Larry's Place

This article makes me laugh and makes me cry at the same time. In it Pamela Anderson is quoted as saying:

“I feel so guilty for that craze being started around Baywatch days – I used to wear them with my red swimsuit to keep warm – never realizing that they were SKIN!”

via UGGs and Their ‘UGGly’ Reputation – Yahoo Small Business Advisor.

This is so funny in that she had no idea her sheepskin boots were made of a sheep’s skin but this is also so sad that, apparently, a lot of people are surprised to discover this.

The story makes it sound like the sheep are killed only for their skin but actually almost every part of the sheep will be used. I wonder where they think mutton comes from.

Almost eight years ago, my parents–Robert Reich and Clare Dalton–separated. Six years later, in January of 2012, they got divorced.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s important for his son, Adam, that Google gets this corrected.

Dan passed on this article about Salt Lake City’s Police Chief, Chris Burbank. This is truly a remarkable man who fully understands that the police are, first and foremost, peace officers whose primary job is to keep the peace.

He grabbed national attention during the Occupy Movements occupancy of Salt Lake City. One of the campers died of a combination of a drug overdose and the city decided the overnight campouts had to cease. While other cities sent out a police force clad in riot gear Burbank went out and negotiated how everyone would be cleared out each night.

I think this paragraph says a lot about Chief Burbank’s understanding of the job of the police and how things should be done:

“I spent eight years on the SWAT team. I’ve served hundreds of no-knock warrants. I know firsthand how it all operates,” he says. “I also know firsthand that there are better alternatives. Too often we start with the highest level of force. We should always start at the lowest level. If the police show up and the situation deteriorates, then that’s our fault. We haven’t done our job right. I think we get too caught up in the whole officer safety thing. The danger you expose everyone to in these raids is significant.”

via A Police Chief Tries To Reform The System From Within.

I can’t help but believe that had Andy Lopez been carrying his Airsoft replica of an AK-47 in Salt Lake City he would still be alive.

I find this way interesting. The Easton Area School District in Pennsylvania banned “I <3 Boobies” bracelets from their schools. These bracelets are sold to support breast cancer research but the school board finds them to be lewd and disruptive.

A couple of students sued the school system to allow them to wear the bracelets and won. They also won on appeal. The school board just voted 7-1 to take this fight to the Supreme Court.

Their justification for going to this expense?

Superintendent John Reinhart tells The Express-Times of Easton the ruling compromised administrators ability to determine what is and is not appropriate in school.

via Boobies bracelet fight heads to Supreme Court.

So, in other words, the school board is determined to fight this fight to the death to preserve their absolute power to determine what is appropriate. Two little girls actually learned to question authority in their schools and they can’t take this challenge to their powers? Couldn’t this money be better spent on bringing art classes back to the students?

My mother-in-law has an almost paralyzing fear of snakes. Her fear of them is so bad that it affects her ability to fully enjoy herself outdoors. It turns out that fear is easily acquired in humans and other primates because we are wired to recognize snakes faster than we recognize other animals and we share that ability with other primates.

Though fear of snakes may not be innate, noticing them more than other phenomena may be hard-wired by evolution, said Lynne Isbell, an evolutionary biologist from UC Davis and one of the authors of the paper. That heightened attention, research has shown, can lead to early and resilient learned behavior, such as fear-mediated avoidance. In other words, getting out of the way of snakes.

via It’s a snake! Monkey brains may explain our fear of reptiles – latimes.com.

I find this fascinating on so many levels, from evolutionary implications to how this relates to religion.

This woman really has me confused. She has been one of the NSA’s biggest supporters in their gathering information on U.S. citizens without probable cause but let us spy on a foreign leader, something that the NSA and CIA was formed to do, and she gets all upset about this.

“Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers. The president should be required to approve any collection of this sort,” Feinstein’s statement reads. “The White House has informed me that collection on our allies will not continue, which I support. But as far as I’m concerned, Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing. To that end, the committee will initiate a major review into all intelligence collection programs.”

via NSA angers Feinstein, one of its key allies in Congress | MSNBC.

