Olympics ignoring 12 athletes massacred during 1972 games

I am watching the London Olympics opening. Remember: Twelve athletes and coaches were massacred in the Olympic village during the 1972 Munich games. The Olympics have never honored their memory. Tonight would be the time to do so - the 40th anniversary. Philly Com

Shame on the politicians that comprise the International Olympic Committee. Give them one minute of silence.

They say they wont do so because it would be political. They did politics tonight. They spent 10 minutes celebrating the UK's NHS, their socialized medicine!!!

Underwater Music Festival will be on the water

Underwater Music Festival puts the bands on the water on a barge for an audience of boaters. Unique. It was/will be in Carr Inlet of South Puget Sound, which is the west side of Gig Harbor. Specifically between Cutts Island, Raft Island and Kopachuck State Park, which is on the Gig Harbor Peninsula.

Three Sheets NW blog

They had to cancel this year, but are committed to 2013.

View Larger MapDriving Directions

Map: You can click the minus to zoom out and drag to get the bigger picture.

Young woman dies in abortion at Planned Parenthood

Is it news that a young woman died as the result of an abortion? In a Planned Parenthood clinic? It gets short mention in the local newspaper, in Chicago. It is not news in Seattle; I checked.

Last winter/spring everyone told us that Planned Parenthood just provides health services to women.

Chicago Sun-Times [This is their full report.]

A woman died of injuries she received during an abortion at a local Planned Parenthood clinic Friday.

Tonya Reaves, 24, of the 1500 block of N. Kildare, was pronounced dead at 11:20 p.m. Friday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. She was taken to the hospital from the Planned Parenthood clinic at 18 S. Michigan Ave.

An autopsy done Saturday listed the woman’s cause of death to be hemorrhage, with a cervical dilation and evacuation, as well as an intrauterine pregnancy as contributing causes, according to the medical examiner’s office. Her death was ruled an accident.

Calls to local and national Planned Parenthood offices were not returned.

Did US government invent the Internet?

Everyone knows the government in the body of Albert Gore, Jr., invented the internet. Listen to President Obama. Wrong!; the government's role was small. The US government let a key technology languish for 30 years before private industry made use of it in 1995! And the internet took off only then.

WSJ

… It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."

Note the distinction between a computer network (one owner) versus a connection between networks; the latter is the key. Meanwhile at Xerox Corporation...

… Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company eventually had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox managers can console themselves that it's rare for a company to make the transition from one technology era to another.

As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."

Harry doesn't know why no tax increase when Dems ruled

Why, Harry? If tax increases are of essential importance why didn't you raise them when you controlled everything from January 2009 to January 2011?

Weekly Standard asked Harry. He doesn't know. Leadership? Harry hasn't done a budget in three years. The law requires him to do a budget. What does he care what the law says?

Weekly Standard

TWS: Leader Reid, when it comes to the Bush tax cuts...why didn't Senate Democrats push through this bill back when you controlled the Senate, the House, and the presidency?

REID: The tax cuts weren't about to expire then. So that's why we're doing it now.

TWS: You could have foreseen this issue two years ago.

REPORTER: What are you talking about? They expired at the end of 2010.

REID: And that's why they were extended one year.

TWS: Why didn't they vote when you could have pushed this bill through and had it signed into law?

REID: Next question.

Harry Reid - the best the Democratics have. ??

Washington Park in Anacortes

Anacortes is a great little city. It has water all around and six marinas. It has views of islands near and far, or Mt. Baker and the Cascades and of the Olympics.

And it has a gem - Washington Park. I first saw something unbelievable there. At sea level there are rocks that bear scratches from the glacier that covered Puget Sound to past Olympia in the last ice age.

Seattle Times

… Washington Park, a 220-acre mostly wooded gem of a park 0.7-mile west of the ferry landing. It's at the far northwest tip of Fidalgo Island, jutting out on a finger of land called Fidalgo Head. Along with a 73-site campground, the park features a picnic area, a boat launch and several miles of trails that crisscross the park's forested interior, which is home to some 100 species of birds. 

