Edward Piou's personal website

Pardon the turkey.
It is unverified that the turkey was ever vetted to be the national bird.

ERIC HOLDER ON GUN CONTROL:

As Deputy Attorney General, Holder was a strong supporter of restrictive gun control. He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners, a three day waiting period on handgun sales, rationing handgun sales to no more than one per month, banning possession of handguns and so-called “assault weapons” (cosmetically incorrect guns) by anyone under age of 21, a gun show restriction bill that would have given the federal government the power to shut down all gun shows, national gun registration, and mandatory prison sentences for trivial offenses (e.g., giving your son an heirloom handgun for Christmas, if he were two weeks shy of his 21st birthday). He also promoted the factoid that “Every day that goes by, about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence”–a statistic is true only if one counts 18-year-old gangsters who shoot each other as “children.” . . .

older played a key role in the gunpoint, night-time kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. The pretext for the paramilitary invasion of the six-year-old’s home was that someone in his family might have been licensed to carry a handgun under Florida law. Although a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showed a federal agent dressed like a soldier and pointing a machine gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that Gonzalez “was not taken at the point of a gun” and that the federal agents whom Holder had sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.” If Mr. Holder believes that breaking down a door with a battering ram, pointing guns at children (not just Elian), and yelling “Get down, get down, we’ll shoot” is example of acting “very sensitively,” his judgment about the responsible use of firearms is not as acute as would be desirable for a cabinet officer who would be in charge of thousands and thousands of armed federal agents, many of them paramilitary agents with machine guns.

Ouch. Read the whole thing.

Lifecasting, a kind of do-it-yourself reality TV broadcast on the Internet, has thousands of practitioners. Until last night, one of them was Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old Florida resident, who used a...

A web-based WYSIWYG website builder that lets you create a free web space with ease and no technical knowledge. [Beta] URL: Viviti.

MySQL problem

I am attempting to create a new user in MySQL, with Yahoo as a Web host. When I go to Privileges, I get this message:

Warning: Your privilege table structure seems to be older than this MySQL version!
Please run the script mysql_fix_privilege_tables that should be included in your MySQL server distribution to solve this problem!

My Google fu has failed me. I have no idea how to repair this problem in Yahoo. Help! Thanks!

Pendant encore quelques mois, les Français auront accès aux soins sans avoir à débourser des sommes astronomiques. Et la conséquence de ce fait, c'est que fatalement, nous allons vivre plus longtemps. Quelle bonne nouvelle me direz-vous ! Sauf que vivre vieux entraîne des frais importants. Je vous épargne mon couplet sur les retraites pour passer directement à l'objet de ce post, bien plus important : les bougies. Et oui... Vivre vieux signifie souffler chaque année toujours plus de bougies, le...
Lire la suite | commentaire

Folding electric bike to supplement my BART commute - genius or folly?

I am sick of driving to work (from San Francisco to Fremont - a suburb about an hour away by car), but my work is far enough away from the two closest stations that this proves difficult without a $12 cab ride each way.

I am not an active person, nor skilled with the biking. There are also slight hills and winds between BART and work that would be challenging.

But a folding electric bike, I could bring it on transport even during commute hours and the electric could get me there with some assistance, right?

Experience with electric bikes - are they worth it?
Experience with folding bikes - are *they* worth it?
Any recommends as to which to buy or avoid? (A Google search yielded the eZee Quando as the most likely option. The one electric folding bike mentioned on askme seems to be unavailable in the states.)

Are there solutions that I'm completely missing here?

I want to become a better cook, is chef school the nuclear option? As a child, my mother insisted that I do the eating and not the cooking. Despite her best intentions, I ended up quite clueless on how to cook. In college, I improved by cooking for myself and quite enjoyed it. I just graduated from college and I'd like to pick up a tangible skill on the side and attend chef school. The reason is because I've only been cooking for 2-3 years and would like to improve faster than the oh-just-keep-at-it-and-it-comes-with-age-and-experience rate.

SO, collective mind:
1) Is cooking school going to improve my skill? I am not "gifted" at cooking nor do I cook all the time. Am I going to have the rude awakening that unless I enjoy cooking all the time or have some innate skill, I'm doomed?
2) Is it possible to do cooking school in the evenings while holding down a fulltime job?
3) Does anyone know the prices/good chef schools in Austin? I've looked at Texas Culinary Academy and the Cordon Bleu Program. I don't know anything about them or their prices.
4) Can anyone who has gone to chef school give advice to the casual cook who doesn't plan on being a chef at a restaurant the cost/benefit analysis of going to chef school?

