From Pine View Farm

Karen’s comment to this post tells me that it is time for this announcement.

Some time soon, in no less than two weeks and no more than four, From Pine View Farm World Headquarters will be relocating from Delaware to Virginia Beach, Virginia. During the transition, the site will be off-line, I hope for no more than two days.

More information will be forthcoming as I figure out what it is.

(more…)

Stewart does Beck.

Via Whad’Ya Know.

The fridge is not cooling properly. It’s stuck in defrost mode.

The tech says it needs a new motherboard.

Sometimes, plain old relay logic beats hell out of computers.

The Bushonomics Hangover continues. Bloomberg:

Payrolls fell by 190,000 workers last month, compared with a 175,000 drop anticipated by the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The jobless rate gained from 9.8 percent in September and exceeded 10 percent for the first time since 1983.

One more time, this resulted from Republican policy. It was not an accident.

It was the logical result of persisting in error.

The last couple of evenings, in search of silliness, we have watched a few reruns of AFV on the ABC Family Channel. Stupid pet tricks always amuse.

In those less than three hours, we have seen approximately three million, two hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred forty-two point three six promos for this.

I have never seen it, will never see it, and can honestly say I have never disliked a movie more.

(more…)

. . . will re-form the status quo into something worse than it already it is:

And it is already pretty bad:

Americans are more likely than people in 10 other countries to have trouble getting medical treatment because of insurance restrictions or cost, an international survey of primary care doctors released on Wednesday found.

While the United States spends more than twice as much as other developed countries on healthcare, it lags well behind in key measures of quality, the annual survey found.

Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary analysis finds: It won’t cost as much as some other proposals and it pretty much accomplishes nothing.

The proposal would reduce the rolls of the uninsured by about 3 million in 2019, leaving about 52 million people without medical coverage, the CBO said. Also, the CBO said that premiums for some people, mostly the less healthy, would go up, feeding into Democratic criticisms that the Republican plan would allow insurers to “cherry pick” and enroll healthier, less costly people.

It will reform the status quo into the status quo antiquated.

But that’s what can be expected from those who think of the 1950s as some kind of golden age.

The irrational hate on the right.

RIchard Blair explains.

General Paul Eaton, USA, Ret., quoted in the Guardian:

The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for seven years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1) Deny it. 2) Ignore it. 3) Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11. The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy ‘experts’ have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy.

Still over half a mil:

The Labor Department also reported that initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped to 512,000 in the week ended October 31, the lowest level since early January. Markets had expected a decline to only 523,000, from the 530,000 reported in the prior week.

The story also reports that productivity is up, but that the pace probably cannot be sustained by the existing workforce, so that hiring may increase. In other news, it doesn’t look like a lot of the hiring will be for Christmas help.

More than half of U.S. retail chains posted October sales that fell short of Wall Street’s heightened expectations, raising doubts about a widespread recovery for the holiday season.

Maybe the two writers should talk to each other.

Via the NetSec Podcast.

Carlymasterplan:

1. Try to destroy Hewlett-Packard.

2. If that fails, on to California to destroy Arnold’s leavings.

I’ve dined there several times.

Without the car repairs.

Two people were transported to Christiana Hospital after a car crashed into a Wilmington restaurant Wednesday night.

The accident occurred shortly after 9 p.m. at Gallucio’s Restaurant and Pub, . . . .

It’s a pretty cramped parking lot; not much room to get up a good head of steam.

James Reston, from the Quotemaster:

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.

For analysis, see the Booman or Balloon Juice.

One thought:

Turnout was very low.

Voting is a duty, not a right. If enough persons fail their duty, bad things happen.

Creative justice in Bedford, Pa.:

In exchange for no jail time, a woman and her adult daughter have agreed to stand outside a Pennsylvania courthouse holding signs saying they stole a gift card from a 9-year-old girl on her birthday.

Follow the link for the pictures.

Brendan writes a column.

There is a related story here.

Susan Antilla writes at Bloomberg:

In fact, those Bloomberg customers said any limits on pay will boomerang. Asked “Do you think limits on executive compensation in the financial industry will do more to control excessive risk-taking or more to discourage useful innovation?” 65 percent of the ones working in the U.S. said limits on pay would choke innovation.

Knowing what we do about innovation in finance, we wouldn’t want that to happen.

Are there actually credible people worried that capitalism will be brought to its knees if restrictions on pay, and related reforms in regulation, are imposed on Wall Street?

“Financial innovation” is Wall Street shorthand for “new ways to pull off the wallet drop.”

This is kind of scary.

That (description of moving a 1,000 pound woman to an ambulance–ed.) was an extreme example of something city ambulance crews here and around the country are seeing more of: super-heavy patients.

