Do your competitive media campaigns target the right audience? Are you tracking and evaluating media coverage or using social media sites and the Internet to their full advantage? In this course, instructors discuss these topics and more.

Learn how to develop a communication strategy, coordinate and prepare for interviews, deal with the media hog and the media mouse, and use social media sites to your advantage. Students work with each other and our experienced faculty, discussing best practices and professional strategies for handling internal and external challenges.

Our Advanced Media Relations course is geared toward practicing public relations professionals with at least three years' experience.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

Approved for 0.7 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: DC Bar Conference Center, 1101 K Street NW, Suite 200 (12th and K Streets NW), Washington, DC (McPherson Square station)

This is an elective course for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see AdvancedMediaRelations.com

Designed for attorneys, advocates, lobbyists, and anyone who must persuade others using the written word.

Do you suffer from "writer's block" when you are asked to draft a one-page document, such as a position paper, in a clear, cogent, yet persuasive manner? If your answer is "yes", this one-day program is for you. Our instructors will give you a practical framework for persuasive writing and specific strategies for writing persuasive documents through instruction and hands-on exercises.

This program will help you better write any document where you must persuade others.

April 16, 2010, 9 am to 4 pm

Approved for .6 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: DC Bar Conference Center, 1101 K Street NW, Suite 200 (12th and K Streets NW), Washington, DC (McPherson Square Metro station)

This is an elective course for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including secure online registration, see WritingToPersuade.com

This definition is from our Pocket Dictionary of Legislative Terms. Perfect reference tool of Congressional jargon and procedural terms. Learn how to translate words that are used every day on Capitol Hill. 4 x 9 inches, 16 pages The cover and inside pages of this booklet can be customized with your logo and information. For more information, see our Booklets page. The Pocket Dictionary is based on the Congressional Deskbook, by Michael Koempel and Judy Schneider.

TheCapitol.Net offers training and a Certificate Program in Congressional Operations and Federal Budgeting.

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• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, April 15, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, April 16, 2010
• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• SnowJob: Revising the Non-Farm Payrolls Report - "It appears as though the concerns expressed by the Administration about the snow storms and their impact on lost employment was overdone, if not misplaced. The market is pleasantly surprised with this -36,000 jobs number, since the expectations had been calibrated lower so effectively.
  
  In fairness to the Obama Administration, they are only doing what Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I* had been doing right along with almost every statistic that they have issued. It's called 'perception management.' Greece used one method of accounting management in shaping the numbers, and the US uses its own approach to what is essentially a similar problem.
  . . .
  Or perhaps the US economy and its monetary system are an increasingly untenable Ponzi scheme, the mother of frauds."
• You Think Joe Stiglitz is Funny? NYT is funny, too! - "I accept, as Angus did before, that debt might be okay if we were investing it. But we are not. We are using debt to fund pet projects that have no purpose other than re-electing Senators, or paying to put more people on the public employment roles so they will reliably vote Democrat.
  
  Third, the dude actually says, 'According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places.' That's not a school of thought, that's accounting physics. Further, if either the Eurozone or Chinese get their act together, our complacency ('sure we suck, but they suck worse! Eat that pie!') will be hammered."
• Gendercide - "Most people know China and northern India have unnaturally large numbers of boys. But few appreciate how bad the problem is, or that it is rising. In China the imbalance between the sexes was 108 boys to 100 girls for the generation born in the late 1980s; for the generation of the early 2000s, it was 124 to 100. In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is worst in China but has spread far beyond. Other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, former communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of America’s population (Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, for example): all these have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on almost every continent. It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike.
  
  Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones. And China’s one-child policy can only be part of the problem, given that so many other countries are affected.
  . . .
  And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life--using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said 'women hold up half the sky.' The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down."
• Return of the natives: Beneath the idealism and political correctness of Avatar, in the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday, lie brutal racist undertones. - "The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy."
• Alice In Wonderland - "Johnny Depp did not work well in this role and the character he played came off as your creepy Uncle Harold rather than the whimsical character that defines the role of the Mad Hatter and would have worked and been better suited here."
• California Doing a Rendition of the Housing Industry on the Budget – $20 Billion Budget Deficit and Massive Amount of Distress Inventory. How Banks Raided the U.S. Treasury with the aid of the Federal Reserve and have Damaged Housing Further. - "The banking system has captured our government and frustration is boiling over. Yet those in the housing and banking industry seem complacent and even self congratulatory that we 'have avoided Great Depression 2.0.' Really? Now we’re taking advice from the same group of cronies that led the economy off the financial cliff. And the most troubling thing is we are at the height of unemployment even though the headline rate seems to have steadied out. California’s unemployment rate still continues to move upward hitting 12.5 percent. Yet all is well in delusional banking world since their idea of a solution is simply not foreclosing. What is even worse, these banking crooks are now offering fire sale deals to other banks and hedge fund investors! I’ve contacted a few banks about short sales and in many cases, preference is being given to “all cash” investors. Glad those bailouts are supporting the crony banking system.
  . . .
  I’ve talked with colleagues who are Republicans and Democrats and both are absolutely appalled by what is going on with Wall Street and the housing industry. They have transformed our economy into one giant casino and houses are now life sized Monopoly tokens that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange with no regard to local economies. Moral hazard applies to the masses yet those rules don’t apply to the plutocracy that sits on Wall Street."
• Housing: A Tale of Boom and Bust and a Puzzle - "That is happening in many areas - I've heard a number of stories of homeowners staying in their homes and not paying their mortgage, and the banks not foreclosing - and, at the same time, there is intense competition for any home that comes on the market.
  
