Nonsensical Ravings of Finely Tuned Insanity

Greetings, world of those seeking equals! Danica Patrick finished sixth in her stock-car debut,

For those who doubt the influence of libraries in the world, OCLC deploys their Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department.

Internationally, a first hand account of Scientology in Haiti, showing the major dangers of letting the unprepared into a third-world country, and especially those who aren't there to provide medicine.

A church in the Netherlands has retained a preacher who believes G-d is not a personal deity, a position that earned him a moniker as "the atheist preacher", despite not actually believing in the nonexistence of G-d.

Domestically, after delivering her rah-rah $100,000 plus remarks to the Tea Party crowd, where she said platitudes about the need for another revolution, led by them, Sarah Palin left the door open for a Presidential run in 2012, suggesting she's still hoping both the Tea Partiers are there (having not extinguished themselves in a fit of political purification) and that she's still going to be their darling.

Also at the Tea Party, delivering the opening remarks, was Former Congresscritter Tom Tancredo, who yearned for the return of "civics literacy tests" and declared that people who can't write or speak English elected a socialist, Barack Obama. Well, that certainly sunk anyone's chances of not being branded as a racist if they're a tea partier, didn't it? Especially if you remember what sort of purposes the literacy tests of past years were put to.

Last out of this section, the Constitutional question of whether lying about having received military honors or medals is free speech if it doesn't hurt anyone.

In technology, a tailor making bulletproof suits, able to weave the requisite material without making excess bulk, the Pentagon's interest in breeding bioweapons, reportedly with kill-switches integrated, and The OpenNetIninitative's year in review post, where they highlight an estimate of 32 per cent of Internet users are being filtered in some manner.

Rolling into the opinions, Mr. Krauthammer opens the tone of our opinions with a piece about how liberals supposedly believe they're better than everyone else and have the right and beneficial way of leading. Or, put more bluntly by Mr. Alexander, "Why are liberals so condescending?" Mr. Alexander's belief: Condescension takes four forms: Liberals believe they're right and that conservatives only succeed by deploying brilliatly underhanded campaign tactics (demonic sheep, anyone?) that disseminate misinformation, even through major media sources; the belief in the stupidity of the populace and the Inherent Superiority of the Liberal platform to guide those stupid people; that conservatives play to the racist and classist beliefs of the populace; and conservatives campaign primarily on fear and emotional appeals instead of policy or platform or rational ideas. Even worse, they apply their brush broadly, while Real Conservatives point out ideology only in specific segments or issues (Glenn Beck, for example, who does paint broadly, is not a Real Conservative). Thus, liberals are the reason why we don't have a dialogue, and they ignore conservatives at their peril in their rush to take over everything.

Excepting that self-identified Republicans and conservatives are not always the highest point of sanity themselves. Based on polling data from Research 2000, there's plenty of crazy going on in conservative-land, with 2-to-1 responses that Barack Obama is a socialist, a quaerter that want their state to secede, and a whole lot else. And that's coming from the mouths of the self-identified Republicans. (They're probably not the Real Conservatives, according to Mr. Alexander).

The more sane voices, as Ms. Noonan puts it, are asking Can't we all just get along? (Sort of.) Instead of spending endless amounts of time squabbling about this, that, or the other thing, can't lawmakers drop the pretenses of being vicious enemies to have civil discussions and show how committed they are to actually making the machine of government work? (Of course, that runs the risk that they will get down to business and flatten the average American in a steamroll, but in some ways it feels better to be flattened by a working machine than by an errant one.) After all, when senators decide to put blanket holds on nominees until their pork is funded, it doesn't take a genius to realize both parties will get whipped by a populace tired of their obstruction and delay.

Elsewhere, Mr. Hayes insists that the Obama administration leaked sensitive information and then lied about doing so to push back against Republican assertions that the administration mishandled the Pants on Fire bomber, thus politicizing national security and putting those politics above national security. So, wait, the system is working as intended as a matter of law, but that's not good? And the responders are doing the politicizing, despite responders have to, by definition, have something to respond to? And that's not political? As far as I've seen, too, no names have been named, so why wouldn't you want to say that things are working against untrue accusations that extralegal proceedings are superior and protect your interests more? If there's anyone politicizing national security, it's all the yahoos who keep saying that no matter what the Pesident does, it's wrong and makes him weak no national security.

Ms. Bowers suggests that President Obama failed his history courses in saying that FDR, Truman, and Kennedy talked to their opposition (and digs that he's a typical liberal in this instance), because FDR went to war and Truman dropped atomic weapons</a>. Kennedy he can be closer to, because Kennedy was a soft weak on defense liberal who ran away from hard decisions, according to Kruschev. In the end, yes, they didn't find diplomatic solutions to their problems, but in all the intervening time, you're telling me that none of those Presidents made any sort of diplomatic overture, or threats, or demands, or anything else before unleashing the troops? Really? That Truman wouldn't have told Hirohito to surrender before he used the atomic bombs? That sounds like a fairly short-sighted view of history, too, because I'm pretty sure that more happened in those time periods before and after the big events that may very well have been resolved with diplomatic efforts.

Last out of opinons, Ms. Wente prematurely declares global warming dead, based on the amount of scandals around the data and neutral positions, while ignoring the base points behind them that say humans do have to learn how they affect the world and how to avoid affecting it in a ruinous way. Even if CO2 emissions turn out to be a flop.

