Poor Mojo's Newswire

You read that right. Republicans filibustered tax cuts.

By the GOP's own admission, the underlying legislation has broad bipartisan support. It would create a $30 billion Treasury-backed fund to help community banks issue loans to small businesses and provide entrepreneurs with $12 billion in tax cuts -- a Republican kind of bill if ever there was one.

But Republicans had been threatening for weeks to stop it, unless they were offered a chance to offer amendments on issues like border security, capping federal spending, and the estate tax -- all of which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid held to be non-germane to the issue of job creation. Many of them also objected to a provision added to the bill that would have provided disaster and agriculture relief funding.

True, the barriers have disappeared, but serious difficulties remain.

While some scholars argue that mixed-faith unions “serve as a refiner’s fire” that make the relationships stronger, the statistical evidence indicates this is all too frequently not the outcome. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 noted that mixed marriages are three times more likely to end in divorce or separation than same-religion marriages. According to Tina Molly Lang in Associated Content, studies of marriages between Jews and Christians indicate that they face even higher risks, with a greater than 40 percent chance of divorce within five years. Even so, estimates are that up to 50 percent of those in the Jewish faith intermarry, which is viewed as a grave threat by many in the Jewish community who watch the continual shrinkage of their numbers with dismay. Catholic research indicates increases in interfaith marriages among those of the Catholic faith as well.

Observers have noted that both Clinton and Mezvinsky were raised in homes where religious faith was central to family life and questioned whether one or the other would convert and how they would reconcile the practice of their different faiths.

While intermarriage indicates a “high degree of assimilation and tolerance,” it also means “the declining role of faith and religious identity in the minds of many young Americans,” according to Allan Schwartz, in the “Emotional Challenges of Interfaith Marriage.” In her classic book, The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, Judith Wallerstein reports that couples set the stage for conflict, bitterness, and misunderstanding as they make the emotional and psychological separation from their families’ religious heritage. Problems begin as early as the planning of the wedding ceremony, where different traditions are in conflict, especially when certain symbols of faith “evoke powerful emotional responses.”

The contract with the General Services Administration, in effect from 1998 to 2006, required the Redwood City software giant to disclose and extend any commercial discounts to government customers, the government said Thursday. The suit claims that Oracle misrepresented its sales practices in several ways, forcing the government - and by extension taxpayers - to overpay.

The brothers, who founded Sterling Software, a business software and services company that they sold for $4 billion in stock to the software company CA in 2000, were also charged with insider trading violations from which they profited by more than $31 million, the S.E.C. said
. . .
The Wyly brothers are in many ways a study in contrasts, paradigms of self-made billionaires who for years have fought investigations into suspected tax dodges by the offshore trusts that the S.E.C. claims they controlled.

Samuel E. Wyly, 75, and Charles J. Wyly Jr., 76, who through a lawyer called the charges “without merit,” have given millions of dollars to Republican candidates and organizations, but Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

“Will e-books wipe out/kill/decimate/pulverize/HULKSMASH/angry verb real books?” — one drink

Above question is lede — one drink

Every use of phrase “real book” — one drink

Expert you’ve never heard of before predicting percentages — one drink

Any predicted percentage of anything over 30% — one drink

Any discussion of book world after 2020 — one drink

“old-fashioned” — one drink

Passionate defense of DRM — one drink
. . .

Bloomberg reports that many life insurance companies send beneficiaries a "checkbook" when they opt to get their money in a lump sum. The companies assure families that the money is safe with them until they need it.

But the money is held in the insurers' general corporate accounts, which are not FDIC insured. The money earns interest for the insurers, only a fraction of which is given to the families.

For one thing, nobody has any idea why the game is being killed. News of the closure came in a brief message posted on the Street Racing forum that said only, "Hey Street Racers - On August 2nd, 2010 Street Racing will be shutting its garage doors and will no longer be open for business. But if you liked Street Racing, try out FrontierVille by Zynga! Get out to the homestead for some fresh air and fun! See ya there partner!"

Which of course leads to the second complaint: The stunningly condescending attitude that gamers who played Street Racer will naturally transition to FrontierVille just because Zynga tells them to. Social basis notwithstanding, could any two games have less to do with each other than Street Racing and FrontierVille?

The final piece of the "screw you trifecta" comes from the fact that, just as in other Zynga games, a lot of Street Racer players sunk a lot of real money into the game to customize and upgrade their online wheels. That money will simply disappear once the game closes; Zynga's invitation to FrontierVille didn't include any offer to bring existing credits along for the ride.

Moreover, there are an estimated 1.55 million potential so-called 'hikikomori' who have felt like shutting themselves in their own rooms. Most of them are young people.

As the population of young people declines due to falling birthrates, the statistics have raised questions about the future of Japan.

Hikikomori are defined as those who shut themselves in their homes for at least six months but are not involved in child care or housework even though they are not sick.

Now a study of optical genes in jellyfish, which are descended from creatures that swam Earth’s ancient seas, long before vertebrates and invertebrates took their separate paths, suggests a common optical origin.

“Eyes have evolved in parallel many times, but they all go back to one prototype,” said University of Basel cell biologist Walter Gehring.

Team Leader, Dr Bryan Fry from the Bio21 Institute says it was a mystery how venomous animals have adapted their venom to have an effect even in sub-zero temperatures, where most venoms would normally lose their function.

"This is the first study that has collected Antarctic octopus venom and confirmed that these creatures have adapted it to work in sub zero temperatures -- the next step is to work out what biochemical tricks they have used," he says.

Dr Fry says the venom analysis revealed that Antarctic octopus venom harbours a range of toxins, two of which had not previously been described.

"We have discovered new small proteins in the venom with very intriguing activities -- these are potentially useful in drug design, but more will be revealed as the study continues," he says.