Clipmarks | ruralart's clips

When America Sneezes, the World Catches a Cold

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:01:18 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Definitely scary!

America's latest export: empty municipal coffers

Financial Armageddon, the meltdown, the crisis, or whichever title fits the bill this week, is about to enter another even more damaging phase in America.

And it would pay for the rest of the world to take notice because a fair amount of evidence has piled up in recent months to prove the adage about America sneezing and everyone else catching a cold.

The housing markets of much of Europe mimicked those in America by slumping after a few years of heady price increases. The credit markets of Europe and Asia seized up, again following America's lead. Then, of course, stock markets in London, continental Europe and the Far East lost trillions of dollars of value in the wake of several historic Wall Street plunges last week.

States have become accustomed to borrowing their way out of troubles like these, but today state and local governments are having just as hard a time securing credit as the banks and financial firms .

Missing the old McCain

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:24:06 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Funny and scary at the same time.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Dear Old Golden Dog Days

I miss August. August was neat. The Dow was over 10,000 and nobody had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It’s only in retrospect that we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain campaign’s golden era. Now, he’s beginning to act like one of those movie characters who steals the wrong ring and turns into a troll.

During that last debate, while he was wandering around the stage, you almost expected to hear him start muttering: “We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious.”

Remember when the McCains wouldn’t talk about the fact that their son was in Iraq? Oh well.

Palin has been pressing the line that people don’t really know “the real Barack Obama,” and who could make the argument better than a woman who we’ve already known for almost six weeks? Really, she’s like one of the family.

The importance of voting - and not for your buddy!

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:26:34 GMT

clipped by: ruralart

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

Palin abused powers

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:42:19 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: No surprise!

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Body blow for McCain as Palin found to have abused powers

John McCain's election campaign last night suffered the body blow which Republicans had been bracing themselves for when his vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was found to have abused her powers in pursuit of a personal feud with her former brother-in-law.

At the end of the 10-week investigation into the so-called Troopergate affair, Palin was found to have breached the ethics rules which govern her conduct as governor of Alaska. The findings, delivered by an investigator who had been hired by the Alaskan state legislature before she was picked as McCain's running mate, are certain to lead to questions over his judgment, and to queries and challenges as to her suitability for national office.

With McCain struggling to overtake Barack Obama in the polls, however, and less than four weeks before the election, the report's findings could barely have been worse for the Republicans.

Palin's kind of patriotism

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:53:08 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Insightful. And although I usually don't agree with Friedman, this time I do.

Clip Source: www.thestate.com

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel.

And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You recently said paying taxes is patriotic. In middle-class America, where I have been all my life, that is not considered patriotic.”

What an awful statement.

she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

“I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

Whether or not I agree with John McCain, he is of presidential timber. But putting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.

Tags: palin, politics

Green Scum may equal Green Fuel

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:49:08 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: What a great way to use a nasty hog pond!

Clip Source: www.thestate.com

Some see enormous potential in the work Michelle Sabaoun and Doug Holland are doing at Brunswick Community College

he two are growing 6,000 liters of algae in large glass tubes that they hope to convert into biodiesel to power two tractors and other equipment at the college’s Center for Aquaculture Technology.

Eventually, the two want to develop a system that uses the methane generated in hog waste lagoons as a power source to help convert the algae to fuel. The nutrients in the waste would be used as a fertilizer to grow the algae. The vegetative mass that’s left over can be used as a feed additive for livestock or a high quality organic fertilizer.

The 3-year-old program is now ready to harvest its first crop, extract the oil it produces and convert it to fuel.

Some scientists believe that algae could produce enough biodiesel in a 15,000-square-mile area — about 10 times the size of Horry County — to power all the vehicles in the United States.

Tags: biofuel

Palin - the reality is showing

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:25:08 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Glad to see folks are beginning to see her clearly. She is very, very scary.

Clip Source: www.thestate.com

Palin clearly out of her league

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

Divorce Rate dropping in US

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:07:40 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Interesting. And maybe a change for the good?

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

So Where’s the Epidemic?

The number of families in our position is actually much smaller than you might think.

The mystery apparently extends beyond my Brooklyn neighborhood. "The 50 percent thing doesn't seem to be my reality," says Debbie Zeitman, 47, a divorced mom who lives with her 15-year-old son in Venice, Calif. "I'm surprised by how relatively uncommon it seems to be." Dorothy Lloyd, the divorced mother of an 11-year-old girl in Highland Park, Ill., says most families where she lives are "more of the traditional kind, both parents at home."

We're not imagining things. The number of families in our position—thankfully—is much smaller than you might think. Only 10 percent of the nation's children were living with a divorced parent in 2004, according to my calculation using the most current available U.S. Census data. That doesn't include kids living with parents who have remarried, or parents who have never married. But it doesn't feel like a national crisis, either.

