Dr Venter, who has been chasing his goal for a decade, is already working on projects to use synthetic biology to create bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas, and algae that soak up carbon dioxide and turn it into hydrocarbon fuels.
made me go, hmmmm.
I can see it now: The global ecosystem overrun by artificially created carbon dioxide consuming algae, humans must now produce massive amounts of Co2 to save earth.
Exacerbating this issue (and with apologies to friends in the industry) is that most development staff historically possesses neither writing nor storytelling experience. What they have, and what they are mandated to exercise, is an ability to anticipate what their superiors desire. The Hollywood hierarchy is thus reactionary, and not driven to just tell a good story.
President Obama made clear Monday that he favors the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and intends to ask Congress to repeal the 13-year-old law that denies benefits to domestic partners of federal employees and allows states to reject same-sex marriages performed in other states.
...why the health care reforms currently being shilled are doomed to failure.
In the 48 hours of June 15-16, President Obama lost the health-care debate. First, a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Sen. Edward Kennedy reported that his health committee’s reform bill would add $1 trillion in debt over the next decade. Then the CBO reported that the other Senate bill, being written by the Finance Committee, would add $1.6 trillion. The central contradiction of Obamacare was fatally exposed: From his first address to Congress, Obama insisted on the dire need for restructuring the health-care system because out-of-control costs were bankrupting the Treasury and wrecking the U.S. economy—yet the Democrats’ plans would make the problem worse.
In more than seven months of ObamaCare salesmanship, we’ve seen a boatload of mischaracterizations and outright lies. The public option won’t chase out private insurers. Wrong. We can bend the cost curve without affecting care. Wrong. We can pay for this without massive tax hikes. Wrong again.
One thing that concerns me is that the Obama Administration, apparently, has failed to think this through in even a rudimentary fashion. It’s as if their approach is, throw enough shit against the wall and some of it’s bound to stick. I think that most people agree that there needs to be some sort of health care reform. Even those who are flooding to the Town Halls to voice their disdain for what’s being proposed now. But Obama doesn’t seem to care as much about doing it right. Instead, it appears as though he just wants to do something, anything so that he can claim to have done something. Most likely for the sake of future political capital.
It’s stupid and it’s an egregious waste of an opportunity.
Also, I’ve noticed how the left has tried to usurp the term “health care reform”. If you’re against this socialized, horrific monstrosity being put forth, you are against “reform”.
Of coarse we can’t forget the ever entertaining Nancy Pelosi who last week called those who disrupt town hall meetings un-American yet seemed to have a different tone when it suited her. Nancy Pelosi is the worst of the worst.
Deep concern about the government’s healthcare activity is nothing new, and politicians who believe that the opposition to the Democrats’ plan is a put-up job are deceiving themselves and imperiling their own careers.
Stephen Hunter writes this concerning depression era bandits Bonnie and Clyde; both the historic and film versions.
That point is that the legendary Penn movie that invented the New Bonnie and Clyde was such a ideological crock that it deserves placement in that list of other leftist crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: Beatty’s own Reds, the appalling JFK, and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones in the documentary field, as well as the recent spate of angry, misguided Iraq war films.
This really is not news; when Bonnie and Clyde was released and soared, following an initial few weeks of failure, the Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko launched a mini-crusade to restore Clyde and Bonnie to their actual dimensions, as vicious murderers, no matter that (as the ad copy said) they were young, they were in love, and they robbed banks. The only thing that mattered about them, Royko said, was that they killed, and killed a lot of people. The critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, then the oldest, whitest guy in New York, also dared to denounce the film; he not only felt the lash of social ostracism and contempt, he may have even lost his job as a consequence.
I thought they were both idiots. I know better now.
In regard to the rule of thumb, for example, she asserted that Romulus of Rome, who is credited in my book with being involved with the first antidomestic-violence legislation, could not have done this as he was merely a legendary, fictional character, who along with his brother Remus was suckled by a wolf.
In fact, Plutarch and Livy each state that Romulus was the first king of Rome. He reigned from 753-717 BC, and created both the Roman Legions and the Roman Senate. He is also credited with adding large amounts of territory and people to the dominion of Rome, including the Sabine women. The modern scholar Andrea Carandini has written about the historic reign of Romulus, based in part on the 1988 discovery of the Murus Romuli on the north slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome.
Hoff Sommers:
She (Lemon) confidently informs us that Romulus actually existed and ruled Rome from 753-717 BC. That is preposterous. She cites Livy and Plutarch as sources. These first-century writers did not claim to be offering historically accurate accounts of events that took place some 700 years before their time, but openly professed to be summarizing beliefs, myths, and legends that had come down through the ages. She also cites the contemporary Roman archaeologist Andrea Carandini—a maverick figure who discovered what he claims might have been a wall of a palace that could have belonged to Romulus. As the July/August 2007 issue of Archaeology politely notes, his suggestion “represents a sharp break with two millennia of scholarship.”
Hypocrisy is one of those things that grate on my nerves more than just about anything. Lately, from the left concerning health care reform, lying seems to be so common that it’s almost expected every time President Obama opens his mouth.
“If you want to keep your current plan, you can …”
Lie.
“There will be no rationing…”
Lie.
“These protests are not representative of how people feel…”
Also, the absolutely amazing drivel that comes from Nancy Pelosi about swastikas and Harry Reid’s claim that those who protest the current debacle called health care reform are evil mongers. The left is trying it’s best to stifle dissent and debate. All of this is to be expected.
Yes, hypocrisy is to be expected as well in almost any political argument, I understand that. But to display it in such an open, idiotic way as this is beyond even the stupidity that is currently the Obama administration. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some idiot like Pelosi or Reid, or some other dolt pushing for this atrocious version of health care reform, claim that the protest are nothing more than “AstroTurf” sponsored by evil insurance companies or militia types, or the--GASP!!--Republican Party. However, now hypocrisy raises its ugly head:
Work to Pass Obama’s Healthcare Plan and Get Paid to Do it!$10-15 hr!
There is a growing sense of a “we’ve been had”, bait-and-switch. Millions of moderate Republicans, independents, and conservative Democrats—apparently angry at Bush for Iraq and big deficits, unimpressed by the McCain campaign, intrigued by the revolutionary idea of electing an African-American president—voted for Obama on the assumption that he was sincere about ending red state/blue state animosity. They took him at his word that he was going to end out of control federal spending. They trusted that he had real plans to get us out of the economic doldrums, and that he was not a radical tax-and-spend liberal of the old sort.
Instead, within days Obama set out plans that would triple the annual deficit, and intends to borrow at a record pace that will double the aggregate debt in just eight years.
He not only took over much of the auto- and financial industries, but also did so in a way that privileged unions, politically-correct creditors, and those insider cronies who favor administration initiatives. On matters racial, his administration is shrill and retrograde, not forward-looking. It insists on emphasizing the tired old identify politics that favor a particular sort of racial elite that claims advantage by citing past collective victimization or piggy-backs for advantage on the plight of the minority underclass.
In other words, the Obama swing voter thought he was getting a 21st-century version of pragmatic, triangulating Bill Clinton—and instead got something to the left of 1970s Jimmy Carter.
As ObamaCare goes down in flames, Nancy Pelosi stoops to a new low by claiming that protesters against President Obama’s proposed government take over of health care are carrying swastikas.
The whole narrative from the left that the protests against ObamaCare springing up at townhall meetings across the country are being funded and orchestrated by evil insurance and pharmaceutical companies is bizarre in that the left seems to disregard what polling clearly shows; that the majority of Americans are not down with this debacle.