  This is a real mystery right now.
  . . .To be clear, I have my own views why the lenders are not foreclosing. Part of it is policy - it is government policy to restrict supply and boost demand to support asset prices and limit the losses for the banks. Part of it is inadequate staffing. Another reason is the lenders are making an effort to find alternatives to foreclosure (modifications, short sales, deed-in-lieu). Of course a majority of modifications will eventually redefault, but that still restricts supply for now. It isn't one reason - and the real puzzle is when (and how many) distressed sales will hit the market."
• Human Terrain Mapping - "It’s about time the Afghans get to enjoy the sight of foreign women.
  
  With rifles."
• The fable of Emanuel the Great - "From too many years of covering politics, I have come to believe as Axiom One that the absolute worst advice politicians ever receive comes from journalists who fancy themselves great campaign strategists."
• Peggy, Clytie, Ethel: 1926 - "June 21, 1926. Washington, D.C. 'Peggy Walsh, Clytie Collier and Ethel Barrymore Colt.' National Photo Company glass negative." (photo)
• Building a Better Teacher - "Lemov, for his part, finds hope in what he has already accomplished. The day that I watched Bellucci’s math class, Lemov sat next to me, beaming. He was still smiling an hour later, when we walked out of the school together to his car. ''You could change the world with a first-year teacher like that, he said."
• Secret millionaire donates fortune to Lake Forest College - "Like many people who lived through the Great Depression, Grace Groner was exceptionally restrained with her money.
  
  She got her clothes from rummage sales. She walked everywhere rather than buy a car. And her one-bedroom house in Lake Forest held little more than a few plain pieces of furniture, some mismatched dishes and a hulking TV set that appeared left over from the Johnson administration.
  
  Her one splurge was a small scholarship program she had created for Lake Forest College, her alma mater. She planned to contribute more upon her death, and when she passed away in January, at the age of 100, her attorney informed the college president what that gift added up to."
• More on Wind - "Any traditional capacity (fossil fuel, nuclear) except perhaps gas turbines takes on the order of a day or more to start up -- if you don’t take that long, the thermal stresses alone will blow the whole place up. During the whole startup and shutdown, and through any 'standby' time, the plant is burning fuel. Since we don’t have a good wind energy storage system, some percentage of wind capacity must be backed up with hot standby, because it can disappear in an instant. We are learning now, contrary to earlier assumptions, that wind speeds can be correlated pretty highly over wide geographies, meaning that spreading the wind turbines out does not necessarily do a lot to reduce the standby needs. And since plant startups take time, even gas turbines take some time to get running, the percentage of wind power that required hot backup is pretty high...."
• Why I Ban Laptops From the Classroom - "Too many students with laptops were distracting others around them, including one group viewing a soccer tournament during a lecture. The complaints about this ban never cease....
  . . .
  The next obstacle to overcome is text messaging during class."
• US Government Working With Pharma Companies To Raise Drug Prices In Other Countries - "A series of stories from Jamie Love at KEI highlight the troubling cozy relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the US government in trying to raise drug prices in other countries -- which very likely will come at the expense of the health of citizens in those countries."
• Roberts: Scene at State of Union 'very troubling' - " U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address was "very troubling" and that the annual speech to Congress has 'degenerated into a political pep rally.'
  
  Responding to a University of Alabama law student's question about the Senate's method of confirming justices, Roberts said senators improperly try to make political points by asking questions they know nominees can't answer because of judicial ethics rules.
  . . .
  Justice Antonin Scalia once said he no longer goes to the annual speech because the justices "sit there like bumps on a log" in an otherwise highly partisan atmosphere."

• Cop’s book defies stereotypes - "Martin Preib is a Chicago cop. And he's a Chicago writer.
  
  You hear that a cop has written a book, and there's a temptation, grounded in stereotype, to think of stock characters: a tough guy, sultry women, Outfit bagmen with plenty of attitude and, of course, gunplay.
  
