Lazy Saturday News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!! What’s happening out there in the world?

I’m a little out of touch, as I spent most of yesterday driving my mom to Cincinnati and back. She wanted to visit her older sister, who has been staying with her son (my cousin), but is leaving today to return home to Gulf Shores, Alabama. My mom’s younger brother and his wife came too. We had a nice day, despite getting lost in the Cincinnati ‘burbs for awhile and driving through several incredible cloudbursts.

My aunt is hoping the BP oil doesn’t come her way, but she ate a lot of oysters before she came north, and she also bought several pounds of shrimp to freeze just in case.

Today is supposed to be warm and sunny in central Indiana, and boy am I looking forward to that! It has been cold and rainy much of the time since I got here.

On to the news…

The Texas state board of education has finally approved a very conservative curriculum which will heavily influence textbook publishing and test preparation. The Republicans on the board were able to get their way on most things. From the Dallas Morning News:

Approval came after the GOP-dominated board approved a new curriculum standard that would encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation – a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer.

Democrats claimed that the Republicans had allowed politics and religion to influence their judgments, but Republicans claimed they were just trying to make up for a supposedly liberal slant in past history and social science textbooks.

Oh really? I strongly recommend anyone who believes that to read Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen.

Board Democrats accused the Republicans of a “cut-and-paste” job that included a flurry of late amendments undoing much of the work of teachers and academics who were appointed to review teams to draft the curriculum requirements last year.

“Here we are trying to approve standards for our children that will be used for years, and we are being asked to approve all these last-minute cut-and-paste proposals,” said Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi. “I don’t think any teacher would accept work like this,” she said. “They would have thrown this paper in the trash.

We’ve done an injustice to the children of this state.”

At least the Democrats managed to get Thomas Jefferson back on the list of political philosophers children can study.

Via edgeofforever, the ultra-conservative but always entertaining Boston Herald has a column today by Hillary Chabot arguing that Obama has become “toxic” for candidates running for office.

Bay State Democrats are hardly rolling out the welcome mat for President Obama as Republicans all but dare them to rally with him during the midterm election campaigns and continue the White House-backed losing streak. [….]

[Democratic] U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch – whose South Boston hometown is a stronghold of Tea Party activists – said he’s not pushing for help from Obama as he campaigns for his sixth term in Congress. “Bringing someone in from Washington to intervene on your behalf doesn’t seem like the right way to go. I should be connecting with my constituents myself,” said Lynch, noting the electorate’s strong anti-Beltway fervor.

Well, when your approval rating is fluctuating from the mid-to-high forties, I guess that’s the way it goes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that President Obama has appointed an “oil spill panel.”

The president has called on former Sen. Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly to lead the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

Mr. Graham is a former two-term governor of Florida and served for 18 years in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Reilly is a founding partner of Aqua International Partners LP, a private equity fund that invests in water and renewable energy companies. He’s also a senior adviser to TPG Capital LP, an international investment partnership.

Obama is giving them 6 months to come up with recommendations. By that time the Gulf Coast could be a dead zone, but hey….he set up a commission so that should take care of the mess, right?

Thanks to RalphB for this link to Nieman Watchdog. Has Obama Created a Social Security Death Panel?

President Obama and the leadership in Congress have delegated enormous, unaccountable authority to 18 unrepresentative, inordinately wealthy individuals. The 18 individuals are meeting regularly, in secret, behind closed doors, until safely beyond this year’s mid-term election. If they reach agreement, their proposal will be voted on in December by a lame duck Congress, without the benefit of open hearings and deliberations in the pertinent committees and without the opportunity for open debate and amendment on the floors of the House and Senate. Despite the speed and lack of accountability, the legislation will affect, in substantial ways, every man, woman, and child in this nation.

Who are these powerful people and what are their views?

They are the members of President Obama’s newly-formed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. They lack racial and gender diversity, and more importantly, they lack diversity of opinion. Their mantra is that “everything is on the table,” but their one member who has any expertise with respect to defense spending, for instance, is the CEO of a major defense contractor that devotes millions of dollars each year to lobby Congress for more defense spending.

