Eideard

Two leading members of the lyin’ bastards club

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have been accused of telling TV viewers blatant untruths about Barack Obama.

The candidates deny their TV commercials are deceitful and dishonest but both ads selectively quote the president to make it appear he is saying one thing when he is saying another.

The advertisements have been widely scorned for crossing a line from a longstanding practice of political campaigns pushing the truth to its limits, over to misrepresentation. One ad appears to show Obama admitting he will lose next year’s election if he talks about the economy. The other has him calling American workers lazy.

Romney’s campaign ad is airing on TV stations in New Hampshire, which holds its primary in January. It shows the president saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” But Obama’s words were from his 2008 campaign, and he was quoting a statement by a strategist for his Republican opponent, John McCain, who was the one on the back foot over the economy.

Perry’s ad shows a short soundbite of Obama saying: “We’ve been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades.”

The ad switches to Perry saying: “Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America – that Americans are lazy. That’s pathetic.”

But a viewing of Obama’s full statement shows that he was saying the US government had been lazy in attracting foreign investment.

Darrell West, director of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Romney and Perry had gone further than previous campaigns in misrepresenting the truth.

“Those ads are blatant misrepresentations,” he said. “They are much more egregious than what we’ve seen in the past. Typically candidates have tried to be close to the truth because they know journalists are paying attention, but with all the problems of the news industry politicians have concluded they can get away with murder…”

But West acknowledged that politicians are less concerned about being exposed by reporters. “Politicians think that the news media have completely collapsed, based on the financial crisis, and so they are acting as if there’s no accountability and they can say whatever they want,” he said.

West makes a great point about American journalists having as little integrity as Republican candidates. Since their employers are either corporations controlled by Republicans or clown who consider news as entertainment – or both – there’s little encouragement for any of them to point out any of the lies or liars.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

In the growing rivalry between the emerging superpowers China and India, Beijing scored a symbolic victory on Thursday: a Chinese woman won a chess match.

The woman, Hou Yifan, 17, easily retained the Women’s World Chess Championship title when she drew the eighth game of a match against Humpy Koneru, the best Indian woman to play the game.

The final score of the best-of-10 match was 5.5 points to 2.5 points. Despite the lopsided score, the victory was not as easy as it appeared, Ms. Hou said in a telephone interview from Tirana, Albania, where the match was held. “Every game was interesting. Both of us had chances,” she said. The difference was that “in the middle games, I caught her mistakes…”

The match was sponsored by Taci Oil International, whose chief executive, Rezart Taci, is president of the Albanian Chess Federation. Ms. Hou will receive 60 percent of the $267,000 prize fund, and Ms. Koneru 40 percent.

Ms. Hou became the youngest world champion in history last year when she was 16. The match against Ms. Koneru, 24, was Ms. Hou’s first defense of the title.

In some ways, the match was a competition between the world’s two most populous countries as well as the two players. In recent years, the Chinese have dominated women’s chess, but the overall world champion is Viswanathan Anand of India. Ms. Koneru had a chance to make India the holder of the chess world’s most important titles.

Though Ms. Hou is ranked No. 3 in the world among women and Ms. Koneru is No. 2, Ms. Hou was a slight favorite because she had beaten Ms. Koneru in the semifinals of last year’s championship as well as the one in 2008…

Though Ms. Hou is the world champion, Judit Polgar, a Hungarian, is the best female player and the only woman to ever be ranked among the world’s top 10. But she does not play in competitions that are limited to women, which is why she has never won the women’s title…

Ms. Hou added that she hoped to find time in her competitive schedule to go to college.

“I have to know some more things,” she said. “I have to open my eyes to see the whole world.”

Bravo.

This will seem incongruous to many Americans. That is a description of your own parochialism. The extension of cellular networks throughout the 3rd World – leapfrogging the construction of landlines – has become commonplace.

From morning all through the night, tens of thousands of Russians have been lining up since Saturday in the cold with just one aim: to kiss a glass-covered reliquary that they believe holds the Virgin Mary’s belt.