  But his book, 'The Wagon and Other Stories From the City' (University of Chicago Press, $20) isn't pulp fiction."
• Detroit school board leader can’t write - "A product of Detroit Public Schools now leads the school board that’s trying to raise worst-in-the-nation literacy scores. Otis Mathis can’t write, reveals Detroit News columnist Laura Berman. The board president’s e-mails are notoriously garbled:"
• Friday's Three Burning Legal Questions - "1) Question: I'm an adult male, and recently I've been thinking about getting circumcised. I saw an ad on Craigslist by some dude who says he can do it for me out of a mini-operating room in his home. He tells me he's a doctor. Should I go for it?"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Succinylcholine, A Perfect Poison, Makes Appearance in the Dubai Killing - "According to Dubai authorities, and as reported by ABC News, Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was given a shot of succinylcholine prior to other grossly things done to his body on the fateful (for him) day of January 19, 2010. And since your humble correspondent is an anesthesiologist by day, and by call at night, let me tell you why succinylcholine is such a perfect murder weapon.
  
  The best poisons usually have three things in common: small effective dose, also called Median Lethal Dose (or LD50), ease of administration, and rapid and definitive action. The fourth characteristic, the difficulty in detection by a forensics team is a big premium that most poisons don't posses. Most poisons, that is, except succinylcholine and maybe a few others."
• The Great Burger Battle - "Sports bore me but I can’t get enough of the great burger battle. McDonald’s reported sales increases of 4.8 last month. Most of the increases are overseas but it is no surprise that its domestic sales are solid as can be.
  
  Their new coffees, which now include frozen drinks, are a close competitor to Starbucks, and in buying them you don’t have to endure a lecture about how you are doing your part to save the planet.
  
  For breakfast, you can get a traditional biscuit or croissant with sausage or move into the new line that includes a fruit parfait for a buck (how is this possible?) or an apple-walnut salad. This stuff is amazing.
  
  And I would compare their Angus burger next to any hamburger in a fancy restaurant that costs twice as much.
  
  This is a company that knows how to market, how to adapt, how to change. And in my town, the McDonald’s is the happiest place around. They offer wi-fi and smiling employees who are quick with a quip and a smile. The place is full of energy and life and is teeming with the sense of progress.
  . . .
  It always amazes me how demanding Americans can be toward private enterprise. Everything must be 100% correct or the customer flips out. But put these same people in line at the post office or the customs line at the airport and they become complacent slaves doing everything they are told. They don’t even complain about it.
  
  It’s as if our expectations are different and we are okay with that. We expect the government to be slow, rude, abusive, unreasonable, and unresponsive and we adapt ourselves to that and figure that this is what is necessary for security or the general welfare or whatever. We let them have our money and our lives and call it a day."

• Why Google Android Favoritism Isn’t Punishing Consumers and Partners - "Mark rightly points out that the coolest new Android apps are appearing on handsets with newer builds of Android first -- and sometimes exclusively. Google Maps Navigation debuted on the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 and Google Buzz is supported on 2.x as well. But I ask myself: if I were Google and I wanted to rock out a new app and build the biggest buzz, I’d get it on the heartiest hardware first so it really shines from a performance perspective. I’d also pair it with hardware designed to show it off -- the Droid car dock morphs what’s essentially a software product into a look-alike, standalone GPS device. That simple dock, designed specifically for the Droid, takes the Google software solution and transforms the experience. Don’t think so? Imagine if Google debuted the software on the original G1. The impact would be muted without a dock and on less capable hardware. Instead, Google chose the right hardware combination to show it off and the stock value of some GPS makers dropped 20%.
  . . .
  If you have to 'blame' someone, choose either Motorola who made the phone or Verizon who decided to sell the phone. All Google does for this phone is provide versions of it’s mobile platform to the phone maker. If I had to pick on someone in this specific case, it would be Motorola -- the Devour runs Motorola’s custom interface called MotoBlur and Motorola doesn’t offer that UI on anything higher than Android 1.6. There’s your likely culprit in this case, which has nothing to do with Google’s perceived favoritism for current Android versions."
• Dreaded Words for One in Love - "It happened to me back when I was in the marriage market. And perhaps it happened to you."
• Two expats master the Cantonese language - "The Chinese language is notoriously complex. There are the tones, the accents, and not to mention the writing! China and Singapore use simplified Chinese characters, while Hong Kong and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese characters.
  
  Then there are the different dialects. Mandarin is spoken in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Hong Kong and China’s southern Guangdong Province mainly speak Cantonese.
  
  That being said, there’s few sadder sights than an expat who’s lived in Asia for years and still doesn’t speak the language of his adopted home. CNNgo profiled two Westerners who defy that stereotype in this article: How two gwailos learned to speak perfect Cantonese."
• BS Alert 2! Steve Wozniak (And The Media) Still Spreading Prius UA Obfuscation - "One of my pet gripes about the media and celebrities is the lack of follow-up and accountability. Remember all the hoopla about Steve Wozniak’s Prius with the mysterious electronics glitch that he could manipulate to create UA? My take was that obviously his cruise control had a minor bug that only showed up at over eighty mph. Woz readily admitted that he could disengage it with a tap on the brakes. Well, thanks to his celebrity status and the coverage, the story ended with Toyota agreeing to take his Prius for a week to test it thoroughly. So what happened?
  . . .
  Sounds like he’s got it all figured out. Toyota just needs to add a Reboot button on the dash. Meanwhile, Wozniak said he’ll continue to drive his Prius, and trusts its safety, and won’t buy another car.
  
