Sarah Palin Only Governor to Turn Down Energy Conservation Funds

'Every single governor except Sarah Palin (R-AK) has written to Energy Secretary Steven Chu accepting millions of stimulus dollars meant to increase energy conservation and efficiency. Last month, Palin rejected $28.6 million for energy conservation work because she said it would force Alaska buildings to adhere to a “universal energy code.” Newsminer points out that the Energy Department has accepted other states’ pledges to simply work with local governments to improve efficiency, and that no “universal” requirement is needed.'

- http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/12/palin-energy-funds/

Even more hilarious, or depressing, depending on what kind of mood you are in, is that this is the only part of the $931 million federal stimulus package she declined.

'The co-chairs of the state Senate Resources Committee sent Palin a letter Monday urging her to accept the funds, which could go for uses including energy efficiency grants, retrofitting buildings for less energy use and replacing streetlights with LED bulbs that use less electricity and last longer.

Anchorage Republican Sen. Lesil McGuire, one of the lawmakers who wrote the governor, said in an interview that Palin herself set a goal of Alaska receiving 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2025.

Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, the other co-chair of the Resources Committee, said in a written statement that, "...Alaskans need this money far more than residents of many other states with milder climates and substantially lower energy costs."

Palin's main beef is that she doesn't want to have to impose a statewide code that would interfere or force the hand of local government. Wielechowski and McGuire pointed out that 'the state would have eight years to meet the efficiency standards and that much of Alaska already has the energy codes...Many of the structures built in rural communities are built with public funds through agencies like the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., which also already has the energy code requirement. They said the code would need to apply only to communities with more than 2,500 people, and structures without plumbing or central heating would be exempt.'

- http://www.adn.com/palin/story/783397.html

Way to go Palin! Palin 2012!!

Rove Says Sotomayor "Isn't Necessarily" Smart

'During a debate at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Wednesday, host Charlie Rose said Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor "is very smart." "Not necessarily," former Bush adviser Karl Rove replied. After Rose noted that Sotomayor graduated with honors from Princeton and attended Yale Law School, Rove said, "I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools." Rove's claim is ironic considering that in an interview previewing the debate, he cited President Bush's experience at Harvard and Yale to mock claims that Bush is stupid. "The myth was that this guy, who was a Yale history grad and a Harvard MBA, was not smart," Rove told the Chicago Tribune.'

- http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/27/rove-ivy-league-smart/

Oh, Karl...

PS: From the "Progress Report, Recovery in Progress, May 28, 2009."

'Public reaction to the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court has been "decidedly more positive than negative, with 47 percent rating the nomination as 'excellent' or 'good'" and 20 percent rating it "only fair." Though Gallup found that the public reacted more positively than negatively to the last four Supreme Court nominees, Sotomayor had the second highest the net positive rating.'

This is a great, great newsletter I highly recommend all of you subscribe to. You can subscribe here: http://pr.thinkprogress.org/subscribe_pr.html

Hilarity at the White House Press Briefings

'Whenever there’s laughter in the James S. Brady Briefing Room — by either the briefer or the briefed — the official White House stenographer indicates as much by inserting “(Laughter.)” into the transcript.

And in Robert Gibbs’ first four months as President Barack Obama’s press secretary, there have been more than 600 instances of “(Laughter.)” during his regular press briefings — an average of more than 10 laughs per day.

It’s a gaudy statistic — and one that puts his predecessors to shame.

Dana Perino, George W. Bush’s last press secretary, got all of 57 laughs in her first four months. Scott McClellan, another Bush press secretary, got just 66 laughs in his first four months.

Gibbs even bests the late Tony Snow, whose jocular performances — dubbed “The Tony Snow Show” by some — drew a relatively paltry 217 laughs during his first four months on the job.

CBS News’ Mark Knoller, who has covered the White House since Gerald Ford was president, said Gibbs is “more inclined to make a wisecrack than any press secretary” he’s covered. “He's at ease at the lectern, understands the press and is willing to offer a quip at our expense or his own,” Knoller said.

