New Debating Rules for Moderators

1. Do not quote the candidates on stage. They are in front of you and can speak for themselves.
2. Do not get into a back-and-forth with a candidate except to clarify or restate a question.
3. Establish a clear method of delegating speaking time. Those who speak quickly in the debates should get more questions and/or time at the end.
4. If you served in a Democratic presidential campaign and the subsequent White House, you don't have standing to moderate anything except a Democratic primary debate.
5. The less you talk, the better.

With a hat tip to the worst offender for this crap in '08 and '12, ABC News.

The ABC News Style of Debate

"Fight Fight Fight Fight!"

(please?)

The places you'll go (but warning, nsfw for near-nudity)

oops

been posting to the wrong blog. my mistake, will rectify.

Welcome 2012! New Year's Around the World

Welcome 2012! New Year's Around the World:

As midnight marched across the world's time zones last night, people welcomed the start of a new year, ushering out the old and toasting the new. From Beijing to Moscow, Beirut to Paris, and London to New York, parties, fireworks and festivals welcomed 2012, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese Lunar Calendar. Gathered here are images from these celebrations last night, and the many people who took part. Happy New Year everyone, may it be a fantastic year for you and yours. [39 photos]

Fireworks light up the London skyline and Big Ben just after midnight on January 1, 2012, in London, England. Thousands of people lined the banks of the River Thames in central London to ring in the New Year with a spectacular fireworks display. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The lucid writings of a ceritifed madman.

How a routine jab sent me so mad I sobbed (and saluted) through the Royal Wedding - then became convinced I was the Messiah... | Mail Online: Before wielding the syringe, the middle-aged nurse in the scruffy Greek prefectural office warned me to expect symptoms similar to mild influenza.

But nothing could have prepared me for the catastrophic adverse reaction that I endured and which has left me a ruined, broken man.

Stamaril, the yellow fever vaccine made by Sanofi Pasteur, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. But the jab fried my brain and transported me to within a whisper of death and paralysis.

New Calendar? Meh. Taking away midnight? Oh hell no.

Proposed New Calendar Would Make Time Rational | Wired Science | Wired.com: Not satisfied with conquering calendrical irrationality, Henry and Hanke take on timekeeping, too. “The time in Australia is the same as it is for us, but their clocks are set different,” Henry said. “We’re just saying, ‘Set your clocks to the same time, because it is the same time.’” All the world’s clocks would be set to Universal Time, or Greenwich Mean Time as it’s generally known. Time zones would be abolished, as would Daylight Saving Time, of which Henry is especially not fond.

Oh, Paris....

George Whitman: A bibliophile in Paris | The Economist: INDIFFERENT as he was to modern amenities, George Whitman took some convincing to snuff out the candles for good and install electric lights in his Paris bookshop in 1959. His ramshackle labyrinth of dusty nooks and sagging bookshelves, some secured with twisted coat-hangers, was more a commune than a shop. Over the 60 years since he bought the place from an Arab grocer, using inherited money, an estimated 40,000 travellers have slept among the books, on makeshift beds or the floor, in his “socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore”.

Mr Whitman expected guests to recite or write (choosing “cannonball” words, preferably), or at least help with chores. Most stayed a week or so; several settled in for half a decade. Le Mistral bookshop, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964, was a fitting endeavour for a self-described communist. He liked to say that all humanity was his teacher.

Top Ten Myths about the Arab Spring of 2011 | Informed Comment

Top Ten Myths about the Arab Spring of 2011 | Informed Comment: 2. President Obama was wrong to ask Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down. This position has been taken by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It is a crazy thing to say. Mubarak could not have stayed in power, with nearly a million people in the streets and order breaking down in the country. If anything Obama was far too slow to act, and there was danger of Egypt turning seriously anti-American if he had not stepped in when he did. Trying to keep a dictator in power who has worn out his welcome is always a big mistake on the part of a great power, as was seen in the case of the shah of Iran.

BBC News - Three big questions for the eurozone

BBC News - Three big questions for the eurozone: Starting from where we are now, there are three big questions:

* Is the ECB's unofficial money printing operation - a massively expanded bond-buying venture combined with unlimited provision of cash by global central banks - going to be enough to prevent a second credit crunch, centred on Italy?
* Does Greece spiral finally into default, social crisis and chaos, raising the prospect of the near-dictatorial economic policies needed if you have to exit the Euro?
* Do the French banks take so many losses on the sovereign debt of southern Europe that they have to be part nationalised, thus removing the country's AAA credit rating and the all-important financial parity between Germany and France that lies at the heart of the European system?

Right now my answers to these questions would be yes, yes and yes.

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies - Salon.com

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies - Salon.com: Then there’s the full-scale sacrifice of intellectual honesty and political independence at the altar of tongue-wagging partisan loyalty. The very same people who in 2004 wildly cheered John Kerry — husband of the billionaire heiress-widow Teresa Heinz Kerry — spent all of 2008 mocking John McCain’s wealthy life courtesy of his millionaire heiress wife and will spend 2012 depicting Mitt Romney’s wealth as proof of his insularity; conversely, the same people who relentlessly mocked Kerry in 2004 as a kept girly-man and gigolo for living off his wife’s wealth spent 2008 venerating McCain as the Paragon of Manly Honor.

MwIvz.jpg (JPEG Image, 459x445 pixels)

MwIvz.jpg (JPEG Image, 459x445 pixels)