Posted 8:34 pm

The Governator says, "Don't be a budgetary girlie-man.":

Thousands laid off in California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has moved to end a budget crisis by sacking 22,000 state workers and ordering pay cuts for 200,000.

The most populous state in the US faces a budget deficit of more than $15bn (£7.6bn), and legislators are struggling to agree a spending plan.

The cuts, which will save $100m a month, are designed to put pressure on politicians to end the budget crisis.

But a leading official in the state challenged the decision to cut pay.

California has one of the largest economies in the world and it has no way to pay contractors for many of the services it provides.

Some 30 American states face budget deficits caused by rising costs and falling revenues in a slumping economy but California's is by far the largest...

...Mr Schwarzenegger, the former Hollywood film star turned Republican politician, told reporters he had signed an executive order on the staff and pay cuts.

"Today I am exercising my executive authority to avoid a full-blown crisis and keep our state moving forward," he said...

Source: BBC News

...frackin' hilarious. I'm not sure we can survive any more of this crackerjack GOP economic theorizing...

Posted 6:26 pm

Stop, please, I'm spotting. I've been using a CLI irc client for years, and recently switched to a CLI email client. I've just now found a CLI RSS reader. And Ubuntu has it in the repositories:

newsbeuter—text mode rss feed reader with podcast support

newsbeuter is an innovative RSS feed reader for the text console. It supports OPML import/exports, HTML rendering, podcast (podbeuter), offline reading, searching and storing articles to your filesystem, and many more features.

Its user interface is coherent, easy to use, and might look common to users of mutt and slrn.

Source: Ubuntu newsbeuter

...so that means a simple sudo apt-get install newsbeuter at the command line and it's installed. Import an .opml feed file, a few entries in a text configuration file, and I have a way cool, extremely fast, super lightweight rss feeder.

[Later] Damn, that is a smoking fast way to go through your feeds. I'm hooked.

[Later, again] And the search through feeds speed almost set my hair on fire...

Posted 3:46 pm

Why are we saddled with such shitty politicians? What have we done to deserve this?:

The New Normal: McCain's Desperate Ad Hours
...Obama's cancellation of a visit in Germany to visit wounded U.S. troops has been adequately explained: that his campaign was advised by the Pentagon that since Obama was on a campaign trip and spending campaign resources, it would be viewed as using the wounded as props whether cameras were allowed in the hospital or not.

This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn't make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It's a blatant lie. Steve Schmidt, a disciple of Karl Rove's who worked on George W. Bush's 2004 ad/communications effort, though, is playing the Rovian playbook that says that it doesn't matter if it's true as long as your target audience (non-college educated white working class voters) won't bother to find out the actual truth, and believe that it "sounds like it might be a true."...

...What the McCain campaign doesn't want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that's political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents-a lie...

Source: BusinessWeek

...I would eat a dog's vomit before I would vote for any Republican...

Posted 3:36 pm

This is what homosexual panic looks like with a paranoid schizophrenic. Somebody groped somebody, or imagined someone did, or secretly wanted someone to:

40-year-old suspect held in gruesome Manitoba bus killing
A 40-year-old man is in custody in Manitoba after a young man was stabbed - and, witnesses said, decapitated - aboard a Greyhound bus travelling through the province overnight.

The RCMP would not confirm the reports of beheading, saying only that a stabbing took place around 8:30 p.m. CT on an eastbound Greyhound bus on the Trans-Canada Highway about 20 kilometres west of Portage la Prairie...

...Garnet Caton, who was sitting in the seat in front of the victim, said he saw the attacker stab his seatmate, a young man sleeping with his headphones on.

Caton said he heard a "blood-curdling scream" and turned around to see the attacker holding a large "Rambo" hunting knife above the victim, "continually stabbing him in the chest area."

"He must have stabbed him 50 times or 60 times," said Caton.

"Like, just everywhere, arms, legs, neck, chest, guts, wherever he could swing it, he got it," said Olmstead...

Source: CBC

...I can't quantify the cutoff for the number of knife thrusts, but you know it when you see it...

Posted 3:31 pm

These mad boffins and their black arts. Wo0t!:

Scientists say they've put exercise in a pill
Scientists have discovered what could be the ultimate workout for couch potatoes: exercise in a pill.

In experiments on mice that did no exercise, the chemical compound, known as AICAR, allowed them to run 44% farther on a treadmill than those that did not receive the drug.

The drug appeared to change the physical composition of muscle, essentially transforming the tissue from sugar-burning fast-twitch fibers to fat-burning slow-twitch ones -- the same change that occurs in distance runners and cyclists through training.

"You're getting the benefits of exercise without having to do any work," said David Mangelsdorf, a pharmacologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas...

Source: LA Times

...oh thank you, thank you...

Posted 3:18 pm

When we return to a legitimate government next January perhaps it will attend to two of its primary consumer protections—monopoly busting, and prosecuting price collusion efforts:

US Connectivity: Where's the Wideband?
...The US is, surprisingly, lagging behind in the Internet access race. The popular Nielsen NetRatings report released in 2004 showed that roughly 75 percent of the US had Internet access; yet only 50 percent has broadband access. To make matters worse, the US' broadband is far slower than broadband in many other countries. A telecom law firm, eNC, recently released a broadband availability report detailing just how bad our access is, comparatively.

