In the past few years, earthmoving has gotten our attention several times:

• Dec 26, 2004 9.3 Sumatra (Indonesia)
• Feb 27, 2010 8.8 Off the Coast of Chile
• Mar 28, 2005 8.6 Northern Sumatra (Indonesia)
• Sep 12, 2007 8.5 Southern Sumatra (Indonesia)
• Jan 12, 2010 7.0 Haiti

I'll bet you weren't even aware of the last 2 Indonesian temblors

Reality check: in terms of magnitude,
• the recent Chile 'quake didn't make the Top 5
• the Haiti earthquake didn't make the Top 20

"So," says my imaginary friend, "I'll bet you're going to tell us about the really big earthquakes."

Said I, "Mañana, siempre mañana."

Then he said "the first clue was the "Part I in the title."

Skinput turns your hand into a touchscreen and your fingers into a keypad. Creative thinkers over at Microsoft Research have created Skinput, a Bluetooth-enabled device that allows you to use your own skin as a peripheral input device for devices like cell phones, MP3 players or gaming consoles.

Skinput uses an armband, which contains a small projector that beams the phone/player/console interface onto your arm ... or in the case of a certain Presidential wanna-be, onto the hand¹. At that point, your arm – or hand – becomes a touchscreen. Tap your skin to click on the virtual buttons being displayed. If you’ve just dialed a phone number, it sends the info to your phone and dials the call. Or you could scroll through your ArmPhone's selection of apps.

Now instead of just walking around appearing to talk to yourself, you can add tapping various parts of your body to the mix. The good news is that involuntary commitments are limited to 72 hours.

Besides, it sure beats getting caught with Sharpie-written crib notes on your hand.²

Read more about SkinPut

^1,2 The joke here is that politician Sarah Palin, who is two scoops shy of being a triple-dip sundae, tries very hard to convince people that she really is smart. Recently on a TV talk show she was trying very, very hard to impress — but got caught with crib notes scrawled on her hand. Once again she proves that she is not ready for prime time – not for prime-time TV, and most certainly not ready for the 4 years of prime-time as leader of the world's most important and powerful country.

1. Lincoln and JFK started in politics 100 years apart.
2. Lincoln and JFK were elected POTUS 100 yrs apart.
3. Lincoln and JFK had vice presidents named Johnson.
4. Lincoln and JFK have 7 letters in their last name.
5. It gets better:
   • Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy
   • Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.
6. Here's the BIG ONE:
   • Lincoln, a week before his death, was in Monroe, Maryland.
   • Kennedy, a week before his death, was in Marilyn ....

Karl Rove was George W. Bush's closest aide throughout Bush's political career. There is a book about him entitled Bush's Brain. The book makes the case that anything that resembled a thought that Geo W. had was actually a thought grabbed from Rove's thought bubble and glued into Bush's thought bubble.

Rove has written a book that highlights (some would say lowlights is more appropriate) Rove's life and career and his time working for Bush. After a career of lying for Bush, Rove's book piles on more lies — in an attempt to shore up the previous lies.

Some examples:

• Lie: Rove admits that the U.S. wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq if the administration knew that weapons of mass destruction wouldn't be found.
  
  Truth: the U.S. wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq if Congress and the American public knew that weapons of mass destruction didn't exist.



• Lie:The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations."
  
  Truth: If Bush actually cared about "human rights violations," Iraq would not have been the first country to invade. Most certainly China and Myanmar (Burma) would have been higher on the list, as would several other countries. If Bush actually cared about "human rights violations," he would have invaded Guantanamo and taken prisoner our own CIA and Marines.
  


• Partly truth, mostly fiction: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Rove argued, may have destroyed most of his WMD stockpiles or possibly moved them to other countries such as Syria before the war.

Partial Truth: Saddam destroyed (under the auspices of UN inspectors) his WMDs. He did so prior to Bush stealing the 2000 election. Bush (meaning Rove) sent 3 different teams of inspectors to look for WMDs. Saddam allowed the inspectors to comb over Iraq. They found nothing that conflicted with the reports from 6 previous years of inspections. When a team didn't give Bush (meaning Rove) the answers he wanted, he fired them and sent in a new team.


