Apparently, the health-care debate now has a dress code. Soon you won’t be able to get in unless you’re wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen. Any day now, Hollywood will greenlight a new movie in which an insane Sarah Palin figure picks out her outfit for spreading disinformation (The Lyin’, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
Sad news from the Netherlands last week. The historic replica ship Prins Willem caught fire and was totally consumed in the port of Den Helder, where it was a popular site for tourists and local maritime buffs alike. The original Prins Willem was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company, built in 1649 and wrecked off the coast of Madagascar in 1662.
The replica ship was built in the 1980s, and served as an ambassador from the Netherlands to Japan for many years. As an institute involved in the reconstruction of historic watercraft, including the Galveztown replica ship, we mourn the loss of this striking vessel and and our hearts go out to those maritime enthusiasts who built, sailed, cared for, and visited her. Seeing this majestic ship go up in flames cannot help bring back memories of the burning of Cutty Sark back in May 2007.
You’ve heard a lot about this crazy, scary, vicious mob on some shadowy GOP payroll. By the way the DNC, Rachel Maddow, and President Obama talk, you’d think it was a motley crue of Hell’s Angels.
Let me introduce you to the mob:
Finally! A sense of humor. This is hysterical.
Some of my happiest memories as a child are of reading the old children's books I found at houses and in the libraries of my school and camp. Musty smelling, filled with deco and nouveau style pictures of girls in strange costumes, they were a tangible link to the past. Not merely because some child had held that book in 1920, but because to read the popular fiction of another era is to take at least a few halting steps into its foreign mental world.So when I see old children's books--and by "old" I mean "pre-1960"--I often buy them. I love having the companions of my childhood to hand. I've always enjoyed the prospect of having more space to really take up collecting.Apparently, I can forget about that. Congress has apparently outlawed my hobby. Nor is this merely ideological hysteria. I just checked Amazon, and while there are still some old books for sale, it looks as if there are a lot fewer than there used to be.
Anyone who came of age in the 80s and early 90s can’t help but remember the John Hughes era thanks to the many, many hours of warm, hilarious and unforgettable memories that sprung from the great man’s Midwestern mind.
John Hughes gave us Vacation, Ferris Bueller, Pretty in Pink, Home Alone and many more.
Cory’s tale is finished, but the story goes on; those who follow bear full upon their shoulders the duty to lay a few more sparks across the band of night. Now she can rest and become once again Maria Corazon Cojuangco instead of Cory.
via pajamasmedia.com
A tribute to former Phillippine President Corazon Aquino and the power of faith.
Great op-ed by Zach Krajacic in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday:
Imagine how much automobile insurance would cost if it paid for all expenses associated with owning an automobile – oil changes, engine failures, worn-out tires, brakes, rust, and so on. The number of people who couldn’t afford car insurance would rise dramatically, and we would have a car insurance crisis in America.
That is the situation with healthcare. As health plans increasingly pay for almost every service or procedure, ameliorate our every discomfort, and succumb to every cultural whim and fad, the price of insurance continues to rise.
Health plans are paying for every imaginable benefit – while automobile insurers are not – because of both consumer demand and state mandates.
Tonight, Googler Mihai Parparita announces that Google Reader now sends realtime updates to FriendFeed when you share items using the PubSubHubbub protocol.
Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It's no Google Wave. But that's what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google Reader/FriendFeed integration is just the first tiny step in what will be a broad deployment of realtime-enabled sites. These sites and services will let one another know when they have new data to share without the sucky inefficiencies of polling. Check out how fast FriendFeed updates when you share an item in Google Reader in the video above.
In short, it's almost zero latency.
via lifehacker.com
With things like this and Yahoo's Open Strategy, there won't be a need to go to Twitter, Facebook or whatever. You'll soon be able to set it up to all come to you. This could get very interesting very soon.
In order to get myself back into the good graces of the White House Office of Disinformation, I'm going to take some time to clear up some of the misperceptions about the "end-of-life counseling" provisions in the various Democratic health-care bills.
"End of life counseling" isn't mandated under the Democrats' legislation. As the bill is currently written, at age 65, you're simply invited to participate in a discussion with a doctor about when the government will stop paying for your health care. The federal government has even generously decided to underwrite the costs of this meeting between you and the doctor about when the government will stop paying for your health care.
I'm glad we got that straightened out.