Author: smartpeopleiknow

Amy Winehouse – He Can Only Hold Her – Doo Wop (That Thing)

I wrote about this before, but the quality of the video was poor. This version of on YouTube of Amy Winehouse performing He Can Only Hold Her – Doo Wop (That Thing) is Live HD and looks great. Sounds great too. A fantastic version of these two songs:

Sad to say it seems not long ago I was commenting on the new sound of people like Amy Winehouse, and now she already seems like so long ago.

Some thoughts on watching “Minority Report” again

In discussions of Science Fiction (SF) films, Blade Runner stands out. (As does Alien, another SF film by Ripley Scott.) I think Minority Report stands up well next to Blade Runner, and in some ways pays homage to it. Many aspects ofMinority Report reflect Blade Runner. First off, both are based on the work of Philip K Dick. Both have a police officer as the main protagonist, a police officer with alot of personal issues he is dealing with. Both protagonist also have an odd relationship with the main female protagonist. If the male protagonist is an outsider, the female protagonist is also an outsider, but more a freak than a loner. Both works feature what can mildly be described as a mad scientist who provides the police officer with insight into what is happening with the female protagonist. From a storyline, there are alot of similarities, and i haven’t read the story the film is based upon, but i am guessing that Spielberg and company emphasized that. Because visually the film echoes aspects of Blade Runner as well. The congested run down nature of the Sprawl in MR reminded me of Los Angeles in BR. The advanced transportation is similar. The run down buildings seem similar. Even the last scene in the first BR (with the voice over, not the Director’s’Cut) reminded me of the cottage scenes in MR. In BR, the Voight-Kampf machine highlights the eye and uses response time of the eye to separate humans from androids. In MR eyescanners are used to identify who you are. In BR there is an eyemaker and when the androids/replicants go to visit him, they play with the spare eyeballs. In MR spare eyeballs also play a signifigant roll. Lastly, both protagonists look like each other. Oh, and they spend alot of time looking at images for clues.

MR is a great film in it’s’own right, though, and it is visually stunning. In BR, Scott went back 40 years into the past to restore fashions and looks he wanted to project 40 years into the future. Spielberg/Kaminsky (cinematographer) resort to creating an almost black and white future with a washed out palatte that supports CGI better but also gives the film a retro look. The film is flooded with complex lighting. It is worthwhile watching it with the sound off just to see the interplay with light on the characters as they move through the film. The palate might be stark, but the tones and complexity of the lighting is tremendous, right down to the juxtaposition of rainy night, sunny day scenes at the end.

Submersion/drowning is a critical theme of the film. Major and minor characters are submerged or drowning, either literally or figuratively. Indeed the main character is drowning in grief. Even the wife of the protagonist is revealing images by dipping them in pools of liquid (not unlike the precogs and their visions themselves, who reveal images by floating in liquid).

Images are also a major element of the film, but really it comes down to vision: what you can see and what you can’t. The film is about images, sight, blindness, the eye. It is ostensibility a blend of film noir/SF genres, but if Blade Runner was a meditation of what the future of the city is, Minority Report is a meditation on what does it mean to see. The precog Agatha asks the protagonist this, but really, it is what the filmmakers are asking us.

One way of dealing with subway delays in the summer time

There have been alot of delays on the TTC subways recently. Blame the G20 and the heat. It can be frustrating to deal with, not to mention unpleasant. What to do?

Well, if the subway is not going to be going your way for some time, and you have a laptop and a Metropass, consider hoping off, heading for your nearest Starbucks, and grabbing yourself a nice cold drink while you take advantage of their free WiFi. You can tell whomever you were supposed to meet that you were delayed, and that in the meantime you are catching up on your email, work, etc. You can also keep track of the subway — I follow @bradttc and @ttcupdates on twitter — so you will know that it is all clear and you can proceed to work (or wherever you are going).

Hey, when life gives you lemons, go to Starbucks and have a Tazo Black Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade! 🙂

A great source of information on energy rebates in Ontario and BC

Can be found here at http://www.homeperformance.com. They have a complete list of rebates, including advice on what information you need to gather in order to make sure you are eligible for your rebate.

