Aug 30 2008
Original article titled Integrity Bank Becomes 10th U.S. Failure This Year , by Alison Vekshin and Ari Levy, via bloomberg.com:
Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) — Integrity Bank of Alpharetta, Georgia, was closed by U.S. regulators today, the 10th bank to collapse this year amid a surge in soured real-estate loans stemming from the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.
Aug 30 2008
Like everyone else, I've been mesmerized for the last few hours by the spectacle of Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate. A few known facts about her are repeated…over and over. And over. But there's something I'm starting to see…and it's really pissing me off. So you get…more outrage. Our currency and gift.
Aug 30 2008
Poor Sarah Palin . . .
Look at her up there smiling. They always smile before they realize what’s about to happen to them.
Sarah Palin is about to become a human sacrifice to the electoral gods.
Aug 30 2008
Aug 30 2008
MATTER OVER MIND
Brazilian psychic Jucelino Nobrega da Luz had some Tokyo residents on edge when he predicted a 6.5-magnitude earthquake would hit the metropolis on August 6. Didn’t happen, fortunately, but a minor quake did rumble the city a couple of days later.And here’s hoping that another of Jucelino’s predictions fails to come true: he’s on record as saying that an 8.4 quake will rumble through Tokyo and Yokohama in September 2010, killing 70,000 people.
In a bit of good news for semi-blind flyboys, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces announced it would relax some of the physical requirements for aircraft pilots due to a drop in the number of applications. People wearing glasses are now free to apply.
Wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who was in charge when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and who was executed for war crimes in 1948, was not the type to go quietly into the night. In recently released papers written during the final days of World War II, Tojo made it clear he thought government leaders and the general population were “spineless” for supporting unconditional surrender to the allies.
Nippon TV was left with egg on its face when it overstated the amount of food that competitive eater Tomoko Miyake quaffed down on its News Real Time program. After a weekly magazine accused NTV of padding its stats, the network went to the videotape replay and subsequently downgraded the number of plates wiped clean from 48 to 39.
Aug 30 2008
Aug 30 2008
Original article via wsws.org:
After going through the formality of a roll call vote ending in the preordained nomination of Barack Obama as its presidential candidate, the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday turned to the question of “national security,” portraying itself as more competent than the Bush administration in defending the interests of US imperialism abroad, while making it clear that it is prepared to launch new and even bloodier wars than those carried out over the past eight years.
Aug 30 2008
Obligatory YouTube — Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” (coutesy of Astrotype):
I didn’t watch the entire Democratic Convention, but I watched enough to be very affected by many of the speeches, especially Michelle and Barack Obama’s words and presentation. I was very impressed by both of them.
But then the production, the media production itself, disturbed me, from the music to the pageantry. Seemed cheesy like the Academy Awards, which is so strange, because those awards are for some of the most talented directors and cinematographers and set designers and yet it always looks so cheesy on the teevee.
Aug 30 2008
Another semester begins, to yet one more time drain the life out of multitudes of college teachers and their students. This year begins with the periodic political campaign speech which, if it addresses education at all, displays no knowledge of life from the perspective of a college teacher.
One of the problems with being a college professor is that one is likely to be swamped with many ideas at once from time to time, which causes them not only to divide one’s time in an often futile attempt to resolve the different issues but also to consider how those issues might overlap…and why they happen to come up now, at this point in the life of a person or the history of the world.
So I’m going to carefully unwrap the twines of my reaction to the acceptance speech vis-a-vis education from another event that occurred yesterday. More time and more thought need to go into any tirade about students who would be better served not going to college and the rest of us remodeling society so that such people could have their own form of a better life through a different vehicle than attending school not because they want to do so but because they are told to do so. And about the amount of destruction done to educational realms when people think that the point of an education is to get a better job instead of, you know, learning something.
More time and more thought also need to go into anything written about the effects of that destruction and the destruction caused by No Child Left Behind…which has been every bit the storm Katrina was and is ongoing…on any effort to create an army of new teachers who actually have the skills and passion to teach. The infrastructure of our education system has been neglected just as much as the infrastructure of our highways and byways…and surely for just as long, if not longer.