  My guess is that he never handed it over to Toyota, or he did and they told him something he didn’t want to hear or repeat."
• Energizer Battery Charger Hides Trojan For 3 Years - "Apparently the Energizer DUO USB Battery Charger has been carrying around a nasty little trojan that can wreak havoc on your system. CERT has issued a warning...
  . . .
  That’s right, something as simple as plugging in your USB battery charger could give someone complete control over your system."

Get expert guidance on writing speeches and preparing oral presentations. This course shows you how to prepare for and draft an effective speech, focusing on organization, sequence, support and style. Attendees also get tips and guidance from a professional speechwriter.

When: March 12, 2010, 8:30 am - 4 pm

Approved for 0.6 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: DC Bar Conference Center, 1101 K Street NW, Suite 200 (12th and K Streets NW) in Washington, DC

This is an required course for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see PreparingSpeeches.com

A free download of our Pocket Constitution is available on Scribd.

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• Single copies of this Pocket Constitution are available at no charge by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with first class postage for two (2) ounces to: TheCapitol.Net, Pocket Constitution, PO Box 25706, Alexandria, VA 22313-5706. Requests with insufficient postage will be returned or destroyed. Only 1 copy per request.
  
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Congressional decision-making is driven by politics, policy and process. In this engaging workshop, Washington-based experts discuss these 3 P's and help you understand the complete policy-making process.

You’ll get a solid understanding of:

• Congressional operations and the legislative process
  
• How public and foreign policy become law
  
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• Congressional budgeting today
  
• The role of OMB in the legislative process
  
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• How the media covers the Hill
  
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• How members of Congress advance their legislative, public policy and political agendas
  
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Attend a congressional hearing and see the process in action.

June 9-11, 2010, 8:30 am - 4 pm all three days.

Approved for 1.7 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: In Washington, DC

This is a required course for the Certificate in Congressional Operations and for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see CapitolHillWorkshop.com

Amendment XXVII.

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

More

• Twenty-seventh Amendment - Wikipedia
• Twenty-seventh Amendment - Findlaw

A free download of our Pocket Constitution is available on Scribd.

Get expert guidance on writing speeches and preparing oral presentations. This course shows you how to prepare for and draft an effective speech, focusing on organization, sequence, support and style. Attendees also get tips and guidance from a professional speechwriter.

When: March 12, 2010, 8:30 am - 4 pm

Approved for 0.6 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: DC Bar Conference Center, 1101 K Street NW, Suite 200 (12th and K Streets NW) in Washington, DC

This is an required course for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see PreparingSpeeches.com

• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing for Government and Business: Critical Thinking and Writing, April 15, 2010
• Word Workshop: Writing to Persuade: Hone Your Persuasive Writing Skills, April 16, 2010
• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• The Philosophical Cow - "Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility? In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows.
  
  Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence? Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows? If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?
  
  I think these questions are important both for thinking about cows and animal rights and for human beings. Tyler has thought a lot about these issues (e.g. here, here and elsewhere). Some people, however, think that cow philosophy is just a bunch of bull."
• Little-used ‘Staple-and-bind’ parliamentary procedure will allow Democrats to pass health bill with just nine votes in House, three in Senate - "Democrat insiders say that an obscure parliamentary procedure known as 'Staple-and-Bind' will be used as an alternative to pass a health care overhaul should reconciliation efforts fail. 'Staple-and-bind' refers to the final act of preparing legislation, using an industrial-grade stapler and a three-ring binder, for shipment.
  . . .
  Congressional Democrats have also purchased a Staple Jihad 5000 Nail Gun, the only street-legal stapler capable of binding the massive legislation. The propane-powered stapler can penetrate up to 3,000 8.5″ x 11″ pages, which leaves room for Democrats to nationalize other aspects of medical delivery including dentistry, veterinary medicine and crystal healing stones."
• King Rudy and the gun ban - "In its wisdom, the U.S. Supreme Court finally took up Chicago's ridiculous 27-year-old handgun ban on Tuesday.
  
  Why is it ridiculous? Because only three classes of people are comfortable with handguns in the anti-handgun city:
  
  Cops, criminals and the politically connected.
  
  Mayor Richard Daley sure is upset that the ban might be overturned. But he probably has more armed guards protecting him than the president of Venezuela.
  
  Chicago aldermen are allowed to carry handguns. I wanted to ask the chairman of the City Council's police committee about those gun-toting aldermen. But there was no chairman. The last one just resigned after pleading guilty to federal bribery charges, so he wasn't around.
  