If Chinese viewers want to watch Disney's Hannah Montana — no accounting for global tastes — they can do so on 56.com, an online-video site akin to YouTube. The show is pirated. But does...

tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slowly but surely, the Minnesota recount is whittling away at Norm Coleman's lead. With 46% of the ballots now recounted, Coleman's initial certified lead of 215 has fallen to 136. There's no real reason why the rate of change should... Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

Had he lost this month's election to Bruce Lunsford, Mitch McConnell apparently was all set for a new career as a stand-up comedian. Because a good portion of his speech at the annual convention of the Federalist Society would have had any other group rolling the aisle. The FedSocs, however, took it all seriously. The part about how Barack Obama should be bipartisan, something McConnell has been so very good at. The part about how Obama should govern from the center, defined, of course, by McConnell and the crew that gauges the center with a heavy thumb on the scales. And the funniest part of all, about how Obama shouldn't appoint judges based on ideology.

Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones writes:

McConnell argued that Senate Democrats had completely distorted the confirmation process. He recalled that in 2001, two of Obama's legal advisers, the Harvard law professors Cass Sunstein and Laurence Tribe, suggested changing the judicial nomination hearing process to take into account political as well as legal philosophy. Much to his chagrin, he said, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) held hearings on the idea, including one titled, "Should ideology matter?"

At those hearings, McConnell claimed Schumer and other [D]emocrats said it would be important to have "ideologically moderate" judges on the bench, which McConnell took to mean judges who sympathized with certain groups rather than sticking to the law in front of them. He bashed Senate Democrats for holding up Bush's judicial nominees when Bush was doing nothing but sticking with the ancient criteria of ensuring that his nominees were competent and intelligent jurists. With a look of horror, McConnell quoted Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who said during the nomination hearings for Chief Justice John Roberts, "Whose side is he on?" (Of course, the Federalists and their Republican allies also ask that question of GOP judicial nominees, particularly on the issue of Roe v. Wade, but that, apparently, is not an ideological question but simply a legal one in this crowd.)

McConnell observed that Obama has said one quality he would seek in a judicial nominee is empathy, a view that McConnell derided as "unorthodox." He warned that Republicans would not sit quietly if Obama nominated judges based on ideology — i.e., which side they're on — as opposed to fealty to the law (at least the law as McConnell sees it). "We can't countenance a process where judges would favor one side in litigation," he roared.

He related this whole routine deadpan.  

As if Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not spend their entire presidencies doing their utmost to pack the federal courts with extremist ultras, some of whom would, among other things, reverse decades of public interest legislation like child labor prohibitions, block environmental regulations as unfair "takings," reject civil rights not specifically spelled out in the Constitution, and generally rule in an "originalist," "textualist,"  or "strict constructionist" manner.

Looking ahead in 1988, an internal report of Reagan's Department of Justice report - The Constitution in the Year 2000: Choices Ahead in Constitutional Interpretation - stated:

There are few factors that are more critical to determining the course of the Nation, and yet are more often overlooked, than the values and philosophies of the men and women who populate the third co-equal branch of the national government--the federal judiciary.

As Dawn Johnson wrote in the August 2002 Washington Monthly:

To hear Republicans tell it, senators shouldn't take into account such factors as the details of one's judicial philosophy or views on particular legal issues. (If they do so, critics accuse them of "Borking.") Former Reagan and Bush administration officials Douglas Kmiec and C. Boyden Gray both testified to this effect last year before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gray put it most succinctly: "Should ideology matter? I can answer in one word: No."

Of course, ideology was precisely the reason GOP senators often gave for blocking President Bill Clinton's nominees, declaring them to be too "liberal." It is an odd sort of hypocrisy: President Bush recently renewed his pledge to continue to appoint "conservative" judges in the model of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. What at least some Republicans seem to have in mind is a constitutional double standard that would allow only a Republican president to consider the views of judicial nominees--and not a Democrat-controlled Senate.

Obviously, it's not ideology per se that McConnell objects to in making court appointments. Just the ideologies that the Federalist Society members find objectionable. And when the approved FedSoc ideology that seeks a return to a pre-FDR view of government regulation combines with narrow corporate interests, the joke's on us.