Last for today, the plane with helpful diagrams about itself, to teach "Flying 101".

Greetings pet and animal people! Be astounded by all these things that you should know about domestic cats, including good reasons why you will never catch your cat in an all-out sprint.

At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, President Obama took time to decry the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda, which probably helped give cover to The Family, whose members are intimately tied to the affair, as well as giving him a forum to express the obvious.

On the international front, The New York Times looks into the life of your average Chinese cyberthief, who makes significant lucre writing, selling, and using code. And there are a lot more like him out in the world, some doing it for the money, others because they work for governmental entities that will deny their ties to them, but all working to break security.

In Pakistan, a bomber blew up part of a school for girls, which should qualify them as a reprehensible human, no further commentary needed.

If you're an American and a terrorist, take heart, as the bullet or other weapon ends your life, that someone had to make a specific decision to kill you.

the Pentagon believes North Korea will deploy a nuclear-tipped missile with the capability of reaching United States shores within the next decade.

Domestically, President Obama visited Democratic members of Congress for another question and answer session, where he told them to learn from the election of Scott Brown and let members up for re-election campaigns ask him questions about how to repel Republican talking points about them

In a move intended completely to get as many people off of full-time benefits as possible, Target is scaling back several full-time managerial and specialist positions to part time, and then hiring others at entry-level to make up for the hours lost. Thus, only wages, instead of wages and benefits. Anyone else still want to say that a single-payer guaranteed health insurance system is not a cost-effective way of doing things? After all, it's a big piece of the economy right now, and government might already soon be spending about half of the total outlay of health care as it is, so why not develop a system to spend that money more effectively, give insurance to everyone, and thus relieve private employers of the burden of costs and health insurance companies of the temptation to put profits over people?

Ms. Murdoch, daughter of Mr. Murdoch, suggests that content-producers will have to accept some loss of control over their product, and that pirates are often their biggest fans and salespeople, so they may have to accept some amount of borderline pirate behavior. And speaking of Mr. Murdoch, despite gathering information from the reliably-conservative QuickNEWS community on LJ, now that he has put up his paywall that restricts access to the full text of his articles, I'm less inclined to use the WSJ for just about anything. That's too bad - it means I have to rely more on other places to get my mockable opinions, like TownHall, and the actual news and information, like the Washington Times, the New York Times, or the Google News aggregator. By not letting me read his articles, Mr. Murdoch loses the possibility of all the eyeballs this post might bring. (Sure, I'm small fries, but the point is the same.)

Last out, The House of Representatives passed their measure to raise the national debt ceiling 1.9 trillion USD.

Technology rocks the house with a robot car attempting to race Pike's Peak at high speed, a hearing aid that vibrates your jaw to deliver sound to your inner ear, and using MRIs to allow vegetative-diagnosed (but not actually vegetative) patients to indicate their awareness of the world around them and answer questions, although currently it's limited to Yes/No.

In the opinions, the WSJ uses data indicating more unionized workers are in the public sector than the private as an attack against Democratic politicians and those unions, because public sector unions are trying to capture economy shares, rather than industrial profits, and they can create a self-reinforcing cycle where public unions get politicians elected and then demand more of taxpayer money to pay their salaries and benefits. So, naturally, to control revenues, unions must be busted before they can gobble up an ever-increasing share of revenues.

Mr. Williams returns to the crusade to convince everyone that globarl warming is a myth, based on the recent revelations of hype and the apparently dwindling number of stations being used to record temperatures, despite those stations still transmitting data. (No word in the article, of course, from either side, as provocation or justification on why those stations aren't being used any more.)

Mr. Stossel makes accusations that the government is picking and choosing which companies succeed and which fail, through the use of "big, complicated government" and because there were some connections between the company and the Obama administration. Mr. Stossel, KBR/Haliburton probably benefited more from cronyism and special tax credits than Serious Materials ever will. Not that it excuses it, should the accusations be true, but there is the issue of scale here...

Tonight's hive of scum and villany starts with Saxby Chambliss, displaying a hypocrisy of position - homosexuals serve the country well, but should not be allowed to serve openly. Furthermore, he argues that if we let homosexuals serve openly, then all the rules regarding alcohol use, body art, and fraternization will also have to be dealt and and possibly repealed. Mr. Chambliss, your slippery-slope argument has superglue on the sides of the mountain. Additionally, The Marine Commandant also believes in the value of "don't ask, don't tell, but his reasons are a little bit better founded in reality. (Everyone knows, of course, that The General has nothing but the stiffest support for leaving the policy in place.)

Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann play mid-boss tonight, by claiming the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department would say the Bush deficits are half what they're claimed to be, while also using Joe Wilson's breach of protocol to set the tone for his column. If TARP is to be counted as a short-term loan, making the defeicit smaller, then wouldn't we be able to count stimulus spending as short-to-medium term credit to the American populace? They'll pay it back in taxes and infrastructure anyway, right? As for his suggestion to cut the deficit in half by caceling the remainder of both stimulus packages, well, here's an alternative - cancel the Pentagon budget request for next year. Presto! Deficit also cut nearly in half, and the domestic programs of the United States won't even feel the breeze. Obviously, neither of these solutions is a sane one, but one of them seems plausible if you believe in the Inherent Superiority of the Private Market (All Praise to Its Name) and that it will recover just fine without any need for government spending, regulation, or anything else other than cutting taxes and feeling good about increased corporate profits that ar ethen squirreled away to avoid being taxed.

