How about McCan’t and Failin’?
Guess it runs in the family
The basic actions of Neil Bush in the S&L scandal are as follows:
Neil received a $100,000 “loan” from Ken Good, of Good International, with no obligation to pay any of the money back.
Good was a large shareholder in JNB Explorations, Neil Bush’s oil-exploration company.
Neil failed to disclose this conflict-of-interest when loans were given to Good from Silverado, because the money was to be used in joint venture with his own JNB. This was in essence giving himself a loan from Silverado through a third party.
Neil then helped Silverado S&L approve Good International for a $900,000 line of credit.
Good defaulted on a total $32 million in loans from Silverado.
During this time Neil Bush did not disclose that $3 million of the $32 million that Good was defaulting on was actually for investment in JNB, his own company.
Good subsequently raised Bush’s JNB salary from $75,000 to $125,000 and granted him a $22,500 bonus.
Neil Bush maintained that he did not see how this constituted a conflict of interest.
Neil approved $106 million in Silverado loans to another JNB investor, Bill Walters.
Neil also never formally disclosed his relationship with Walters and Walters also defaulted on his loans, all $106 million of them.
Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case and ended up paying $50,000 to settle out of court. The chief of Silverado S&L was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (Keep in mind that you can get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)
Today Neil Bush is working on closing a deal in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, to sell a software package to schools with his startup company Ignite.
Trifecta!
Walking from the U2 line to the U8 line in Alexanderplatz. Saw a blond in a Rage against the Machine t-shirt.
She had a tramp stamp, a coin slot and a muffin top.
the Trifecta!
Long live the Free Market ! (unless it hurts the wealthy)
Democrats maybe donkeys, but Republicans are dumbasses.
Free Market! Free Market! Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!
Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money!
Live by the free market, die by the free market, no?
Isn’t the bank bailout basically socialism?
Why doesn’t the federal government bail me out when I make bad business decisions?
touch
interesting site about touch.
Liberal vs. Conservative
An interesting TED talk about Liberals and Conservatives.
Race and Our Place in It
Is it an any wonder the USA has so many racial issues? We can’t even get the terms to identify each other right.
There are black people and white people. A color scheme, yes?
Okay, fine, but then to call an Asian person yellow is derogatory and to call a Native American person red is also offensive. But to describe someone as having olive colored skin is okay. Which kind of olive anyways – Kalamata or Graber’s? Nabali or Manzanillo? Mission or Pecholine?
Oriental is out and Occidental (its correspondent term) was never in.
To call a person a European is fine, but to call someone Oriental is frowned up. European cars and Oriental rugs, just fine. Granted no one under 75 calls Asia the Orient, but still…
And European styling? What the @#$@! is that? Italy and Sweden…same style?
Caucasian, or European. Are we using continents or mountain ranges to define ourselves? Hitler tried Aryan, but he probably would have put the real Aryans in his camps.
Are we using colors or names of countries, continents or geographical features? How about all of the above?
And then there’s hyphenating. Do we do it from the part of the world our ancestors came from? or just the country? Am I a European-American? Or a Northern-European American? Or an American of European descent? Or to be people first, a person living in American of European descent.
I think this inability for us to pick one spectrum of label ourselves is related to the affirmative action debate, also to the individual vs. group debate. What scale do we use to evaluate applicants for schools, jobs, contracts? When do we say that everyone is finally on the same playing field?
Who knows?
I certainly don’t.
I just know that I am a white Caucasian Occidental Polish-Czech-German-Irish-English-Scotch American.
Carbon Footprint of music
As I write this post, I am listening to the melodius musical styling of Miles Davis et al. on Pandora.com. If you don’t know Pandora, get to know her!! Type in a musicians name, or a band or a song and the algorithm or small elves or whatever picks other songs to play based upon your voting yeah or nay on other songs.
But I digress…
As I sit here and listen to this music, I wonder about the environmental impact of listening to music on the internet. Does it take more juice than listening to a cd of the same music? How does that compare to a turntable? If all music in the future is only digital and no physical LPs or CDs are made, would that offset all the energy needed to run my computer, wireless router, DSL system and computers at Pandora’s end? No need to drive to a store to buy a plastic disc to then drive back home and stick into my computer to then rip and store on a harddrive that has to be on and using juice if I want to listen to the music.
Maybe the best way, least impactful method of listening to music would be just to make my own music on non electrified equipment…
the true history [is] lost
From “John Adams” the HBO miniseries
“It is very bad history”
“Do not let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license.”
“I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost.”
Was Tom Hooper, the director of this series, also talking about his own work, this miniseries on John Adams. A visual experience based upon a written experience, the book John Adams by David McCullough. How much has this series deluded our posterity with fictions? How much of what we witnessed in the series actually happened?
What scares me is that in a few years, and maybe this is already happening, films & movies such as these will be shown in classrooms as fact. Easier to watch a movie than to read a book.
The second quote above also relates to art making. I would postulate that art, especially dance is deluded with too many fictions under the guise of poetical license. Too often choreographers are vague about what the point of their work is. Hiding under the guise of poetical license is one thing that brings dance down in terms of being taken seriously, removing it out of the entertainment world.
Too often dance makers bow too quickly to their own aesthetic to make something that is palatable to the audience, rather than following their curiosity to its end – wanting more to please than to challenge. Dance is still stuck in the world of dancing for the court, trying to please the king. Instead of now it is the audience and the grant panels. What logics are hip now? What tools are hip now? What aesthetics are hip now? The true idea of the choreographer gets lost. The work gets lost in poetical and graphical license.
Not many choreographers are accused of being great intellects. Playwrights, composers, yes. But not choreographers.
Why is that?
( I think it has something to with that horrible quote which has been destroying dance ever since whoever said it – “Dance expresses what words cannot” or some such nonsense like that)
Quote of the day
“Sounds like running down a mountain in the rain towards a deer just killed by an arrow.”
from Pandora about a song by the Precious Fathers