  If the Supreme Court really wanted to know why some folks in Chicago have guns and others don't, they should have called an expert witness:
  
  Rudy Acosta, the former 'gangsta' rap impresario, or King Rudy, as he likes to be known."
• What Journalists Like: #40 the grumpy old reporter - "He shuns technology. When he talks about lead, he’s not talking about a journalist’s first graph. He still remembers typesetting. Hell, he still uses a rolodex. While journalists born after the Carter administration click away on their Blackberries and iPhones, the entire newsroom can hear the screeching noise coming from the grumpy old reporter’s cassette tape recorder as he plays back an interview. Most journalists have never even owned a cassette tape before. The grumpy old reporter still refers blackberries as a fruit and couldn’t use an iPhone if his life depended on it."
• I’ve Been Given a Reason to Vote Republican - "Michael Moore Says He’s Not Coming Back to Arizona Until State 'Elects a Democrat as Senator'"
• Cyberwar Or Moral Panic? Beware Of Ex-Politicians Screaming About Cyberthreats - "For years and years we've been hearing about the supposed threats of 'cyberwar' and 'cyberterrosism.' For nearly a decade we've questioned whether this was all hype, and the story hasn't changed. Sure, there are hackers and those who look to break into systems, but the real risks and overall threats still seem fairly minimal. But that's not enough for some people. Wired's Ryan Singel has a long, but excellent look at how former director of national intelligence (now consultant) Michael McConnell appears to be trying to build up a giant moral panic about this ill-defined threat, with the goal of basically ripping out the guts of today's internet to recreate it with almost no privacy at all."
• Good Grief! - "Unless you’re an idiot -- like me -- if you own a home, you probably should have grieved your property taxes over the last couple of years, maybe even more than once. It’s almost a sure thing that your municipality has been assessing your home at more than what it’s worth -- and that you’ve been paying your taxes on that inflated value. (Many tax bills, like mine, include the value at which the municipality is carrying your property.)"
• The Housing Metrics of Southern California – Seasonal Home Sales, Inflation Adjusted Home Prices, Tens of Thousands Living Rent Free, and the Japanese Experience. - "People are realizing the problems in the housing market are simply a bigger reflection of the lingering issues in the overall economy. There have now been a few stories comparing California with the issues being experienced in troubled Greece. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon echoed his concerns regarding California. The markets seem to underestimate how profound the issues are in the California economy. What is more troubling is California is merely a reflection of other states. The Legislative Analyst Office projects deficits deep into 2014 and each year we experience a deficit will require higher taxes or deeper cuts. That is why focusing on jobs is such an important barometer for the improvement of the overall economy. Without one net added job in California people are already counting the next housing boom. The numbers simply do not reflect this assumption.
  . . .
  The above tells you a lot. While the median home price in Southern California is down by 46 percent from the peak the typical monthly mortgage payment is down 52 percent from the peak. People are committing to half the monthly payment amount and this has more to do with the health of the economy. I know many would love to have a $1,170 monthly mortgage for a place in Southern California."
• State polls show gathering storm - "Congress, it turns out, isn’t the only institution held in low esteem by voters this year.
  
  According to a POLITICO review of publicly available polling data, numerous state legislatures are also bottoming out, showing off-the-charts disapproval ratings accompanied by stunning levels of voter cynicism.
  
  It all adds up to a toxic election-year brew for legislators inside and outside Washington."
• One young American still wants to serve in the Marines - "Jordan Blashek, Princeton '09, turned down a chance to go to med school and he joined the Marines, beginning at OCS at Quantico, for at least four years. He explains why."
• Renters Priced Out of Homes In Heavily Planned Montgomery County (MD) - "The Washington Post reports on a new study by a tenant advocacy group in Montgomery County, Maryland arguing that renters are being priced out of homes. The problem is likely to get worse as the economy picks up, demand for housing increases, and the supply can't keep up with demand."
• Another Journalist-Stenographer Makes a Lame Attempt to Tell the Truth About Legal Hiring - "The law schools lie about how much their students make so they themselves can make more money. And then they feed those false, inflated salary and employment numbers to the NALP to hide the true source of the numbers--the law schools themselves.
  
