You can read about what it really is here- laughingsquid
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The Jejune Institute
If you are in San Francisco, this was a lot of fun. Silly, perhaps but, definitely fun.
Dear US State Dept,
This is important. The inauguration of our new president was almost 2 weeks ago. Bush is home in Texas. Get with the program.
January 31, 2009
EDITORIAL
Time Lag in Vienna?
Programs that give drug addicts access to clean needles have been shown the world over to slow the spread of deadly diseases including H.I.V./AIDS and hepatitis. Public health experts were relieved when President Obama announced his support for ending a ban on federal funding for such programs.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s message seems not to have reached the American delegation to a United Nations drug policy summit in Vienna, where progress is stalled on a plan that would guide global drug control and AIDS prevention efforts for years to come. The delegation has angered allies, especially the European Union, by blocking efforts to incorporate references to the concept of “harm reduction” — of which needle exchange is a prime example — into the plan.
State Department officials said that they were resisting the harm-reduction language because it could also be interpreted as endorsing legalized drugs or providing addicts with a place to inject drugs. But the Vienna plan does not require any country to adopt policies it finds inappropriate. And by resisting the harm-reduction language, the American delegation is alienating allies and sending precisely the wrong message to developing nations, which must do a lot more to control AIDS and other addiction-related diseases.
Some members of Congress are rightly angry about the impasse in Vienna. On Wednesday, three members fired off a letter to Susan Rice, the new American ambassador to the United Nations, urging that the United States’ delegation in Vienna be given new marching orders on the harm-reduction language. If that doesn’t happen, the letter warns, “we risk crafting a U.N. declaration that is at odds with our own national policies and interests, even as we needlessly alienate our nation’s allies in Europe.”
Google dysfunction
4Scratch that. Gmail is still unreliable.
Many of the major news outlets are running a story about this. Were the site warnings the only issue? For a few hours this morning, my gmail was unreliable, google maps was incredibly slow, and google talk kept disconnecting in ichat.
Google users get bogus warning on site searches
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period Saturday were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.
ACTION ALERTCall the White House and Your Senators
Support HIV, STD Prevention funding:
Ensure $400 million funding remains in Economic Recovery Bill
Why: The Senate will begin debate next week on the Economic Recovery bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives this week. The Senate bill includes $400 million in funding for HIV and STD screening and prevention. (The House version is $335 million and includes TB and Viral Hepatitis as well. We will call for inclusion of those diseases in conference). We must make certain the full funding remains in the bill.
Friday, January 30, 2009
front page worthy?
Even if only the front page story online, really? The Fairway elevator? No wonder the nonsense "main street" rhetoric got so much traction. News: NO ONE outside of Manhattan cares. Quite possibly, no one north of 96th Street cares.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
This is why I hate (almost) everyone.
maybe if our prisons were not bursting at the seems with non-violent offenders and we made some minimal effort to reduce recidivism, providing basic medical care and humane conditions would not seem so extravagant.
California Asks Removal of Prison Overseer
By MALIA WOLLAN
Published: January 28, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state attorney general, Jerry Brown, filed a motion on Wednesday in Federal District Court here to remove the receiver charged with overhauling California’s decrepit prison health care system.
drug czar
boooooo. come on, get it together.
Obama Appoints Temporary Drug Czar
Posted in Chronicle Blog by Scott Morgan on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 10:17pm 4 stopthedrugwar.org
it is just heroin.
Heroin overdose is a tragedy. The death of children is a tragedy.
Maybe if the media and the missing-chromosome Dallas police started calling "cheese," by its real name, heroin, then we could start addressing youth drug use instead of just sensationalizing it.
2 deaths renew 'cheese' alarm in Dallas schools 4the dallas morning news
google gears gmail
gmail now works offline with google gears. 1) if I did not already have all of my gmail downloaded into mail.app, I would be thrilled about this. 2) I am hoping this means that we can expect offline google calendar in the near future.New in Labs: Offline Gmail
Now, if only they could rescue gmail contacts from its current state of super-suck.
4Forget it. You cannot attach files to emails composed while offline.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The first amendment and the bath water.
JANUARY 27, 2009, 04:19 PM EST
Should Cameras Be Required to Click? wsj.com
Should Cameras Be Required to Click? wsj.com
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
new dork configuration I am trying...
everything in gmail....calendar and remember the milk on one side, labels on the other. (do not know about you but, all of my labels are automatically applied with filters.)
I finally saw Milk.
Amazing. Painful but, amazing. Sean Penn deserves about 10 oscars and Randy Shilts deserves a place in the credits.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday night outreach
16th and Mission is usually buzzing. Not last night. Outreach was still the highlight of my week, of course but, we seemed to have FAR fewer exchangers than we normally do. Why so quiet, 16th street?
Friday, January 23, 2009
barf and vomit.
JANUARY 22, 2009, 9:22 A.M. ET
Playing House in the White House
By JENNA and BARBARA BUSH
Sasha and Malia, we were seven when our beloved grandfather was sworn in as the 41st President of the United States. We stood proudly on the platform, our tiny hands icicles, as we lived history. We listened intently to the words spoken on Inauguration Day service, duty, honor. But being seven, we didn't quite understand the gravity of the position our Grandfather was committing to. We watched as the bands marched by -- the red, white, and blue streamers welcoming us to a new role: the family members of a President.