“Everything is on the table,” they say, but the members appointed by the minority leaders in the House and Senate have made clear that they do not believe that the problems in this country stem from under-taxing, rather from overspending. The one area that they seem to be in agreement on — and which they are in fact, focusing on like a laser — involves programs that help the middle class and those Americans who are the most vulnerable. Even liberal Senator Richard Durbin has stated, “the bleeding-heart liberals… have to…make real sacrifices to strengthen our nation.”

This is very scary, and we’ve talked about this issue here since way back during the 2008 primaries. It was clear to me from what Obama wrote in his book, The Audacity of Hope that he intended to privatize, cut, or end Social Security and Medicare. It’s obvious now that our “representatives” in Congress don’t care one bit about us–only about the needs of giant corporations. And we are on our own. As the article points out, the press aren’t doing their jobs, because they too only care about what the super-rich and the giant corporations want.

The New York Times discusses the firing of Dennis C. Blair as head of all U.S. spy agencies. There are a lot of excuses given, but the gist seems to be that Obama didn’t really like Blair that much, so Blair became the designated scapegoat for recent intelligence failures surrounding foiled “terrorist attacks.” In addition, Blair tried to negotiate an intelligence agreement with France that the WH didn’t care for.

Mr. Blair had pressed for a pact between the United States and France that would have halted espionage operations on each other’s soil, a more formal version of America’s “gentleman’s agreement” with Britain.

The informal agreement with London is built on decades of trust between the American and British governments. Officials said that Mr. Blair had come to believe that Mr. Sarkozy’s presidency was a unique opportunity for two countries long suspicious of each other’s motives to build lasting security ties.

But others worried that a written pact — the first of its kind for the United States — would handcuff the United States if a new government came to power in France that was more hostile to American foreign policy goals.

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the effects of sanctions on Iran. It is critical of U.S. policy and of Hillary Clinton’s “penchent for sanctions.”

Finally, Jordon Romero, age 13 has become the youngest person to climb to the top of Mt. Everest.

Jordan Romero, from California, telephoned his mother from the peak of the world’s highest mountain, she said.

“Mom, I’m calling you from the top of the world,” Leigh Anne Drake quoted her son as saying.

He was climbing with his father and three Sherpa guides. The previous record was held by a Nepalese boy of 16.

The 13-year-old has now conquered the highest mountains on six of the world’s seven continents.

So what are you reading and discussing this morning. I look forward to following your links. And have a wonderful Saturday and a great weekend!!!!!

Saturday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!!!

A giant 8.8 magnitude earthquake has hit Chile and triggered a tsunami

President Michelle Bachelet confirmed 47 deaths and said more were possible. Telephone and power lines were down, making damage assessments difficult in the early morning darkness.

“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings and forced staff to evacuate the regional hospital.

According to The New York Times,

The quake downed buildings and houses in Santiago and knocked out a major bridge connecting the northern and southern sections of the country.

It struck at 3:34 a.m. local time and was centered about 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was some 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live.

Phone lines were down in Concepcion as of 7:30 a.m. and no reports were coming out of that area. The quake in Chile was 1,000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000, earthquake experts reported on CNN International.

The U.S. Geological Survey and eyewitnesses reported more than a dozen aftershocks, including two measuring magnitude 6.2 and 6.9.

Only hours earlier, there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Japan. A tsunami was predicted, but did not take place.

The late late night TC crowd was discussing this insane video of Trent Franks (R-Arizona) being asked about hate radio and Rush Limbaugh and then doing a quick pirouette to talking about abortion and “killing innocent babies.” He calls Obama “the abortion president” and he thinks African Americans were better off under slavery because (he claims) “half of all black babies are aborted.” Oh, and Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox because he cares so much about humanity.

Just who is voting for politicians like this? Thinking about the possible answers to that question gives me the creeps.

And speaking of forced servitude, why don’t they just set Tilikum the serial killer whale free?

Three years ago, Russ Rector, a Fort Lauderdale dolphin trainer turned marine mammal activist, said he wrote SeaWorld a letter warning it was pushing its show mammals too hard to wow audiences, thereby inviting attacks on trainers.

On Wednesday, a killer whale named Tilikum implicated in two previous fatalities attacked a trainer during a show at the Orlando theme park, dragging her around like a toy and drowning her in front of horrified visitors.

