Photo by Zooey
There were a bunch of these strange-looking squirrels living in the rocks at Rockaway Beach, Oregon. They had absolutely no fear of people, probably because they were well fed by the tourists. This little guy kept getting closer and closer and closer…srsly, I don’t really like squirrels, especially when they’re too friendly. *shudder*
This is your Friday open thread — TGIF!!
In a vicious effort at censorship, Apple has released new guidelines for the iPhone apps store: no more fart apps.
Apple’s newly published guidelines for the App Store review process provide a candid, plainly written summary of the company’s policies on iOS software, including the blunt statement in the introduction: “We don’t need anymore Fart apps.”
As promised, on Thursday Apple published its App Store Review Guidelines, a document that details what is and is not acceptable for App Store software. It covers a number of topics, including the functionality of software, use of features such as push notifications and location services, and integration of Apple-controlled programs like Game Center and iAds.
In its opening introduction, the document makes clear the “broader themes” that Apple uses in reviewing App Store submissions. The company clearly stated that it is concerned about children having access to inappropriate applications, and is also interested in keeping the quality of software at a certain level.
“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store,” the document reads. “We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”
Yet another reason to get an Android phone. Can you believe that?
This is our OPEN THREAD.
Topiaries in the Children's Garden, Oregon Gardens
Photo by Zooey
Open thread y’all — you know what to do.
Cascade Head Trail - Lincoln City, OR
Photos by nwmuse
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This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic. The Zoo has run open threads pretty constantly since January, 2009, Very few missed weekends or holidays since we started ‘The Watering Hole.’ On those occasions, it was always due to illness or hospitalization within the Critter ranks.
Labor Day – (from Wikipedia)
Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September (September 6 in 2010).
The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City.[1] In the aftermath of the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the 1894 Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with Labor as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike.[2] Cleveland was also concerned that aligning an American labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair.[3] By the 20th century, all 50 U.S. states have made Labor Day a state holiday.
Labor Unions – How Unions Help All Workers (from a 2003 study)
Unions have a substantial impact on the compensation and work lives of both unionized and non-unionized workers. This report presents current data on unions’ effect on wages, fringe benefits, total compensation, pay inequality, and workplace protections.
Some of the conclusions are:
• Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%.
• Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low- and middle-wage workers than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree.
• Strong unions set a pay standard that nonunion employers follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25% unionized is paid 5% more than similar workers in less unionized industries.
• The impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages.
• The most sweeping advantage for unionized workers is in fringe benefits. Unionized workers are more likely than their nonunionized counterparts to receive paid leave, are approximately 18% to 28% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 23% to 54% more likely to be in employer-provided pension plans.
• Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers. They also pay 18% lower health care deductibles and a smaller share of the costs for family coverage. In retirement, unionized workers are 24% more likely to be covered by health insurance paid for by their employer.
• Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28% more toward pensions.
• Unionized workers receive 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave (vacations and holidays).
Unions play a pivotal role both in securing legislated labor protections and rights such as safety and health, overtime, and family/medical leave and in enforcing those rights on the job. Because unionized workers are more informed, they are more likely to benefit from social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Unions are thus an intermediary institution that provides a necessary complement to legislated benefits and protections.
Reasons why Republicans hate unions: All of the above bullet points.
This is our Open Thread. Speak Up!
I heard about Kenneth C. Davis, and his site Don’t Know Much About® on Thom Hartmann’s radio show a few days ago. I love this sort of thing — the kind of things you don’t hear about in grade school or high school history, because it’s just too unpleasant, controversial, or just plain shocking.
Re the 19th Amendment: American women as far back as Abigail Adams—who admonished her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when he went off to declare independence—had consistently pressed for voting rights, but just as consistently had been shut out. It was not for lack of trying. But women were fighting against the enormous odds of church, Constitution, an all-male power structure that held fast to its reins, and many of their own who believed in a woman’s divinely ordained, second-place role.
Re majority misrule: The Founders and the Framers honored democracy and the will of the people. But they also recognized the danger of rule by a mob. That is why they wrote a Constitution.
Re “mosques,” memorials, and burning convents: It was August 1834 and the place was Charlestown, Massachusetts, outside Boston. The “threat” then came from a Roman Catholic convent where Ursuline nuns ran a private school for girls called Mount Benedict.
But the Ursuline Convent stood near sacred ground – the site on which the Bunker Hill Monument was being built. To many Americans, the Ursuline compound nearby was an affront, a symbol of a foreign faith that was evil, hateful and a threat to the nation.
On the night of August 11, 1834, a few hundred locals descended on the convent. As the nuns and their young charges cowered, both the convent and school were ransacked and torched by the mob.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Can we break the pattern…please? We’ve done things a certain way for our entire history, are we not able to see that this is problem? Come on, people — get a frickin’ clue!