However, Knoller was sure to add that, "Jokes aside, we get business done."'

- http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23015.html

And here is a taste of Gibbs' style:

Follow the President's Hour to Hour Activities

Or almost at least. This is a cool website I just came across that posts a fair amount of Obama Administration daily schedules. It doesn't have all that many events up there but it's still pretty cool. Check it out.

Schwarzenegger Proposes Welfare Cuts, and WTF is Good in Canada?

"Arnold Schwarzenegger gave details of spending cuts needed to help close California’s budget deficit. The state’s governor said welfare benefits for around half a million families would have to go along with a health-care programme for low-income children."
- Economist "Politics This Week", may 28th, 2009

I guarantee you there is some bull shit funding that is continuing in lieu of these welfare cuts.

And also, "Canada’s governor-general, Michaëlle Jean, helped to butcher a seal and ate a slice of its raw heart. "
- Same publication.

WTF?!

KBR Receives Huge Bonuses Despite Shoddy Work

"Congressional investigators have found that KBR Inc. was awarded $83 million in performance bonuses. Even worse, more than half came after Pentagon investigators linked faulty KBR wiring to the electrocution of four soldiers.

An electrical engineer hired by the Army who reported finding that 90 percent of KBR’s wiring work in Iraq was not done safely.

It has ordered emergency repairs, but the electrical inspector found that the building where the showering soldier was electrocuted still was not safely grounded by KBR until last October, 10 months after his death."

The Pentagon has informed Congress that KBR bonuses were suspended pending a full review of the situation. Senator Byron Dorgan described the Pentagon's initial awarding of bonuses as "stunning incompetence."

KBR is an offshoot of Halliburton, the company Dick Cheney is the ex-CEO of and managed to be awarded major contracts in Iraq and after Hurricane Katrina, despite numerous reports of mismanagement and poor performance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24sun3.html

Will Machines Be Our Masters?

'The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.

The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence” — was dubbed “The Singularity” in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.

for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” He sought to expand Moore’s Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045.

In Dr. Kurzweil’s telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.

Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

Other ideas include ' “The Technium,” forecasting the emergence of a global brain — the idea that the planet’s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence.'

“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, “The Artilect War,” that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.

Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea of “friendly artificial intelligence,” an engineering discipline that would seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals rather than our masters.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Wingsuit Base Jumping

OMG. The dope song that starts at 1:30 is apparently:

Diz Organ & Sackcloth Fashion - Under Man

Also, check this article on wingsuit jumping and people hoping to land without a parachute.

Waterboarding is Torture

A conservative talk show host known as 'mancow,' who formerly stated that waterboarding was not torture, after having it done to him, agrees it is "absolutely torture."

Harlem Children's Zone Schools Wildly Successful

'[Roland] Fryer [a Harvard economist] and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

The most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students. Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”

Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.'

- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html

I'm not sure why Fryer believes this 'cure' cannot be replicated.

I suggest this book by Geoffrey Canada, "Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America"

Making Congressional Research Publicly Available

"The Congressional Research Service investigates important issues and produces detailed, well-written reports that are available to members of Congress but not the general public. A resolution has been introduced in the Senate to make these reports freely available online. It would be an important step forward for government openness, and it would narrow the information gap between Washington insiders and ordinary Americans.

Washington lobbyists and special interests can get the reports from contacts in Congress or from a company that collects the reports and resells them. Ordinary Americans without contacts or research budgets are often denied this taxpayer-financed research.

A resolution sponsored by Senator Joseph Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, would require that the research service’s reports be posted on its Web site. The resolution makes an exception for information that is truly confidential.

For the resolution to become law, it needs to be passed by the Senate Rules Committee. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York and chairman of the panel, has not endorsed Mr. Lieberman’s resolution, but he is working on a plan that would make the research reports publicly available. However it happens, the reports should be put online for all Americans to access free."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12tue3.html?th&emc=th

Worst Graph Ever?