  This is a whitewash of false stats. Why do you so called journalists never question this aspect of these stats?"
• FORTHCOMING WORKS BY DR. BOLI. - "In 2002, a revolutionary piece of legislation completely changed the face of accounting in the United States. Yet, incredibly, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act aimed specifically at children under the age of twelve. Now, at last, Dr. Boli rectifies this glaring omission in the publishing world. A Child’s Picture Book of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is aimed at children who have exhausted the resources of the more general accounting picture-books and wish to have specific information about Sarbanes-Oxley in a visual form. Enchanting illustrations bring auditor independence, corporate responsibility, and enhanced financial disclosures to vivid life."
• A History of the California Housing Gold Rush – The Financial Expansion of California Real Estate from 1850 to 2010. - "I decided to dig up some old Census data to show how dramatically housing has shifted over the years. Many in the housing industry assume that real estate has always been the way it currently is but forgetting about history can lead many into challenging situations. In 1910 and 1920 the majority of Americans rented their home. Of the 20 million dwellings in 1920 only 4 million were mortgaged. Today, the majority of American households own a home. The homeownership rate has fallen since the crisis started."
• Get up earlier, Germans tell Greeks - "Here, people work until they are 67 and there is no 14th-month salary for civil servants. Here, nobody needs to pay a €1,000 bribe to get a hospital bed in time.
  
  Our petrol stations have cash registers, taxi drivers give receipts and farmers don't swindle EU subsidies with millions of non-existent olive trees.
  
  Germany also has high debts but we can settle them. That's because we get up early and work all day."
• Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself - "Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable: that is a lesson that the convinced, indeed militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins, has recently learned. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that he has learned it the hard way, for what he has suffered hardly compares with, say, what foreign communists suffered when, exiling themselves to Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, they learnt the hard way that barbarism did not spring mainly, let alone only, from the profit motive; but he has nevertheless learned it by unpleasant experience.
  
  He ran a website for people of like mind, but noticed that many of the comments that appeared on it were beside the point, either mere gossip or insult. So he announced that he was going to exercise a little control over what appeared on it - as was his right since it was, after all, his site. Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.
  
  The torrent of vile abuse that he received after his announcement took him aback. Its vehemence was shocking; someone called him ‘a suppurating rat’s rectum.’
  . . .
  The insults and abuse did not come from uneducated people. This is not surprising, really, because uneducated people are unlikely to care very much what George Bernard Shaw thought of the germ theory of disease; most of them have other, more practical things to think about. You have to have read Bernard Shaw to care, and these days at least, I think only university types are likely to do that.
  
  Indeed, much of the abuse, even the vilest, came from university professors. Almost to a man (or woman), they said that what I had written was so outrageous, so ill-considered and ill-motivated, that it was not worth the trouble of refutation. On the other hand, they thought its author was worth insulting, if their practice was anything to go by. I didn’t know whether I -- a mere scribbler -- should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).
  
  What struck me most about these missives is the sheer amount of hatred that they contained. It was not disdain or even contempt, but hatred.
  . . .
  With the coming of the internet, the tone of the criticism changed. It became shriller, more personal, more hate-filled. It wasn’t just that I had made a mistake, I must be an evil person, probably in the pay of some disreputable organisation or other. (There are very few of us who are not in the pay of someone, and no one is entirely reputable.)
  . . .
  The question now arises as to whether it is a good thing that people should be able now so easily to express their rage, irritation, frustration and hatred. Here, I think, we come to a disagreement between those of classical, and those of romantic, disposition.
  
  According to the latter, self-expression is a good in itself, irrespective of what is expressed. Indeed, such people are likely to believe that any sentiment that does not find its outward expression will turn inward and poison the person who has not been able to express it. Better to strangle a new-born babe and all that.
  
  The person of more classical disposition does not believe this. On the contrary, he believes that there are some things that are much better not expressed at all. He counterbalances his belief in the value of freedom of opinion with that in the value of freedom from opinion. He believes that rage will not decrease with its habitual expression, but rather increase with it."
• Missouri Budget Overstates Revenues By Up To $1 billion; Indiana Revenue Falls Short; Budget Battles In Washington; Budget Gaps In Kansas - "Budget news from state after state is grim. When will this matter? No one knows but service cutbacks are coming, as are huge layoffs.
  . . .
  In case you missed it, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie laid it on the line in a speech to about 200 mayors at the New Jersey League of Municipalities.
  
  Chris Christie Actions
  
  * He froze aid to schools
  * Challenged school boards.
  * Wants to change arbitration rules for public workers
  * Requests public-private salary and benefits parity
  * Demands pension reform
  * Property tax hikes not an option
  * Wants to get rid of programs like COAH
  * Is not thinking about the next election
  . . .
  Reckless government spending, not a recession is what caused this mess. The recession just made the problem noticeable sooner. Since spending is the problem, higher taxes cannot be the solution. Higher taxes just encourage more reckless spending."

• Saint Cesar of Delano - "When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died--as he had so often portrayed himself in life--as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had 5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers--the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.
  . . .
  I remember sitting in bad traffic on the San Diego Freeway and looking up to see a photograph of Cesar Chavez on a billboard. His eyes were downcast. He balanced a rake and a shovel over his right shoulder. In the upper-­left-­hand corner was the corporate logo of a bitten ­apple."
• The Philosophical Cow - "Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it's the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
  
  If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of cow welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough? Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant?"
• What if High School Ended After 11th (or Even 10th) Grade? - "Efforts to eliminate at least one year of high school for some students have been gaining momentum in recent weeks.
  