I have to assume from her statement that she believes the U.S. government is engaged in hostilities against its citizens. How else could she justify her support widespread harvesting of data on the phone calls and Internet traffic of U.S. citizens?

And I have to wonder how does she keep getting re-elected to her seat in the Senate?

I like the idea of electric cars. I like them because they are quiet and they don’t foul up the air along the roadways. I’m glad to get this news from these governors and I wish Gov. Nathan Deal was among these governors promoting electric cars.

The governors of California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont signed an agreement to promote and spur the adoption of more environmentally friendly vehicles in their states. Ideally, there will be 3.3 million zero-emission cars in their states by 2023.

via Governors Push for Zero-Emission Cars | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

However I feel a need to point out there ain’t no such thing as a zero-emission car. The car may not be emitting pollutants but that electricity it’s running on most likely came from a power plant running on natural gas or coal.

This! This is why I blame all of Congress, both parties and the Administration for this damned government shutdown and debt ceiling fiasco we just went through:

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.

Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.

via Health insurance exchange launched despite signs of serious problems – The Washington Post.

If you are one of the group of people that is without health insurance because you don’t now qualify for it for one reason or another you are suppose to be able to sign up for insurance through this health insurance marketplace they are talking about here. It doesn’t look like the technology is in place to allow you to sign up but if you don’t have insurance by mid-February then the IRS is sending you a bill.

I support that tax on the uninsured but I don’t support requiring it so soon if the mechanism isn’t set up to allow you to avoid the tax by buying insurance through these exchanges!

The Republican controlled congress, after sending a completely unreasonable continuing resolution to the Senate that would have funded government but shut down funding for the ACA, sent a counteroffer to the Senate that would fund government but asked for a delay of one year in this health insurance tax and elimination of a medical device tax. The Senate absolutely refused both of these and shut down government.

That delay, as we see here and we saw on October 1st, was and is a needed delay. Had the Senate just stripped the elimination of the medical device tax from that CR government would not have shut down. Instead they stripped both items from the bill and declared that they would not negotiate, even on a point that now appears will be necessary, on funding for the government.

Along with this Internet sign up problem the ACA seems to be having a friend has just told me that the premium his private insurance with a $5,000 deductible has just gone up and is now 250% more than it was for last year. This is going to force him to drop this policy and pick up a policy through the exchange which he can’t sign up for because he can’t get through on the website.

Although big, the asteroid is considerably smaller than the type that caused the dinosaur extinction.

via Asteroid flew by us unnoticed last month, will get closer in 2032, but NASA says don’t worry – The Washington Post.

Dan points out an interesting article in The Atlantic suggesting that private schools aren’t all that and public schools may actually be superior. But it brings up another question for me. The article also suggests that poor people are inferior students:

Our data says: If public schools are truly failing, then private schools are in even more trouble. But I’m not convinced that’s the case when you look at a lot of the longitudinal data and even some of the international data. There are reasons to think our typical and our best public schools are doing a pretty great job—it’s just the national averages are often dragged down by the fact that we have a lot of schools with poor-performing students who happen to also be poor. That we have such large socio-economic polarization in this country that students at the bottom are kind of skewing the overall sense of how we are doing. But there are reasons to think that over time, top scores have stabilized or even improved despite the additional challenges that are being pushed on the public schools.

via Are Private Schools Worth It? – Julia Ryan – The Atlantic.

Okay, so why do poor-performing happen to be poor? Is it nutritional? Is it that poor people are poor because of bad choices which also makes them poor parents and role models? If not the parents is it the poor child’s peers?

I refuse to believe that children from poor households are just not as smart as children from affluent households so what is it? In order to change this we have to know why. However I think a lot of people may be afraid of the answer because it will point toward poverty actually being a choice and not just bad luck.