Four people have been arrested following a protest in Dublin city centre this morning where former British prime minister Tony Blair held a public book signing, the first since his memoirs were released this week.
The four were taken to Store Street Garda station where they were charged with public order offences and released. They are due to appear in court on September 30th.
Mr Blair arrived at the Eason store on O’Connell Street shortly after 10.30am. Shoes, eggs and bottles were thrown toward him as he arrived.
Several hundred anti-war protesters staged a demonstration opposite the shop amid tight Garda security.
The pavement area outside Eason and neighbouring stores were sealed off, with a line of gardaí and two sets of temporary railings separating the shop from the demonstrators, who gathered in the traffic island in the middle of O’Connell Street.
A bottle and some smaller missiles were thrown when a motorcade of three silver BMWs and a blacked-out minivan pulled up to the book store and then left. A number of minor scuffles took place throughout the protest, and the four people were arrested by gardaí as a result.
The northbound section of O’Connell Street was closed, and Luas services on Middle Abbey Street was halted. The Eason outlet was closed to the general public while the signing took place, and security shutters were pulled down on the Middle Abbey Street side.
Somehow, I think Bush’s publisher will make better arrangements to prevent this sort of publicity and shield the former President from democratic protests.
This is our Open Thread.
I have to admit, I always thought Thin Lizzy was a Southern Rock band. No, seriously. Irish? Are you kidding me? Last year, a friend who is a huge Gary Moore fan made me sit through a Thin Lizzy tribute concert from Dublin and I finally realized the band wasn’t from Alabama. At any rate, they went through a few lead guitar players over the years, including Gary Moore. Eric Bell was the first, and appeared on their first three albums. When he finally got sick of the road trips, he reportedly threw his guitar into the air, his amp into the crowd, and stomped off in the middle of a show. He began his career with Van Morrison’s seminal bad, Them. For, apparently, about a month in 1966.
Part of the show I watched is captured in the video. Eric Bell is a really good guitar player. Any other videos I found were crap, or were Thin Lizzy post-Eric.
It’s Music Night. So make music.
What can we say? We all knew that Beck was a phony.
This is our Open Thread. Have anything to cry about? Speak Up!
On September 2, 1945 the Japanese signed the act of unconditional surrender, finally bringing to an end six years of world war.
From the BBC:
In the presence of 50 Allied generals and other officials, the Japanese envoys boarded the American battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the surrender document.
Within half-an-hour of the signing, a convoy of 42 US ships entered Tokyo Bay and landed 13,000 American troops.
The Supreme Commander of the Allied powers, US General Douglas MacArthur, briefly addressed the dignitaries on the deck of the battleship urging them to comply with the terms of the surrender “fully, promptly and faithfully”.
He continued: “It is my earnest hope and, indeed, the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past; a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfilment of his most cherished wish, for freedom, tolerance and justice.”
(Read more..)
This is our Open Thread for Thursday, September 2.
‘They’ say that it really isn’t healthy to keep things bottled up inside. On Wed. evening’s MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the liberal host and his guest, The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill went the healthy route and let it rip.
Discussion centered around President Obama’s address on the Iraq war and the ensuing criticism from neoconswho complained Obama should’ve thanked and praised President George W. Bush for the ‘success’ of the surge in Iraq.
“These people have a Ph.D in lying and a master’s degree in manipulating intelligence,” Scahill says of the neocons, “And it is, it’s really sobering to see this kind of brash historical revisionism happening in real time. The idea that these people want to post some kind of false flag of victory on the corpses of all who have died in Iraq because of their decisions. These people destabilized Iraq, they destabilized the Middle East, with their neo-con vision of redrawing maps, and they didn’t even succeed in their own stated mission. This is a special kind of pathological sickness that these individuals are plagued with.”
Scahill then begins to bust the ‘surge’ myth, “Pardon me for introducing a little bit of fact onto cable news over these 24 hours, but the reality is there was no success of the surge. The fact is that Bush’s policy in Iraq caused massive destabilization, led to a civil war that killed upwards of a million Iraqis; there were ethnic cleansing campaigns. When the surge troops went in there, Baghdad was a walled-off city, the Sunnis had been pushed out and sided with the United States, Muqtada al Sadr responded to the announced timetable for withdrawal that the neocons so opposed by saying he considered it a truce with America and pulled his forces off the street… So, the entire surge myth permeates to this day, and its actually one big lie.”
(Continue reading..)
This was awesome—a MAJOR dose of reality, and well delivered. It’s refreshing to hear somebody say it like it actually happened.. Facts are pesky things…
