Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in David Fiske's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, August 9th, 2009
4:02 pm	On health care and Rachel Maddow I don't know if it is the fact that she's got video on her side (most likely), or that she's just the person who has most consistently exposed the BS that is opposition to health care reform in the US, but Racel Maddow is hitting her stride, just like Olberman did when he started his special comments, so long ago... Go Rachel! In no particular order: Exhibit 1 Exhibit 2 Exhibit 3 (WELL worth clicking to) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
11:11 pm	Monetizing a wedding entrance Cool story, even cooler video... (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
11:16 pm	Daily Show on health care The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Drag Me to Health - Universal Health Care www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
8:13 am	Roubini - Not clear yet Ouch! This is painful reading.... The June employment report suggests that the alleged ‘green shoots’ are mostly yellow weeds that may eventually turn into brown manure. The employment report shows that conditions in the labor market continue to be extremely weak, with job losses in June of over 460,000. With the current rate of job losses, it is very clear that the unemployment rate could reach 10 percent by later this summer, around August or September, and will be closer to 10.5 percent if not 11 percent by year-end. I expect the unemployment rate is going to peak at around 11 percent at some point in 2010, well above historical standards for even severe recessions. I wouldn't say it gets better from there, but it does go on.... (Comment on this)
Monday, May 11th, 2009
8:48 am	Great video I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
12:46 pm	David vs Goliath and unconventional strategies A great read on unconventional strategies. Covers Basketball, military history, war games and human nature. Well worth the read. Here's how it starts: When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
1:48 pm	Susan Boyle WOW Quite the surprise, eh? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
4:39 pm	Moka Meltdown Whoops! I forgot my Bialetti Moka on the burning stove this morning. I only remembered it when the handle fell off and made a noise from the kitchen. Oops! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
1:00 am	What should happen to women who have illegal abortions? Sad, so sad, but equally brilliant. Source (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
10:02 am	The last hours of the Bush administration Oh my - it has finally come. These last 8 years have been extremely hard for me as an American (to say nothing of the ups and downs in my personal life, but that's a post for another time). President Bush has sullied the name of America in ways that I never thought could happen, 8 years ago. Now, almost nothing shocks me. I have no outrage left. But today is Barack Obama's inauguration day! It still amazes me that he will be our next president, still brings a tear to my eye. The hopes that he embodies and inspires have been missing from my view of America for so long that this is like an acid flashback to when I was young and naive, when I actually believed that great things were possible in my country. Obama will have some difficult conditions to address, but he has the support of the congress and the people straight away. Throughout the transition period he has shown that to him bipartisanship is substantive. Some things I hope he'll accomplish, or at least work toward: 1 - Close Guantanamo Bay prison camps. 2 - Open dialogue with Iran. 3 - Open dialogue with Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza. 4 - Force Israel to lift blockade of Gaza. America is the only country that can do this. 5 - Nationalise some banks. We've seen that simply giving them money isn't working, so time to wipe out the shareholders and the current management, and bring some real change. 6 - Prosecute George Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes. No one is above the law. Will he even touch the Israel issue? I strongly believe that the only way to attain peace in the middle east is by bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (pre-1967 borders anyone?), first of all. And to win the war on terror we need to have the trust and cooperation of the Arab and Islamic countries of the region. Blindly standing besides Israel because they are "our strongest ally" is not helping America to achieve its strategic goals. How many of these will Obama accomplish? What other challenges will be thrust upon his shoulders? What flaws will time uncover in the man? Will he be assassinated? Will the hopes that he inspires outlive his term in office? In just a few hours we will have President Obama. I am ready! YES! (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
2:20 pm	Happy New Year 2008 is over. Another year passed, another set of experiences to pack away with mothballs and maybe a few bits of lavender so that when we re-open them later they won't smell too badly. Forgive the downbeat mood - 2009 will be a hard year, full of transitions. I have no shortage of dread for the coming year, but a little hope too; albeit the former is much greater than the latter. I just got back from 2 weeks in Thailand, which was marvelous. My body was literally crying for me to leave London; I was sick from the moment I left the apartment through my first 4 days in Bangkok. Thankfully my hotel was quite nice, and the weather complied with my wishes for warmth and sun. Now back to the grindstone of life. Happy New Year. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 20th, 2008
2:43 am	Genetic engineering OMFG - seriously - this is wild! they’re either going to be specially bonded besties, or bitter mortal enemies over this drama. Amazing. I hope it is the former, because it is certainly no the latter's fault for trying... (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
