Admit it, you know we all do it.

Ian Welsh - What Can Obama Really Do ?

A zombie argument is going around about why Obama hasn't accomplished liberal and progressive ends to the extent many would have liked him to:

Obama can't do anything because he needs 60 votes in Congress and he doesn't have them because Republicans and Dems like Lieberman and Nelson won't vote for his programs.

This argument is misleading in one sense and incorrect in another.  It is misleading in that it misrepresents how things get done in Congress.  It is incorrect in that many liberal policies do not require the consent of Congress.

Let's examine the misconceptions this zombie argument is built on.....

worth a read

keep to the Fen Causeway

Reijo Jämes, Marketing Director of Finnkino, the country's largest cinema chain, said that last summer was the best ever in terms of ticket sales.

"We had record sales in June this year, and this August is shaping up to be the best ever," he explained to YLE.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

If you live in Britain...

Although it should work where ever there is google streetmap

Puerto Rico Daily SunDespite official reports saying the effects of hurricane Earl were to be intermittent rains and gusts of wind during the morning, with their frequency and intensity increasing during the late afternoon, the fifth event of this year's hurricane season started pounding the island with heavy rains and winds early Monday morning.
By noon several branches had fallen over power lines and roads,  flash floods in both urban and rural areas, and some 20 people had sought the safety of emergency refuges in the island/municipalities  of Vieques and Culebra, Gov. Fortuño informed.
Early Monday morning several thousand residents of Río Piedras and Guaynabo woke up to find out they had no electricity in their homes and that they would have to brave a more combative Monday morning commute because several traffic lights at key intersections were out due to the power failure.

PR Daily Sun: The island's close brush with Hurricane Earl Monday demonstrated that the Puerto Rico Electric Energy Authority is not ready for such a challenge, said the industry's powerful union.
"The state of abandon and lack of preventive maintenance of the system was apparent with just a few moderate winds," said Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, president of the Union of Electric and Irrigation Industry Workers.
He noted that several sectors were without electric service and several lines were down in the mountain in Barranquitas, Aibonito, Orocovis.
He said the following towns were also lacking power service: Guaynabo, Ceiba, Fajardo, Río Grande, Luquillo, and the island municipalities of Vieques and  Culebra, affecting thousands of PREPA clients.

Bernard Kouchner, a long-term humanitarian advocate, said he came close to stepping down over the French government's new law and order crusade against the Roma gypsies. 

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, told RTL radio on Monday that he had considered resigning over the French government's recent crackdown on Roma Gypsies. Kouchner said he told President Nicolas Sarkozy about his concerns and his thoughts of stepping down. He decided to remain in the job, saying that leaving amounted to 'deserting.'

"I asked myself whether I should resign, Kouchner said. "But what would have that changed? No, I was not happy about this policy. I've been involved with the Roma for 25 years. And I don't like making a political issue out of them."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has defended her plan to go to China instead of to Thursday's (2 September) Middle East peace talks following criticism by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner.

In a detailed statement issued over the weekend, her office said the Beijing trip is "very important" due to upcoming discussions by EU leaders on a strategic partnership with the Asian country and in order to build personal relations with her Chinese counterpart, Dai Binguo.

Belgium's King Albert II has refused the resignation of politician charged with forming a new government. Socialist leader Elio Di Rupo has offered to step down, saying he could not reconcile deep political differences. 

Belgium's French-speaking Socialist Party leader Elio di Rupo has been told he must press ahead with talks to form a new government, 10 weeks after parliamentary elections failed to produce a clear winner.

Di Rupo visited the palace of monarch King Albert II on Sunday to offer his resignation after failing to build a working coalition government. The pair were in discussion for three hours, a palace statement said.

Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey, is set to become the biggest political memoir of all-time, according to Amazon.co.uk.

Pre-orders of the book have outstripped those for Lord Mandelson's memoir, The Third Man by 36 per cent.

Experts at Amazon claim it is set to overtake the former Business Secretary's sales figures once it is released on Wednesday.

Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, has been interrogated by the Swedish police. His lawyer says he is accused of sexual assault although he fully expects the charges to be dropped.

Leif Silbersky, one of Sweden's top defence lawyers, said police had questioned his client in his presence for about an hour on Monday evening and that the interrogation "went very well. I expect the prosecutor will drop the whole thing."

A duty prosecutor issued an arrest warrant on the evening of Friday 20 August in connection with an allegation of rape, but chief prosecutor Eva Finne abruptly withdrew it the next day saying new information had come to light.

More details.

Drilling Rig in Greenland SHUT DOWN

At least they found very good use of their free time, exceptionally courageous.

Skennah Kowa

I gained some insight into this recently when an elderly relative started complaining about "Obamacare" and how it would lead to "socialized medicine." Knowing the person had heart surgery courtesy of Medicare and was receiving ongoing monitoring and care, I said, "I didn't realize you were so unhappy with Medicare." To which I received the reply: "I'm not talking about Medicare, I'm talking about socialized medicine."