A geologic wonder as well, the peninsula is largely composed of greenish serpentine rock, which weathers into a rust-colored soil that's toxic to many plants. Thus, only certain plants and wildflowers — Blue-Eyed Mary and Pod Fern, among them — can survive on its windswept meadows. 

But the park's true calling card is perhaps its 2.2-mile loop road that explores all that the peninsula has to offer: rocky shoreline and tidepool beaches ripe for exploration; forests of fir, cedar and island-esque madronas; bluff-top meadows and grassy knolls, and just about everywhere, water views to the surrounding islands and far-off mountains. 

Numerous pullout spots with park benches and/or beach access invite visitors to stop, ogle the views and smell the saltwater, as it were. Along with folks in cars (speed limit: 10 mph), the one-way, one-lane road is beloved by walkers, cyclists, families — pretty much everyone.

The photo - Mt. Erie, about 900 feet tall, is in Anacortes! I don't recall where I got this photo.

You didn't build that - ridiculed

Arrogant Obama claims credit for everything. Well, not all credit for himself, but all for him and his government.
Friday he topped himself. Quote at Foxnews:

"If you've got a business, you didn't build that," Obama said. "Somebody else made that happen."

Oh? John Podhoretz says that there are 21,700,000 businesses that have no employees but the owner/proprieter. Tell those hard-working people that they didn't build their business - that you did, Obama. Go ahead, tell them. And ask them to vote for you.
John P at Contentions Blog

How about a bit of ridicule for The One: Didn't Build That

Graphic is from Didn't Build That. Click to enlarge.

The Chicago branch of government guts successful welfare reform

The 1996 welfare reform was immediately successful. It got people to work and they were better off for it.

Poor Obama was constrained; he couldn't give out all the favors he wanted. The 1996 welfare reform requires people to work. Obama wants to give hand outs to people who sit. So why would he let that law get in the way.

Why ask Congress to pass the law you want when the Chicago way is to do whatever you want - no matter the Constitution.

So Obama arrogantly is not enforcing part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The parts he doesn't want to enforce.

PJ Media

Where does north meet south in Virginia?

Where does north meet south in Virginia? I wasn't worried about this question, but I discovered an interesting data analysis of the topic - Where is sweet tea served? That is, tea served with sugar in it.

At a blog called Eight over Five they got data on what is served at the 300 MacDonalds in Virginia. They have a nice interactive map showing this data and fitting lines to it, plus historic lines, including the Mason-Dixon line.

EightOverFive - It is interactive; go try it.

Via Strange Maps


Graphic from EightOverFive.

Why search for Higgs boson?

A cartoon that explains it, at least why is is being sought. Very good.

CBS News

Via Jim Miller

US Envoy to Kenya threatened to shoot staff

Obama's chosen dipomat violated security procedures and threatened his staff. He resigned last Friday. The UK news tells us. US news media made light mention of it that bypassed me. [updated]

Ambassador Scott Gration set up an office in the laundry area so he could avoid the security on the embassy's computer network. He was an early Obama supporter and appointed special envoy to Sudan.

Telegraph (UK)

Raise taxes and watch people leave - MD to VA

People are moving across the Potomac River from Maryland to Virginia by the thousands, indeed, 40,000 between 2007 and 2010. Why? High taxes. And it's getting worse in MD; they raised the income tax for high earners on July 1. And the individuals moving in many cases are moving because their employers chose more tax-friendly Virginia.

Washington Times

US Co2 level dropping to 1991 level

The US has made stunning progress by reducing Co2 emissions to the level of 1991 despite population and economic growth.

The US "arrogantly refused" to confirm the Kyoto protocol under President Clinton and continued to refuse international agreements under President Bush.