Before you buy anything, make sure the person / company selling you a product or service conforms with the terms of the rebate. Don’t get caught buying an air conditioner, for example, that is not energy efficient enough. Not only will you not get your money, but you will end up with a less energy efficient product, which is doubly bad.  Cavaet emptor.

Are you looking to replace your air conditioner and you live in Ontario and you want to know about rebates?

Then visit this site: everykilowattcounts.ca. It shows you how you can get rebates towards any air conditioner you purchased. Apparently it is retroactive to 2009, which means if you didn’t know about this when you bought your A/C last year, there is a chance you can still apply.

You can use the money to help pay for the new unit. Or you can do some other things around the house to make it even more energy efficient (e.g. replace light bulbs, seal up doors and windows against draughts).

Stay cool.

Phishing/Spam of the Day

Is this. Besides the stilted language and the typographical errors, the reply-to email is an AOL site (highly/extremely unlikely to be the source of such a lucrative prize).

Anyway, here it is:

UK Games Commission
Victoria Square House,
Birmingham B2 4BP. London-UK.
Reference: BOGC/9887-44UK,
Batch: 44/0091-BO1/GC2

This Official Letter of Notification is displayed in the order of the 2012 Olympics Games that will next be held in London 2012. Your Email Address was gotten through United Kingdom Information Network Online and above is enclosed your Reference & Batch Number been for the International Promotions Program that was recently held.

Draws of Email Addresses was selected through a computer system from  Thirty Thousand email addresses across the world as part of the IPP and the winning sum for this draw is Five Million Pounds to be shared amound 5 eligible winners from this promotion and by receiving this notification, this makes you an eligible winner to lay claims.

Send your claimaint details to the below contact for payment processing and data programming and further steps of claim will be related with you.

Sex: | First Name: | Surname:| Occupation: |  Marital Status: |  Date of Birth: |  Residential |  Address: | Country of Origin: | Nationality/Citizenship: | Email: | Alternative Email: | Fax #:
Tel#: | Cell#:.

Fill in the details or write it out as it best suit you to send to the contatct below:

SEND DETAILS TO:
Mr. Perry Lyons
Tel: +44 702 402 7924
Email: bogcservice1@gmail.com

Quote your Reference and Batch numbers and avoid unnecessary delay/complications, all funds that are unclaimed within 2 weeks of notification will be revoke.

Congratulation,
Euro Tele Raff
Copy Right 2010

Three ways (plus one) of dealing with procrastination that you might not have read before

Three ways of dealing with procrastination that you might not have read before — I haven’t — are:

  1. Acknowledge the difficulty of doing it (at first): one of the chief reasons I procrastinate is because I have something difficult to do, but I refuse to acknowledge it is difficult.That’s likely why I am not doing it!  Instead what I end up doing is subconsciously avoiding it by doing other important-but-not-as-important things. But if I acknowledge it is difficult, then I give myself some slack and I take other steps to ease the difficulty and get it done.
  2. Bribe yourself: if what you have to do is difficult, then find rewards for yourself to motivate you to get it done. It can be small things and it doesn’t have to be monetary, but associating the difficult with something rewarding takes the sting out of the task.
  3. Give yourself copious amounts of time to get it done: I find sometime that I have something difficult to do and little time to do it, the little time to do it in is my excuse for not doing it. One way to overcome that is to give yourself lots of time to do something. For example, if there is some unpleasant chore that I have to do that I can do in less than an hour, I will give myself three hours to do it. Even with procrastination, I will eventually get it done in the three hours.

And now a fourth step. After you complete the task, review the difficulty of it. Was it really that hard to do? If the answer is no, or not usually, then make an effort to acknowledge that it wasn’t that hard, then write that done or log it somewhere as a reminder to yourself for the next time you have to deal with a task that you are procrastinating about.

The Midnight Special

If you goto Youtube.com and search on “Midnight Special”, you will find a wealth of music from the late 1970s and you can see the progression of music from folk/disco to New Wave. You might think that the 1970s was only about disco, but there were lots of styles then, and the end of the decade was trending towards edgier music.

A great example of this is The Cars, who, like Cheap Trick, combined band members that embodied different styles of music yet came together to provide an integrated sound.