"How is Medicare different from socialized medicine?" I asked.

"Medicare isn't socialized," came the reply. "I pay for it. I pay every month and when I've had surgery, I've had to pay some of it. Medicare is like any other insurance."

"Well," I said, "I know you're paying a premium for Part B and I know there are copayments and deductibles, but Medicare is a government run health insurance program."

To which the reply was: "But I'm talking about socialized medicine. You know that whenever the government gets involved in anything, it never does a good job."

"I had no idea you were having problems with Medicare." said I. "I always had the impression you were pretty satisfied with it. And with the VA, too. I know you've used the VA for some care recently. What problems have you had with Medicare or the VA?"

"Well, none with Medicare or the VA, but I'm not talking about Medicare. I'm talking about socialized medicine."

"So you're happy with Medicare?"

"Yes."

"Would you mind if your [adult] children could buy into it? Your son is unemployed. Would it be OK if he could buy into Medicare?"

"Well, sure. As long as he has to pay like I do."

You were all wondering how someone could say, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare?" Well, there you have it.

from endnotes of my book Destiny Matrix 2010 up-date of the 2002 book

[1]  Yakir Aharonov wrote : 4.2 Destiny states: new solution to measurement problem
Up until now we have limited ourselves to the possibility of two boundary conditions which obtain their assignment due to selections made before and after a measurement. It is feasible and even suggestive to consider an extension of QM to include both a wavefunction arriving from the past and a second "destiny" wavefunction coming from the future which are determined by two boundary conditions, rather than a measurement and selection. This proposal could solve the issue of the "collapse" of the wavefunction in a new and more natural way: every time a measurement takes place and the possible measurement outcomes decohere, then the future boundary condition simply selects one out of many possible outcomes [35, 32]. It also implies a kind of "teleology" which might prove fruitful in addressing the anthropic and fine tuning issues[77] The possibility of a final boundary condition on the universe could be probed experimentally by searching for "quantum miracles" on a cosmological scale. While a "classical miracle" is a rare event that can be explained by a very unusual initial boundary-condition, "Quantum Miracles" are those events which cannot naturally be explained through any special initial boundary-condition, only through initial-and-final boundary-conditions. By way of example, destiny-post-selection could be used to create the right dark energy or the right negative pressure ...

This is Tibetan Buddhism!

" ... the description of the time evolution given by QM does not appropriately represent multi-time-correlations which are similar to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen/Bohm entanglement (eq. 1.1) but instead of being between two particles in space, they are correlations for a single particle between two different times. Multitime-correlations, however, can be represented by using TSQM. As a consequence, the general notion of time in QM is changed from the current conceptual framework which was inherited from CM, i.e.: 1): the universe is viewed as unique, and the objects which inhabit it just change their state in time. In this view, time is "empty," it just propagates a state forward; the operators of the theory create the time evolution; to a new conceptual framework in which: 2): each instant corresponds to a new pair of Hilbert spaces, (i.e., each instant is a new degree of freedom; in a sense, a new universe); instead of the operators creating the time evolution as in the previous approach, an entangled state (in time) "creates"the propagation: a whole new set of structures within time is able to "propagate" a quantum state forward in time ...

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

1985 - 1995 was Wild East time.

In the new Russia, like the Soviet Union, it was important to have personal connections with the powerful.
      Rahunen was connected. St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoli Sobchak and his wife sometimes stopped over at Rahunen's office for coffee. President Mikhail Gorbachev would be seen talking to Rahunen at the Afrodite Restaurant.
      His charm even won over the Tambov mafia, one of the most influential crime syndicates of Northwestern Russia.
      "If a company did business in cash or exercises some other type of visible activities, it had no possibility to operate without an agreement with a protection racket of some kind, as there was no official security organisation", says Jukka Svahn, who delivered goods to several shops and restaurants in St. Petersburg.

A conservative Republican Senator has now come out strongly against efforts to block the construction of the Cordoba House Muslim community center near Ground Zero in New York: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

In an interview with the local Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City, Hatch stated his support and past work for religious freedom. "So, if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so," said Hatch. He also discussed his past experiences dealing with discrimination against the construction of Mormon temples -- and when his late friend Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) helped him to resolve just such a dispute in Boston.

OMG! Are any of u Californians watching the debate of State Senate? Republicans have lost their FREAKIN' MINDS!!! More tax cuts for RICH!

Although Miliband has strong intellectual credentials, he is interested in organisation as well as ideas and he would probably seek to revive Labour campaigning at the grassroots. At Westminster he is seen as non-factional figure and he would lead in a collegiate manner. As one of the best communicators in the party, he would also become a magnet for media attention.

I'm always interested, Piaget-wise, in what people were doing from 0- 7. Eddie seems OK from that POV. The usual family-forged personality dynamic is that first-borns become the diplomats and second-borns the rebels. (Third-borns are the comedians).

You can't be me, I'm taken