Gilles Vidal posts some well done VR scenes from Toulouse.
Category: Current Events
Delightful
Took in the Madison Rep’s latest last night: Talley’s Folly. Highly entertaining and simply delightful.
Cheeseheads’ Taste of Chester
Frank Fitzpatrick pens a Philly view of UW basketball coach Bo Ryan (Ryan is from Philadelphia):
Ryan peddled the cards until he got the camera. Forty-nine years later, the big picture hasn’t changed much. He’s still fighting and selling relentlessly.
“You’ve got to sell,” he said, “because a lot of times you’re a perfect stranger trying to convince somebody to do something they might not want to do. If I wasn’t a coach, I’d probably be a salesman. I’ve got to have that competition.”
Now Ryan sells Badger basketball – to recruits, to his players, to boosters, to the media, to the nation. With that slick exterior abetted by street smarts, he has transformed Wisconsin, once an off-the-rack program, into one of the hottest items on college basketball’s shelf.
The Age of Perpetual Conflict
Blind men and women have been the motor of modern history and the source of endless misery and destruction. Aspiring leaders of great powers can neither understand nor admit the fact that their strategies are extremely dangerous because statecraft by its very nature always calculates the ability of a nation’s military and economic resources to overcome whatever challenges it confronts. To reject such traditional reasoning, and to question the value of conventional wisdom and react to international crises realistically on the basis of past failures would make them unsuited to command. The result is that politicians succeed in terms of their personal careers, states make monumental errors, and people suffer. The great nations of Europe and Japan put such illusions into practice repeatedly before 1945.
At the beginning of the 21st century only the U.S. has the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to intervene everywhere it believes necessary. Today and in the near future, America will make the decisions that will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is largely in its hands. It thinks it possesses the arms and a spectrum of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role for itself. It believes that its economy can afford interventionism, and that the American public will support whatever actions necessary to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path it deems essential. This grandiose ambition is bipartisan and, details notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a consensus on it.
Anna Christie
Following the success of 2005’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, Artistic Director Richard Corley returns to America’s greatest playwright. Winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize, Anna Christie is the tale of a mid-western girl who loses and finds her way amid New York’s waterfront bars and barges, and the two men who fight for her body and soul. One of the finest female roles ever written, Anna Christie has been played by actresses as diverse as Greta Garbo, Natasha Richardson, Liv Ullman, and Celeste Holm.
We enjoyed the Rep’s production of Annie Christie. I’m always amazed at how well the actors adopt their character’s language, in this case Swedish and Irish influenced English. Carrie Coon, Lea Coco and Craig Spidle were great. Go.
“Use the Web, Luke” – Presidential Candidates Embrace the Web
In choosing the Internet to announce she intends to run for the presidency in 2008, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton bowed to the burgeoning political power of the medium and offered a preview of how she hopes to harness it to her purposes.
In declaring “I’m in” the White House race in a video clip on her new campaign website, HillaryClinton.com, the New York Democrat did considerably more than simply appear before the cameras; she invited supporters to join an almost Oprah Winfrey-like session of give and take.
“Let’s talk. Let’s chat. Let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine…. ” she told viewers.”With a little help from modern technology, I’ll be holding live online video chats … starting Monday.”
By doing this, Clinton signaled her intention of using the Internet to shore up one of her chief political weak points, what independent analyst Charlie Cook called the caricature of her as “this shrill, raving, partisan, liberal lunatic.”
Hilary’s video is here. Take a look through the window – I wonder when it was shot? Sam Brownback announced on the web as well.
Charles Franklin looks at the polls.
Buckley on Iraq
You are a Republican legislator, retiring after this, your fifth term. Last night, into midnight hours, you composed a questionnaire for yourself. You vowed to submit to it before your committee speech. You’d flower up the language a bit — but not the thought. You wake up this morning and turn to last night’s self-quiz.
American Samoa Exempt from Minimum Wage Hike?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
House Republicans yesterday declared “something fishy” about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week.
“I am shocked,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party’s chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. “Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats.”
On Wednesday, the House voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour.
The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.
Meanwhile, some Senators are attempting to water down any sort of earmark reform. A cynical observer might wonder if those in the House knew this would happen in the Senate…
A Semi Self Defense of Enron
I also have a minor challenge for aficionados of the Enron case.
Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, one of my colleagues on the science desk—Bill Booth—called up a dozen or so Nobel Laureates in physics and asked them to explain, in plain language, the nature and significance of the Higgs Boson atomic particle. None of them could. This was at a time, mind you, when the physics community was arguing passionately for the construction of a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to look for things like the Higgs Boson. So it wasn’t for lack of interest. They were gung-ho for nailing the Higgs Boson. They just couldn’t explain the Higgs Boson.
Can anyone explain—in plain language—what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?
TSA’s Latest: Sponsored X-Ray Bins
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is launching a one-year pilot programme to allow companies to place advertisements in bins at passenger screening checkpoints at “select” US airports in return for equipment donations.
The effort follows a 3-month test programme at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) security checkpoints that started in July.
TSA is looking for commercial advertising companies who will team with an airport to provide divestiture bins (the plastic bins used to transport passenger carry-on items through the X-ray machine); divestiture and composure tables; and bin return carts free-of-charge to the TSA. In return, the companies will be allowed to place airport-approved ads “on the bottom of the inside of the bins,” says a TSA spokeswoman. Airports partnered with ad companies will ultimately be required to screen the materials for “offensive, obtrusive, political or controversial” content, she adds.
Not a bad idea, actually. How about a free bottle of water with the ad?