But the US kept making progress. The climb leveled off in 2001. Then grew little. Then dropped after shale gas arrived the past 5 years.

Watts up with That

Another $400 million Obama pet bankrupt

But they only got $68 million so far… Obama gave solar-panel maker Abound $400 million of taxpayer money - a "bold risk" with our money.

Abound, of Loveland, Colorado, announced it is bankrupt this week. It was going to manufacture in Indiana.

NY Times

Fourth Revolution?

The US has had three consequential changes of direction - Jefferson in 1800, the Civil War, and the New Deal of FDR in the 1930s. James Piereson thinks we are arriving at a fourth.

New Criterion

[quote] ... he financial crisis and the long recession, with the strains they have placed upon national income and public budgets, are only the proximate causes of the political crisis now unfolding in the United States. The deeper causes lie in the exhaustion of the post-war system of political economy that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s. One pillar of that system emerged out of the New Deal with its emphasis upon national regulation of the economy, social insurance, expanding personal consumption, and public debt; the second emerged out of World War II with the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the U.S. military as the protector of the international trading system. The post-war system created the basis for unprecedented prosperity in the United States and the Western world. That system is now unwinding for several reasons, not least because the American economy can no longer underwrite the debt and public promises that have piled up over the decades. The urgent need to cancel or renegotiate these debts and public promises on short notice will ignite the upheaval referred to here as “the fourth revolution.”

The video that got U Virginia president fired

A Stanford University professor is teaching a class online with over 100,000 students in 44 languages at Udacity. What was President Teresa Sullivan doing at UVA? The same old, same old.

MJ Perry at Carpe Diem blog has the story:

The video above features a talk ("Higher Education 2.0") by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of the new, low-cost (mostly free) online university Udacity, and originally appeared on CD in January. It was this video that was partly responsible for the downfall of President Theresa Sullivan at U-Va, because it seems that the U-Va. Board of Visitors wanted the university to move more rapidly in the direction of innovative, open-course, online education (with Udactiy cited as one model), and weren't getting enough support from the president.

[Prof. Perry embedded the video with Flash. I haven't conquered that. See it at his blog at the first link above.]

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):

"In the weeks leading up to the resignation of Teresa A. Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, the leaders of the board that forced her out of office traded a number of e-mails with attached articles about the forces transforming higher education, telling one another that the articles illustrated "why we can't afford to wait."

In many of the e-mails, which were obtained by The Cavalier Daily [through a FOIA request], the rector and vice rector of the Board of Visitors—Helen E. Dragas and Mark J. Kington, respectively—commented on articles about online education and the open-course ventures in which top research universities like Harvard, Stanford, and others, are engaged.

The exchanges included one about Udacity, the free education platform that grew out of a Stanford University professor's course. In an e-mail on June 3, Jeffrey C. Walker, a member of the Board of Trustees for the foundation of the university's McIntire School of Commerce, urged Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington to check out a video of a talk by Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford computer-science professor who founded Udacity.

Mr. Walker said the Berklee College of Music was going to have its board, of which Mr. Walker is a member, watch the video 'as a signal that the on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind.'

In the e-mails, Ms. Dragas, Mr. Kington, and others appeared to believe that Ms. Sullivan was not doing enough to embrace change, or to press for it quickly enough at the University of Virginia.

On June 10, Mr. Kington sent Ms. Dragas an e-mail in which he forwarded a statement that Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business, made about Ms. Sullivan's departure. In Mr. Bruner's statement, which he sent to faculty, alumni, and other supporters of Darden, Mr. Bruner said that the "philosophical difference of opinion" between Ms. Sullivan and the board, cited as the reason for the president's resignation, had to do with 'the rate of change and progress in the face of long range challenges to the University.'"

ObamaCare has bad cost problems - Robert Samuelson

Robert Samuelson quietly lays down the facts. ObamaCare is a mess that is making health care costs worse. It increases uncertainty, which raises costs. He so respects authority that he calls it by Nancy Pelosi's name for it, ACA.