  As The Times’s Sam Dillon reported last month, public schools in eight states recently adopted a pilot program, effective next year, that will allow 10th graders in certain schools to test out of high school classes, earn diplomas and advance to community college. (Those states are Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.)"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Your high IQ will kill your startup - "Intelligence is like a knife. If you are intelligent, you are at a clear advantage against people who are not intelligent. But if you are intelligent, and another person is not as intelligent, but the other person is willing to train harder than you, the other person will very quickly overtake you in ability.
  
  People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.
  
  But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.
  
  And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible."
• How to Get People to Respond to Your Ad NOW - "Want customers to take immediate action? Offer something free."
• My Favorite Negative Book Review - "For those who haven't heard, Professor Joseph Weiler is facing criminal charges for publishing a negative book review, and has asked others dig up far more negative reviews so that he may prove this one is nothing out of the ordinary. Steven Landsburg published his nominee here. Here is mine, written by Edward Snyder (University of Chicago) and published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Literature on 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.' Here is the opening paragraph:"
• The Pentagon Shooter - "Naturally, this means the gunman is a Tea Bagger. Why? Well, an utter absence of evidence can't be a bar to leaping to the target conclusion, now can it?
  
  The syllogism on offer is that the gunman was heavily into his illegal weed. Marijuana is a gateway drug to libertarianism, lots of Tea Partiers are libertarian, QED.
  
  Oh, well - in the MSM this guy will either be crazy or a righty. *If* the intrepid researcher has found the same guy than the gunman had a number of Bush-bashing books on his Amazon wish list. That's just more proof he is a disgruntled righty, since so many true believers think Bush was too moderate."
• New Yorkers 'Share a Cab' - "It may be commonplace in Washington, D.C., but in New York City, sharing a cab ride is still a rarity. That's changing with a new one-year pilot program that will allow up to four passengers to share a taxi along three routes in Manhattan for a discounted per-person flat fare of $3 to $4. The shared rides, which will pick up passengers at designated taxi stands and allow them to hop-off anywhere along the route, will only be active during morning rush hours."
• The Great Grocery Smackdown - "Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.
  
  Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food."

• The implications of a money-making Android app - "There's been plenty written about the App Store gold rush, but this is the first rags-to-semi-riches piece I've seen about the Android Market. Edward Kim, creator of the Car Locator app, saw his daily revenue jump from around $100 per day to more than $400 per day when the $3.99 app claimed a featured spot in the Market."
• How cybercriminals invade social networks, companies - "The attacks run the gamut. In just four weeks earlier this year, one band of low-level cyberthieves, known in security circles as the Kneber gang, pilfered 68,000 account logons from 2,411 companies, including user names and passwords for 3,644 Facebook accounts. Active since late 2008, the Kneber gang has probably cracked into "a much higher number" of companies, says Tim Belcher, CTO of security firm NetWitness, which rooted out one of the gang's storage computers.
  . . .
  On the high end, the Koobface worm, initially set loose 19 months ago, continues to increase in sophistication as it spreads through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks. At its peak last August, more than 1 million Koobface-infected PCs inside North American companies were taking instructions from criminal controllers to carry out typical botnet criminal activities, says Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research at security firm Damballa.
  . . .
  Each infected PC in a corporate network represents a potential path to valuable intellectual property, such as customer lists, patents or strategic documents. That's what the attackers who breached Google and 30 other tech, media, defense and financial companies in January were after. Those attacks -- referred to in security circles as Operation Aurora -- very likely were initiated by faked friendly messages sent to specific senior employees at the targeted companies, says George Kurtz, McAfee's chief technology officer.
  
  The attack on the picnicking co-workers at the financial firm illustrates how targeted attacks work. Last fall, attackers somehow got access to Bob's Facebook account, logged into it, grabbed his contact list of 50 to 60 friends and began manually reviewing messages and postings on his profile page. Noting discussions about a recent picnic, the attackers next sent individual messages, purporting to carry a link to picnic photos, to about a dozen of Bob's closest Facebook friends, including Alice. The link in each message led to a malicious executable file, a small computer program.
  
  Upon clicking on the bad file, Alice unknowingly downloaded a rudimentary keystroke logger, a program designed to save everything she typed at her keyboard and, once an hour, send a text file of her keystrokes to a free Gmail account controlled by the attacker. The keystroke logger was of a type that is widely available for free on the Internet.
  
  The attackers reviewed the hourly keystroke reports from Alice's laptop and took note when she logged into a virtual private network account to access her company's network. With her username and password, the attackers logged on to the financial firm's network and roamed around it for two weeks."
• Anatomy of Toyota's Problem Pedal: Mechanic's Diary - "Toyota has recalled millions of cars and trucks--4.2 million to replace floor mats that might impede throttle-pedal travel, and 2.4 million to install a shim behind the electronic pedal assembly. All of the affected pedal assemblies were made by Canadian supplier CTS. Toyota's boffins have documented a problem that can make a few of these pedals slow to return, and maybe even stick down. Problem solved.
  