They shuffle along, waiting for up to 12 hours without complaint in a line that stretches for miles. Within a few days, the organizers say, the wait could reach 24 hours. At any given time there are about 25,000 people, according to news media estimates, and as of Wednesday morning, 285,000 true believers had earned their moment before the belt, said the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which organized the tour…

Of all the industrial nations, perhaps only Russia outdistances the United States in the religiosity of its people, two million of whom venerated the belt before its final stop in Moscow…

“We came so that we will live well, be happy and healthy, for the sake of our children,” said Anna Kozlova, 68, a pensioner who joined the end of the line late Tuesday night with her daughter Oksana Kulikova, a nurse, wrapped, like her mother, in fur against the cold.

She said she planned to head straight to work after venerating the relic at the towering Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which has been open around the clock…

Moscow’s city government closed streets around the cathedral — causing those Muscovites not so inclined to venerate relics to rant about the even-worse-than-usual traffic jams. Mobile canteens were set up to feed the pilgrims, and heated city buses lined the embankment to offer respite from the cold. A free bus service is shuttling provincial visitors to train stations…

Next – I hear someone is bringing in Jesus’ jockey shorts.

At the peak of the United States’s war in Iraq, the U.S. military had more than 170,000 troops, 500 bases replete with tents and toilets, kitchens and motor pools, and an airline that flew hundreds of times a day across the country.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq after nearly nine years of war is believed to be one of the largest removal jobs in history. At the start of the year logistics experts calculated there were nearly 3 million pieces of equipment to be moved, from airplanes, helicopters and tanks to laptops and lights…

Since September 2010, around 2 million pieces of equipment have been redeployed, U.S. officials say, some back to the United States, others to Afghanistan or other locations…

“Someday I truly believe that future military classes … will study the logistics (of our) move out of Iraq.”

What will be studied is the lies accepted as mandate. Agitprop given greater weight than historic fact. No-bid contracts and supply streams whose size, content and volume were determined by cronyism and donations to the Republican Party.

Never before has such a volume of death and destruction been wasted to satisfy the greed and corruption of so few.

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American author Jack Kerouac’s first ever novel, which was thought to be lost, has been published 40 years after his death.

The American writer, who was hailed the king of the Beat generation and a hero to many young men, penned The Sea Is My Brother aged 20, based on his years as a merchant seaman. It features correspondence with his best friend Sebastian Sampas and recalls his “life and experiences” at sea, says the book’s editor Dawn Ward.

“This book is really quite important as it shows how Jack developed his writing process,” she says. “The letters that support this period, show that he and Sebastian were reading very important writers and playwrights of the time. They were paying attention to changes in literature styles and autobiographical works.”

Ms Ward says the work is especially poignant as he “opens up and shows a side to him that we don’t normally see in his books.”

The manuscript, which was was discovered in the writer’s archive by his brother-in-law, came as a surprise to Kerouac experts, Ms Ward says.

“It was referred to briefly in letters, but nothing that led anyone to believe that there was this really large volume…”

On The Road, about a spontaneous road trip, was and still remains Kerouac’s most influential and famous book.

Ms Ward says it is the “great rhythm, flair and openness” that continues to attract people to the novel.

At the time, critics sat up and took notice of the work, hailing Kerouac as the voice of the Beat Generation – a group of post-WWII writers including poet Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, who rejected conformity and materialism in favour of free expression and experimentation with drugs and sexuality…

Kerouac famously penned the work in three weeks, on one large roll of paper, so he could avoid reloading a typewriter…

“He was well known for just firing himself up on drugs and alcohol and writing and writing and writing. So there’s a kind of free flowing stream of consciousness quality to it. It has a kind of excitement and energy to it which makes it continually interesting…”

“Jack made a tremendous impact on American literature, not just as this cult figure, but also as this person who changed the rules,” says Ms Ward.

“I think young people are still driven to his work because it is this exemplary of freedom.”