As the Center for Investigative Reporting observed four years ago in Bush Judicial Nominees Bring Close Corporate Ties to the Bench:

The investigation reveals that more than a third of President Bush’s nominees to these federal courts – 21 of 59 nominations since 2001 – has a history of working as lawyers and lobbyists on behalf of the oil, gas and energy industries. Eighteen of the 21 have been nominated to the Appellate Courts in the 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th and District of Columbia circuits where those same industries frequently battle over cases with huge financial interests at stake. These five circuit courts are at the forefront of establishing judicial precedent on matters involving conflicts over natural resources. The placement of the nominees suggests an administration strategy of nominating corporate friendly judges in circuits where they will make the greatest impact. In many cases, these same corporations and industries are also major campaign contributors to the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.

Too bad you didn't give up your day job, Mr. McConnell. Comedy's loss.

• • •

The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Aides: Obama plans to nominate Clinton.

Download | Play    Download | Play

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed during a speech Thursday night and lost consciousness, a Justice Department official said.

The 67-year-old Mukasey was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where his condition was not immediately known.

Mukasey was delivering a speech to the Federalist Society at a Washington hotel when "he just started shaking and he collapsed," said Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor. "They're very concerned."

Mukasey was 15 to 20 minutes into his speech about the Bush administration's successes in combatting terrorism when he began slurring his words. He collapsed and lost consciousness, said O'Connor, the department's No. 3 official.

Mukasey's was noticeably shaking during his speech before he collapsed shortly before 10:20 p.m. EST. His security detail called 911. Mukasey was on the stage for 10 minutes being attended to by his FBI detail before medics arrived, according to a Justice Department official who was there.

UPDATE: The Justice Department released a statement tonight:

The Attorney General is conscious, conversant and alert. His vital statistics are strong and he is in good spirits. He is receiving excellent care and appreciates all of the good wishes and prayers he has received. The doctors will keep him overnight for further observations.

Mukasey was still breathing at the time, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media.

An FBI official said Mukasey got stuck on a word during his speech to the conservative legal group, repeated it several times and then "went down hard."

A senior law-enforcement said Mukasey appeared to be talking when he was taken away. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation.

He was conscious during part of the ambulance ride to hospital, the official said.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said President George W. Bush was informed about Mukasey's collapse.

"The president has him in his thoughts and will be kept apprised and hopes that he will be back up and at 'em again soon."

What have been the most influential articles and books in psychology (esp. articles)? Any amazing reading lists, or anthologies? I'm talking the whole gamut -- social, developmental, clinical, physiological, cognitive, etc. -- and only the most universally acknowledged important works. Thanks!

If the retiring Yankee doesn't make the Hall of Fame, it shouldn't be because he failed to win 300 games.

With 46 percent reporting, it's down to a measly 136 votes.

Of the big Democratic counties, 36 percent are in St Louis County, 42% in Hennepin County, and 30% in Ramsey.

If you follow that link, you'll see that a bunch of counties don't even start counting until the 24th, and a bunch are waiting until December to do their recounts. So this thing won't be over anytime soon.

When I think of Blackberry users, I think of accountants, lawyers and anyone else who wears a tie and carries a briefcase. You know, really boring people. MySpace users, sorta the opposite.

But there must be some significant overlap, because 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace Blackberry application in the last week, says MySpace - it was launched on November 12.

Both RIM and MySpace say this is a record - no other application has been downloaded so quickly onto Blackberry devices, and MySpace has never had an application on any platform be downloaded as often.

MySpace also says that 15 million messages have been sent and received via the mobile app, and users have updated their mood and status more than 2 million times.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The DOJ has now released a statement describing Attorney General Mukasey as "conscious, conversant and alert. His vital statistics are strong and he is in good spirits." The AG is currently at George Washington University Hospital and will remain there... Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

Attorney General Michael Mukasey was giving a speech tonight at the Federalist Society meeting tonight when he collapsed on stage. Talking Points Memo has a report from an eyewitness.
The TPM article goes into detail about the contents of the speech before he collapsed. Apparently he was defending the administrations use of torture and why there shouldn't be prosecutions of officials who approved it.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Inspector general says Joe the Plumber’s files searched improperly. “A state agency director authorized improper checks of state computer systems for confidential information on ‘Joe the Plumber,’ according to a report released this afternoon by Ohio’s inspector general. Nearly four hours after the release of the report, Gov. Ted Strickland announced he had placed Helen Jones-Kelley, the suspended director of the Department of Job and Family Services, on unpaid leave for one month. Republican leaders used the report’s findings to call on Strickland to fire Jones-Kelley for abusing her authority to snoop into the background of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.”