The Penguin Bar

All that is changing now. Actually, it’s been changing for thirty years, but now it’s really crashing down hard. During the middle part of the twentieth century a literal new deal was struck in American society, in which for the first time the masses would get a moderate share of the pie and the fantastically wealthy would be reduced in economic stature to being merely hugely wealthy. But, after a while, the greediest amongst us decided they’d had enough of that tough bargain and, circa 1980 or so, the empire struck back. The American plutocracy hired Ronald Reagan and his party to undo the provisions of trade, labor, tax and welfare state laws that propped up the newly created middle class, and the ground underneath most Americans’ feet has been eroding ever since. It was actually much worse than what people thought all along, because much of the pain for the middle class was eased by sending wives to work earning a second income, and stealing from their children via budget deficits.

Now comes the triple whammy of the apocalypse, as the products from these policies come home to roost in a serious way. First, deregulating everything in sight so that the rapist class could have its unfettered way with all of us has produced the inevitable reckoning with reality now screening in your neighborhood as “The Great Recession”. Second, the unsustainable pattern of profligate borrowing has become – go figure – unsustainable, and we are now seeing the beginning of serious movements toward reeling back spending on popular government programs, just when they are needed most. And third, the structural changes that have been promulgated over the last three decades leave most Americans poorly positioned to even hope for a path to economic recovery. Roughly speaking then, the middle class have been tossed out of the plane, their primary parachute was defectively fabricated by a deregulated corporation trying to save money on production, and their emergency chute was stolen out of the pack and sold on the black market called Wall Street.

via The Regressive Antidote – Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way.

Excellent read – as usual from David Michael Green.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Christopher Hitchens

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

via Meet the Flintstones | The Texas Tribune.

Americans should be ashamed of these figures.

It led him and two friends to launch a Web site this week provocatively called PleaseRobMe.com, a mashup of users' content from Twitter, the San Francisco microblogging service, and FourSquare, a site in which users share their location.

While little more than a gag, PleaseRobMe raises serious questions about the potential ills associated with publicizing information online, particularly a user's whereabouts.

“We're not trying to get people robbed, but helping them not to get robbed,” said Groeneveld. “We're just presenting this information in a more obvious way. And that's our point: Everyone can see this on Twitter.”

PleaseRobMe reformats the information that users make public on FourSquare to read like an alert to a would-be burglar, stating that a user “left home and checked in 12 minutes ago,” followed by the user's update: “I'm at San Francisco International Airport.”

via PleaseRobMe.com posts when you’re not at home.

The folks at the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics offer a novel way to look at the nearly $3.5 billion spent to lobby Congress and federal agencies last year: About $1.3 million was spent on lobbying for every hour lawmakers met in 2009.

Lawmakers in both chambers spent a total of 2,668 hours in session last year, the center said, citing congressional records. That was a busier-than-usual schedule for Congress, which tackled an aggressive agenda that included health-care legislation, climate-change proposals and plans to impose new regulations on banks and Wall Street. None of those bills has become law yet.

via Washington lobbyists earn $1.3 million an hour – On Politics: Covering the US Congress, Governors, and the 2010 Election – USATODAY.com.

Late in January, the book publisher Macmillan told Amazon it wanted to raise the prices of its books sold through the online retailer. Amazon made clear it wanted to continue to set prices for Macmillan’s books, as it does for most books it sells.

To make sure the publisher understood it was serious, Amazon cut the links that enable people to buy Macmillan’s books via Amazon’s Web site. For more than a week, you could still see Macmillan books on Amazon; you just couldn’t order one.

Even though the two companies have since struck a truce, the showdown should deeply concern anyone who cares not merely about the health of this vital industry, but about concentration of political power in America.

What should concern us foremost is not that Amazon’s managers believe they — rather than the people who write and edit our books — have a right to set the price for books. It is that Amazon’s managers believe they have consolidated sufficient power — the company sells as much as 80 percent of all ebooks, for instance — to enforce their will by cutting off the public’s access to a publisher’s books.

via Corporate giants have too much power – CNN.com.

Well, to put it bluntly, there is no such thing as a mass-energy relation. What does exist is a mass-energy-momentum relation. The equation Einstein came up with more than a century ago can be considered a degenerate form of the mass-energy-momentum relation for vanishing momentum. Einstein was very well aware of this, and in later papers repetitively stressed that his mass-energy equation is strictly limited to observers co-moving with the object under study. However, very, very few people seem to have paid attention to Einstein's warnings, nor to any of the more recent warnings. Even worse, the vast majority of authors of popular science books take great liberty in applying E=mc2 to objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light, and then declare mass to increase with velocity in an attempt to recover consistency in what has become an incoherent mix of relativistic and Newtonian dynamics. Theoretical physicist Lev Okun refers to this practice as a “pedagogical virus”.

What I consider truly amazing, is how few people are aware of the mass-energy-momentum relation. In contrast to the widely popularized equation E=mc2, the mass-energy-momentum relation is a direct result of the fundamental principles of relativity theory, and provides true insight into the basics of relativity.

via What’s Wrong With E=MC^2?.

Wine in Roman society had a long and changeable history. At certain times prohibited to certain social groups, it was believed to be a health drink. It was also enjoyed in a variety of different ways.

The Romans and Alcohol

Wine was the Roman’s alcoholic drink of choice. Viticulture was established in long before the influence of the Greeks. The Romans had their own god of wine, Liber, a deity with very particular Roman characteristics which were incompatible with the Greek wine God Dionysus. This indicates that Liber developed separately and could not be directly associated with any Greek gods.

Beer was available but regarded as an inferior drink. Roman beer was made from rye and was extremely cheap, half the price of the worst kinds of wine. It was not a drink for the sophisticated although beer foam was used in the cosmetics of roman ladies.

via Wine Drinking in the Roman World: The History of Roman Wine.

I have a new blog reserved for my “SL persona”. That will be about SL, as well as having gay porn and what not. I’ll save this for current events and art-related stuff.

Have a look: Miro Collas on Blogger.

Alistair Darling's 50 per cent “super tax” on bankers' bonuses has done almost nothing to curb the City's culture of excess, with almost half its bankers receiving significant increases, a survey to be published today reveals.

The poll of 694 British bankers and finance professionals carried out by eFinancialCareers found that 57 per cent saw an increase in their bonuses this year compared with last year, with many payments more than doubling.

via City bonuses soar despite super tax – Business News, Business – The Independent.