You got it, Dawn. As much as I and others from that period relished the outlaw life – and there were other significant voices before and during the same period, ranging from James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Peter Bowman to Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – we often came back to Kerouac as the example of artist who cared for nothing but his art and his freedom.

If you had to throw away everything, destroy everything material you owned to break free – that was the choice you had to make.

Insects have served as the inspiration for a number of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that could be deployed to monitor hazardous situations without putting humans in harm’s way. Now researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are proposing using actual live insects enhanced with electronic sensors to achieve the same result. The insect cyborgs would use biological energy harvested from their body heat or movements to potentially power small sensors implanted on their bodies in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.

To harvest energy from insects, the researchers have designed a spiral piezoelectric generator that converts the kinetic energy from the insect’s wing movements into electricity. This power would be used to prolong the battery life of devices implanted on the insect, such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor. The prototype piezoelectric generator was fabricated from bulk piezoelectric substrates and was designed to maximize the power output in a limited area.

“Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack,” said Professor Khalil Najafi, the chair of electrical and computer engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. “We could then send these ‘bugged’ bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go…”

Getting the insects to go where their handlers want them to is another part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before insect cyborgs can be deployed. But DARPA has been working on this, having put out a call some years back for research proposals for Hybrid-Insect-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) interfaces to control the movement of living insects. Combining the two technologies could be just the thing to take insect cyborgs to the next level and see them used to monitor hazardous situations in the not to distant future.

Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

Can we trust the insect cyborgs to be loyal to their new human masters – or will they become double agents on behalf of the Dark Side.

Not the best tool for removing stuck rings from swollen, um, members

A man who turned up at hospital with a ring stuck on his penis had to be cut free by 10 firefighters, according to data released by the London fire brigade.

It took firefighters 20 minutes to remove the ring after staff at Queen Elizabeth hospital, Woolwich, were unable to prise it from the man’s genitals.

Two fire engines were dispatched to perform the delicate procedure, which took place in May this year. Two? One to watch and learn?

It was just one of three incidents in which firefighters were called to remove a ring stuck on a penis between April 2010 to May 2011, records show.

The disclosure is one of 417 incidents attended by London’s firefighters involving people stuck in objects, machinery and furniture – not including road traffic accidents…

The removal of rings from fingers accounted for 160 incidents, while 74 people had “other” objects removed. Some 133 people had become trapped in or under machinery or other objects, and 14 people were impaled.

Dave Brown, the brigade’s assistant commissioner for operations and mobilising, said: “You wouldn’t believe some of the incidents we’re called to deal with…we’d ask the public to take greater care to avoid getting themselves into these often ridiculous situations, and to think carefully before dialling 999 and calling us out if there isn’t an emergency.”

Phew? I never matched any of these. But, barely.

And, no, I’ve never gotten near any other portions of my anatomy threatened by something similar.

Neiman Marcus sold out 10 Ferraris at $395,000 each under an hour of making them available

As the busiest retail weekend of the year begins late Thursday night, the differences between how affluent and more ordinary Americans shop in the uncertain economy will be on unusually vivid display.

Toys “R” Us, Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Target will start their Black Friday sales earlier than ever — at 9 and 10 p.m. in some instances — with dirt-cheap offers intended to secure their customers’ limited dollars. A half a day later, on Friday morning, higher-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom will open with only a sprinkling of special sales.

The low-end and midrange retailers are risking low margins as they cut prices to attract shoppers, while executives at luxury stores say that they are actually able to sell more at full price than in recent boom years.

“We’re now into a less promotional environment than we were before the recession,“ said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks. In the third quarter, for instance, Saks reduced the length of an annual sale to three days from four, and excluded the high-margin category of cosmetics from another regular sale.

Retail analysts are expecting a decent holiday season, with many estimating that sales will increase about 3 percent over last year, with contributions from shoppers across income levels. Yet the Friday after Thanksgiving, the kickoff to the highest-revenue weeks for stores, is expected to lay bare the increasingly parallel universes of retailing in America, the analysts said.

