News

Fellow Cooperative Bloggians. It appears that our blog has become a bit stagnant. That doesn’t mean that we’ve left the wide world of the web. We’ve just found and embraced another means of sharing information . . . or at least of sharing news and blog articles.

Enter Google Reader.

Google Reader has been around for some time, and a subset of our fellow cobloggers have been consuming digital news via this RSS feed reader. It is great for many reasons. I’ll only highlight two reasons here:

It is quick. Once you’ve subscribed to the feeds that interest you, you’ll be able to peruse the news pretty fast . . . especially if you use keyboard shortcuts. It generally takes me about 5 minutes to make it through hundreds of headlines. I open the articles that I am interesting in in new tabs for further reading.

You can share. If you find something especially interesting, well-written, or relevant, you can share it so your friends can be enriched too. In general, we all have topics that we are more interested in than others. Sharing lets us cherry pick the best of our respective interests. For example, Himay shares music articles; Dillon shares design post; I share architecture pictures. Of course we all share more than just that, but you get the point.

If you are not using Google Reader, I encourage you to do so. And make sure you share with your fellow cobloggers.

Here’s a great article about how the banks are doing. I don’t fancy myself an economic analyst, but this was a fairly decent article, with great information if you check out the actual report. Check out the section on the left called “The Feds Report” if you’ve got some time and would like to throw up in your mouth a little. How did your bank fare?

“The government’s long-awaited “stress-test” results have found that 10 of the nation’s 19 largest banks need a total of about $75 billion in new capital to withstand losses if the recession worsened.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103914217&ft=1&f=1001

Several years ago (pre-Iraq war), I discovered Salon.com and started reading everything they had ever printed. Most significantly, I started reading about current events, something I hadn’t done previously. After about two years, though, I couldn’t read current events stories anymore. It was too depressing. It made me too angry. I couldn’t read another story about Bush’s policies or about how he couldn’t even read the teleprompter or use real English words in sentences. About all I could do was watch The Daily Show.

But I know some of you soldiered on. You kept reading the articles – from Salon and the NYT and lots of other media sources. So, now that Obama has already begun unraveling some of Bush’s heinous webs, I’m wondering how it feels to be reading the news these days. I find that I look forward to the news articles and even caught myself watching the news on ABC last night.

Is it terrible of me that when things were really bad, I couldn’t stomach it, but now that the news is reporting the actions of a president I agree with, I’m interested and connected to current events again?

I’ve never read FoxNews before. I just assumed that they were as bad as I have heard. But now I’ve read it, and it is fricken awesome.

For instance, in an article about Earth existing in a cosmic bubble, they lead with with this

If the notion of dark energy sounds improbable, get ready for an even more outlandish suggestion.

I mean that is awesome on so many levels. First, they know about dark energy, awesome. Second, they set the tone early – “OMG you are totally not going to believe this but …,” awesome. Third, the rest of the article is reasonably well informed and well written, doubly awesome. Fourth, they play to their base awesomely,

When Nicholas Copernicus argued that it made much more sense for the Earth to be revolving around the sun than vice versa, it revolutionized science.

Since then, most theories have to pass the Copernican test. If they require our planet to be unique, or our position to be exalted, the ideas often seem unlikely.

Why does our placement in the universe make us unique or worthy of exaltation? Maybe we’re at a cocktail party and we’re stanky and the rest of the universe is trying to avoid us. Have they ever thought of that? That sucks. I don’t want to be stanky and alone. I wanna be doing a keg stand* with everyone around me screaming, “chug, chug, chug . . .”

And then in the very next, sorry for the non sequitur, article that I read about a British dude saying he invented the iPod in 1979, FoxNews says, “London’s Daily Mail, always ready to wave the Union Jack in the face of boorish Americans . . .” Seriously, that is awesome. I wonder what they say about the French? I might become a daily FoxNews reader.

* I’ve never actually done a keg stand.

My dad is a professor of Finance at Oklahoma State, so he understands what’s going on with all this economic/credit brew-ha-ha.  I’ve been asking him to explain it to me, and he sent me this link to an episode they did on This American Life that explains it all – from the people who got the bad mortgages, to the people who sold them, to the people who bought them, to the people who sliced them up and sold them to the “Global Pool of Money”.  Very well done and very enlightening.  Ira Glass rocks.

http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Paris Hilton totally owns McCain.

So this is basically the scariest thing i’ve ever seen relating to copyright laws and their abuse.

Happy Monday!

http://www.bestofartists.com/creative-sculpture/2008/7/7/you-could-lose-your-rights.html

America’s largest brewery sold to a Belgium company, that is really controlled by Brazillians, the third world.

Gov’t bailing the largest lenders in the nation.

Markets in trouble today after an overnight correction in the Asian Markets.

The dollar the weakest it has ever been agains the Euro

The upcoming Olympics are in Beijing.

Ford and GM cutting more jobs.

And in case you missed it, there was a run on a bank.  An honest-to-god line to get money out of IndyMac.

Strap in, it’s going to get interesting.

To wit: kind of.

“Walking as bad as driving for global warming” was the headline on Glenn Beck’s show.  This ‘news’ was based off this article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

“Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” a calculation based on the UK Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

Ok, sure let’s not bring transport into the equation for gasoline, but just for food.  That makes sense.  Secondly, beef, milk?  Both inefficient ways to get calories.  What about the energy use of the treadmill that wouldn’t get used that day?

Point is, this article uses terrible ’science’ – an actual, thorough comparison was not done.  And Glenn Beck just reported it that way without actually doing any journalistic research.  Brilliant.  The message was “Why do anything?  Everything causes global warming.  Don’t let those liberals fool you that we can make any difference.”  Frankly, the reporting was so irresponsible I was disgusted.

So currently in Dubai there is dwindling of oil reserves, a huge upsurge in international (US) investment, key members of staff who are receiving huge benefits from their positions in office via their deferred multi-million dollar stock option plans, and well, michael jackson.

Tourism in Dubai

About Dubai – Wikipedia Specifically read the Economy and Human Right and Labor sections.

Halliburton in Dubai

Halliburtion quarterly report has some kinks

Could someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on? I mean, you know, besides the obvious.

And, as a payoff for all of this noise, here’s Michael.

and i’ll add one more since i fucked up. (good call liz. way to keep me honest)

Michael is now normal?