Daughter of Billy Bob Thornton Arrested in Baby's Death
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
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The oldest daughter of Billy Bob Thornton has been charged with child neglect in the death of a 1-year-old baby under her care.
Amanda Brumfield was arrested Friday and charged with child neglect causing harm or disability, the Associated Press reports. Brumfield was released from custody Saturday after posting $2,500 bail.
Brumfield, 29, told Ocoee, Fla., police that a girl she was babysitting in October 2008 fell ...
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Daughter of Billy Bob Thornton Arrested in Baby's Death
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
posted by tgazw @ 11:15 PM,
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Will GOP Look to Senate for 2012 Nominee?
PrintEmailPDF Interesting point from First Read: "We've wondered what Obama's election would do to other senators. For years, senators were told they'd never get to the White House, and the stats proved it. Now, with governors in general less popular now than before, having a well-rounded issue experience that a senator gets may mean more to voters than so-called executive experience."
Will GOP Look to Senate for 2012 Nominee?
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
Will GOP Look to Senate for 2012 Nominee?
[Source: Television News]
posted by tgazw @ 10:25 PM,
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THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING AND THE AMERICAN WORKER.
PrintEmailPDF What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.
For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.
When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.
Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.
Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.
What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.
Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.
More after the jump.
--Robert Reich
THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING AND THE AMERICAN WORKER.
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING AND THE AMERICAN WORKER.
[Source: Market News]
THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING AND THE AMERICAN WORKER.
[Source: News Paper]
posted by tgazw @ 9:24 PM,
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The other Susan Boyle
PrintEmailPDF The global success of the Britain's Got Talent star has had an unlikely impact on one unassuming Texas artist. Stuart Jeffries hears how
There is, you might think, room in the world for only one Susan Boyle. But you would be wrong. The American artist, Susan K Boyle, was living her quiet, unassuming life in the pretty hill country of Kerrville, Texas, when a friend sent her an email.
"It was a link to Susan Boyle's YouTube performance a few days after her audition," recalls Susan K. "I thought she was wonderful - what a beautiful voice and what a compelling story. But I thought it was just an interesting coincidence, nothing more."
Except that back in 2002, Susan K Boyle had set up a website, susanboyle.com, to display her artworks. That site had been rusting in cyberspace for a couple of years - until the Britain's Got Talent finalist sudenly came to the global consciousness last month, and something rather strange happened. "A journalist called me and said, 'Do you know your site is getting 1,800 hits per hour?' I had no idea - I hadn't upgraded the site for a couple of years." Yesterday, she calculated the cumulative total of hits to be more than 172,000.
Susan K's website shows her figurative line drawings and head studies in oil. Like her namesake, she has got talent, though not the sort to irrigate Simon Cowell or Amanda Holden's tear ducts.
And then the madness, as it does in such cases, began in earnest. "A couple of Susan Boyle fans emailed me to say they thought I sang beautifully. Another thought I sang beautifully and liked my artwork! Among the emails were inquiries for price quotes on a couple of my art pieces. However, I have had no sales as a result of this. Yet."
So is Susan K expecting a surge of sales as a result of the sudden celebrity of an unglamorous though sweet-voiced woman who lives on the other side of the Atlantic? "That would be too weird, wouldn't it?"
Next, she started getting calls and emails from people wanting to buy her website's domain name. "One guy, within a minute, had increased his offer from $100 to $500,000. I'm not sure how serious he was, but that sort of thing is very strange to happen to someone like me." She consulted a company called Sedo that sells domain names and, following their advice, has now put her web address up for sale for a cool $25,000. She hasn't sold it. Yet. (She has moved her artwork display, though, to sboyleart.com).
Surely she'll be rooting for her namesake to win tomorrow night's final? "I haven't heard the other finalists, so I can't say." Admirably diplomatic - but Susan K now has a pecuniary interest in the other Susan's success. According to Sedo's director of business development, Nora Nanayakkara: "The value of the domain name really depends on the sustainability of Susan Boyle's popularity."