But at the very bottom, the American missionaries who tried to take children out of Haiti, after lying that the kids were orphans to some, and then lying about their education and opportunity prospects to the parents they were taking the children from. I don't know what actual purpose they were being taken for, whether it would have been adoption into a white Christian family to show off their concern for the darkies, or as a gesture to "save" them from their home, where all the heathens and voodoo practitioners are, but whatever it was, that they lied about these children to their parents and to authorities makes them the runaway winners of being the Worst People In The World. The fact that they have been charged with child abduction is only the beginning of what we hope is a very informative session, so we can see all the works they were planning on doing.

At the very end, Norman Rockwell as a pro civil-rights artist, a wrinkle in his image as the artist of rural, conservative America. I'll bet he would have enjoyed the phallic monuments of Love Valley.

Good day, persons of knowledge, thirsty for more.

We start today with the attemtp to enforce the trademark of being No. 1 in textbook rentals, despite the inherent malleability of the truthfulness of such a claim.

Out in the world, the house Rudyard Kipling grew up in will not become a museum to Kipling, because he is still too much of a political hot potato, quite a while after his death. And there's no way at all to build a museum that won't take that controversy into account.

The United States military is retooling itself to fight insurgents and asymmetric forces - and wants $708 billion USD to do it with. That seems like a lot, but then again, when contractor-provided radar domes malfunction during a simulated missile strike, maybe they should be asking for lots of money to make things work.

In domestic news, if you wanted to know whether the Republican Party really gives a damn about the country as opposed to their own political point score, observe the requirement of sixty votes to approve a mid-level government functionary. The filibuster and claims from the GOP is that the nominee was a liar about a program costing all of $6,000 in an $11 billion budget. That's nit-picking with a high-powered microscope. Perhaps that's why Mr. Obama hasn't made appointments to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. Well, possibly that, and his tendency to follow certain Bush-era practices that make it seem like he doesn't really care that much about civil liberties.

Not that he's getting any pressure from anywhere else - Republicans and some Democrats are going to try and attach an amendment to any bill they can that will defund civilian trials for the accused of 11 September, under the reasoning that they are war criminals and thus only entitled to whatever our military commissions are willing to give them.

The Washingon Times wants you to believe the President's promise to cut spending is already being broken. Recall said promise was a fig leaf anyway, because it refused to take cuts of the biggest spenders in the economy, like entitlements and defense. Put up against the article indicating the federal government will emply more than 2.1 million people this year and it looks like the tea partiers and Republicans alike should have a feast about government waste and how they're sucking money out of the Inherently Superior private sector.

Lest we forget why there was a health care fight last year, try this - "Will Marry for Health Insurance".

And worse, look well at what happens when your tea party anti-tax sensibilities get the better of your sound judgment.

Last out, the prosecutor in the O'Keefe case recused himself for unknown reasons. Also of apparent interest to the article writer is that andrew Brietbart claims the media and the prosecution worked to deny O'Keefe a lawyer before and then get the narrative set up as a "Watergate Junior". Such material is polluting what would otherwise be a decent article.

In technology, the unveiling of Roxxxy, a robotic sexual partner, moving along the path of closing the uncanny valley (although there's still a ways to go) by adding personality to the mix, and some infographics about the demographics of Internet use.

Rattling on into opinions, Mr. Ajami turns out to agree with Tom Tomorrow in saying that devotees of the President projected their desires onto him, and thus, when those desires were shattered, they turned swiftly on him. He then goes on to say that the President has such an ego, and believes in his own self so much, he took those desires as a mandate to remake the country.

The beginnings of the hearings on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy were greeted with...well, something. Senator McCain used to say he would defer to the judgment of the military, but today decided he was taking a stand against equality. Mr. Gaffney, Jr. wastes an entire column first trying to set Mr. Obama up as an inept commander-in-chief, and then going back to tired arguments about unit morale suffering when openly non-cisgendered or non-heterosexual persons are allowed to be open in their service, with his conclusion that the American people will lash out against Mr. Obama for his decision to support equality.

Further down, in our Worst Persons debate, Ms. Parker says there's nothing provocative about the Tebow ad on the Super Bowl, and the only reason it's inflaming pro-choice groups is because it stops those groups from dehumanizing fetuses and tells people they're part of something bigger than themselves, which runs counter to the messages of selfishness and "it's not life" that pro-choice apparently advocates for. Because pro-choice people are cavalier about the decisions they make and don't ever discuss alternatives or aren't mandated by law in some states to see an ultrasound and be told about all the bad and evil sinful things they have done if they choose to abort. And, if you're a scared single mother whose partner bolted when he found out, I think being told "Oh, it's part of a larger plan. Trust in $DEITY and it will all work out" would result in a middle finger for offering platitudes instead of actual help.

Going one step up from there, Mr. Adams accuses Temple University of reneging on a deal and sticking a group with a bill for security because they hosted a speaker critical of Islam, and obviously that was offensive to the Powers That Be, so those Powers decided to stick them with the security bill for hosting the controversial speaker. He warns them to retract the fee Or Else. How about a more complete reporting before making threats like those. If you want to make the case, you'll have to do better than "it was because of the speaker!" and not giving any proof.

