First a quick update on TheLittleguy – we’re pretty sure he’s topped 20 pounds. Today he is 14 weeks old. He is a giant among babies! He’s demo’d a few proto-giggles for us, although doesn’t giggle consistently quite yet. He’s slowly, slowly getting better at tummy time, although he still hates it. He enjoys the baby yoga and baby massage class I take him to and he loves having his teeth (gums) brushed before his bath. He also likes to chew on Dad’s arm for fun.
On to the tab dump..
- Merlin Mann, who helped make blogging about GTD and related productivity stuff a little cottage industry has become a bit disillusioned with it all and is rethinking what he’s doing with his site. Kottke has the rundown. Mann’s essay “Better” is thought-provoking. It’s the productivity guru’s version of the advice to not be lukewarm and to remove stuff from your life that is not really useful to you. In my own sphere (my GTD system, btw, has gone all to hell during the pregnancy and post-partum babycare), I’ve been thinking lately that while I can be pretty ruthless about getting rid of stuff sometimes, I have a harder time letting go of sources of ideas. For example, I keep piles of unread magazines around, I subscribe to way too many weblog feeds, I have a whole bookcase full of unread books, and so on. I think I need to become better about culling sources of input that just chew up my time and offer very little return, all the while provoking guilt and anxiety while sitting there being ‘unread’.
- How SEC Regulatory Exemptions Helped Lead to the Collapse, or, as Atrios likes to call it, the “big shitpile” that we the taxpayers are going to have eat thanks to gross mismanagement and an irrational anti-regulatory fetish on the part of too many. The Republicans have finally found something government is good for – transferring wealth from you and me and other poor and middle class folks to the very wealthy. As a reader over at TPM pointed out:
Is it just me? With this last enormous bail out of our Wall Street Investors/Corporate America, I have this picture in my mind of these cartoon Republicans sweeping out the last of the people’s money from the vaults. It took eight years, but they managed to get it all. The War/Private Contractors, the Oil Companys, the deregulation and fleecing of America. These Republicans started their tour of duty eight years ago with the coffers overflowing, flush with cash.
Too bad we wasted all those billions upon billions in Iraq, huh?
- Eve Ensler on the nightmare that is Sarah Palin:
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous
choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those
candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in
so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally
disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the
world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have
seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the
presidency with regularity.Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor.
In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets
better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The
melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the
pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is
fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The
earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves
and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to
be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered.[...]Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she
has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense
with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an
e nvironment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could
and might very well be the next president of the United States. She
would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.[...]This vote is a vote that will determine the
future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine
whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever
uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards
dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence
through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether
we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in
alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It
will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or
whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine
whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of
fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
