Buddy Guy's Stratocaster

In honor of Buddy Guy's January shows at Legends here is his strat. I like the soft V neck, very comfortable to play. It has a little pre-amp, too, which means that it doesn't really solely on the power from the chord to power the awesome Lace sensor pickups. The switches are the usual, 5 positions, one for each pickup and then one for in between adjacent pickups for the weird strat twang. Hendrix used mostly the far left position for the middle pickup alone, but Mr. Guy moves his around a little more on the recordings. This guitar won't make you sound great, but it will make you sound better.

Paul Krugman Speaks at Google

Prof. Krugman tells us his take on the mortgage meltdown. It's over an hour long, but it's a good start for an understanding of what is hitting the markets now. Like this huge hit to Bear Stearns. Or Morgan Stanley selling themselves to the Chinese for $5 billion after a $9.4 billion loss. Unfortunately, that still leaves $4.4 billion after selling themselves to a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Ouch.

H/T Calculated Risk.

Paul Krugman Hits Another One Out of the Park

I mean, this guy has Obama's number to the point that it's almost embarrassing. It should be clear by now that John Edwards has it right, no one is going to give their power away at the bargaining table. The people will need to take it from them. Here is a link to the article in the NYT, it is currently featuring a video of John Edwards.

IMHO, after 8 years of incompetence and malfeasance including outing a CIA operative working on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the politicization of the Justice Department the next president will not have it easy. All the entrenched political operatives from the Bush administration need to be removed since they will stand in the way of any change. They will not go quietly.

Updated: for link to Edwards article.

Aspirin Does Not Help to Prevent Cancer

Apparently medical research has found it of no real benefit in preventing cancer, except, surprisingly, lung cancer. Apparently no one doubts the real benefits against heart disease. Let's face it, the best way to prevent cancer is to eat right, exercise, and see you Dr. regularly, but taking a little pill is so much easier!

The Obama Dustup

Or I guess the English would say that it's a 'row'. Now, this 'oppo research' thing holds no real significance. I'm sure that every campaign looks into people who can have a harmful effect. Who cares if they did or didn't?

It seems that the real meat here, and what reveals more centers around the response that the Obama campaign directed towards Paul Krugman. They even have a little post on their website to check the facts for us about it. But if you click through to the original Krugman articles you will find that the fact checks don't give you all the facts. You can read the three Krugman articles here, here, and here.

If you read the original articles you will see that Krugman was never that taken with Obama's plan, but he thought it should be praised as a step in the right direction. The issue here is whether or not people will be required to sign up for the health insurance. Krugman argues the technocrat position that it would work better if they did, and Obama says that it would be more difficult to pass the legislation with that mandate. Yawn. Instead of responding to Krugman's claims about the best way to provide universal health insurance, the Obama campaign selectively quotes the good things that he says and then pretends that Krugman has suddenly changed his mind on Obama's plan. He hasn't, and saying so shows bad faith on their part.

Worse, the campaign remains strangely silent about the more damning issue of how Obama has run his campaign and attacked his Democratic opponents with the same right-wing straw men that will be used against his plan - if he ever gets the chance to put it into action. So for a short term advantage in the primary he sinks his own health care plan's future. Maybe Obama's plan really is a 'me too' plan and not his first priority. But if implementing policy is not the first priority, what is?

Shining Clouds

This is a pretty scary but cool new phenomenon. The money quote is

"It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means," stated AIM principal investigator James Russell III of Hampton University, Hampton, Va. "These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed."

Whoops, we broke the sky. Now who's going to fix it?

Home WiFi at Last

I finally, finally got WiFi at home, so now I will be able to post a little more often.