But, at the bottom of the pile, Mr. Barone, who feels that the Obama admininstration techniques of following the rule of law and attempting to act within the boundaries of legal methods is great for impressing liberals, but makes terrorists want to attack all the more. Because we're not impressing "world opinion", terrorists don't care, and even the rest of our own country thinks Obama'a weak. Because he's at least aping doing the right thing, whereas the last administrator had no such compulsions, only justifications for what he wanted to do outside the law.

That said, tomorrow's news will bring notice of a revenge on such thinking...but that's all for today.

Greets to all of you, people of power and influence, emperors of worlds lost to time.

Up top, the murderer of Doctor George Tiller has been convicted for first-degree culpability, a conviction that carries the mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after twenty-five years. The murderer espoused his beliefs that Dr. Tiller had to be killed so that unbon children would live and confessed to his killing on the stand. I hope that all such killers are found and arrested before they are able to do their work.

The Dead Pool claimed Lee Archer, the only officially-recognized ace of the Tuskegee Airmen at 90 years.

Before beginning, a thing to note for your reading and for all of us - when the President complains about a media that's only interested in combat, confrontation, and the baser parts of politics, thus reinforcing the incivility currently in Washington, the worst thing to do is to prove him right. For us readers, the takeaway message is that the media is always trying to sell us a point of view, even if that view is not partisan.

Around the world, the truth of disaster relief - the real timeline for recovery is far longer than any American's charitable impulse.

A day after some coordinated attacks in Iraq by insurgents, the United States military claims to have killed a significant person in al-Qaeda. Propaganda war? Makes sense. Mr. Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, is fighting his own battle in testimony before a commission investigating the UK's involvement in the Iraq conflict.

For a different propaganda fight, a hardline Iranian cleric is calling for more executions of protesters in the country, in an attempt to get the government and the civilian parapolice to kill protesters and silence the movement for fear of their lives.

Somalia continues to be a country of conflict, with 19 killed in fighting in the country's capital.

And, to either warm your heart or freeze your blood, a story of the bomb-and-explosive-detecting dogs used in Afghanistan.

In domestic news, for those wondering about debt expansion, some possible perspective - Republican presidents are equally good at raising debt amounts.

On the matter of the President criticizing the Supreme Court, the NYT wants to make hay about the possible breach of decorum, cloaking it in "well, it's not that Presidents haven't criticized the SCOTUS, they just generally don't do so to their faces". In this political climate, where CongressCritters have shouted that the President is a liar, there are people concerned with decorum? How about we start getting concerned with results, and then add on decorum once thinks stop being horribly broken. Besides, that criticism earned the President some high marks from the dial-in MoveOn crowd.

Speaking of good-polling phrases, the Pentagon will begin to seek the end of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that mandates the dismissal of open homosexuals from the military. This is not, however, a legislative effort to repeal the ban on open homosexuals in the military - that has yet to arrive.

Finally, the President attended a session of the Republican retreat, delivering a speech and taking questions and answers from Republicans about his policy and several of the errors of thinking that have become talking points for the opposition. The President really did sell the image of the pragmatic centrist stuck up against ideologues, while also trying to cultivate the idea that people are taking seriously what Washington insiders might know is posturing and theater, so moderation in language would be very helpful toward getting things done. If the President were to go before his other major critic group, the Progressive Caucus, and do this again, tailored to their objections, and come out looking that good from them, it'll say omething about his oratorical skills, but he might also be able to have shot down the worst parts of both sides so that they start working to fix problems instead of score political points. Otherwise, the lot of incumbents might find themselves out of work, replaced by those people out here who really do believe the President is a Mancurian Socialist.

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, there will likely be some crowing from conservatism that they've killed health reform, as Democrats appear ready to switch to jobs and possibly genreate some smaller health care bills for the upcoming year. This could be a blessing for the liberals, though, as well, as doing it piecemeal might also make for better legislation that can pass by majorities - assuming, of course, that the Republican Party doesn't intend on filibuster-threatening everything. Or, that the Democrats force the actual usage of those filibusters and gain significant political capital by being able to show the opposition as dithering, delaying, wasting time, and preventing effective government.

Mr. Bernanke was re-confirmed for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, despite a contentious battle over whether his policies have been correct and effective.

Mr. O'Keefe claimed he was not trying to engage in wiretapping during his filmed stunt, but that he was going to ask embarrassing questions about how people were apparently being ignored by Senator Landrieu's office. Furthermore, the result of pimp-and-whore show he put on to get ACORN defunded has been reversed - a judge ruled Congress could not strip ACORN of its funding the way they did. While that may stop them from stripping funding from Haliburton and other convicted felons, it at least undoes the indignity done to ACORN, for now.

In technology, the possibility of filtering reality to your liking, and the hope that people will be able to break those filters to ensure reality intrudes, and another report indicating critical infrastructure is vulnerable to hacking, with foreign governments suspected as the hackers, robots developing complex predator-prey interactions, resulting in better homing techniques, and "seeing" through opaque glass.

Elsewhere, Super Bowl advertisements as possible political statements, with an ad for a dating service for homosexual males under review and an anti-choice ad by a collegiate quarterback already accepted and slated for broadcast. Well, at least now our corporations can explicitly say what they believe.

