Merge Left

Obama Shies Away From Union Protests, by Sam Stein.

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nurses union, called Obama “largely a bystander” in the debate over collective bargaining. “I think we’re feeling a sense of betrayal from him and not liking it much,” she said. [snip]

The request for Biden to travel to Wisconsin came from Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, according to two union officials familiar with the Feb. 24 meeting. The officials requested anonymity because the meeting was private.

Five days later, during the AFL-CIO winter meeting, McEntee told Obama senior adviser David Plouffe that unions wanted more than words, the officials said. McEntee told Plouffe they wanted a high-profile emissary to stand with protesters to show that the president was by their side.

What possible benefit is there to any of these people going to Wisconsin?  There are plenty of things the president can do on his own, without congressional involvement that could help unions. Aside from that, I have to agree with Bowers: “We need this so badly–a movement where people feel they are fighting for each other, not that one man is fighting for them.” (The administration has failed labor is numerous ways – I just find this one complaint to be misguided).

With “Use old embed code:”

New style with iframe:

Just pasting in the raw URL:

In anticipation of the upcoming auto-scheduler (and auto-promoter), I’ve changed it so only posts marked Front Page will appear on the front page. Others will still appear in their respective categories. Posts now have the [New] functionality and each category tells you how many new posts are in them (up to 5). The posts shown on the sidebar do not include anything on the front page, so they are easier to find.

Once the auto-scheduler is working, each post to the front page will be scheduled, typically for one each second hour (unless we get more content, then one an hour), during regular hours. To fill in the blanks, each hour a post that is not on the front page will be promoted (or every other hour if we don’t have enough content). At the moment it uses comment count as the primary method of determining worthiness. It seems the php level on this site is lower than what I have at home, so what runs there is an error here, but I should be able to get this running by tomorrow night, I think.

I’ve ‘promoted’ all recent posts to the front page, so it looks the same. Feel free to post quickhits, etc to the front page for now, to keep what we currently use working. (Or if it really is a QH you don’t want on the front page, feel free to not. People should be able to find it now.)

(REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

If you’ve not seen, Boing Boing has collected a number of stories on the recent Japanese quake that link to news sources with excellent pictures and videos, including this one from Reuters. Which gives new meaning to the kid’s game of cops and robbers (Hands up!). And don’t forget New Zealand, Chile, and Haiti have also suffered devastating quakes in the past year.

More on the inside. Read the rest of this entry »

OK. Over in my other life I have been working through the implications of some recent data pertaining to fuel metabolism in cancer cells. Naturally enough, this means that I have been reading as much of the informational deluge that the electronic libraries, journals, databases and search engines conspire daily to wash over my strained synapses. As usual, I disagree with about 60% of the stuff most folks seem to take for granite (granted? There’s a whole series of inside jokes in this vein. I used the improper word properly). Its not the facts we disagree about, i.e. the results of our studies, it’s the interpretation of those and the picture one paints of how the living things we study “work”. (Quotes because the meaning of that word is subject to interpretation itself).  Anyway, long story short, I’m starting to see malignant cancer cells (and the organized form of tumors) as defective (by mutation, apparently) in terms of the Homeostatic Imperative.

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Ah, this makes driving through Riverside worthwhile all of a sudden...

Edward Abbey:

I write to make a difference. “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better,” said Samuel Johnson. Distrusting all answers, to raise more questions. To give pleasure and promote esthetic bliss. To honor life and praise the divine beauty of the world. For the joy and exultation of writing itself. To tell my story.

“Well now,” says the old wolf, vox clamantis in deserto, “that should keep him busy for a while.”

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying In The Wilderness(Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Everyone should have one of these things.

And so I put the question to you, fellow bloggers. I myself have enough good quality pics to put one up each day for a couple years or so, even if I don’t shoot another picture. I’m sure others have items they might like to put up as well. Yves Smith, over at Naked Capitalism, puts up an “antidote du jour,” which she says generates some traffic*, even though she mostly gets stuff from Flickr or whatever.

Is this something you all would like to do as well? Can we add value to the site with esthetic or cultural items as well? Am I out of my freakin’ mind?

Do tell.

*–Yeah, and after reading her site for an hour or so, the cute animal pictures are kind of handy. A moment of sanity in a world wrecked by CDOs and such.

Before we kill the Humor page (see last comments) before anyone has posted there, it might be fun to do a round up humor online, especially political humor. Let’s warm up with Charlie Sheen’s rant:

But here’s perhaps funnier material:

From Ben Sargent at Slate’s Cartoon Box.

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An exhibition of art works created by collaboration of artists and researchers in the the life sciences

Visceral: The Living Art Experiment at Trinity College in Dublin. Its closed now, but the videos live on.

I especially liked Let a Thousand Proteins Bloom by Abhishek Hazra, in which he attempts to purify ammonium nitrate explosives from breast milk.

While folks like Eduardo Kac have been creating bioart for years (One of my favorites is Genesis), Visceral is unique because each piece is the result of a collaboration between working scientists and artists.