Thinking...lots of nachos with some chili.  And beer.  Lots more beer.

Also: Go Giants!

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

...Gok Wan is a Leicester boy. Gok Wan is a fully licensed me duck or duckie.

You can't be me, I'm taken

More worrying is the temperature that hasn't got above the freezing point for about a week now, and is forecasted to remain so for yet another week. A water pipe for the washing machine has a tendency to freeze up when it gets cold for a long period of time so I'm watching it carefully; difficult to run water regularly since it's the washer's supply and there's no sink underneath: we plan to wash a load every day.

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

Frage: why is it 4 grad in my apartment?  Antwort: close the windows, dork, even if you aspire to be German.  Fazit: wow, that sure is fresh air Gazprom Siberia sent us.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

They fucking hate you. They want you, and everyone who speaks for you, and every institution that represents your values, whether it be Planned Parenthood or food banks or ACORN- you name it. They want it destroyed.

I just do not understand why more people do not recognize this. The Republicans have declared total war on America, and people are responding like this is politics as usual. It isn't. It really isn't. It's really all or nothing at this point. We put the birchers/tea party/conservatives back in their place and destroy the current GOP, or we deal with this shit for the next forty-sixty years.

Fiscal Ignorance should not be allowed to cloud the argument

Further to Kate Devlin's article on the Scottish budget veto, the amount of ignorance on the subject of national fiscal and monetary matters - extending right up to the top level of the UK Government - is quite staggering ("Scots budget veto threat to Bank of England plan", The Herald, January 28).

On the subject of currency and central banks firstly, Hong Kong has never had a central bank and their private banks - which are well capitalised because there is no HK lender of last resort - clear bank credit "real time", and issue bank notes. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority maintains monetary stability with a peg to the US dollar and a currency board backed by substantial assets, including significant capture of land rental value. The fact HK people do not have both landlord and government monkeys on their shoulders to the same extent as we do is undoubtedly a competitive advantage for that entrepreneurial territory.

Another approach is that of Ecuador, which is one of several countries which choose to use the US dollar as their currency but without intrusion from the US. While this does cause problems, they have been working on a very interesting idea whereby Ecuadorean businesses may access credit for working capital simply by discounting VAT invoices directly with the central bank. With such a credit clearing system, goods and services will change hands not in exchange for US dollars sourced from the US, but by reference to the US dollar purely as a standard unit of account or benchmark.

Those are a couple of examples of more or less conventional possibilities.

I advocate a simple but radical 21st-century version of the sovereign credit model which pre-dated modern central banking. Scotland could turn back the clock to 1693 when the then privately owned Bank of England first privatised public credit.

Sovereigns had for some 500 years funded public expenditure through issuing stock, which was simply undated credits or IOUs given to creditors in exchange for value received, and returnable in payment of taxes. The origins of the phrases "stock" and "rate of return" - which referred to the rate at which stock could be returned to the exchequer for cancellation against tax obligations - have long since been airbrushed from economic history as an inconvenient truth.

I advocate a new approach to stock creation and issuance, perhaps through basing professionally managed public credit issuance on taxation; or on Scottish land rental values, as proposed by John Law in 1705; or on the value of Scottish energy production; or even all of these.

I am sure Messrs Salmond and Swinney and their team could easily achieve monetary independence in this way.

etc etc

Le ministre de l'intérieur, Claude Guéant, a réaffirmé dimanche 5 février que "toutes les civilisations ne se valent pas", confirmant ses propos controversés tenus la veille lors d'un colloque organisé par l'association étudiante de droite UNI à l'Assemblée nationale.

from the front page of Le Monde

the French Minister for the Interior said that not all cultures are worth the same.

The Local: Bavarian school bars 'impolite' greetings

Principal Petra Seibert has declared the St. Nikola school a "'Hallo' and 'Tschüss'-free zone."

If students slip up, teachers are instructed to politely remind them to use the more polite Bavarian variants for hello and goodbye, "'Grüß Gott" and "Auf Wiedersehen."

The word "Tschüss," which is heard everywhere in cities like Berlin when people part ways, apparently has few fans in southern Germany.

Newt Gingrich said Sunday that an "age of austerity" is the wrong solution for the economy and would "punish" the American people. He said he prefers "pro-growth" policies instead. The comments appear to pour cold water on the modern Republican belief that austerity and growth go hand.

The 2012 Republican presidential was asked by NBC's David Gregory on "Meet The Press" whether his hopes for a U.S. colony on the moon fly in the face of the GOP's fiscal responsibility mantra. Gingrich responded with some choice words about austerity itself before defending his lunar ambitions.

"First of all, David, I don't think you'll ever find me talking about an age of austerity. I don't think that's the right solution," Gingrich said. "I am a pro-growth Republican. I'm a pro-growth conservative. I think the answer is to grow the economy, not to punish the American people with austerity."

The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation', and shows that this is "uncomfortably common," according to authors Allen Wilhite, an economist, and Eric Fong, who researches management, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

...

Fong became interested in the problem when he was asked by a journal editor to cite more articles from that journal as a condition of publication. "Until this happened to me, I had never heard of such a thing," he says. He and Wilhite asked around, and found that some people were familiar with the practice, while others were "absolutely stunned. There was no in-between", says Wilhite.  

...

Excessive self-citation can inflate the impact factor of a journal, so three years ago, Thomson Reuters started publishing impact factors with and without self-citations. McVeigh says that the company sees "a fairly constant dribble" of journals that have inflated their impact factors with self-citations. If doing so significantly affects the journal's impact-factor ranking, the company removes it from the lists for two years (after which self-citations usually drop considerably). Last year, 33 journals out of around 10,000 received this treatment. McVeigh's figures suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals (see 'Self-citations in research journals').

Unfortunately their announcement is in greek. I translate it below, though it's far from a perfect translation (Kilkis is a city in Greece):

...

The workers at the General Hospital of Kilkis answer to this totalitarianism with democracy. We occupy the public hospital and put it under our direct and absolute control. The Γ.N. of Kilkis, will henceforth be self-governed and the only legitimate means of administrative decision making will be the General Assembly of its workers.

The government is not released of its economic obligations of staffing and suppling the hospital, but if they continue to ignore these obligations, we will be forced to inform the public of this and ask the local government but most importantly the society to support us in any way possible for: (a) the survival of our hospital (b) the overall support of the right for public and free healthcare (c) the overthrow, through a common popular struggle, of the current government and any other neoliberal policy, no matter where it comes from (d) a deep and substantial democratization, that is, one that will have society, rather than a third party, responsible for making decisions for its own future.

...

Kid 1: "I am a Giants fan!"
Kid 2: "I am a Giants fan!"
Kid 3: "Soy un partidario de Giants!"

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.