In the opinions, an interview with an advocate for neurodiversity, that says people with different brain wirings should be treated as people first and foremost. They can get help if they want to be more neurotypical, but the advocate says people who want to abort the non-NT or forcibly "cure" them are behaving in much the same way a racist felt the "cure" for black people was their death.

Mr. Kamisnki says the West should be more invovled with Ukraine and provide lots of assistance to build them into a secure democracy right on Russia's border. This really sounds like a "spite the Commies with a democracy on their front door" talk.

A claim presented that British publications presenting themselves as newspapers routinely make stuff up to sell papers.

Regarding the matter of the Pants on Fire bomber, Mr. Jeffrey, high priest of CNSNews, seems incensed that we have people who are under watch for terrorism but still get to fly. The WSJ continues to be pro-indefinite detention and possibly pro-torture on interrogations, with their latest on how the interrogation of the Pants On Fire Bomber went All Wrong, including that they only interrogated him for 50 minutes, instead of "50 hours" as the WSJ claims should be. Mr. York says that Mr. Holder has to answer who botched the job by giving the bomber his Miranda rights so soon.

On more pedestrian political matters, the Washington Times declares the President to be full of shit when he talks about the jobs he's created or saved, claiming that no other numbers matter except the increasing unemployment rate and the trillions of dollars wasted that have accelerated that rate instead of retarding it (because it took money from The Market, all praise to its name, that would have created jobs, remember, because of it's Inherently Superior efficiency). The WSJ tacks on their information about the wild defecit spending President, and that the new defecit-hawk President would have to reverse himself entirely to undo the damage he's already done, instead of making gestures of spending freezes.

And going straight for the argument that the President is an egoist convinced of his own miracle-working ability, Mr. Stephens. This, in contrast to Mr. Pruden's assertion that the President is an inept bumbler who can't do anything right, especially not national security.

But last out of our opinions, two of the most headpiano inducing ones we could find. Mr. Bozell misses the point by a mile in complaining that many newspapers ran a similar letter from an "Ellie Light" without verifying her address, with the hidden prejudice that the letter itself defended the President, and thus must be evul libruls Astroturfing, and that the mainstream media, so in thrall with Obama, will spike the story of the "Light" identity because it could be someone connected to the President. Mr. Bozell, if it turns out to be someone from the Administration doing this, found in good investigative journalism, then if the media spikes the story, you may be outraged all you like, and the rest of us should be as well. Otherwise, can the indignation and fund the investigation. It might turn out to be that a group of people decided to adopt the same pseudonym and write to the editor of their various papers. Nothing wrong with that - after all, the founders of the country did it when agitating for the revolution. And that's what a layman like me can think of. I wonder what will happen when a professional investigates? Will you spike the story if it turns out not to follow your agenda?

And then, Ms. Barber believes that discrimination lawsuits based on "disparate impact" are institutionalizing the idea that blacks and minoirities are perpetually inferior and should be held to lower standards, so self-respecting blacks should refuse to play by those rules, and slog their way through whatever stands in their way so they can have the same qualifications as everyone else. Her message is to play by the system's rules, even if those rules are designed to screw you over without ever doing so overtly. Where have I heard messages like that before? To be fair, there is the potential for abuse in such situations, but one of the worst parts about institutionalized discrimination is that it doesn't look like it on the surface. Even if it just forces people to provide good justification for doing things they way they are, it makes the entirety of socierty better by preventing accusations of discrimination.

Last for tonight, Cosmic Motors: Concept art of future vehicles.

Hello to all of you. As you well know, tax season is upon us, and thus for those of us in the library profession, I salute your diligence and your ability to point people in something resembling the right direction day after day.

For those looking to play with their lifespans, Death Risk Rankings allows you to compare your likelihood of dying in the next year to others, based on various factors.

If the following was too sobering for you, enjoy this list of famous drunks and addicts on your way to the liquor cabinet.

Out in the world, a former Guatemalan president was apprehended and charged with laundering international money intended to buy children's books. I salmost think the appropriate punishment would be to require him to be subjected to every punishment a librarian can think of, to have to read to every child he screwed as much as they want him to, or to be used as a live pinata until dead, have his insides removed, and then to be used as a dead pinata until ground into dust. But then again, I might just be biased on this matter.

North Korea fired artillery shells near South Korean territory, reminding the world that the Korean War is not officially over, and much work has to be done before any sort of formal peace treaty is created.

The leader of Montenegro praises the United States for their assistance in helping develop the tiny nation into what it is today. I can see a lot of ways this can be interpreted, both in a pro-war and an anti-war stance, so I’ll let the viewing audience decide how they want to interpret it. If they would like something less ambiguous, The Christian Science Monitor provides with an opinion on how American-style democracy is still the best, because of the equality of opportunity it provides at the core. Yes, even with all that’s been built on top of that that makes that equality look like a funhouse mirror of itself, that makes some people ascend easily and forces others to go the very long way around.

A Fox News blog follows the story of persecution of Christians in Egypt, a story that will resonate well with the people afraid of the brown people, the people who think Islam is a bloodthirsty religion, and the people who think Christianity should be the one and only religion across all the world. Most of those people, however, will miss the application of that story to how minority religions here in the United States may feel - although thankfully not in the “everyone, private or public, is trying to kill me because of my religion” sense.