10:12 pm	Baltic Dry Index This is bad news - one of the best leading indicators is HAMMERED: Via Big Picture, and I have to say, the BDI was first mentioned to me by Mish. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:29 am	The Real John McCain? Colbert hits the nail on the head... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
8:14 pm	Why I read Andrew Sullivan Encapsulated in this post. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
11:58 am	PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Wikipedia): PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events that threatened or caused grave physical harm. The recent story of Cindy McCain's comments about PTSD and her husband's resistance to it was something I found rather interesting. Here's the telling section of the interview: Q: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you - or is it a part of history? McCAIN: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that’s in the past. Certainly it’s a part of who he is, but he doesn’t dwell on it. It’s not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is. Q: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night? McCAIN: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing. Keith Olbermann took issue with this and interviewed Jon Soltz of votevets.org, and mentioned something that got me thinking about my own experiences post-9/11. He mentioned the citizens of New York City and how diagnosis of PTSD skyrocketed in the wake of 9/11. I lived in an apartment on the 31st floor of a building in Chicago at the time, where sounds of the city floated up regularly. Just below the window was La Salle Street, a major avenue on the north side of the city. Cars honking their horns, trucks passing by, the slow grown of the CTA buses during rush-hour - they all combined to form the din of Chicago. These sounds were frequently augmented by the roar of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances careening up and down this 4-lane road. Before 9/11 this was a regular thing of which I thought nothing. After 9/11, I remember a feeling of fear/terror/dread when those sirens came by. What building had blown up? What city had been attacked? What anthrax scare was just released? At night, the sound would wake me up, as though my ears were specially tuned to this frequency as a mother is to her infant's cries. Consciously I knew none of these terrible things were even remotely likely, but still, as the police cars careened past and the fire trucks rumbled down La Salle, my mind's first thought was to the very worst of all situations. I never really talked about this with anyone. Maybe I was ashamed to have these reactions? I don't know. These feelings stayed with me for several months, maybe even a year after 9/11. But it was always just one sound that triggered these thoughts - the sound of sirens. I can't even imagine how many such triggers there are for vets returning from combat. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
10:53 pm	More on McCain A while ago I came across this correspondence between Obama and McCain, and it sort of made my jaw drop - the open hostility from Old McPOW. Then I saw this long article in Rolling Stone examining his life, growing up a spoiled brat child of high ranking military commanders, getting into various academies through family connections, crashing numerous planes, life as a POW, and then a migration to politics. Maybe it was a good thing Bush beat him in 2000? The long article begins: At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam. McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door. There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met." On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe. "I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran." "Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively. "It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says. "Why? Where are you going to, John?" "Oh, I'm going to Rio." "What the hell are you going to Rio for?" McCain, a married father of three, shrugs. "I got a better chance of getting laid." Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in." (Comment on this)
5:40 pm	McCain's foul mouth, bad mood Amazing video. Really classy. (Comment on this)
5:32 pm	Palin and Sessionists Nice video: (Comment on this)
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
10:09 pm	Roger Ebert on the Palin-Biden debate An alternative perspective on the debate from Roger Ebert. Emphasis mine. One thing a critic of a live performance is sensitive to is any unanticipated moment. There was a famous moment at the National Theater in London when an actor pulled out an automatic pencil to make some notes. It contained no lead. He should have pretended it did. Instead, he said, "There is no lead in my pencil." Then, fatally, he paused to listen to what he had said, and the audience roared with laughter when they were certainly not intended to. A very different sort of unanticipated moment took place during the debate. Biden said, "I know what it's like to be a single parent raising two children." He did not know if his sons would survive the auto accident that took his wife and daughter. For a moment, he lost his composure. Looking at the moment again here I believe, as I did at the time, that it was genuine emotion, and not stagecraft. It could not have been anticipated by Palin. The next camera angle was above and behind her. She paused. The silence seemed to anticipate words of sympathy and identification from her. But Biden had ended in a sentence using the word "change," and her response, reflecting no emotion at all, cued off that word and became a talking point about McCain. This felt to me, at worst, insensitive and callous. At best, that she had not fully heard Biden. In either event, her response troubled me. If a man had responded in that way to such a statement from a women, he would be called a heartless brute. (Comment on this)