Here’s “Lets Go”

Some thoughts on old school programming and Why Johnny can’t code

It’s hard to know where to start with what is wrong with this article: Why Johnny can’t code – Education in Salon.com

First off, the author is making a virtue of a necessity we once had as users of computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Back when personal computers first came out, programming them in BASIC was something you did because, well, there wasn’t much else you could do with them! If you wanted your Commodore PET or 64 or TRS-80 to do something, you needed to program it. Later on came wordprocessors and spreadsheets that allowed you to use the computer without having to learn programming. But first, you had to program.

Second, most kids I knew back then did NOT use a computer. Did not program. That was for geeks.  I think that will always be the way it is with new technologies. There are a minority of kids who are tinkerers and changers of things, be it cars, computers, or some other new thing in the future. For the rest of them, they will be just happy to drive the car, or use the mobile phone or play the video game.

Third, young people have access to vastly more free technology and tools than kids of the 70s and 80s did. There is so much open source and free software to program with and use, be in Java or Python or Javascript or Clojure. You name it: there’s something that is easily downloadable with lots of great documentation and examples anyone can use to get coding.

Fourth, personal computers have had more layers of abstraction added to them, true, and you have less control over them than we had back then. But I would argue that as new technology comes along, that kids have that chance again. I am thinking in particular about mobile application development. Also, I look to things like Arduino devices which young people can get, attach to their computers, and program. It’s the same thing as kids from the 70s. In fact, looking at Arduino books and tech, it reminded me of being a kid back in the 70s. There’s still the same opportunities, but instead of programming the PC they are programming something else.

It’s a good article, and I think it is worth a read, but it subscribes to view of that time that I don’t have.

You too can write like Malcolm Gladwell

John Graham-Cumming, in his post, How to write a “Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller”, dissects the essence of Gladwell’s approach to bookwriting very successfully.

At first consideration, there seems to be something signfigant that Gladwell is attempting to say. But there is less there than it seems. It’s very good writing, and it is no worse and arguably much better than alot of business writing centered on case studies. But as this author says, they are a collection of interesting essays, and not a strong argument for some grand new idea.

How to wear brown and blue together

While they don’t go as well together as other colours, this is a superb example of how to pull it off


It works well here because the brown suit is mid tone brown, while the blues are either very dark (shirt stripe, necktie) or very light (handkerchief).  To make it even better, he matches it all with a caramel colour briefcase. Lighter browns with reddish tones can work well with dark blues, and very light blues can work really well with dark browns.

Not surprising, this man is Florentine and was featured on The Sartorialist blog. The link is now gone.

P.S. The quality of the photograph, with the muted lighting, and the soft yellow/green walls and the terra cotta planter in the background, make it look even better. Then again, all the shots on this blog are great.

P.S. Thanks for reading this. If you have found it useful and you’d like to say thanks by buying me a coffee, you can do so here. Thanks! That’s awesome!

Thinking of starting up your own craft business using etsy.com to distribute your wares?

Then you should read this: Hobbyists Use Etsy to Trade Day Job for Hard Work – NYTimes.com. This quote sums the article up well:

“Etsy saved my life,” Ms. Gibran said. But, she added, “this is the hardest job I’ve ever had.”

As anyone who has tried to make a go of it running a small business can tell you, it’s alot of hard work. Then again, it could be the best work you’ve ever had.

Warren Buffett on the state of California and its finances

In this good article summing up the dire economic condidtion that California is in (California on ‘verge of system failure’ – The Globe and Mail), there is this quote:

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who advised U.S. President Barack Obama during his White House run, suggested recently that a Washington bailout of California and other troubled states is inevitable. How, he wondered, can Washington deny California after saying yes to General Motors, AIG and dozens of banks.

“I don’t know how you would tell a state you’re going to stiff-arm them with all the bailouts of corporations,” Mr. Buffett said.

Warren Buffett is a smart man when it comes to money, so I am wondering how he could have made that comparison. For the companies that accepted (or were made to accept) bailout money had to do so with signifigant strings attached. I wonder if the same could be said for states that were to accept bailout money. Would California turn governing over to the Feds? It seems unlikely, so that comparison seems invalid.