WWII Nurse Remembers

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:10:47 GMT

clipped by: ruralart

Clip Source: www.thestate.com

'I thought it was my duty' to serve

87-year-old recalls her days as an Army nurse in 1940s

Anna Bell “Wendy” Wendelburg Zeigler began work at 6:30 that December morning in 1944, in a sprawling Gothic hospital in Paris, to pandemonium, blood and screams.

Ambulances crowded the large, snow-covered plaza of Hospital Lariboisiere on Rue Ambriose Pare. Stretchers with bloody men jammed the corridors. Every bed was filled with wounded soldiers from the Battle of the Bulge.

“There were so many litters, you could barely walk down the hall,” says Zeigler of Northeast Richland, now 87. “We probably worked until midnight. I really can’t remember. There were lots of days like that.”

The young nurse, part of the buildup of U.S. forces in England in spring of 1944, landed among the wreckage on Utah Beach that August, two months after the D-Day invasion. She spent “forever” in a pup tent in an apple orchard near St. Lo before arriving in liberated Paris.

Palin's "gibberish"

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:03:15 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Another view...

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, that is simply not true.

Will someone please put out of her agony?

"It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America. Where—where do they go? It's . It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to—to our state."

There is, of course, the sheer absurdity of the premise. Two weeks ago I flew to Tokyo, crossing over the North Pole. Does that make me an expert on Santa Claus? (Thanks, Jon Stewart.) But even beyond that, read the rest of her response. "It is from Alaska that we send out those …" What does this mean? This is not an isolated example.

what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish.

New Prime Number discovered

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:07:49 GMT

clipped by: ruralart

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Huge new prime number discovered

Mathematicians in California could be in line for a $100,000 prize (£54,000) for finding a new prime number which has 13 million digits.

Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.

The prize was set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to promote co-operative computing on the Internet.

The team from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) found the new number by linking 75 computers and harnessing their unused power.

This enabled them to perform the enormous number of calculations needed to find and verify a new prime.

Thousands of people around the world linked the powers of their personal computers in the search for a higher "Mersenne" prime number - named after 17th-Century French mathematician Marin Mersenne.

Mersenne primes are expressed as two to the power of P, minus one - with P being itself a prime number.

Hurricane headed for Maine and Canada

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:06:01 GMT

clipped by: ruralart

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

US north-east on hurricane alert

A rare hurricane watch has been issued for the US state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Tropical Storm Kyle strengthened to hurricane force off the US east coast with winds of 75mph (120km/h), the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

It is the first hurricane watch issued for Maine in 17 years, the US National Weather Service reported.

It is projected to make landfall near the Maine-New Brunswick border late Sunday or early Monday, the NHC said.

The alert comes on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Juan, which killed two people and caused millions of dollars of damage in Canada's Atlantic provinces.

Kyle is the 11th named storm of the season, which has already brought extensive damage and hundreds of deaths in Caribbean nations.

Look How the Self Right - eous Fall

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:15:04 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Sorry for the girl... but love the irony. Too bad instruction in how to prevent pregnancy was part of the parenting here. Crucial for both sexes today.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

ST. PAUL — The 17-year-old daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, is five months pregnant, the Alaskan governor announced Monday, adding a new element of tumult to a Republican convention that had already been disrupted by Hurricane Gustav.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned,” the statement said. “As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows that she has our unconditional love and support.”

WaMu falls

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:31:22 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: What is that line about getting what you deserve? If you make risky bets you reap the consequences. Unfortunately, that means the rest of us reap them also!

Clip Source: www.thestate.com

WaMu becomes biggest bank to fail in US history

As the debate over a $700 billion bank bailout rages on in Washington, one of the nation's largest banks - Washington Mutual Inc. - has collapsed under the weight of its enormous bad bets on the mortgage market.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized WaMu on Thursday, and then sold the thrift's banking assets to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion.

Seattle-based WaMu, which was founded in 1889, is the largest bank to fail by far in the country's history. Its $307 billion in assets eclipse the $40 billion of Continental Illinois National Bank, which failed in 1984, and the $32 billion of IndyMac, which the government seized in July.

Views of damage from Hurricane Ike

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:23:33 GMT

clipped by: ruralart
clipper's remarks: Distressing.

Clip Source: www.boston.com

In its brief lifespan of only 13 days, Hurricane Ike wreaked great deal of havoc. Affecting several countries including Cuba, Haiti, and the United States, Ike is blamed for approximately 114 deaths (74 in Haiti alone), and damages that are still being tallied, with estimates topping $10 billion. Many shoreline communities of Galveston, Texas were wiped from the map by the winds, storm surge and the walls of debris pushed along by Ike - though Galveston was spared the level of disaster it suffered in 1900. (28 photos total)

A horse grazes beside a house, surrounded by floodwater, near Winnie, Texas after Hurricane Ike, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008. Ike was the first major storm to directly hit a major U.S. metro area since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. (AP Photo/Pool, Smiley N. Pool)

Tags: hurricane, weather