So this is how it will become with Public Libraries

NY Times

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries

By DAVID STREITFELD

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.
Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/27libraries.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=general&src=me&adxnnlx=1285761833-pyW2s/nDJjwdhw21upcikQ

Simplifying the Decision for a Prostate Screening

September 27, 2010, 5:13 pm

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Stuart Bradford

One of the most difficult decisions a man makes about prostate cancer happens long before the diagnosis. Should he get a regular blood test to screen for the disease?
Screening for early detection of cancer sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s not an easy choice for men considering regular P.S.A. tests, which measure blood levels of prostate-specific antigen and are used to detect prostate cancer. Though use of the test is widespread, studies show that the screening saves few, if any, lives.
While the test helps find cellular changes in the prostate that meet the technical definition of cancer, they often are so slow-growing that if left alone they will never cause harm. But once cancer is detected, many men, frightened by the diagnosis, opt for aggressive surgical and radiation treatments that do far more damage than their cancers would have, leaving many impotent and incontinent.

Just a treasure trove of rights abuse today

F.B.I. Searches Antiwar Activists’ Homes

by Colin Moynihan

F.B.I. agents executed search warrants Friday in Minneapolis and Chicago in connection to an investigation of support of terror organizations.


The searches in Minneapolis took place early in the morning at the homes of people who have helped organize demonstrations against the war in Iraq and protests held two years ago during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

The Republicans think they have the answer. Why?

Saturday's NY Times Editorial page has an examination of the "Pledge to America," a document that is worth mocking. And the Times does its best.

The GOP's Pledge
Extravagant promises and bluster are the stuff of campaign rhetoric, but the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” goes far beyond the norm.


Its breathless mimicry of the Declaration of Independence — the “governed do not consent,” it declares, while vowing to rein in “an arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites” — would be ludicrous, if these were not destructively polarized times.

Dancing on the graves

As a society dies, the laughter rings out. Each death calls for more unimpeded guffaws and for frolicking on graves.  The living could do nothing better than laugh since their impending fate will emerge soon enough and the peels of laughter will be heard as the gasping breaths expire. Reported as such in the book "The Mountain People" were The Ik who were starving to death. And those who watched them starve laughed only to be starving later themselves.

We have a picture of our own society which is dying, but it is dying from an excess of stupidity and blindness not from want of food. That we have a bloated class of wealth and a fattened herd of poor only makes the failure of our society that more pronounced in its failure. All around us we have entertainment and all around us the individuals who have emerged who claim leadership are "entertainers" looking to be popular, to be exciting to want to bask and wallow in the adoration. Yet no one wants to say the truth which is that we are a society lying fallow and fallen to earth that we no longer stand with angels, that we no longer care even about ourselves. Those who follow which are almost all of us, follow the leaders into the morass.

These failures are highlighted in a political system that has become increasingly shallow and is soon to be hollowed.  Those emerging in the new paradigm whatever it might be will be the wealthy, the organized and whoever the anointed royalty is. These were the ones who didn't laugh out loud. These were the ones who only smirked to themselves.

A reign of terror will be the only answer in the end as it was in France in 18th Century and then this will be followed by many decades of upheaval.  Call it revolution, call it whatever. It will happen regardless of the current terrorists, the nuclear weapons, the religious fervor, the political tomfoolery and the madness that infects us all.  

Bill Maher's New Rule

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It's so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being "rich", or what tax rate is "too much." But I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

Don't Blame Me

Obama To Liberals: Don't Blame Me, Blame Yourself

Obama said this last night at a $30,000 a plate fundraiser:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.) We have had the most productive, progressive legislative session in at least a generation.

So, let's review the record one more time:

http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20100917/obama_to_liberals_dont_blame_me_blame_yourself

Jimmy Carter's Quotes

JIMMY CARTER QUOTES

Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities -- not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. JIMMY CARTER, Farewell Address, Jan. 14, 1981 War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. JIMMY CARTER, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2002 To be true to ourselves, we must be true to others. JIMMY CARTER, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1977

One of the tenets of the Declaration of Independence

We know that life is cheap nowadays. No one cries over the collateral damage any more.  Liberty is also at a premium given the continuing loss of our rights. Those rights we don't understand that they are gone until we are involved in some legal wrangle.  But what about the pursuit of happiness? Where has that gone?

What's in a name?

High fructose corn syrup, by any other name

Corn syrup producers want sweeter name, corn sugar, to help boost sales 

By EMILY FREDRIX

updated 9/14/2010 11:04:56 AM ET

 

NEW YORK — The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten up its image with a new name: corn sugar.

The bid to rename the sweetener by the Corn Refiners Association comes as Americans' concerns about health and obesity have sent consumption of high fructose corn syrup, used in soft drinks but also in bread, cereal and other foods, to a 20-year low.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39169416/ns/business-consumer_news/


 

 

And he was allowed to return to school--only after passing a drug test

School Suspends Boy for Bloodshot Eyes

Published : Thursday, 09 Sep 2010, 9:32 PM CDT

• 
  Sophia Reza
  FOX 4 News

Adapted for Web by Tracy DeLatte, myFOXdfw.com

TROPHY CLUB, Texas - Administrators at Byron Nelson High School in Trophy Club suspended a 16-year-old boy on Tuesday because his eyes were bloodshot and they thought he might have been smoking marijuana.
The teen said he was not high. Instead his eyes were red because he had been grieving the loss of his murdered father.

http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/090910-school-suspends-boy-for-bloodshot-eyes

I'm welcoming myself

Welcome!

Bloglines has announced that they will be closing down on Oct1, 2010. Most of my blog is lost. I managed to save a year's worth but it can't be exported to this blog. So. I'll be starting from scratch.  Mainly I use this blog for musings and nonsense.

Where did the name the Blinking Head come from?  Explanations below:

Some News items. But mainly personal opinions that may be unreasonable, without warrant, meaningless and shameless but relentless and consistent as a blinking light. Of course there is that story about Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the guy who discovered and named oxygen & hydrogen and executed during the reign of terror. He purportedly asked a servant to see if his eyes blinked after he was beheaded. No one could prove the story. But maybe we can see after death.