Domestically, a fragment of an article reports a Congressionally mandated panel says the current administration would not be able to respond to a bioterror attack. The example often referred to was the outbreak of H1N1 flu and the response there. The White House pushed back against that attack, claiming it had put into place several reviews and programs that would make the US prepared to respond.

Health insurance executive claims politics has gotten in the way of good policy on health care and insurance reform. And the reason we should listen to him at all is...?

Defecits for this fiscal year are projected to run approximately the same amount as last year, mostly thanks to the stubbornness of the unemployment rate causing bigger than expected spending on benefits and planned stimulus spending. The Republicans point to all this and say the stimulus is a failure, and Democrats ignore the dire warnings of defecits at their own peril, because if they continue, they will kill the economy with public sector everything and The Market (all praise to its name), which is always more efficient, will be crushed. The liberals point to all of this and say, “If you had funded this the right way, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The Republican Party has had a purity test introduced as a resolution at their current meeting. It doesn’t look like it will pass, based on the article, but its mere presence should say something about the state of the Republican Party in our current times.

In technology, accusations from climate change skeptics that the data used to create the models is coming from only some of the thermometers deployed worldwide, instead of taking all of the data from everywhere and modeling it.

Despite fears of a brain drain, it appears that most science and engineering doctoral graduates stayed in the United States through 2007. The 2009 data may have a completely different story to tell, with the economy the way that it is.

Technology has progressed closer to making intelligent pills that deliver their payload directly to the affected site, using nanoparticle drug delivery systems.

In the United Kingdom, the government and a contractor are developing drones to fly and take CCTV images and video over UK citizens. Makes me wonder if someone’s going to make it a sport to disable, control, or destroy those drones once spotted.

Apple and Steve Jobs today unveiled a device called the iPad that appears to have no real benefits compared to ereaders, netbooks, tablets, or their own smaller iProducts, and a whole lot more drawbacks than any of the other ones. It’s a nice try, and I’m sure that schools and libraries will have plenty of them soon as everyone else who wants to use devices gets the real devices and donates their iPads. (Actually, we’re not sure whether it will be a hit or a bust, but from the looks of things, actual usefulness an an iProduct looks to be very close to zip.)

And last, a comparison - going for the most powerful laser yet constructed and going for very tiny antennas thanks to metamaterials.

Into the opinions we go, with speechwriters making commentary on the President at the podium, combining his lack of catchphrases and signature single lines with praise that he always knows what he's talking about and can communicate that. He’s a paragraph prsident, instead of a one-liner president. For some of the people there, that makes him a snooze and a wonk and boring. For others, that makes him a President that addresses the populace as adults and expects them to use their brains.

The matter of Scott Brown’s election continues to make opinions, from pundits, those who claim to be pundits, and sitting Congresscritters. And idiots, too, but the Internet is a big place. Mr. Henninger, for example, can say that things are the way they are because Kennedy let the federal work force unionize, and that opened the door to unions everywhere, who broke the economy through their incessant demands for higher wages and better benefits, ignoring any other possible cause in his anti-union zeal. Mr. Fund chooses to focus on the apparent fantasy-world of Ms. Pelosi, unflapped by the election while her caucus runs and hides with their tail between their legs. As it is, Mr. Rove turns out to be the sane voice of the three, believing health care reform will only anger the defecit populace more by adding on even more spending.

Messrs. Glassman and Doran agitate for the adoption of a policy that will undercut the current regime in Iran and replace it with the Green Revolution protesters, still ignoring that we don’t know whether the Greeen Revolution people are for democracy-without-clerics, or are just agitating to have their voices hears and the candidate they elected fairly be put into office.

The WSJ believes the creation of budget deficit comissions is really a political move to get Republicans to give them political cover for raising taxes, because the “bipartisan” commission recommends doing so, and thus, it’s not totally a Democratic thing.

Providing us with yet more evidence that people can be both wonderful and horrible, it’s tonight’s high-velocity flaky pastry competition.

The bronze for sheer audacity to the unnamed blogger claiming Interpol is associated with Nazis and will gladly arrest dissidents if their countries make them criminals, as well as uncritically sharing files of U.S. citizens and accepting disinformation planted into files by governments hostile to the United States. Because Interpol isn’t composed of, say, police detectives and workers who would know to vet information and check sources and the like before putting material into someone’s file.

Doing them several grades better, however, is the Florida doctor and judge who may have just established a court precedent saying the rights of a mother are subordinate to the rights of their unborn fetus, with the doctor getting a court order to force the mother to stay in the hospital after she wanted to leave, because she was pregnant. If the appeal doesn’t overturn the idea, it could very easily be used as some way of forcing women to carry to term, regardless of their wishes, because they’re pregnant. Silver effort to them, though, only because...

...the gold standard is once again, tough to beat. Elaine Donnelly attacks Richard Socarides's column saying Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be repealed because men and women have served together in the armed forces without incident by blaming the Abu Ghraib incident squarely on the policy that let women serve in the military, calling it an incident that started between men and women and then became an abuse of prisoners incident as discipline continued to break down in the unit. Uh, yeah. What about the bit where they determined it to not be a bunch of people acting on their own, but systematic from the top down? Oh, and the whole thing is

Last for tonight, the rumored secrets of the Tokyo subway system, including secret bases, fallout shelters, and military-application lines. Additionally, bizarre dinosaurs and extinct species.

