Today, I had a collection plate passed to me; the receipts
were intended to go to those millions of cyclone victims
in Myanmar.

I placed nothing in the 'feel-good' basket.

Unless the communist-leaning junta there was overthrown
by Burma's citizens in the next few days, that bunch of
genocidal murderers would simply confiscate everything
they permitted into the country; nothing of consequence
would go to the victims.

What to do in this situation ?

Despite the misguided 'feelings' of many Americans, our
military has never been a steriod-charged "Meals on Wheels"
for the world; that is NOT their job.
However, the most generous nation on earth (us) has often
bent the rules to help in such natural disasters, with
excellent results. It is the right thing to do, WHEN it
can affect the outcome positively.

Unfortunately, it cannot.

The news likes to keep alive the notion that there is still some kind of
real race going on, however, looking at a website like:

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

. . . which tracks state polls, McCain has the election sewed up pretty
well. In the last election, some of the key states were too close to call
but in the red states now, McCain beats both candidates by a fairly large
margin, if the election were held today.

--g

I live in Morrisville, NC and the external siding of my house has
become loose at couple of places. Could some one refer a reasonable
repairman who could fix this problem. Thank you.

- Vishal

An interesting analysis of the changes in the way we measure the economy
over past 47 years and how the leadership in washington dc have mislead in
order to make themselves appear successful.

This is a link to an abridged article by Kevin Phillips. The original is in
Harper's Magazine, which requires a subscription:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2008/Pollyanna-Creep-Economy1may08.htm

John Kennedy, out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs - even
if this was because none could be found - were labeled "discouraged workers"
and then excluded from the ranks of the unemployed.

Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security
with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus
receipts in Social Security to mask the emerging federal deficit.

Richard Nixon created a division between "core" inflation and headline
inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle
of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of
"volatility," categories that happened to be troublesome (and thus in the
"headlines"). At that time, it was food and energy (as it is now).

tcol said...

Good idea (forgetting it), if you ask me.

Joining Microsoft's unpaid quality control team has
never appealed to me. Over the years, it has paid
off to give microsoft a year or two to get most of
the major bugs out of their new products/"upgrades"
- before deciding to try it or reject it.

It took MS less than a day after the introduction
of XP sp3 to learn that it was blitzing users all
over the world with systems that would crash during
boot-up.

Remember, the last relatively-stable and almost-secure
OS that mickeysoft created was win95. (But only if you
didn't use IE, Outlook, or Word.)