Thanks NBA.com - http://www.nba.com/games/20090511/CLEATL/gameinfo.html

Wanda Sykes at WHPC Dinner

Getting to the Bottom of the Mustard Debacle

So as you may know, Barack Obama was criticized by the great Sean Hannity for requesting Dijon mustard on his burger. Obama and Biden went out to get burgers about a week ago.



Let us get the facts straight. Thanks to David Frum of NewMajority.com, we are told that "Texans traditionally eat hamburgers with mustard or with mayonnaise (or with both), but without ketchup."

and "a 2000 survey of members of Congress by the National Hot Dog Council found that 73% of Republican lawmakers preferred mustard to ketchup, as opposed to 47% of Democratic lawmakers."

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, "Grey Poupon is owned and manufactured by Kraft Foods. It is the processed cheese of mustards. It is the fucking Velveeta of faux-French products. Can we all shut the fuck up?" Thanks for that

Arianna Huffington has called this "the lamest political food fight since freedom fries." Agreed.

Do I feel bad for spending so much time writing about this? Yes.

Obama the Comedian

Obama cites something Jefferson once said, that between a government w/o newspapers or newspapers w/o government, he would take the latter. Very interesting.

Also, for those who haven't seen it:





It was a lot funnier during the campaign because the jokes are very topical. Does take one back and remind one of the silly bickering that occurs during the campaign.

Point is Obama has skills with words.

The Art of Focus

'Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention.

The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life.

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

“When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice." '

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html?th&emc=th

Sex Workers Protest in India

One protester had this to say: "May day is labor day. Sex workers are laborers and sex work is just like any other profession. It should be considered as a profession and not viewed in any other way."

The Reuters reporter said that there are around "2,000,000 female sex workers in the country, most of them trafficked or forced into the work by poverty."

Overall, legalization and regulation of prostitution seems like a smart move.

Personally, I doubt there are few if any people who actually enjoy being a prostitute. Trying to empathize and imagine being prostitute is revolting and makes me want to tear my skin off.

Lastly, prostitution is the world's oldest profession? This is what Reuters claims. Wikipedia had this to say: "It has been described as 'the world's oldest profession.' Others would dispute this claim supported by the fact that hunting and farming were likely to have taken place first in human history.' LOL. I am going to have to lean towards the latter. Something tells me food was a priority before sex. Furthermore, what could they have been paid with?

MED + Talib Kweli - Classic

Produced by Kareem Riggins

Off the new Stones Throw podcast

DL LINK - http://www.sendspace.com/file/ohchn7

http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2009/04/med-bang-ya-head-2

The 6th Mass Extinction in Earth's History

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/05/the-earths-6th.html

"Over 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have compiled data showing that currently 51 per cent of known reptiles, 52 per cent of known insects, and 73 per cent of known flowering plants are in danger along with many mammals, birds and amphibians.

Experts say that at least half of the world’s current species will be completely gone by the end of the century.

There is hope, but it requires radical changes. Many organizations are lobbying for that change. One group trying to salvage ecosystems is called The Wildlands Project, a conservation group spearheading the drive to reconnect the remaining wildernesses. The immediate goal is to reconnect wild North America in four broad "mega-linkages". Within each mega-linkage, mosaics of public and private lands, which would provide safe migrations for wildlife, would connect core areas. Broad, vegetated overpasses would link wilderness areas normally split by roads. They will need cooperation from local landowners and government agencies.

It is a radical vision to many people, and the Wildlands Project expects that it will take at least 100 years to complete. Even so, projects like this, on a worldwide basis, may be humanity’s best chance of saving what’s left of the planets eco-system, and the human race along with it."

NYT typo

This is kind of old but better late than never.

Damn you $410 spending measures holding up our congressional happenings!

Genius - It's All About Practice

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?th&emc=th

'In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

The recent research has been conducted by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and others. It’s been summarized in two enjoyable new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin.

It’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.'

See this earlier for more on genius and the nature v. nurture debate;

http://curiousspencer.blogspot.com/2009/02/producing-genius-nature-or-nurture.html