Don't lose it.

The rain has stopped. Physics tutoring, for my regular student over the past 2 years, begins in less than an hour. World Series with the Gigantes starts in late afternoon. No bullets flying nearby; no visible drone strikes. Should be a good day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wp4O7v5320

An Open Letter to Ann Coulter | The World of Special Olympics

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren't dumb and you aren't shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I'm a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public's perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

A friend you haven't made yet,

Class act.

Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?

So I was just reading a study about innovation structures/culture/org forms in Open Source Software and it strikes me that someone out there must have written about Open Source as the new, mildly democratised form of the "Gentleman Scientist" of the 18th/19th Century.

i.e. This is a group who largely have found stable income from a source (although in this case they work for it) and then spend their spare time on some exploratory activity. But a crucial bit is that they mostly feel secure in their income horizon...

Went to the Launch of Peters book last night, Far too many people crushed into upstairs rooms drinking wine and beer. Ended up in conversation with numerous figures involved.  Tom watson was there, but unfortunately was rather tight lipped on what his new project was going to be. plus spent much time discussing details with lawyers and  reporters. Now have a whole new range of things to research.

much fun was had by all

(losing my car park ticket till today cost me an arm and a leg. it's one of those put something somewhere safe, and you'll forget where it is so 7you can't lose it situations)

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Reuters: U.S. sues Bank of America over "Hustle" mortgage fraud (October 24, 2012)

According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Countrywide in 2007 invented a scheme known as the "Hustle" designed to speed up processing of residential home loans

Operating under the motto "Loans Move Forward, Never Backward," mortgage executives tried to eliminate "toll gates" designed to ensure that loans were sound and not tainted by fraud, the government said.

This resulted in "defect rates" that were roughly nine times the industry norm, but Countrywide concealed this from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even awarded bonuses to staff to "rebut" the problems being discovered, it added. The scheme ran through 2009 and caused "countless" foreclosures, it added.

Bank of America: because buying a company that ran a mortgage program called 'hustle' involves no foreseeable reputational or legal risk.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Daily Kos: GOP Rape Advisory Chart.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Euromoney: Lithuania joins list of CEE Swissie issuers (October 2012)

Lithuania became the first triple-B rated sovereign to issue in Swiss francs since 2005 last month. This demonstrates both the readiness of investors in Switzerland to look further down the credit curve in search of yield and their enthusiasm for emerging Europe risk.

...

The issue was the second debut in the Swiss currency by a CEE sovereign this year, following Slovakia's SFr425 million dual-tranche offering at the end of March. Lithuania's deal also came shortly after an inaugural SFr200 million four-year bond from the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank (BSTDB).

The latter raised eyebrows in Switzerland, given the inclusion of Greece among the supranational borrower's member states. Bankers at sole lead Credit Suisse, however, said the combination of a single-A rating, a 2.5% coupon and a rare chance to buy into a name with links to countries such as Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan proved compelling.

They're all mad, borrowers and lenders alike.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Mitt Romney, Mormon

At the time Joseph Smith's translation took place, no known scholars knew how to translate such hieroglyphics. However, over the years, due to the discovery of the Rosetta stone and other research into Egyptology, considerable scholarly work has been done on such hieroglyphics. The video, mentioned above, documents, in painstaking detail, the exposure that the hieroglyphs that Joseph Smith "translated" were burial documents quite commonly found in tombs whose meaning and interpretation has been well known and unquestionably established to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Joseph Smith's purported translation. The video documents the exposure of this fraud in such painstaking detail as to leave the Church with no plausible retreat from the inescapable conclusion that the purported scriptures resulting from Joseph Smith's translation are a fraud. Only the most naive and uninformed remain with their delusions about the authenticity of this purported body of scripture, propped up by subsequent attempts by Church apologists to re-frame the history of their translation in ways that fly in the face of that which is documented in Joseph Smith's own authenticated journal.


...


The overwhelming accumulation of this type of evidence, together with staggering evidence that the contemporary leadership of the Church is well aware of this evidence and expends enormous energy and resources to conceal it from the view of its members and the public, has resulted in volumes of well documented books on such subjects. These include, An American Fraud, One Lawyer's Case against Mormonism, by Kay Burningham; An Insider's view of Mormon Origins, and The Mormon Corporate Empire by Grant Palmer; and other notable works. My book, The Apostasy of a High Priest - The Sociology of a Mormon Cult, deals with the corrupt epistemology (or doctrinal theory of truth and knowledge) of the Mormon Church which renders the membership susceptible to the level of intellectual absenteeism enabling such preposterous fraud to go unchecked. I was pleased that it received an honorable mention by Kay Burningham in her review of it, in which she referred to it as the "cherry on the cake" of the books dealing with the fraudulent underpinnings of Mormonism. Kay Burningham, by the way, is not only an attorney, but a former Judge pro tem in the San Diego Court system with years of experience in civil litigation, including fraud actions.

The inescapable questions that we are left with, as they relate to the campaign of Mitt Romney, are not whether we are comfortable with Mormonism as our President's religion; not whether Mormonism is a cult; not whether Mormonism is compatible with Christianity; not whether Polygamy is good or bad; not whether the average lay member of the Mormon Church is a good citizen who we are reticent to offend; but rather, whether Mitt Romney, a current High Priest of the Mormon Church, and former regional church leader, is aware that his religion is a demonstrable contemporary fraud in which the leadership of the Church are exploiting the faith of the lay members in extracting countless millions of dollars in tithing receipts, a significant portion of which being invested in world-wide commercial enterprises controlled by the Church, and real estate development in down town Salt Lake City, and all over the world? Is the man in whom so many hope to place all of their hope and faith for a brighter future for America, and in whom they will rely for the assessment of intelligence briefings that are the basis of world-wide military action, aware of the unmistakable, and incontestable evidence that his Church is a fraud? If he is aware, how do we escape the conclusion that he is a party to this fraud, as a High Priest of the Mormon Church, and a party to the oath and covenant of the Holy Melchizedek priesthood of the Church, and a party to the oath of obedience to the Church Leadership, that is part of the sacred Temple covenant to which I have personal knowledge that he is a party. If he is not aware that it is a fraud, amidst glaringly unmistakable evidence that makes what Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented to the United Nations, in justification of the invasion of Iraq, look like an inconclusive pack of lies by comparison, (perhaps a bad analogy, since it did anyway), then shall we not have profoundly serious questions about his judgment?

"It's very hard to see what is kept invisible" Roseanne Barr