in the video below, but I have to tell you that when I watched the video I had the same reaction I had when I watched my first fax transmission.
If you happen to be awake from 5:30 – 7:00 tomorrow (Friday, July 8) morning you might want to tune in to watch WXII's morning show. Yours truly will likely be at the Dash stadium with Bolt, some folks from the Dash and Second Harvest, and one of the WXII-ers to promote the 2nd Annual "Fill the Stands with Cans" which is part of Piedmont Triad Apartment Association's annual food drive to benefit Second Harvest. Here are the details for those of you who may not be awake at that crazy hour:
Hope to see you tomorrow night. If you plan on attending the game please do stop by and say hello.
The Sunlight Foundation and the National Journal are trying to crowdsource the identities of lobbyists:
On May 11, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile merger. Titled "Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?" the hearing was concerned with possible antitrust issues, questions of competition, access to wireless service, rising costs and the loss of jobs.
Of course, Washington lobbyists had their own concerns and not surprisingly, the room was packed. In concert with National Journal, we at Sunlight decided to turn the cameras around 180 degrees to see who was watching the hearing. Our hope is that you can help us identify D.C.'s power brokers and assorted lobbyists who have an interest in influencing the Senate's view on the proposed merger.
Something tells me that RayBans and hoodies are going to be popular at Hill meetings in the near future.
YardDawg, aka Doug Grimes, is featured in a Winston-Salem Journal story about grilling:
Grimes, 61, grew up around Kinston. He remembers his grandfather and other male relatives barbecuing whole hogs. "I'd hang out with those guys and watch them — I was probably 4 or 5 years old the first time I saw that."
Later, he watched his father grill on the weekends. "Every Friday or Saturday night he was cooking something outside," Grimes said.
His father is now 88 and no longer grilling himself, but Grimes will cook for him on visits to Kinston on the grill that Grimes gave him as a present in 1971.
Grimes even grilled on the many days spent away from home as a tobacco buyer. "Even little towns inKentucky would have a motel, and we'd set up a little grill on the balcony," Grimes said. "It might be just hot dogs or hamburgers, but it was still better than McDonald's."
A beef lover, Grimes took two grills with him when he moved to Zimbabwe for three years to work as a tobacco export manager.
He's eaten grilled food in Mexico, Thailand, Argentina and other countries. "I've always been a fan of street food," he said. "When I was in Bangkok or wherever, I'd find the stall that had a line with like 20 people."
He has found that a love of grilled meat is universal.
"I've done it (grilling) just about everywhere I've ever been," he said. "We even had a pig pickin' in China, inYunnan province."
A reporter-turned-blogger who won a journalism award in the blog category thinks that reporting is reporting no matter how you report. She also divulges her secret to scooping her media competition:
Well I use a lot of tasers and threats – idle threats. Someone asked me this the other day, they say how do you get so many scoops? And I’m like, I work harder than you, I call more people, I follow up. I’m kind of relentless in terms of making calls, building sources, creating relationships. When I hear a small thing I follow it up. I think there’s no trick to great reporting, it’s just being curious, following things up, developing sources and not just putting up whatever idle rumor is around. We don’t do that. When we write something it’s going to happen. We spend a lot of time on accuracy, on credibility, on truthfulness, and on being right about what we say is going to happen.
I've long felt that the one competitive advantage that mainstream news outlets had after they had laid off their real competitive assets (their people) was that they were the "reliable source." Of course all it takes to lose that advantage is a couple of poorly researched stories that are publicly debunked by some nosy blogger, or heck, some well informed and well connected person who exposes the errors on Facebook. It's like you tell your kids, one lie undoes all the trust you built with a thousand truths. Now I'm beginning to think that another way the traditional news outlets can lose their advantage is by having it taken by a reporter who's spent years building her reputation by doing great work and who is now swimming outside of the mainstream media, probably because she was downsized, and is now highly motivated to eat their proverbial lunch so she can continue to literally put her dinner on the table.
So what's the over/under on when we'll stop referring to reporters as "main stream" or "bloggers" and just start referring to them as, well, reporters? How about when we'll stop worrying/caring if the reporting comes to us in the form of paper, traditional television newscast, carrier pidgeon or electronically on the personal-digital-device-du jour? I'm glad I'm not the one who has to figure that out.
This piece at bookofjoe.com is about how husbands and wives who have been married a long time start to resemble each other. From the post:
More from Albergotti: "In a seminal 1987 study, Robert Zajonc, a psychologist, found that married couples began to look physically alike over time. Participants in the study were asked to look at individual photos of people and then match the photos of the ones who seemed to fit together. When shown photos of couples early in their relationships, the participants were unable to match them. But when they were shown photos of couples who had been together 25 years, they often matched the photos with the correct partner. Couples who reported being in happy relationships were matched more than unhappy couples."
This seems to be another case where the men defnitely make out better than their wives, and after reading the piece it I feel compelled to apologize to my wife if I've managed to bring her down to my level.
If you want to lose, oh, six or seven pounds in about two hours I know one way to do it. Try transplanting a bunch of monkey grass from one side of your property to the other in 94 degree heat on July 4 in an effort to beat the predicted thunderstorms. If you sweat like a Lowder, which means you have to be the kind of person who breaks into a sweat when you walk a block in 65 degree weather you might even lose 10 pounds.
The bad news is you put a bunch of pounds right back on when you suck down four beers to celebrate your accomplishment. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Befuddled 