That said, there is a model of how this could be achieved that is already being demonstrated in the U.S. It’s the Race to the Top program that is part of the Stimulus Act (ARRA, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). Perhaps something similar could be put in place to spur reform in areas other than education.

How serviceberry trees are actually great bird feeders, too

I love birdfeeders, but I can’t have them on our property in Toronto because it attracts everything but birds. This is a shame, because it is great to have something to attract birds to your yard.

Surprisingly to me, the serviceberry tree in the front yard is not only a very nice looking tree, but it turns out it is also an excellent birdfeeder. I have had a number of robins and cardinals fly into it, gobble up some of the pea sized berries, and then fly off. And unlike birdfeeders, it doesn’t attract a ton of squirrels or other unwanted mammals. In Canada there are lots of beautiful trees you can plant in your yard for a variety of reasons. Besides the serviceberry, I also have a Himalayan birch tree and a Japanese maple. But for the added benefit of attracting birds, consider a serviceberry tree.

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

Some thoughts on Vacational (?) Thinking

We think differently – or aim to – when we go on vacation. in fact, if I go
on vacation and find myself still thinking about my day to day
preoccupations, I feel I have failed to take a proper vacation. To me,
vacational thinking can be thinking whereby I forget my day to day cares
for a period of time and with any luck I think instead about special things
that I might not normally think about. It’s not enough to attend an art
gallery or a restaurant or a performance in another place, I have to think
that it is something special and unique in some way and my thinking
reflects that.

But there is another aspect of this thinking, too. With vacational thinking
your brain operates in a less (or sometimes more) excited state than your
day to day state. Your thinking may relax on vacation. Or if you are going
someplace exciting, you mental state may be excited. Either way, it is
likely a break from your typical emotional state.

I thought of this because I have been planning my summer vacation, and even
if I don’t go any where, I plan to shift my way of thinking when I am on
vacation as well as my mental state. But I also plan to think like I am
some place special, even if I am going to a cafe or an art gallery or a
park in Toronto. I am going to think: if I was in Florence or Paris or San
Francisco or Miami, how would I be thinking about that experience right
now? Or, right now I am sitting on my porch and the weather reminds me of
being in Florence ages ago and I am trying to recall how I felt about those
nights in that city. To make myself appreciate the beauty and the
specialness of where I am, even if it is home for me.

When I moved to Toronto from Cape Breton, people would always tell me how
beautiful my first home was. I never really appreciated that until I
travelled to other places and then travelled back to Cape Breton. It hadn’t
changed much, but my mental state and way of thinking did. I could
appreciate the beauty of something that I used to experience all the time
because I changed my mind. I had achieved vacational thinking.

this morning I was planning to be late for work. I took the time to have a
coffee at a cafe. For the few minutes I was getting my coffee while
watching some World Cup play, I could imagine I didn’t have to go to work
(for no one else there looked like they had to go to work either) and
instead I imagined that I was on vacation. It was an oasis of calm thinking
in an otherwise hectic day. If your days are the same, I recommend take
micro vacations at the very least ehenever you can. It will benefit you
more than you can imagine.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. May you have many frequent
vacations soon.
—————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

Some thoughts on the dissolution of time even as it accelerates and accumulates

My kids are like timepieces. I can convince myself that time is not moving,
or moving very slowly and I can be convinced of that until I think about
my two kids. They are like Dorian Grey’s painting: constantly showing the
acceleration of time even if nothing else is.

I thought of this when I checked on my son sleeping the other night.
Already he has gotten so big. I can recall just how a few short years ago
he was just a small thing sleeping. Now he is so big I can barely carry him
up the stairs. Yet looking at him, I could skip around in my mind and see
all of the times when he was lying there sleeping. It was like time was
dissolving and I was moving back and forth in time, and he was the time
traveller’s son.

The other day I was in the powder room washing up and he was calling my
name from the other side. For a moment I imagined I was in the future and I
was in the powder room and I was recalling what it was like to hear his
voice on the other side of the door but in the future he would not be there
and I would open the door and he would not be there. He would be grown up.
Gone. So I slid back to the present and there he was and I gave him a hug
and we went out and played.

In Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks, his patients go into a vegetative state
that allows them to perceive time as hardly moving to them, even though it
is changing rapidly for the rest of us. Decades could pass by, but it would
be perceived as no time at all for them.

I was reading last week that memories are not something like words on
paper. They are more dynamic than that, and we are constantly writing them
and rewriting them all the time.

I wonder how much of our perception of time and how it passes has less to
do with the world in itslef and more to do with the limits of our current
thinking.

If time is relative, then maybe we can learn to have future memories and
alternative memories?

Memories are just a form of thinking.

I can imagine how tomorrow will be, and though I can control a lot abot how
my perceptions will match the outcome, the outcome will be determined to a
large degree on the predictability of others. In effect, I can remember the
future only to the degree that others are predictable. Others dissolve the
future.

If everyone in the world thought like the patients in Awakenings and I did
not, I could predict the future, for I could see what was coming well
before it happened. In effect my ability to perceive time at an accelerated
rate would allow me to respond better to events and have more time to
prevent others from dissolving the future.

In Borges story The Secret Miracle, a man about to be executed is allowed
to live his whole life in the few minutes he supposedly has before he is
executed. This ability to live a long life in the time span of a few
minutes is the miraculous part. When the time comes for them man to die, he
is …happy?…because he has lived a full life, despite what others have
perceived.

The passage of time is as much a matter of perception as it is anything
else. If we were not to physically change in a way as to show our age and
if we lived in a way that spent less energy on tracking time, then how
would we perceive time then?

We have only begun to play with time.

Time for me to sleep. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
—————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

On the destructive nomadic aspect of business

One thing I often hear when someone gets laid off is something to the effect that this person had a lot of valuable skills and had accomplished a lot and therefore it’s surprising that they were let go. I call this the old house theory of employees. Such employees are like old houses: fill with old antiques and some newer things. Those things do have a lot of value. However, it goes against the increasingly fast natured approach to business. Businesses are becomng less established and solid, I believe. They are becoming more like tribes of nomads. And like nomads, they have very transient like structures and they travel light. And employees who are nomadic in mindset will be the ones who will be the most successful.Hacked together on my blackberry. Thanks for reading this, and if you have
a comment, thanks even more
—————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

Feeling “meh”? You need the awesomeness of Sam & Dave

If you liked Janelle Monáe video, Tightrope, then you need to check out Sam & Dave.

Here’s the incendiary Hold on I’m Coming

and the sweet slow sound of When Something is Wrong with my Baby

and I haven’t even included the often imitated, never duplicated, Soul Man.

If you want to know more, you can read a little about Sam & Dave at Wikipedia or here at Ta-Nehesi Coates blog at The Atlantic. You can get what looks to be a great book, Amazon.com: Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick that goes into things at depth.

The end of miscegenation – part 4

This is a good story for the U.S.: Interracial marriages at an all-time high, study says – CNN.com. There’s lots of good material in there that’s well worth a read.

So while you still have the likes of people like Sen. Jake Knotts in South Carolina calling people racist names, that type of thinking and the fear it brings with it is dying out. Instead you have people loving people for who they are and people supporting that. And that is a smart thing indeed.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree By William Butler Yeats

You can find out more about this great poem, Lake Isle of Innisfree, at that link. But first, read it for yourself:

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,     
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;      
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,     
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.     
    
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon apurple glow, all a glimmer:
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.     
    
I will arise and go now, for always night and day  
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;      
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,     
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

How having an unsecure Wifi network connection could cost you alot more than you think

So you have a router at home, or you are using your laptop in a cafe or an open space and you have an unsecure wifi network setup. You might think: what’s the big deal? How’s that going to help anyone? Well as Oscar González shows, you need to be careful when using WiFi. Your files could be exposed. (from his Techie of All sorts) blog. Even exposing a little information via wifi can potentially expose alot.

Now, you might think: fine, he can look up all that information about me, including personal information…big deal. Well, actually for someone malicious — unlike Oscar — it can be a big deal. Alot of institutions use that information to establish your identity. Someone can get that information and commit some nice identity theft (not to mention other theft as well).

Short of it is: follow Oscar’s advice and secure your connections as well as other information about yourself out there.