See the rest in yesterday's wall street journal
Obama's crackberry
First of all, in case you had not noticed, dork or not, our president is smoking hot. He is getting to keep his blackberry, his fight for which suggests dork over not. Gizmodo article and one describing the Sectera Edge, the approved device Obama has been resisting. 4nytimes story here
Lobbyist Exception
Is this really necessary? Is there no one else on the short list for deputy secretary of defense that has not worked as a lobbyist? As it is, the money involved in defense spending makes momentous decisions deteriorate into debates over which state will get to build the helicopters. Come on, you are off to a great start.
4Senate OKs several Obama nominees, waits on others AP story
4Nominee’s Vote Postponed Over Concerns on Lobbying nytimes story
dogpile
can I break my google addiction? I am trying dogpile.com. It includes google results with those from other search engines and donates a portion of profits to the humane society. Each result lists which search engines produced it; maybe that will help...I put a search box on the bottom of this page as well. http://rescue.dogpile.com/search%5Fdb/?s_cid=OM4545
4looking unlikely.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
whitehouse.gov civil rights
This is worth checking out- http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/civil_rights/
Most of the objectives inspire great optimism.
4Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.3
The section about the expansion of hate crime statutes brought me to wonder, what about rape? How many cases of stranger rape, especially those that occur outside of prison, do not target an individual particularly because of her/his sex?
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
good reminder
http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/090115.html
"TAX CUTS
I just have to keep saying it. This is really dumb. I guess we have to do some of it, for political reasons, but that famous line – who can spend your money better, you or the government? – is not nearly as wise as it sounds.
You will spend your money to pay down credit card balances (as you should, but that hardly creates jobs) or to shore up retirement savings (as you should, but that hardly creates jobs) or to buy clothes (that creates jobs in Shanghai) or to buy a flat screen TV (that creates jobs in Seoul), or to take the kids skiing or to take your honey to dinner twice a month instead of once a month – which is good for the chef, waiters, and busboys, but here is the thing we have to ask ourselves:
Is now really the time to keep borrowing (for this tax cut will be financed entirely with borrowed money) to keep more busboys and waiters employed? Or is now the time to be borrowing to become energy independent, build a smart energy grid, digitize our medical records, dredge our waterways, repair our bridges, and educate our children?
Is now the time to be borrowing to give people with jobs a break (much as we’d like to), or is it the time to be borrowing to extend unemployment benefits – and, by spending on infrastructure, create new jobs?
Should we borrow to give people the money to go out to dinner and keep restaurants open? Or should we borrow to funnel money to the states to keep them from having to lay off teachers and cops and shut down after-school programs?
Which would be worse? Becoming a nation with fewer auto dealerships and fewer retail stores – perhaps even fewer real estate agents and fewer restaurants – or remaining a nation whose infrastructure continues to deteriorate and whose kids fall further and further behind the global competition?"
WORLD BRIEFING | MIDDLE EAST (today's nytimes)
Iran: 2 Prisoners Are AIDS Doctors
By NAZILA FATHI
Published: January 20, 2009
Four Iranians imprisoned on charges of trying to overthrow the government with the backing of the C.I.A. include two prominent AIDS doctors, an Iranian intelligence official said Monday. The government reported their convictions on Saturday but had not identified the men, nor reported when they had been arrested or tried. But the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted the unidentified official as saying that two of the prisoners were “doctors named Arash and Kamiar Alaei.” The two men, brothers, founded Iran’s first H.I.V. prevention program and have been jailed since June. NAZILA FATHI
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Inauguration streaming
I ended up missing most of Joe Biden's oath because the ustream coverage was so disrupted. Of course, when I tried switching to CNN/ facebook or CBS, I was supposed to wait for their ads to run before I could see the live feed. In the middle of the inauguration? boooooo. I gave up and went with kqed audio. I would love to know if anyone had better luck.
6:32
6:32
*Inauguration video draws record crowds online*
"Not all Web sites were able to keep up with the flood of traffic: CNN.com had to place some viewers on a "wait list" for a while before they could view the live stream. The Associated Press had issues as well — from a bit after noon until shortly before 1 p.m., new viewers could not access its video streams on various Web sites. Akamai streams video for both companies.
The huge number of video viewers appears to have slowed the Internet as a whole. Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Web site performance, said the Internet's top 40 sites slowed by as much as 60 percent when the ceremony started at 11 a.m., and many news sites saw even sharper declines in performance. NPR.org was almost completely unavailable around noon."
Inauguration, schnoguration, THIS is not to be missed
Masterpieces of the Prado Museum in Google Earth
check it out in Google Maps or search for "the Prado Spain" in Google Earth
Woot! Today's THE day!
Monday, January 19, 2009
Fine, maybe I drank the kool-aid.
Our president (as of tomorrow) not only encouraged a day of service, but also chose an activity that drew attention to youth homelessness, an enormous problem that most politicians pretend does not exist. I cannot help it. I am excited!
Obama Celebrates Holiday With Service today's nytimes
Obama Celebrates Holiday With Service today's nytimes
Sunday, January 18, 2009
New Rules for Air Travel:
It is not ok for each of your 47 kids to have 3 carry-on bags. It is even less ok for most of these bags to contain prohibited objects that must be removed and discussed at length.
If you want fellow travelers to respect the legitimacy of your service animals, you might want to go ahead and train them. Barking, lunging, crazy-ass dogs: not so compelling.
