This is my tribute to all you drunk bastards this holiest of holidays.......St. Patrick's Day.
So here you go....
This segment is sponsored by:
Drunk Yank on St.Patrick's Day
The After-effects of a Heavy St. Patrick's Day
Drunk Guy in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day
And Lastly we have some nice traditional irish music for ya:
Kiss Me I'm Sh*t-Faced
I'm sailing up to boston
Let's Get Ready to Stuuumble!
Climate Debate
For those of you who are sick and tired of having a singular view of global warming (or climate change I think it's now called) shoved down your throat; There is an excellent website called Climate Debate Daily that I think you would all enjoy.
Good day and safe surfing.
The Push-up Belongs in Your Fitness Routine
From Lifehacker.com:The New York Times reports that the push-up, longtime signifier of fitness, really is an indicator that we should take seriously.
The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs... Push-ups are important for older people, too. The ability to do them more than once and with proper form is an important indicator of the capacity to withstand the rigors of aging.
More here.
I promise you, this will not become a regular segment.
Paulson's Plan: Prevention, Prevention, Prevention
From BusinessWeek:
Call it an attempt to lock the barn door before the next group of horses escapes. Even as criticism has mounted that the Bush Administration has moved too slowly to stem the slide in housing and credit markets, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Mar. 13 announced a series of recommendations intended to prevent a recurrence of the lapses and errors that led to the meltdown in the first place.
"As we continue to address the current market stress, we must also examine the appropriate policy responses," Paulson said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. But he also sounded a note of caution aimed at heading off calls for more radical regulatory changes emanating from Congress, consumer groups, and others critical of the financial industry.
More here.
What's the Matter with Kids Today?
Nothing, aside from the panic that most older adults have that the Internet is turning their brains into gray goo.
From Salon.com:
The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature.This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting "the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life," particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing's condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of "a fragmenting culture" in which "young men and women ... have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers."
More here.
Total Recall Machine
From CrunchGear:Remember the X-ray technology from Total Recall? A British company has developed what it calls “ThruVision” — a similar technology that “uses what it calls ‘passive imaging technology’ to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays — known as Terahertz or T-rays — that they emit,” according to Reuters. “Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.”
More here.
A Physics High-Wire Act
From People of the Web:
Walter Lewin is not merely dangling at the bottom of a 15-foot pendulum. He is swinging high and wide, his rapt audience of 300 counting off each cycle.At 71, he's likely missed his window for a shot at Cirque du Soleil, but the Netherlands-born MIT physics professor seems happy with his own high wire act -- revealing to students, in the most unorthodox ways, the beauty of science.
More here.
China vs Monks
The Chinese government this week dispatched military troops and police to important monasteries in Tibet to crack down on the largest protests by ethnic Tibetan Buddhist monks in the Himalayan region in 20 years. Witnesses are reporting that trucks full of troops have surrounded Drepung monastery in Lhasa, as police surround nearby Sera monastery.
More here.
700,000 People and Growing
From the ACLU:
In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported (warning: link is to a pdf document download) that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.
At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead.
More here.
Here's just a sampling of the names on that list (via the ACLU website):
Robert Johnson - 60 Minutes interviewed 12 men named Robert Johnson, all of whom reported being pulled aside and interrogated, sometimes for hours, nearly every time they go to the airport. | |
Alexandra Hay, a college student with a double major in French and English at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2004, when she joined an ACLU lawsuit due to problems she was having with the airline watch list. | |
Sarosh Syed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan working for the ACLU of Washington in Seattle also had problems flying. (Syed was also a plaintiff in the ACLU suit in 2004.) | |
9/11 Hijackers. While certainly these were individuals we all wish had been watched out for, they are, in fact, dead. Yet, the names of 14 of the 19 hijackers from 9/11 were on a copy of the list obtained by 60 Minutes . More evidence that the list is poorly maintained and full of junk names that will only serve to ensnare the innocent. | |
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. Name found on list obtained by 60 Minutes . | |
Saddam Hussein. Although he was imprisoned in Baghdad and in U.S. custody at the time, his name was also found in the database obtained by 60 Minutes. Again, this accomplishes nothing except ensnaring the innocent, diluting the list, and wasting the time of security workers. | |
Gary Smith. Another name that is extremely common in the United States, found on the no-fly list by 60 Minutes. | |
John Williams. Yet another common name found on the airline watch list by 60 Minutes. | |
U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D, Mass.) After repeated delays at airport security, the senator had trouble getting removed from the airline watch list despite calls to Homeland Security and eventually a personal conversation with the Secretary of DHS. | |
Representative John Lewis (D, Georgia). Being a hero of the Civil Rights Movement isn't enough to keep off the aviation watch lists, apparently. | |
Akif Rahman, founder of a computer consulting company from suburban Chicago, was detained and questioned for more than two hours by U.S. customs officials on four separate occasions when crossing the Canadian border. On one occasion he was held for 5 ½ hours, shackled to a chair, and physically searched. He was also separated from his wife and children (who were forced to wait in a small dirty public area without food or telephones). A U.S. citizen born in Springfield Illinois, Rahman is being represented by the ACLU of Illinois in a lawsuit over this treatment. | |
Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown was blocked from flying while on his way home from an 8-month deployment in Iraq. He was listed as a suspected terrorist due to a previous incident in which gunpowder was detected on his boots, most likely a residue of a previous tour in Iraq. | |
Asif Iqbal, a Rochester, NY, management consultant and University of Texas graduate who flies weekly to Syracuse for business, has been weekly detained and interrogated by local law enforcement because his name is shared by a former Guantánamo detainee (who was himself released from the extrajudicial detainment, presumably because of lack of evidence of terror involvement). | |
James Moore, author of a book critical of the Bush Administration, Bush's Brain ; problems flying. | |
Catherine ("Cat") Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens (R, Alaska). Problems flying. | |
Yusuf Islam, a singer and pop star formerly known as Cat Stevens. Author of song "Peace Train." His flight from London was diverted and forced to land in Maine once the government realized he was aboard, and he was barred from entering United States. | |
Major General Vernon Lewis (Ret.); a recipient of the Army's highest medal for service, the Distinguished Service Medal who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, Lewis had problems flying. |
Abolish the Fed
From CNBC:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should resign and the Fed should be abolished as a way to boost the falling dollar and speed up the recovery of the U.S. economy, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe Wednesday.Asked what he would do if he were in Bernanke's shoes, Rogers, who slammed the Fed for pouring liquidity in the system and accepting mortgage-backed securities as guarantees, said: "I would abolish the Federal Reserve and I would resign."
More here.