The report recommends that 100 Mb/s service be available to US consumers by the year 2012. While that may seem aggressive to that majority of broadband customers who are currently stuck with 8 Mb/s, the report puts it into perspective. In Japan, 85 percent of households have access to fiber and 100 Mb/s service costs about a fourth the price Americans pay for 8 Mb/s service. In fact, the US ranks 14th among other countries with broadband access when it comes to available speeds...

Source: Enterprise Networking Planet

...that's the way to insure your competitive advantage...

Posted 11:18 am

They're still just passing on the increase in their crude supply costs. Otherwise they'd be making a killing. Er, what?:

Exxon posts record $11.68 billion profit
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Exxon Mobil once again reported the largest quarterly profit in U.S. history Thursday, posting net income of $11.68 billion on revenue of $138 billion in the second quarter.

That profit works out to $1,485.55 a second.

That barely beat the previous corporate record of $11.66 billion, also set by Exxon in the fourth quarter of 2007.

"The fundamentals of our business remain strong," Henry Hubble, Exxon's vice president of investor relations, said on a conference call...

Source: CNNMoney

...someone just peed on my head and told me it's raining...

Posted 9:59 am

When you abandon criminal investigations in the face of extortionate threats from foreigners, then you are no longer a sovereign nation. By the way, the thugs in this set piece are close Bush family friends:

How Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar muscled Tony Blair into silence
The United Kingdom's highest court today provided new details of how the Saudis pressured British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government to shut down a politically embarrassing bribery investigation two years ago that implicated the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The ruling, by a House of Lords judicial panel, offers an unusually revealing window into how international power politics is played in the post-9/11 era.

The five-member panel recounts how Blair, faced with Saudi threats to cut off cooperation on counterterrorism operations, personally intervened to scuttle a criminal investigation into billions of dollars in allegedly improper payments made by British Aerospace Systems (BAE) to obtain Saudi contracts...

...Bandar, a longtime close personal friend of the Bush family who is now national-security adviser to Saudi King Abdullah, was so worried about investigations into the BAE payments that last year he hired the international legal and security firm Freeh Group International, headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh, to defend him from the charges. Among the Freeh Group's partners is Sir Stephen Mitchell, a prominent British barrister and former High Court judge. In addition, Bandar has hired William Bradford Reynolds, a former top official in the Reagan Justice Department, to represent him in a private shareholder lawsuit relating to the alleged improper payments...

Source: Michael Isikoff in Newsweek

...yeah, that's the Louie Freeh, the former Director of the FBI. Gosh, I hope his firm of crack lawyers wasn't involved in facilitating such a crime, they might end up facing criminal exposure. Hahahahahahaha .. sorry, just kidding. Crikey, I crack me up.

On a serious note, I take as much glee as any fat and fatuous white man in excoriating our ghetto inhabitants for their immoral ways. But the truth is, their actions have no effect on the viability of the larger society. But when the leaders of a culture agree that everything is for sale to the highest bidder, then we truly are a decadent and doomed nation...

Posted 7:02 am

How cool is this? A treasure of available hydrocarbons just waiting for us:

NASA Confirms Liquid Lake on Saturn Moon
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane. This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface.

Scientists made the discovery using data from an instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. The instrument identified chemically different materials based on the way they absorb and reflect infrared light. Before Cassini, scientists thought Titan would have global oceans of methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. More than 40 close flybys of Titan by Cassini show no such global oceans exist, but hundreds of dark, lake-like features are present. Until now, it was not known whether these features were liquid or simply dark, solid material.

"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," said Bob Brown of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Brown is the team leader of Cassini's visual and mapping instrument. The results will be published in the July 31 issue of the journal Nature.

Ethane and several other simple hydrocarbons have been identified in Titan's atmosphere, which consists of 95 percent nitrogen, with methane making up the other fiver percent. Ethane and other hydrocarbons are products from atmospheric chemistry caused by the breakdown of methane by sunlight...

Source: NASA

...forget the Moon and Mars, let's get out there where the good stuff is...

Posted 6:19 am

I'm not sure the trade-off was worth it:

Religions thrived to protect against disease
Prof Richard Dawkins the atheist and sceptic, has condemned religion as a "virus of the mind" but it seems that people became religious for good reason - actually to avoid infection by viruses and other diseases - according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences.

Dr Corey Fincher and Prof Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas.

"Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.

The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests.

Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus.

Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.

" If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

And the team finds evidence to back this...

Source: UK Telegraph

...I prefer the sniffles, thank you...

Posted 5:58 am

I almost shat myself laughing when I read this today:

Financial group urges more worker assistance
NEW YORK (Associated Press) - A financial industry group on Wednesday recommended a significant increase in government support for unemployed workers to help address growing public skepticism about international trade.

The Financial Services Forum, which represents chief executives from 20 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, issued a white paper that proposes a $22 billion "adjustment assistance program." That dwarfs the federal government's current trade adjustment assistance spending of about $1 billion annually, the paper says.

The white paper comes as trade liberalization efforts have come to standstill. Seven years of negotiations on a new global trade agreement, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, collapsed Tuesday in Geneva amid acrimony over agriculture tariffs and other issues.

Several bilateral trade agreements, meanwhile, between the U.S. and countries such as Colombia and Panama face a hostile Congress unlikely to approve them this year.

The group's chief executives "are extremely concerned about the rise of protectionism ... and that there's been an erosion of support for openness," said Financial Services Forum President Rob Nichols.

The white paper is intended to address workers' anxieties about job loss and globalization...

Source: CNNMoney

...those pesky unemployed worker bees and their silly anxieties about their prospects. They don't seem to grasp their role in things. Perhaps some free cheese would help...