  But the media, Congress--and personal-injury lawyers--smell the blood in the water. Not to diminish the injuries and a few deaths attributable to these very real mechanical problems, but they're statistically only a very small blip, which may explain why Toyota took so long to identify the issue, especially when it has symptoms similar to the similarly documented floor mat recall.
  . . .
  Bottom line: The system is not only redundant, it's double-redundant. The signal lines from the pedal to the ECM are isolated. The voltages used in the system are DC voltages--any RF voltages introduced into the system, by, say, that microwave oven you have in the passenger seat, would be AC voltages, which the ECM's conditioned inputs would simply ignore. Neither your cellphone nor Johnny's PlayStation have the power to induce much confusion into the system.
  
  These throttle-by-wire systems are very difficult to confuse--they're designed to be robust, and any conceivable failure is engineered to command not an open throttle but an error message.
  
  So what to make of the unintended acceleration cases popping up by the dozens? Not the ones explainable by problem sticky pedals, but the ones documented by people who claim their vehicle ran away on its own, with no input, and resisted all attempts to stop it? Some can probably be explained as an attempt to get rid of a car consumers no longer desire. Some are probably the result of Audi 5000 Syndrome, where drivers simply lost track of their feet and depressed the gas instead of the brake. It's happened to me: Luckily I recognized the phenomenon and corrected before it went bang. Others may not have the presence of mind.
  
  But the possibility that a vehicle could go from idling at a traffic light to terrific, uncalled-for and uncontrollable acceleration because the guy next to you at a traffic light answered his cellphone? Or some ghost in the machine or a hacker caused a software glitch that made your car run away and the brakes suddenly simultaneously fail? Not in the least bit likely. Toyota deserves a better deal than the media and Congress are giving it."
• Taking Memes Seriously - "The hilarious scorn poured on Dawkins and his memes by the Australian philosopher David Stove is entirely deserved:
  
  I try to think of what I, or anyone, could say to him, to help restrain him from going over the edge into absolute madness. But if a man believes that, when he was first taught Pythagoras' Theorem at school, his brain was parasitized by a certain micro-maggot which, 2600 years earlier had parasitized the brain of Pythagoras...what can one say to him, with any hope of effect...One might try saying to Dr. Dawkins: "Look, you are in the phone book, and they print millions of copies of the phone book - right? But now you don't believe, do you, that you are there millions of times over 'in the form of' printed letters, or 'realized in' the chemistry of ink and newsprint?" But I would be so afraid of being told by Dr. Dawkins that he does believe this that I do not think I would have the courage to put the question to him.
  
  No person of even mediocre intellect and disinterested mind can read Dawkins' chapter on memes without feeling these same sensations of contempt. Yet so far was this inauspicious inception of the meme meme from discouraging Dawkins' dutiful Yankee minion, Daniel Dennett (a man of very mediocre intellect, though a mind anything but disinterested), that he mildly reproaches his master for failing to defend the notion of memes in subsequent publications with the full strenuousness that Dennet himself is willing to exert for its vindication.
  
  Several chapters in Darwin's Dangerous Idea are devoted to the defense of memes, marked from beginning to end by that hectoring and digressive style which has become Dennett's calling card, and by which he has earned his status as the clown prince of contemporary academic philosophy. So, in a purported disquisition into a 'science of memetics,' Dennett takes a tangential journey which passes through tales about his grandson, West Side Story, the camouflaged wings of moths, the propensity of scientists to employ acronyms, fictional scenarios of spy-hunting, and a long quote from the physicist Richard Feynman, singing a hymn to the virtues of philosophical materialism. None of this, of course, has the least bearing on Dennett's central issue- or at least what ought to be Dennett's central issue - of whether or not memes actually exist, though, in fairness, these passages do prompt in the reader an admiration for the perseverance of a man who, so evidently stricken with an acute form of Attention Deficit Disorder, still managed to carve out for himself a lucrative career in academe.
  . . .
  Actually, by this point in the book, the image of Dennett's brain as a pile of worm-infested shit will strike the reader as remarkably apropos; it would certainly provide an explanation of sorts for the quality of his writing. Nonetheless, one would like to point out - again, quite wearily - that larvae and parasites are things which can be observed and measured, and that if the author wants us to believe that memes are such kinds of entities, possessing the same kinds of properties, then, for God's sake, show them to us!"

Nina Paley alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality, and why it's so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are "original" usually aren't very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another -- a point that we've made here many times. And yet, many people seem to think that there's some sort of objective standard for originality, and that something that involves a direct copy of something else as part of the process can't count as original (though, they conveniently ignore it when "the greats" like Mozart or Shakespeare did a direct cut-and-paste type of copying in their own works).

The Myth Of Originality..., techdirt

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