• Mostly fiction: (the claim that) Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein moved his WMDs to other countries such as Syria before the war.
  
  Truth: One word: Mossad (Israel's spy agency). If Saddam had WMDs, Mossad knew everything there was to know about them - including where he would have moved them. Besides, Syria would not have allowed it; two words: (1)Israel, (2)USA. Syria knew the price they would pay if they accepted Saddam's alleged WMDs. In case anyone missed it:
  
  
  
  • Israel will not allow an Arab nation (including Syria) to have WMDs.
  
  
  • Israel has kicked the asses of every Arab nation (including Syria).
  
  
  • Syria has been trying for decades to negotiate with Israel to regain the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967.
  
  
  • Israel already destroyed Saddam's only nuclear threat.
  
  
  • The USA did not look kindly upon Afghanistan's harboring of Al Qaeda. You might say that we invaded the country in response to that cooperation with terrorists. You might also say that it won't happen again.
    
  
  
  • No Arab country trusted Saddam or wanted to have anything to do with Saddam - he was a secularist and a loose cannon.
  
  
  • Why is it that nearly everyone who opposed the war had facts proving that there were no WMDs? Why is it that inspection teams — impartial, like the UN inspectors, and partisan, like Bush's (Rove's) hand-picked "inspectors" never found anything? Why is it that people who wanted to go to war believed the Liar-In-Chief (Rove) in spite of all facts to disprove the WMD claims and no facts to prove the claims?


• Lie: "Our weak response in defense of the president and in setting the record straight (about WMDs), is, I believe, one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years."
  

Truth: The biggest mistakes were


• Lying to start a war.
  
  
• Lying about the real reasons for the war.
  
  
• Torturing captives.
  
  
• Lying abut torturing captives.
  
  
• Hiring officials based on party loyalty rather than on actual qualifications: "Heckuva job, Brownie."
  
  
• Running the country for the benefit of Republicans, rather than for the benefit of the American people. Someone turned loose the Crawford Hillbillies, and they stole everything that wasn't nailed down - and carried big pry bars to get the rest. Two words: "Jack Abramoff"
  


• Lie: He defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet.
  
  He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques. Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. "Nonetheless, when political winds shifted and memories of 9/11 faded, some Democratic leaders claimed that they had never been told about the techniques and that the Bush administration used EITs only in secret."
  
  Truth: OK, this is a he-said-she-said situation. Note two salient facts:
  
  
  
  1. Democrats invited to the "briefings" were not allowed to take notes or otherwise record the proceedings, so there is no proof of what really happened
  2. Which side has the track record for lying about everything connected to this war & its collateral damage?
  
  He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.
  
  The CIA (at the direction of Cheney-Rove-Bush) responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.
  


• Lie: Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."
  
  Truth: Bush (meaning Rove)ordering the a partisan-packed Justice Department to create legal opinions that would justify torture. He did not ask an impartial or bipartisan commission to look into the legality of torture.


• Lie:"What's more, EITs did help our intelligence agents gather critical information to thwart future attacks," he added.
  
  Truth: the Bushies (Rovies) have never proven a case in which torture actually generated actual, real, usable intelligence. Nor have they proven which "future attacks" were thwarted. Note that evidence proving torture (that the Rovies say didn't existed) got misplaced or accidentally destroyed. On the other hand, now that it is safe to come forward with information (not that Rove is out of power), many interrogators have done just that: they have provided examples of torture, examples of bad information gained from tortured prisoners, and examples of good information gained when torture was not used.
  


• [Note: Rove (Bush) and his administration have been criticized for their response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated much of the Gulf Coast in 2005. One incident Rove addresses in the book involves Bush flying over Louisiana in Air Force One rather than landing and surveying the damage.] Rove notes that while the decision did not help out Bush politically, it was the right thing to do so as not to take away vital resources that were needed for the relief effort.]
  
  Lie: Someone cared cared whether or not Bush's (Rove's) airplane landed in Naw-lins.
  
