There are close to 650,000 foreclosed properties sitting on the books of lenders, according to RealtyTrac, a data provider. An additional 710,000 are in the foreclosure process, and according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, about 3.25 million borrowers are delinquent on their loans and in danger of losing their homes.
...at least so far, the most visible effect of the Citizens United decision has been not so much a flood of corporate cash into politics as a flood of cash from billionaire cranks into politics.From Wiki, just to refresh your memory:
David Koch " is skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming, and thinks a warmer planet would be good because "[t]he Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food...dislikes President Obama's policies. "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation... and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had."[15] Koch believes that Obama's father's economic socialism explains what Koch views as Obama's belief in "antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences."[15] Koch believes Obama himself is a "hardcore socialist" who is "marvelous at pretending to be something other than that."
Sheldon Adelson owns and publishes "a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left.[7] The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007.According to Target Group Index(TGI) survey published in July 2011, Israel HaYom, which unlike all other Israeli newspapers is distributed for free, became the number one daily newspaper (on weekdays) four years after its inception."Just sayin'.
Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson.One of my favorite NYT science writers, Natalie Angier, explains.
"In 1908, an unheralded and at the time unappreciated would-be astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was employed as a 'computer' at the Harvard College Observatory. ('Computers' were women brought in to catalogue the brightness of stars recorded on the observatory's photographic plates; women were not allowed to use the observatory telescopes at the time.) Daughter of a Congregational minister and a descendant of the Pilgrims, Leavitt made an astounding discovery, which she further illuminated in 1912: she noticed that there was a regular relationship between the brightness of Cepheid stars and the period of their varieation. Therefore, if one could determine the distance to a single Cepheid of a known period (subsequently determined in 1913), then measuring the brightness of other Cepheids of the same period would allow one to determine the distance to these other stars!...Leavitt's discovery revolutionized the field. (Hubble himself, who was snubbed for the Nobel Prize, often said Leavitt's work deserved the prize, although he was sufficiently self-serving that he might have suggested it only because he would have been a natural contender to share the prize with her for his later work.) Paperwork had actually begun in the Royal Swedish Academy to nominate Leavitt for the Nobel in 1924 when it was learned that she had died of cancer three years earlier. By dint of his force of personality, knack for self-promotion, and skill as an observer, Hubble would become a household name, while Leavitt, alas, is known only to aficiaonados of the field."Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing
I have to say that the various accounts of what went wrong are converging on a very depressing picture, in which White House political “experts” actually believed that trying to please the Washington Post editorial page was a winning political move.From an earlier column on "most voters," vs. the Very Serious People:
What I learn from political scientists is that this is all fantasy — albeit a kind of fantasy beloved of political pundits, who love to imagine that complicated psychodramas are playing out in the minds of voters. Well, here’s a little secret: most voters don’t sit around reading Clive Crook columns or debating the Bowles-Simpson plan. They have a gut sense — things are getting better or they’re getting worse — and mainly vote on that basis. They’re not paying attention at all to this stuff.
Thirteen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign scientists, all of whom skate for the Twin City Derby Girls.This entry courtesy of Anthrobrawlogist.
Top row, left to right: Therafist, clinical psychologist; Anthrobrawlogist, biological anthropologist; Snarker Posey, legal information scientist; Doc Dementer, educational psychologist; Oh No Bobo, veterinarian; Killy Love-less, social scientist; MRSA, microbiologist.
Bottom row, left to right: Jo Holley, evolutionary ecologist; Gaya Jenda, family scientist; Mrs. T, educational psychologist; F1, developmental psychologist; Punchwrap Supreme, reproductive toxicologist; Polly Nator, evolutionary biologist.
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.- Bernard Levin, quoted in The Story of English
Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”Where can I buy me some of that social media? Oh, wait...
Academic life and family life are both built on love — the love of learning, the love of other people — but they survive on contention, renewing and extending quarrels from one generation to the next. Interpretation begets interpretation, and a father’s mistakes are corrected by the errors of his children. There is no reason to suppose, or to hope, that this will end. The substance of human existence is argument, and each of us has a footnote to contribute.
Azathoth – Rules all time and space from a black throne at the center of Chaos.