Remember, this morning, that one should always be careful when engaging in extramarital affairs - because the revenge boomerang can hit hard. In that case, one might find oneself getting acquainted with urinal falls.

Furthermore, recall a Supreme Court decision made thirty-seven years ago is still the biggest legal protection a woman has to stop a fetus from coming to term.

Rejoice that Hawai'i moves further along the scale toward the Century of the Fruitbat, approving civil unions for hetero and homosexuals.

And, professionally, library cuts hurt everyone, just like school cuts hurt everyone.

If you’re wondering what the credit bureaus are saying about you, there's a free site from the government to get you your credit report, once a year.

Finally, a reminder that our pets are our companions, and that losing them can be just as hard as losing a person close to you. To help other companions find their humans you can bid on a signed portrait of Neil Himself and Zoe.

In the international sphere, MSF reports that they still can't get necessary medical supplies on the ground in Haiti, as others continue to be diverted to the Dominican Republic to go on a very long land route into Haiti. Where, apparently, those attempting to set up ham radio equipment are shot at. And where texts, tweets, and mobile communications lead to the rescue and recovery of trapped persons. The Boston Globe has gone in and captured the faces of those there, struggling with basic necssities and trying their best to distribute aid where infrastructure basically isn't.

A follow-up on an earlier story - the company manufacturing equipment with Christian Foundational Writings references on them will send kits out for their removeal and stop including the references on new material made for the military. Yay, sanity.

In an effort to combat the winter and get persons into their hotels, Holiday Inn in the UK has dispatched employees in body-length fleece to help warm the bed for guests.

Last out of the international section, the Untied States Marines have officially ended their role in the Iraq conflict. The timetable for withdrawal may yet be adhered to. And, rather late to the party, bin Laden claims responsibility for the Pants on Fire attacker.

Doemstic news begins with the President proposing a set of new bank regulations aimed at fixing the problems that let banks create the bubbles that burst and plummeted the economy to its current state. Tapping the populist rage, Mr. President? Awesome. Predictably, The WSJ, conservatives, and the banks rallied immediately to the cause of defeating that regulation, claiming it would hurt them too much. Attempting to ward off the firestorm, Goldman Sachs trimmed its bonus pools. A little. Elsewhere, massive apartment complexes built on bubbble economics went bankrupt.

While claiming not to be racists, the creators of a basketball league requiring that a player be a natural born citizen of the U.S. and the player's parents both be of Caucasian descent have certainly fooled us. It’s a league formed mostly in the South part of the country, and only accepts white players to play basketball. I think they’re qualifying for the definition, even if they don’t think they are.

Air America, a network of liberal radio programmes intended to provide balance to the conservative-dominated talk-radio industry, has filed for bankruptcy. The network had troubles from the beginning. I suspect that they were forced out because they couldn’t find someone like ClearChannel who wanted to carry them - lacking the ability to tie into existing networks, there probably weren’t a lot of radio stations that could or would carry them. In talking about the bankruptcy of Air America, Mr. Fund is careful to try and distance himself from those who take the easy road of saying how the bankruptcy proves liberals can't compete in a competitive environment, before yoking himself to the people who believe this demise is another harbinger that liberalism is unpopular in the country and the President must change course, lest he be doomed.

Following in the footsteps of publications like Financial Times, the New York Times will erect a paywall for most of its content, although it will allow users a limited amount of free article viewing per month. I thought paywalls and the like were supposed to be things that would speed the death of the print industry. Why would the NYT do something like that?

In technology, Microsoft was aware of the flaw that was used to attack Google sites, and had planned a February release for such a patch, but the attack sped up their cycle. So they knew about it and were working on a patch for it. Question now is whether it was ready and they were sitting on their hands or they were still going through testing. The reporting of a vulnerability that has been in Windows code for 17 years now without a patch ready is...not encouraging. And, as it turns out, once patched, exploits appear, which has to be headache-inducing at Microsoft.

Google's Nexus One speech-to-text input will censor you if you curse while speaking, although Neil Himself has found a workaround - Add ".com" on the end of it and it will transcribe normally.

More encouraging is The Guardian newspaper's new tool for mining and accessing publicly-available government data sets, searching across several countries. Thus, mashup possibilities, as well as a nice portal for those looking to find something the government has put out into the public.

Last out of science and tech - bacteria in the dirt may help you lift your mood, so having a good roll around in the dirt, with or without kids, may be helpful.

The opinions leads with five more reasons why Pat Robertson is a dangerous man and should be repudiated by Christians everywhere.

On the more sane track, Paul Krugman for chairman of the Federal Reserve. And Mr. Zuckerman credits the brains of the American populace, who don't believe that stock figures going up means anything about economic recovery, especially not with so many unemployed still. He believes they’re holding back their money because they see new taxes on the horizon - and his solution for jobs is to invest serious capital in infrastructure, which does generate lots of jobs. So, again, why haven’t we brought back the WPA to rebuild the country and put all those unemployed people to work building?

Ms. Noonan believes Mr. Brown's election is a signal that traditional Democrats and Republicans are about to get thrashed at the polls, and that Mr. Brown’s ticket to success is not becoming like the traditional entities, but managing to retain his air of independence and apparent connection with the voters. In other words, to be a Senator elected by the people rather than bought by the corporations. Good luck with that. Ms. Strassel suggests Mr. Romney scrap the plan he put in place in Massachusettes and move on so he can become a better Presidential candidate in 2012, because his plan is what the Obama plan is right now, and we see how well that’s worked out for them.