  Truth: The real issue is not if Bush looked at the destruction. The real issue was that the Rove Administration took 3 days to acknowledge that something was wrong and to start taking action. Another real issue is that political hacks were in charge of a gutted, underfunded operation (FEMA). Another issue is that Rove (Bush) predictably focused on a little bit of looting rather than a massive amount of destruction and misery. Also predictable was that Bush (Rove) sent in armed mercenaries (Blackwater) to deal with the small problem (looting), and bungled the big picture (everything else - food, water, shelter, sanitation, missing persons).
  


• Lie: Rove cites a particularly touchy subject that emerged during the 2000 presidential campaign: Bush's 1976 arrest for driving while under the influence of alcohol. Rove said that while Bush told a few people about it, including himself, the governor didn't want it to be made public. The DUI disclosure, which came out shortly before Election Day, was "suspicious," Rove says.
  
  He points a finger at Vice President Al Gore's campaign spokesman, Chris Lehane, as a possible source of the information getting out. "We had our suspicions and they centered on Lehane," Rove writes. "He had been raised in Kennebunk, was one of the Democratic Party's best opposition researchers, had run the Maine campaign for Clinton-Gore, worked on the White House rapid-response team handling scandals during the Clinton years, played around in Maine Democratic politics.
  
  
• Truth: Rove tries to distract attention from the actual issue: what was GW's driving record in Maine AND in Texas?
  
  'Splain me this:
  - Why, in his first week in office as Governor of Texas, did the Texas agency that managed drivers' licenses issue Bush a new license (one with no driving record attached)?
  - Why does the source of the "leak" matter?
  - Is the information true, or isn't it? That's what matters.
  


• Lie: Dick Cheney, a Defense Secretary under President George H.W. Bush and former Wyoming congressman, was tasked to help then-candidate Bush picking a running mate. But it would be Cheney's name that would resonate with Bush at the time. Rove says the governor was "starting to feel that Cheney was as good as any" [ ?!?! ] to fill the role. "I saw the man squirm as Bush pressed him to accept."
  
  Truth: Bush asked Cheney to find a good running mate for the 2000 election. Cheney picked himself. [duh!]
  


• Lie (OK, insignificantly possibly true):Rove writes that he faced a possible indictment [true] over leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the media -- an accusation he denies in the book. Upon finding out that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was not likely to charge him, he says he "placed the receiver in its cradle and wept."
  
  Truth: Who cares if Rove wept when he found out he wouldn't be going to jail? The fact is that Cheney and Skippy (or Scooter or something like that) Libby had to discredit Joe Wilson. reason: Cheney asked the CIA to prove that Saddam Hussien tried to purchase nuclear materials. The CIA sent Joe Wilson — former Ambassador to Iraq — to investigate the claim. Wilson returned and reported to the CIA that the claim was false ... not that there was no proof to support the claim, but that the claim was false. The CIA forwarded the non-classified information to Cheney. The Bush (Rove) administration ignored the report and continued to use the debunked claim to prove that Saddam was trying to make nuclear weapons. So Joe Wilson went public. In the New York Times he described the entire situation to the public, attempting to derail the use of false information. Cheney's response was to get some conservative "reporters" to identify Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA agent (which she was). She was a covert agent working, ironically, nuclear non-proliferation. If Bush's father, former CIA Director and form Commander-in-Chief is to be believed, the actions by Rove, Skippy, and their right-wing writers constitute TREASON. After months of pressure, Bush (Rove) relented and appointed a REPUBLICAN to be a Special Prosecutor to investigate the situation. The REPUBLICAN operative turned out to have more integrity than Bush-Rove-Cheney imagined. Granted, to those 3, integrity is a foreign concept, but still .... As the prosecutor closed in on Dick and Scooter, Scooter went into high gear to obstruct the investigation. Eventually Scooter-Skippy was convicted on 5 felonies involving obstruction of justice. The prosecutor gave up on investigating the Bush-Rove-Cheney triumvirate. And Bush commuted Libby's sentences in the conviction (on 5 felonies involving TREASON).
  

