Merry Christmas from San Miguel de Allende Mexico.We have come here to spend Christmas. This is a small 450 year old town in the interior of Mexico, some five driving hours from Mexico City. It is is over 6000 feet in elevation with temperatures in the day in the mid 70’s and at night in the mid 40’s. We have rented a 300 year old house which is five blocks from the center of town – the main square. The…
I’ve previously reported here (12/6/06) about the appointments of the Bush administration. They have consistently demonstrated an objective of appointing people who are unfit to head regulatory agencies and positions designed to protect the public from harm and which instead favor big business and industry interests. This failure to put the public first, before money interests, has occurred again. Public Citizen has expressed it’s concern about the White House plan to nominate Susan Dudley as administrator of the Office of…
Discover magazine covered the year in science this month and had many interesting reports. Here are a few. One of them was about Terry Wallis who suffered severe brain damage in an auto accident and for nineteen years was in a speechless, minimally conscious state until one day in 2003 he suddenly called his mother “mom.” After recovering speech he regained some limb use. Doctors used a technique to study his brain and found that it had developed…
Earlier this year, Senator Jay Rockefeller and others sent a letter to ExxonMobil Corporation CEO Rex Tillerson, urging Exxon to stop funding efforts to deny and distort the facts about global warming. The National Association of Manufacturers immediately characterized the letter as a "senators attempt to muzzle global warming debate." As reported previously here, (10/25/06, 11/5/06 & 12/9/06) the oil industry is generally opposed to efforts to control consumption of oil and fossil fuel use as against their financial interests….
Scandal has involved the U.S. home mortgage market which in turn has contributed to the loss of value of the U.S. dollar. Our government doesn’t directly fund or guarantee house mortgages, but it created programs to obtain mortgage loans. To do this the government charted two corporations. They are The Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") and The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"). Fannie Mae was created by the United States Government in 1938 to help provide a…
HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND MERRY CHRISTMAS. Lita and I are leaving for San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where we will spend Christmas. Here are a few photos from past Christmas days at my family home in Anacortes, Washington. Left to right: me, mother and my sister Phyllis about 1943 My Italian grandfather Nicola Luvera with me. I got a tool set for Christmas that year and he is showing me how to use some of the tools. Circa 1941 The ultimate…
Keith Ellison was elected from Minnesota to Congress as the first Muslim to serve in the House. When he announced he would take his oath of office on the Quaran, not the Bible, there was an nationwide outcry, especially conservative Christians. The American Family Association urged it’s 3.4 million members to write their congressman to pass a law requiring a Bible to be used for all oaths of office. But Religion News Service reports that he wouldn’t be the first…
Newspapers in Milan, Italy, reported this last week, that tenor Roberto Alagna was singing an aria in Zeffirelli’s "Aida" at the world famous opera house, La Scala. There were many prominent people in the full house. However, he abruptly stopped singing, glared at the audience and left the stage when boos and whistles from the top gallery area began as he sang. His second had to rush on stage, wearing jeans, to finish the performance in his place. Afterwords Alagna…
The Seattle PI reports that plaintiff’s attorney Roxanne Conlin started presenting the class action case against Microsoft by showing the jury a 1998 deposition video of CEO Bill Gates taken by a Department of Justice lawyer in an earlier lawsuit against Microsoft. The article reports she plans to show all ten hours of the video to the jury because Gates made a poor impression during his deposition. Usually, showing video testimony to a jury for any length of time bores…
Michael Brush has recently published "4 ways you can fight greedy CEO’s" in MSN Company Focus. His report about the amounts paid CEO’s is shocking. Here are five of his examples: 1. IAC/InterActiveCorp’s CEO Barry Diller was paid $295 million 2. Capital One Financial CEO Richard Fairbank received $249 million through stock options 3. Nabors Industries CEO Eugene Isenberg was paid $203 million in pay, bonus, options and stock 4. Yahoo CEO Terry Semel collected $183 million 5. KB Homes…
