I guess I’d be remiss in not posting a note about Cynthia’s and my outing last night to see Prince at the MCI Center.

It was pretty much the best thing ever.

Prince is just one of the Great Entertainers. Having never seen him live before, I can’t say if it’s a recent development, but apparently, James Brown has arranged to copy his essence into Prince’s body so he can live on.

Prompted by an inquiry from BpB lurker Karo, I’ve wasted some time this afternoon researching Timer, that amorphous blob of 70’s Saturday-morning PSA fame.

More and more I really think it’s best to send children back in time to be raised in the 1970’s. Watching again the laid-back messages we were fed as kids in the 70’s really highlights how insane modern kid culture has become.

The theme of Timer’s breakfast spot, por ejemplo, seems to be “If you can’t eat a good breakfast, just eat whatever’s in the fridge — it’s better than nothing”. And my favorite part of “Sunshine on a Stick“ is “fill it up with lemonade or orange juice, or pomegranate juice, or whatever turns you on.”

When I was a kid, I can tell you, they were made with Coca-Cola.

Folks, your Social Security “Contributions” are going up. John Kerry said as much in his acceptance speech “As President, I will not privatize Social Security. I will not cut benefits.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Social Security is the 8,000 lb gorrilla hiding in the federal budget. It’s strained now, and the Boomers haven’t even begun to retire. The system is going broke, and the conventional wisdom is that there are 3 ways to prevent the system from going broke:

1. Privatize it – make the Social Security “accounts” actual accounts that belong to the contributor that the feds can’t use to grab money for the budget (The government’s been selling itself cut-rate bonds for years so it can spend the Social Security surplus on other items).
2. Cut benefits – Not necessarily even to the poor woman living in Topeka who looks at the SS as her only source of income. But there are a lot of folks named Bush, Kennedy, Rockefeller, and soon to be Gates who get social security dollars and have absolutely no need. This could also be done by raising the retirement age to more accurately reflect skyrocketing life expectancies.
3. Raise the heck out of “contributions” – Well, let’s be honest and call them taxes. There’s a couple of things that could be done immediately to quit the doublespeak and increase taxes. First, we could get rid of the cap on Social Security deductions (currently, any income over $90K is exempt). Second (my preference) is that we could pay Social Security out of the general fund, using revenue from things like dividends and capital gains which aren’t currently contributing at all to SS.

But Kerry’s knocked out both options 1 and 2, which leaves us at 3. The good news is he’s got a plan: Young people don’t believe that Social Security will be there for them. I intend to take the politics out of how we are going to guarantee that Social Security is sound into the future. And that requires leadership. Right. And leadership and two bucks will buy you a cup of coffee.

Tons of camera types and styles are covered at ACP including several Lomo, Leica, and Rollei styled camera.

Yes, it’s a public bookmark.

A little more focused this week to start, then I’ll devolve into bitter rancor.

I believe that the party-line excuses (on both sides) for economies shifting is B.S. and I don’t know if I even buy the ‘indicators’ that have been agreed upon. I do know that under W, in August of last year, the U.S. hit a new 12 month record for bankruptcies and in July of this year forclosures hit a new record high=, so I’m not buying the adminstration’s line of soylent green on the state of the economy and W’s contribution to said economy. My current theory on the swings of economy boils down to a fairly Occam-ic ideal: products sell.

I know it sounds simple, but that’s why it works. Expanding on Jank’s ideas from Wednesday, the swings of local economies are based on the popularities of products, i.e. Detroit and the auto industry, San Jose and computer chips, Austin and the internet, etc. Innovation is a throttle for economy and the best place for government to support the economy is to step up support for projects that are difficult to fund privately, but show great promise for future business. This is reflected in several DARPA projects (the whadda-ya-call-it…internet), military funding (how many missles and planes sold to other countries?) and NASA research (TANG!). That’s one of the reasons why it bothers me that the Bush administration is continuing their fight against stem cell research.

Biomedical research is a potential goldmine for new product and the bans on funding for stem cell research reinforced by the First Lady are forcing this important research into other countries who will reap the financial rewards for radical new treatments.

…more than 100 new cell lines have been created worldwide since the president’s decision—some with new techniques that may make them more scientifically useful—and could be studied under more open rules. An exact count is not possible because private funding means much of the work is done without public scrutiny. …

All that comes across more cold and calculating than I really feel, but between the heart-rending needs of saving/improving human lives and the financial benefits that are associated, this is just more potential for great things to happen squandered by a president playing into the pocket of the religious right.

(The Oly Gold, that is):

(For the record, if the cat’s orange, that’s suspiciously like my cat. But our couch doesn’t have buttons.)

62 mile (Yes, mile as in real measure of distance, 1,000 steps [a step being left/right in the Roman tradition instead of just left or right] give or take, not some freaky unit of measure arbitrarily decided by the circumference of the earth) in diamater ant colony has been found under Melbourne, Australia.

A couple of interesting knock-on effects – 1. The headline in Yahoo was, I kid you not, Giant mutant ant colony found in Australia. Which is slightly misleading. The colony is giant, not the ants. And the ants are Argentinean aliens, as opposed to mutant Australian arthropods. – wait, I read the article, and they are mutants. But you’ve got to admit that’s an admirable attempt at alliteration (The link’s to an Aussie anti-war columnist firing back over being called a “doddering daiquiri diplomats” – posted not so much for content as for style – I appreciated “Our profiles may be podgy, our prostates prominent, but our penchant for the profound persists.”)
2. When googling to make sure I had the right quote, I found the Language Log which is interesting in its own right.
3. Why not genetically engineer ants like this to, say build subway tunnels? That’d be cool…