There's something truly ironic in Bush's nickname for his pal. Bush called Rove Turdblossom. A turdblossom is a flower that grows up, wild and uncultivated, from a seed embedded in a bovine, um .... turd. Turdblossoms are always found next to Post Turtles.

When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, you are looking at a post turtle. You know that

• he didn't get there by himself


• he doesn't belong there


• he can't get anything done while he's up there
  

and you just want to help the poor thing get down before he hurts himself.

"Post Turtle" image and text first posted at our ancestor site Entropy Pile on August 17, 2006

The internet is abuzz with the meaning origins of the expression hurt locker.

The short answer: a hurt locker is a place where one stores — or finds — hurt, pain, insufficiencies.

According to the publicist for Kathyrn Bigelow's 2010 Oscar-winning film (The Hurt Locker), hurt locker is GI slang for severe injury.

The film's screenwriter, Mark Boal, tells us "if a bomb goes off, you're going to be in the hurt locker. That's how they used it in Baghdad. It means slightly different things to different people, but all the definitions point to the same idea. It's somewhere you don't want to be."

Documented uses in history:

• 1966, according to the linguist's authority on words, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). The OED's New Words Group cites 1966 as the first usage of hurt locker. "It's from a Texas newspaper and it says
  
  'If an army marches on its stomach, Old Charlie is in the hurt locker'.
  
  Old Charlie is the Viet Cong. It is similar to the phrases world of hurt or world of pain. .
  
  [ Note: in the early days of the Viet Nam war, the US image of the VC was that of a group of inadequately-supplied soldiers. ]


• 2001, AP News, about the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King debacle: 'Right now they're in the hurt locker. Healing takes a long time'


• 2002, Canada's Globe and Mail: "One of the Canadian Armed Forces' officers told me, 'We're gonna find ourselves in the middle of Baghdad, and realize we're in a hurt locker'"


• 2005, soldier-poet Brian Turner published Here, Bullet, a collection of poetry from his tour of duty in 2003-4. Among the poems was The Hurt Locker, about snipers and suicide bombers. The poem opens with
  
  "Nothing but hurt left here,"
  
  and includes lines such as
  
  "Open the hurt locker and learn
  How rough men come hunting for souls."


• When parsed, the components of the expression — as used in this context — might be much older: hurt, as in world of hurt (considerable pain); locker, as in small confined space.
  
  [note: I'm certain that I first heard world of hurt from VietNam-era GIs]

What about the future of the phrase?

• Hurt locker will see a spike in usage, at least temporarily," says Robert Groves, of Collins Dictionary.


• "As long as the expression is trendy, hurt locker will probably be used incorrectly," according to me¹.

¹ That would be I, as quoted in TruthForDummies.com in 2010.

Earlier this week the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to move city money out of banks that fail to invest in the community. The "responsible banking practices" motion creates something like a report card that evaluates banks looking to do business with the city based on their record of mortgage modifications and small business lending, among other things.

Banks that do not meet the standard would not receive city funds. Read more here.

When are YOU going to move your money from a bank that doesn't give a damn about you or your community? http://moveyourmoney.info/

Technically, I'm not reading it yet. I'm listening to it, while I drive, as a book-on-CD. However, the information (and conjecture therein) is so compelling that I want to have it available as a reference.

The author discusses the differences between the thinking of people whose dominant cognitive¹ function is "left-brain" or "right-brain."

Left Brain		Right Brain
Logical Sequential Rational Analytical Objective Looks at parts		Random Intuitive Holistic Synthesizing Subjective Looks at wholes

Everyone's thought processes are a combination of left-brain and right-brain, but each person's "style" is dominated to some degree by one or the other.

The author's premise is that American culture - especially the economy - has been dominated by left-brained thinking. We have evolved from an agrarian economy to a blue-collar economy to a "knowledge worker" economy - all largely "left-brained." The problem is that those parts of the economy - the jobs - can be done faster by machines (including computers), and cheaper by workers in less-industrialized countries. Those jobs are gone from the USA, and will never return.