I ask if Susan K's life story is as heart-rending as her namesake's. "I don't know much about her biography," she replies. I'm thinking of the fact that the 46-year-old singer from West Lothian claimed - apparently as a joke - never to have been kissed, at least until Piers Morgan made her life story even more harrowing by kissing her backstage last week. "Oh, I've been kissed," Susan K replies finally.
The 64-year-old from Kerrville is an art major who has drawn and painted throughout her life, while working mostly in the airline industry. "I was a stewardess, as they were called in the 60s, for PanAm. I left just before Lockerbie [the PanAm crash in 1988]."
In addition to Susan K's new website, her work can be seen in a show called Turning Point at the Hill Country Arts Foundation in Ingram, Texas, from 6 June. She is understandably eager for the media circus (ie me calling her at the prearranged time of 7.30am from London) to move on, so she can walk her "lovely old dog" and then get back to her art.
After the interview, she sends me a disarming email: "Please be kind to me in your article. Another outfit in the UK wrote about me yesterday and made me sound stupid AND greedy - and they hadn't even spoken with me!! Egads!"
For the record, Susan K Boyle is neither of those things (and I'm always a sucker for a woman who exclaims "egads"). She is, like her namesake, a breath of fresh air. The last thing the "other" Susan Boyle says sounds sweet coming down the line to this celeb-crazy nation. "I am an artist and am happiest in my studio working on my art. I don't deserve, or want, fame".
guardian.co.uk ? Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The other Susan Boyle
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
The other Susan Boyle
[Source: International News]
The other Susan Boyle
[Source: Sun News]
posted by tgazw @ 8:50 PM,
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Now, New Hampshire!
PrintEmailPDF Marriage equality arrives in that traditionally conservative/libertarian state. This is the sixth state to achieve equality for all its citizens in its marriage laws, and the third to achieve it legislatively. The canard of judicial activism is collapsing.
Now, New Hampshire!
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
posted by tgazw @ 8:21 PM,
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Reason Writers Around Town: Michael C. Moynihan on the West German 'Fascist' that Was Made in the East
PrintEmailPDF Writing in The Weekly Standard, Senior Editor Michael C. Moynihan looks at the police murder that helped trigger the 1968 German student movement. Previously believed to have been purpotrated by a "fascist pig," new evidence discovered in East German archives shows that the shooter, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a longtime agent of the East German secret police:
To future Baader-Meinhof leader Gudrun Ensslin, the shooting demonstrated that West Germany was a "fascist state [that] means to kill us all." Ensslin, a 27-year-old pastor's daughter, provided a tidy apothegm for those who would join terror organizations like the 2nd of June Movement (a tribute to Ohnesorg) and the Red Army Faction: "Violence is the only way to answer violence."
And it is this narrative that has persisted—until last week. According to new documents uncovered by two German researchers, Karl-Heinz -Kurras was not the "fascist" cop of popular indignation, but a longtime agent of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and a member of the East German Communist party. In a rare moment of justified breathlessness, the ever-excitable German tabloid Bild called the discovery the "revelation of the year."
While there is no evidence that Kurras acted as an agent provocateur in shooting Ohnesorg, it is doubtless true that had his political sympathies—and his covert work for the Stasi—been known in 1967, the burgeoning radical student movement would have been deprived of its most effective recruiting tool. As Bettina Roehl, the journalist daughter of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, argued in Die Welt, the glut of post-Ohnesorg propaganda helped establish "the legend of an evil and brutal West Germany," while simultaneously minimizing the very real brutality of Communist East Germany.
Read the whole article here.
Reason Writers Around Town: Michael C. Moynihan on the West German 'Fascist' that Was Made in the East
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
Reason Writers Around Town: Michael C. Moynihan on the West German 'Fascist' that Was Made in the East
[Source: Onion News]
posted by tgazw @ 7:35 PM,
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