-
Who knew that ancient Roman poetry was absolutely filthy?
-
Not only is the new titleholder not black, but she's from a small satellite campus. Apparently many people are pretty unhappy. Judging by the photo, nobody moreso than the girl standing next to her.
-
The San Francisco-based Twitter has made Mayor Gavin Newsom one of their suggested users, meaning that new registrants are encouraged to follow his updates. Which would seem to constitute a pretty valuable campaign contribution. But Newsom isn't disclosing it as a contribution in kind. I can see how it wouldn't occur to the campaign to do so—this is a new problem, after all—but I think that should be reported by his and future campaigns that Twitter highlights.
-
Imagine that you found a Mexican page-a-day calendar in a store and the last date on the calendar was December 31, 2009. Would you conclude that Mexicans forecast that the world is going to end on that date? Of course not. Some Mayans would like everybody to STFU about 2012 being the end of the world. It's just the last year on one particular calendar. Hell, Mayans couldn't even forecast the end of their own civilization—the end of the *world* is out of their league.
-
A whole blog just for GIS geeks in Virginia, courtesy of VITA's Virginia Geographic Information Network.
-
You get what the person before you searched for.
Comments are closed.
RE: Newsom – Who would it be incumbent upon to disclose? Twitter or Newsom? If Newsom is not aware of the link, is he liable? And how is Twitter doing this any different than you or I linking to his Facebook page? Or, for someone with larger clout, BoingBoing making an endorsement? Or a letter to the editor being published in the Washington Post or New York Times? And how do you value this kind of contribution?
It’s all a gray area for sure, and I’m personally torn on the issue as well. Twitter’s certainly sending a lot of eyes his way but is telling friends, customers, users, the public to check someone out a contribution? I’m leaning to no.
Oh, Catullus 16. The translation in my high school Latin book was “I will bugger you and stuff your gobs”. . .I don’t know if I prefer that “lofty” translation or Wikipedia. Catullus can be explicit, but nothing matches poem 16. May I also recommend some Ovid?
Re: Catullus 16
Gangsta Rap is a rip-off! The Romans were kickin’ it ancient school, *Mutha-uckers! (Thank you FOTC for the borrowed reference)
Re: 2012
Preaching to the choir, but that won’t stop a run on the banks and supermarkets before December 21st 2012. And Hollywood and the History Channel will be their to drum up and then capitalize on this for the next few years.
RE: Newsom – I agree, Jason! If Newsom or Twitter is breaking campaign finance laws, I support their right under the Constitution to do that. I used to think that those against campaign finance reform were hyperbolating when they said restricting monetary contributions was a limitation on free speech. I saw that excessive money from narrow special interests was a problem in politics (and I still think it is) and I thought that regulating it was the answer. However, I see now that opponents of campaign finance regulation were not hyperbolating. It has now sunk to a gross violation of free speech–a company can’t make a recommendation to it’s users (that might be as much entertainment as political) without violating campaign finance laws. That’s just wrong. When the government is telling you who or what you can or can’t recommend, we have a serious, serious problem on our hands.
Obviously you can put a dollar value on any bit of speech that has either political or commercial ramifications, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
I might add that you can’t have it both ways. You either believe money = speech or money != speech. If the former, any kind of campaign finance regulation is verboten by the Constitution. If the latter, you can regulate money, but you cannot regulate speech on the idea that influential speech is worth money.
Why would you pull money out of the bank or load up at the grocery store before the literal end of the world? We’re not talking about a big disaster or a breakdown of society, but the end of time. You don’t need money or groceries when that happens.
You’re trying to apply logic to something deeply illogical. :)
You’ll need money to board the alien spacecrafts that come to take the lucky few away. Hellooooooo.
Waldo, when I got your comment on my Blackberry, I thought you were replying to me! :-D
I am interested to hear what you think about what I said.
I think that “I’m exercising my constitutional rights” is a damned poor excuse for selectively violating campaign finance laws that have been upheld by the SCOTUS. I’ve written easily a hundred pages of case briefs and papers on campaign finance law, which is to say that while I find the topic of its constitutionality interesting, it’s rather outside of the scope of the matter at hand. If Newsom wanted to stop filing campaign finance reports, then there’d be some sense in this argument—I’d be impressed with him. But to simply fail to report this particular in-kind contribution has nothing to do with McCain-Feingold’s constitutionality, and vice versa.
I’m glad to hear your perspective. So perhaps I’m misunderstanding the issue. Do CA campaign finance laws limit endorsements/recommendations/in-kind contributions or do they simply require their reporting?
KCinDC, I don’t know. Why do people in the DC Metro raid the grocery store when the forecast indicates 2″ of snow? And plus, the speculations about 2012 are all over the place. If it is the some-Mesoamerican-God-returning-to-earth idea, then the food and money might help you prepare a proper offering. Since you haven’t been worshipping them, you’ll have to make up for lost time. =P
I loved Meri’s response to that too!
I shouldn’t make fun though. This could be the one time when prophecies about an impending apocalypse will actually be right. And then boy, would I be sorry that I hadn’t been stockpiling food.
Fair enough, Tx2VaDem. Then again, the point Waldo is making is that the Mayans (who are supposedly the source of all this) aren’t making any “prophecies about an impending apocalypse”.