“Those in a more modest income situation are the people who are going to the Wal-Marts and the Best Buys and the Targets at 8, 9, 10, 11 p.m. with little kids in tow because they can’t afford a baby sitter,” said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultant firm. “It’s a very unpleasant shopping experience, frankly, for a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, many affluent shoppers will avoid the scene altogether, he said. “The women who are shopping the fourth floor at Saks are not Black Friday shoppers,” he said…

“If you talk to people who are in my business, people who analyze our business, they would consistently tell you that stores at the mall, especially anchor stores, are more promotional than they were last year,” he said. “Now that may not be true at the high end — the strength of the business or the higher-end consumer has allowed them to do a little less promotion — but that’s high end.”

At Saks Fifth Avenue and other luxury stores, full-price selling has generally been increasing. So the few deals at luxury stores on Friday are not so much bargains as token nods to the Black Friday tradition. Saks is offering half off cashmere sweaters, Neiman Marcus is giving discounts on a future shopping trip when people spend more than $100, while Nordstrom says it does not have big promotions planned.

High-end retailers “don’t have to do anything desperate — it’s kind of hard to see a 5 a.m. queue outside of a Fifth Avenue luxury retailer,” said Chris Donnelly, a senior executive in Accenture’s retail practice. “If you don’t have to put it on sale and people are still going to buy it, why put it on sale?”

Since I’m a news junkie who actually prefers to watch news instead of consuming what some media hack considers entertainment – I get a lot of my TV news coverage from business channels like Bloomberg TV. Folks in business, concerned with markets and investing, haven’t any inclination to watch crap. There’s a lot more news on hand in a half-hour of Bloomberg TV than you might bump into on CNN or one of the truly cruddy network news programs in an hour or two.

Some of the soundest economists I’ve watched feel the growth in sales for this holiday season will surpass 6%. More than anything suggested in this article. The question is how much of that is the bump at the upper end from the folks with serious increases in their disposable income – over the same period that’s seen a continuation of the decline in real income for the American middle class that started to nosedive with the Bush/Cheney election?

Oy, we saw you picking yer nose!

Metropolitan police officers fired a Taser nine times at a man sitting on a train in the belief he was carrying a weapon in his briefcase.

The use of Tasers on a train comes as the commissioner of the Met police, Bernard Hogan-Howe…said this week he wanted to see more Tasers in response cars and Scotland Yard has confirmed work is going on to review the availability of Tasers for its officers…

BTP said Tasers were used by Met officers to restrain Justice Livingstone when he failed to comply with officers’ requests to remain seated. Scotland Yard said a Taser was fired several times after the suspect moved towards officers while shouting and refusing to move his hands from his pockets.

The Met police and British Transport Police said the suspect was in possession of an “imitation” firearm.

Livingstone, who said he had no history of mental health problems, had bought the toy gun earlier for his son’s birthday. “It was 99p,” he said…

“…they jumped at me and used the Taser four times at my chest. That did not have any effect, I felt no current. They then held me down, grabbed on to my head and pinned me down and shot me in the back of the head with the Taser three times and I felt the current…

Livingstone said he was taken to a police station in Victoria where…he was stripped naked, he said, and refused access to a lawyer.

He was eventually sent to Bethlem Royal hospital in Beckenham where he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But on Wednesday, after he made an appeal to the mental health tribunal, he was released and is now at his home in south London…

BTP said its officers were called along with the Met to reports that a man was on the platform waving a gun.

Livingstone said he would be making a formal complaint about his treatment.

At this point the story is pretty confused. I know a fair bit about the fog or war and comparable foggy minds in the heat of civil conflict. Police are as likely as civilians to jump to conclusions based on what they expect to confront – regardless of the facts.

If this ever gets to court and the coppers place in evidence a 99p toy gun made of orange plastic – I don’t think they stand a prayer of getting away without paying a considerable amount in compensation to Mr. Livingstone. Especially if they allow photos of his injuries.