The right-brained jobs will grow in significance. The left-brained jobs will become more right-brained (or they will disappear).

Right-brained work cannot be exported. Also, right-brained work cannot be farmed out to cheap imported labor (such as computer programmers from countries where labor is cheap, but working in this country on H1-B visas (work permits). 15 years ago I earned $68,000 per year - right next to an H1-B foreigner who was thrilled to work for $24,000. Add in a $24,000 American "administrative assistant" to fill in the foreigner's cultural gaps, and the company can get passable production for a fraction of the price of one person who brings the whole package to the job.

My work was superior to his, but not 2.8x better than his. How do you suppose that worked out - especially in a left-brained economy that looks at discrete components of the job, rather than at the big picture.

Back to right-brained work.

Imagine an MD, e.g., an internal medicine specialist. People's innards are the same, whether in Chicago or Istanbul. Hospitals can (and do) get away with hiring 3rd-world physicians who work for less than American-born doctors. Traditional American medicine runs on left-brained thinking.

Now imagine a psychiatrist. How could a psychiatrist born, raised, and educated in Calcutta be effective dealing with the emotional issues of someone born, raised, and educated in Sacramento? Sticking with the psychiatrist ... Japan's culture is, by US standards, rather melancholy. Suicide is more common there than in the USA. That is in part because of the more widespread desperation among the people there, and in part because of the role of "honor." Some types of dishonor make suicide almost a cultural imperative. Can a Japanese shrink just off the boat, treat a suicidal person in the USA? I fear that the outcomes might not be good. Mental health medicine demands a right-brained approach.

American health care is moving in the direction of holistic medicine. Medical schools might well be recruiting right-brainers - poets, meditators - instead of scientists.

Computers - the epitome of left-brained functioning - can do much of what engineers do: strength calculations, process selection, cost estimating, and such. Computers cannot come up with the original idea. Computers cannot innovate.

The idea people, designers, innovators - the right-brained people - will thrive in spite of outsourcing, offshoring, mechanizing, computerizing, and H1-B-ing.

Given my thinking on such matters, this book is an excellent resource for me.

¹ cognition (n) the product of perception, learning, reasoning, and cultural influences.

Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
-- Richard M. Nixon

Source: Nixon's Farewell Remarks to White House Cabinet and Staff, August 9, 1974

Sears supports our troops - with cash and employee benefits!

Since 1990 (for Operation Desert Shield-Storm) Sears has operated a program for military pay differential for its employees whose Guard/Reserve units are deployed. This program fills the gap between military pay and employer pay, and continues benefits for up to 60 months for eligible employees called to duty in the Reserves or National Guard.

While deployed, eligible employees can:

• Continue participating in SHC's life insurance, medical and dental programs.
• Receive annual merit pay increases and incentive pay.
  

All employers are required, by law, to hold jobs for deployed reservists. But Sears has encouraged and supported employees serving in the armed forces for decades. Records indicate that Sears provided support to employees serving in the military in 1916.

Yes, I confirmed this before passing it on. Snopes.com's Urban Legends website gives this story a big thumbs up.

For more information: Sears Holdings Heroes at Home Program

Do I have to tell you that you should support Sears by, um.... shopping (and purchasing) there?

Decision to Stop Making Hummers Saddens Assholes

Douchebags Seek New Way to Compensate for Tiny Penises

DETROIT (The Borowitz Report) – General Motors’ decision yesterday to stop manufacturing Hummers has struck at the heart of the group who loved the vehicles most: America’s assholes.
Across the nation, leading assholes spoke of a sense of loss and sadness caused by the decision, and suggested that they would now be searching for new ways to compensate for their small penises.

continued at The Borowitz Report

Read the rest at The Borowitz Report. While you're there, subscribe to Andy's newsletter.

1. How do you know that "silence is deafening" if you're not deaf?
2. How would a deaf person know the difference?

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-- George Santayana

"Those who do not archive the past are condemned to retype it."
-- any student, anywhere, any time

"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat 11th Grade¹."
-- damphyno

¹ The upside: one more junior prom. The downside: one more junior prom.