To help accommodate them – and to cut down on the rash of back injuries suffered by paramedics and firefighters trying to lift them – agencies have invested in costly equipment and modified some of their practices.

Portsmouth (Va,) in recent years has replaced its standard gurneys with battery-driven hydraulic “power stretchers,” said Capt. Paul Hoyle, Emergency Medical Services manager. They’re rated to safely hold 700 pounds and lift at the touch of a button, at nearly the cost of a small car: $8,000 apiece.

Virginia Beach rescue squads added electric lifts to fewer than a dozen of their stretchers, said Bruce Nedelka, EMS division chief.

Medical Transport, a private ambulance service, has added eight oversized stretchers to its statewide fleet, four of them in South Hampton Roads, said Elizabeth Beatty, district field supervisor. Her company also operates an oversized ambulance, based in Virginia Beach, that gets requests from across Virginia.

I’m sort of torn here. When I watch the antics of those who want to turn being 10 pounds overweight into a pre-existing condition for health insurance premiums, I scream, “Blaming the victim!”

Nevertheless, 700 pounds plus is slightly more than 10 pounds overweight. Although there can be physiological or genetic causes, they do not seem to explain the explosion of obesity, but in numbers and amount.

All it takes to see that is a walk down the street.

Frankly, I think it has more to do with making Cheetos, Big Macs, and Super-Sizing part of the American Way of Life than with anyone’s personal culpability.

Full Disclosure: I hate Big Macs. I like Cheetos. In fact, I like anything that tastes like cheese, no matter how artificial and no matter how orange it leaves my fingers. I like real cheese even better.

Details, as well as outtakes, at Scientific Blogging.

Read about it here.

Possible price fixing by Wall Street banksters. Oh, noes.

Only after the Internal Revenue Service investigated five years later did local officials learn that Rubin’s firm, CDR Financial Products Inc., had entered into a secret side agreement with the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank. CDR’s share would be worth as much as $340,000, based on city and federal records.

“IRS believes that CDR, Bank of America and possibly others may have colluded to fix pricing,” an unidentified Atlanta employee wrote in an undated internal memorandum after city authorities met with IRS investigators in September 2005.

Who woulda thunk?

That about providing good value for the money?

Nah. Too simple.

From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, retailers and food chains plan to use social media this holiday season to get their brands in front of consumers and possibly win a bigger piece of their limited shopping budgets.

I’m taking the day off.

When I haven’t been eating and sleeping, I’ve been napping.

The regularly scheduled invective returns tomorrow.

Via Dragonbytes.

A windfall tax on the banksters’ obscene bonus “pay for attendance” culture:

Government must take on a new strategic authority to build the economy of the future. Its first step must be to end the power of the banking oligarchy and reassure the public that its capture of the political elite is over. The Compass campaign for a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses is an essential first step in reasserting democracy and bringing the business elite to account. A windfall tax would mark the start of the longer term transformation of the banking sector which will be necessary to meet the challenges of future economic development.

No, not the guy behind you on the Turnpike.

The real thing.

Rumored to inhabit remote regions of the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Devil is said to resemble a gruesome cross between a bat, a horse, and a kangaroo. Possibly the best description comes from Bruce Springsteen’s epic song “A Night with the Jersey Devil”: “Ram’s head, forked tail, clove hoof, love’s my trail.” Local folklore traces the devil’s origins to a woman known only as Mrs. Leeds, who cursed her unwanted 13th child on a fateful night in 1735 near Burlington.

Follow the link and read all about it.

I’ve been to the Pine Barrens. They are indeed kind of spooky. And within them is a huge tract of miniature pine forest, fully grown and formed and three feet tall.

That’s even spookier.

More here.

(Click for a larger image.)

Addendum:

I was on the road all day and behind in my reading.

This post and its comments fit with the cartoon above.

Faith is not about jots and tittles in books, nor about men’s and women’s judging and condemning other men and women, though many seem to build their faith on the condemning of others.

It is not about living narrowly, emptily seeking justification in contrasting one’s own virtue with the unspeakable failure of the [insert condemned group here].

It is about oneself, not about others.

It is about living charitably and justly.

To the extent that one’s faith is contingent on the disparagement of others, one has not faith.

Andy Lubershane (click for larger image):

It’s probably a good idea not to try to sell it in a public forum:

An 18-year-old Maryland teen was arrested this week for allegedly stealing a University of Delaware student’s car and listing it for sale on Craigslist.

Craig Cunha, of the first block of Peach Road in Elkton, was charged Tuesday with one count of felony theft and conspiracy, said Newark police spokesman Lt. Brian Henry.

Then, again, maybe he thought it was his own list.

As I write this, I wonder about the “conspiracy” charge. Can one be charged with conspiring with oneself?