P.S. Even if you are not a techie, you should check out Oscar’s blog and in particular this post.

Some thoughts on epiphenomenalism and running

Because I run alot, people ask me: what do you think about when you run? Well, if I am running at a slower pace, I think a myriad of things, not unlike what people when they are walking, or shopping, or generally milling about. However, if I am running at a faster and harder pace, my thinking is directly affected by my run. If I am having a difficult run and I am experiencing alot of pain and suffering, my thoughts automatically turn very dark. I will suddenly notice this, for it creeps up on me. It’s as if I am trying to tune out the difficulty my body is having, so my mind starts having dark fantasies and thoughts. And that form of thinking makes the run even harder: it’s like a downward spiral. Whenever that happens, I either cut the run short or ease back on the tempo until I start to feel (and think) better.

The flip side of that is when I am having a very good run, I start thinking very creatively and imaginatively. It’s as if my mind is freed up to think this way. For example, tonight I was thinking of an essay I read by Sara Ruddick on maternal thinking and how it relates to Martin Buber’s I and Thou and how, while it relates to Buber’s ontological thinking, it differs in that a maternal relationship is symbiotic to a degree and that defines a different form of identity and relationship than Buber’s. And I thought about other things, like…well…running and epiphenomenalism! 🙂 And I think if anything illustrates empirically that epiphenomenalism — either weak or strong — is not true, then I think my runs do that. (Not to mention one of the reasons why I like to run.)

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

Black Humor 101

What is black humor? Well the wikipedia definition is a good one: a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which topics and events that are usually regarded as taboo are treated in a satirical or humorous manner while retaining their seriousness. Synonyms include dark comedy, black comedy, dark humor, and morbid humor.

This image of how not to fast-rope onto a ship is an excellent example of that:

The recent events of the Israeli Defence Forces trying to stop the flotilla trying to break the embargo of Gaza is a deadly serious matter and it hardly seems worthy of laughter. However, this pseudo-instructional image satirizes and mocks the IDF for doing what they obviously should not have done. (At least in the eyes of the illustrator). I am a big fan of black humor: it is sometimes the only way to deal with extermely difficult subjects. This is a well done example of it.

From Fast-Roping 101 – The Daily Dish  By Andrew Sullivan

Moules marinière: fast food of the gods

Are Moules marinière, mussels in white wine, the “fast food of the gods”, as this blog, Mastering the Art of 10 Minute French Cooking, says? I think so! And even if you don’t, if you like shell fish, you will like this recipe.

The recipe I use, from Lucy Waverman, is slightly different and uses a cup of white wine and a cup of water. Instead of the scallion, it uses four cloves of garlic thinly sliced and two onions chopped. (You could get by with one.) As for herbs, it uses two dried teaspoons of thyme, which I really like.  Finally it uses 2 pounds of mussels.

However you want to make it, really, it’s the combination of white wine, herbs, and onions that create a wonderful broth and the means to steam open the mussels. Feel free to experiment. While the mussels are great all by themselves, if you want something to go with that, frites, or at least a good bagette to soak up all that delicious liquid. Finally drink the same wine you cooked with.

Enjoy!

Saturday Night Music…Ain’t No Sunshine – Bill Withers (version 1) and Sting (version 2)

It’s pretty tough to improve on the original version of Biill Withers performing Ain’t No Sunshine, seen here:

However, I came across this version by Sting on the sublime music show from the 80s, Night Music. Sting, combined with David Sanborn and with some other great musicians, perform a great version of it as well.

Enjoy both.

You too can be a great American politician (or at least go through the motions)

Your first responsibility as a great leader is to stabilize the debt.  And if you click on that link, you will see what choices you have in front of you. Ross Douthat an American right of centre commentator at the NYTimes.com, has made his choices. You can go to the stabilize the debt site and make yours. If you are going to be honest, you should make hard choices and reflect that if you are to the left, you will have to support left-wing choices that add to the debt. Likewise, if you are right-wing, you will have to make some right wing choices and that too will add to the debt. Anyone who thinks they can just make choices that reduce the debt regardless of political pressure is not ready to be a great American politician.

Give it a try.