Cost control should have been Obama’s priority. He could have combined this with some of the ACA’s more modest and less controversial insurance expansions: providing additional federal coverage for poor children; keeping children on their parents’ policies until age 26; and establishing insurance exchanges in states to lower premiums for small businesses. But this restrained approach would have disappointed many liberals and denied Obama the presumed historical glory of achieving near-universal coverage.

Washington Post (Some points are clipped.)

(1) It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty. ... Given the ACA’s complexities, people can’t know where they’ll get insurance and what it will cost. In 2014, the ACA requires all employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide insurance or pay fines (“the employer mandate”). On the one hand, formal economic studies conclude that most employers now offering insurance will continue to do so; on the other, in direct surveys of firms, 30 percent or more say they might drop insurance and pay fines. Uncovered people must buy insurance (“the individual mandate”) or face penalties, though government will subsidize households with incomes up to four times the poverty level ($92,200 for a family of four in 2012). [another cost]

(2) The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring. This is basic economics. If you increase the price of labor, companies will buy less of it. Requiring employers to buy health insurance for some workers makes them more expensive, at least in the short run. Particularly vulnerable are low-skilled workers ...

(3) Uncontrolled health spending is the U.S. system’s main problem — and the ACA makes it worse. Spiraling health costs crowd out other government programs and squeeze wage increases by diverting compensation dollars into employer-paid insurance. Because insured people use more health services than the uninsured, the ACA (covering an estimated 30 million more) raises spending. As for the ACA’s cost-control provisions, even the government’s own actuaries don’t believe they will do much. By their latest projection, total health spending — government and private — rises from 17.9 percent of the economy (gross domestic product) in 2010 to 19.6 percent in 2021. In 1980, health care was 9 percent of GDP.

(4) Obama’s program also worsens the federal budget problem. Driven by Medicare and Medicaid, health care already exceeds one-fourth of the budget and is headed toward a third. It’s the crux of the problem. So Obama creates another huge health program. The administration’s retort: the program lowers the budget deficit. This is rhetorical hocus-pocus. Here’s what happens. From 2012 to 2022, the ACA raises federal spending by $1.762 trillion, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. However, all of this and a bit more is offset by tax increases and assumed cuts in Medicare. But these tax increases and cuts could have been used to shrink the huge budget deficits that pre-existed Obamacare. Now they can’t; moreover, the Medicare cuts might be repealed or reduced.

(5) The ACA discriminates against the young in favor of the old. Government policy already does this through payroll taxes that have young workers subsidizing Social Security and Medicare benefits. The ACA compounds the effect by forcing some young Americans to buy insurance at artificially high premiums that would pay for the care of a sicker, older population.

Fast and Furious gun program is now Obama's problem

Fast and Furious was Attorney General Eric holder's problem until today. He has repeatedly blockaded Congress from carrying out its Constitutional duty to oversee the executive branch. He has refused to provide documents subpoenaed by Congress. So a House committee today voted him to be in contempt of Congress. That term seems appropriate.

Holder was cornered. So Obama today joined him in the corner. Invoking executive privilege says the White House was involved.

Now the White House wants to get back to talking about creating jobs. Seattle Times

The White House reacted sharply to the committee action. "Instead of creating jobs or strengthening the middle-class, congressional Republicans are spending their time on a politically motivated, taxpayer-funded election-year fishing expedition," Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said.

I agree, Obama, let's talk about jobs - how you promised to keep unemployment below 8 per cent. Would you really join Holder in contempt of Congress to get the discussion off your record on THE big issue?

AP finally gets to the heart of the matter many paragraphs down. The AP reporter says the problem opened up after DOJ made false statements.

However, because Justice initially told the committee falsely the operation did not use a risky investigative technique known as gun-walking, the panel has turned its attention from the details of the operation and is now seeking documents that would show how the department headquarters responded to the committee's investigation.

