Greg Leding
November 30, 2009
A few quick facts about how much water it takes to make common items.
On a related note, I watched this last night.
smarterplanet:

secondaryartifacts:

IBM is confident. Mills is confident. SWG is confident. It really showed through at Connect this year. Expect some specifics tomorrow.
IBM is RedMonk’s biggest client.
(via Ric Hayman and James Governor’s Monkchips » Jumping Off IBM Connect 09: looking back)

A few quick facts about how much water it takes to make common items.

On a related note, I watched this last night.

smarterplanet:

secondaryartifacts:

IBM is confident. Mills is confident. SWG is confident. It really showed through at Connect this year. Expect some specifics tomorrow.

IBM is RedMonk’s biggest client.

(via Ric Hayman and James Governor’s Monkchips » Jumping Off IBM Connect 09: looking back)

ryking:

Remember, this is the man invited by Obama to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Goes a long way to explaining why Barry’s done fuck-all about DADT and ENDA.

If [Obama] ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama’s middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

Andrew Sullivan (via southpol) (via soupsoup)

Rocks and hard places, et cetera, et cetera.

Abortion remains the omnipresent irritant of American politics. The country seems to have reached an uneasy equipoise on abortion rights: some, but not too much. Yet the adversaries in both sides remain engaged in trench warfare, with every battle over a few hard-fought yards. Abortion opponents have little hope of overturning Roe v. Wade, but they can try to make access more difficult. Supporters of abortion rights are, for the most part, trying to maintain the ground already won. Meanwhile, abortion is a handy public-policy hand grenade to be tossed in the middle of any legislative battle by those whose goal is to blow things up.

Hmm, indeed. I don’t see Cheney pulling the trigger, but I don’t see him going out of his way to put an end to the speculation, either.

bellatoris:

Hmm.

You should look at big thinkers on the question of identity. Samuel Huntington wrote the famous book The Clash of Civilizations. But we need an effort to explain and, if possible merge, theories of identity that are biological, psychological, social, and political, because it’s obvious that in an age of interdependence, you want Wright’s thesis, you want there to be more nonzero subsolutions. You want this thing to happen; you hope he is right that you can reconcile religion and science; you hope the president’s speech in Cairo turns out to be right, that it’s a walk in the park to reconcile religious differences. I gave a bunch of speeches on this after 9/11, saying that our religious and political differences could be reconciled. I think President Obama’s word was that we had to respect doubt.

What I always said was that if you are religious it meant by definition there was such a thing as Truth, capital T. So to make it work in a world full of differences, you had to recognize that there was a big distinction between the existence of Truth, capital T, and the ability of any one human being to understand it completely and to translate it into political actions that were 100 percent consistent with it. That’s what you had to do; all you had to do was accept human frailty. You can’t tell people of faith to be relative about their faith. They believe there is a truth. But the question of whether they can know it and turn it into a political program is a very, very different thing. That is an act of arrogance.

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. This is wrong and unacceptable.

Paul Krugman (via azspot) (via shorterexcerpts)

The urgency to bailout “too big to fail” banks and the lack of urgency to bailout people who WANT to work is criminal.

(via soupsoup)