“I warned them this was going to happen,” Rector said. “Happy animals don’t kill their trainers.”

Another opinion:

Naomi Rose, a senior scientist for the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned at marine parks, said Tilikum’s reputation was well known and that SeaWorld specifically forbade trainers from entering the orca’s tank.

“He clearly has some sort of issue with people in the water with him,” she said of the orca.

Rose and many marine mammal activists believe the stress of life in a tank is acute for orcas, large animals that roam deep waters in close-knit pods.

“They’re moody,” she said. Rector, who has campaigned for years to free Lolita, a female orca that has spent nearly four decades in captivity at the Seaquarium in Miami, says it leaves them “demented.”

Lolita, Rose said, has not been linked to any serious attacks on trainers, but its old tank-mate, Hugo, died of a cranial bleeding in 1980 that activists blamed on the orca ramming its head against the sides of a small tank.

Can you blame a whale for getting mad when he is kept in a tiny container and forced to perform tricks for humans instead of being able to swim freely in the ocean? And get this, another trainer says Dawn Brancheau’s horrible death was all her own fault.

A former co-worker told the station that trainer Dawn Brancheau was to blame when her hair floated over the mouth of killer whale Tilikum. The massive creature responded by dragging her under Wednesday, and she drowned.

Thad Lacinak, a former head trainer at SeaWorld, said the trainers knew to stay away from the whale’s mouth. “The protocol was not to be around Tilikum’s mouth while you’re laying down,” he said.

Reporter Emily Turner explained that Lacinak said Brancheau “became too comfortable with the animal she loved so much.”

And can you believe there are still pictures and video on-line of Breacheau’s last moments? What is wrong with us? Set these beautiful, intelligent animals free!

Did you know that Matt Taibbi and an expat named Mark Ames ran an alternative newspaper in Russia for years? I didn’t. Yesterday I posted a link to an article by Ames on Ayn Rand’s obsession with a vicious serial killer who liked to dismember little girls.

From there, I was directed to Ames’ website and learned that this month’s Vanity Fair has an in-depth story on the “The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.” Ames is also the author of a book on workplace and school shootings in which he argues that Americans don’t want to face what is really going on in this rage killings–that bullying and alienation in schools and workplaces are driving both kids and adults to the point where they just can’t take it anymore. Sounds controversial yet interesting. I reserved it at my local library.

President Obama got up really early this morning so he could offer more “compromises” to Republicans in his weekly radio address.

“I am eager and willing to move forward with members of both parties on health care if the other side is serious about coming together to resolve our differences and get this done. But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge,” Obama said.

“The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act. Small businesses cannot wait. Americans with pre-existing conditions cannot wait. State and federal budgets cannot sustain these rising costs.

The President didn’t mention that the bill he supports doesn’t do anything to help lower health care costs for ordinary Americans or prevent insurance companies from refusing to pay for care for people with preexisting conditions.

This article in New Scientist reports on research suggesting that ancient humans may have communicated in a written language much earlier than previously thought: The writing on the cave wall

Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a “creative explosion” around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.

Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity’s early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.

I’ll wrap this up with a feel-good story from a few days ago about a 3-year-old girl who was saved from freezing to death by her dog Blue: Police Credit Dog With Saving Lost Girl’s Life

“She was able to stay warm with the dog. And it probably was one of things that saved her life. It was extremely cold out here,” Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office told KPHO, a CBS news affiliate in Phoenix. “God watched over her last night.”

Victoria Bensch vanished while playing outside with the family’s Queensland Heeler around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. Search teams scoured the rocky terrain surrounding Victoria’s Cordes Lakes, Ariz., home, but as the night wore on, and temperatures dipped into the 30s, there was still no sign of her.

When the sun rose Friday morning, a rescue helicopter spotted movement below. It was Blue, hovering close to the missing girl, nearly half a mile from their home.

Even as medics approached, Blue kept Victoria, who was only wearing a T-shirt, pants and tennis shoes, safe.

“I think the dog was initially apprehensive of me. I was a little concerned he might bite me when I first walked up, but as I just walked right past the dog, the [animal] realized I was there to help,”

Awwww….

So what are you reading this morning?

HAVE A STUPENDOUS SATURDAY!!!!!!!