In Fast and Furious, agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of gun-walking was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers, who had long eluded prosecution, and to dismantle their networks.

Grandkids!

Our four grandchildren arrived from Virginia late last night. Life is a lot more complicated - and interesting today! Daughter and husband came too, but sill!

"Grandpa, I am going to turn this clock into a frog." Oh. "There, see I changed it back to a clock!" - Bethany, age 3.

Darcy Burner is running - Let's rejoice

Darcy Burner, who was not a manager at Microsoft and did not get a college degree in economics, is running for Congress in the greatly changed First District. She excites the root-nuts and puzzles everyone else.

Washington Demo Big Chief Dwight Pelz tried to talk her out of running. Reasoning with Darcy Burner? Good luck.

Seattle Times describes her recent life as a DC insider:

… In late 2008, a group of progressive leaders, emboldened by President Obama's victory, decided it needed someone, for the first time, to act as a "bridge" between the then-83-member Congressional Progressive Caucus and the broader community of like-minded activists and think tanks.

Burner, fresh from a second loss to Rep. Dave Reichert, knew many of the progressive leaders, including Robert Borosage, who runs one of the think tanks. The board of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation — which Borosage chairs and included the founders of Moveon.org and the website Daily Kos — was impressed by Burner's energy, tech savvy and willingness to fundraise her own salary, Borosage said.

"She basically built it from nothing," said Borosage. "It had all the perils of a startup and entrepreneurial venture."

Burner, who as executive director renamed the group Progressivecongress.org, raised $390,535 and was paid $134,084 in 2010, the most recent year that the group's tax statements are available. Donors aren't on file, but Burner said big funders included George Soros' Open Society Institute; the Stewart R. Mott Foundation; and The Arca Foundation.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation and a board member, said Burner acted as a counterweight to conservatives such as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

The Progressive Caucus doesn't have its own staff, and tended to be "fragmented," vanden Heuvel said. Burner urged the Congress members to focus on just a few core issues. "Darcy has a good strategic mind about the fights that need to be focused on," vanden Heuvel said.

First up was progressives' demand for a public option in the health-care overhaul. Burner and her organization helped frame the argument for a public option with a memo recommending that supporters avoid phases such as "Canadian-style health care" or "universal health care" in favor of "An American solution," according to memos on the group's website.

In an interview on MSNBC, Burner described Sen. Joe Lieberman's opposition to a public option as "a national disaster." As congressional support for a public option faded, Burner advocated killing the bill entirely.

On the campaign trail now, Burner describes the Affordable Care Act as "imperfect" while claiming to help pass it. "It's a really good partial solution to the problem," she said in a recent interview.

Sharp rhetoric

In the Netroots Nation speech this month, Burner said winning in politics is more about using raw power than crafting the best policy statements. "If we want to win, we need to play the game that is really being played," she said.

That means exercising "moral power," such as having innocents be victims of police force at protests, and legal power, like lawsuits against corporations, she said. "Virtually every Fortune 500 corporation is discriminating economically against women," she said.

She used similarly barbed rhetoric at times at Progessivecongress.org. In fighting Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan's proposal to make fundamental changes to Medicare, Burner wrote on Twitter, "Real choice is between insurance companies and government. Insurance companies kill people when it's profitable."

Burner often also worked on behind-the-scenes messaging.

As Congress debated whether to end the Bush-era tax cuts in 2010, Burner's group circulated memos that suggested avoiding "tax cuts" and "tax breaks" because "these words immediately win the sympathy of most audiences." Instead, the memos suggested phrases such as "Republican Bonus for Billionaires" and "greed, greedy, excessive wealth."

Burner's campaign speeches pack the same punch. While her Democratic opponents stress the need to help the middle class, Burner agrees, but also denounces policies "rigged for bankers and oil barons," and emphasizes prosecuting Wall Street malfeasance.