The WSJ praises the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with money and messages of their own, slipping in several digs about how only liberals want to ban free speech from corporations and that unions will benefit from the new rules, too. Mr. Greenwald provides perhaps the best explanation of why this ruling was making open that which already was, and the benefits it provides, while indicating his continued ambivalence about other parts of the ruling.

And elsewhere, Mr. James Q. Wilson says New York should not have to shoulder the costs of prosecuting the self-appointed plotter of the 11 September attacks, believing that because the federal government wants to prosecute him in a civilian court, they should pay for all the costs related to it. It’s a backhanded way of saying “Military commissions and then the death squad for him!” For the more striaghtforward manner, The WSJ's editors think the recent admission of mistakes by the FBI's director constitues good reasons why terror suspects should not be treated to civilian courts, because civilian courts prevent authorities from extracting all the intelligence they can out of them before charging them and putting them on trial.

Ms. Erbe would like to start a discussion on whether America should prohibit Muslim women from wearing face-or-body covering garments, based partially on what she sees as an incompatibility between the values behind such dress and Western values of freedom.

Mr. Hanson believes Mr. Obama sees himself as a philosopher-king, passing ideas the populace hates but is good for them, and that this thinking is unwise and foolish. Except, Mr. Hanson, in a representative form of government, we really should be putting into office people who will do unpopular things because they are good for us. Things like civil rights and health care reforms will be opposed by lots of people, some because they have deep-seated ideas about what the government should and shouldn’t do, and others because they’vebeen bought off or frightened into saying what the opposition wants them to. We need level-headed, unflappable persons who will do the right thing, not corrupted persons more interested in re-election or in their own coffers than in the welfare of the people. In short, we need someone like the philosopher-king and an army of enlightened legislators behind him. Then, perhaps, we can get some work done on fixing what’s broken.

Ms. Torregrosa opines on why Fox is No. 1 in the ratings - because it appeals with controversies designed for the right-wing that believes itself to be center-right, locked in a battle between pinheads and patriots, the voice of Middle America, and the majority of the people, while MSNBC is liberal elites on both coasts with unpopular ideas, and so can’t compare. So far, so good - and then she blows it by saying that liberals should have been paying more attention to Fox and the Tea Partiers and appeasing them instead of mocking them for what they are, and that maybe the defeat in Massachusettes will make them more friendly to the Tea Party Fringe. Without that last sentence, it would be an excellent article on why Fox appeals so much.

Last out before Worsts, The Slacktivist lays the smack down on the Tea Party Protester, telling him to stop agitating against the think that will help him and his paycheck the most and get in favor of real health care reform.

And playing tonight’s Worst Persons Derby, one part of the bronze to Silvio Berlusconi, attempting to implement legislation saying all content to be uploaded to places like YouTube in Italy will first have to be screened for violence and pornography. Good luck with that, and I hope you pay whatever authority you set up to do this good money, because they’re going to have hell on their hands. Assuming they all don’t decide to anonymize and get around you by using IP addresses not from Italy.

Sharing the bronze honors with the Italian Prime Minister are the morons that challenged, and then the greater morons that removed, DICTIONARIES from schools because they contained a definition of "oral sex". This was clearly inappropriate for THE CHILDRENS, and soon, as the parent prophetically mentioned, the encyclopedias will also be going because of their in-depth discussion of the nature and function of the sexual organs. *headpiano!* It appears we will have to resort to the use of ballpoint pens to explain various sexual differences. That said, if we remember this for Banned Books Week... *grin*

Adding one on top of that, one half the silver to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez suggested the earthquake in Haiti was the result of the United States testing a seismic weapon. If that really were the case, why test it on Haiti? Why not test it somewhere where a successful test would do some damage to the opposition? Not that Mr. Chavez will escape scrutiny of another sort - he might be sitting on some very large oil reserves, which might make him the target of many a predatory company...or government.

Sharing that honor with Mr. Chavez is Mr. Baehr, who spins together the movie Avatar and the disaster in Haiti and uses it as a screed against pantheism, because apparently James Cameron is a pantheist for wanting people to appreciate their connection to the world. Not to mention, pantheists become radical environmentalists, who become socialists, and decry capitalism, that which makes us all rich, and would have helped with the Haiti disaster because capitalism brings huge building and earth-moving machines. Oh, and pantheism and environmental connectedness apparently means hunting for food with bow and arrow and giving up all of one’s modern conveniences, too. Distortion, stretching, strawmen, and forgetting Joel and Mike’s mantra, too. All in the service of trying to make a quick religious buck, as it were. Bleargh.

The top of the dungheap, however, goes to eugenics advocate Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer of South Carolina, for advocating that poor people should not be fed by the state because feeding poor people encourages them to breed and make more poor people for the state to feed. He compared them to stray animals, and declared poor people can’t control their sexual urges and many women on the dole are simply staying home, doing nothing, and then gaming the system by having more children. His further comments included: those receiving government aid should be subjected to drug tests and (if with children in school) required to attend PTA meetings and teacher conferences upon pain of losing their benefits, and free and reduced lunch schools hurt children because the schools with the highest free and reduced school lunches have the lowest test scores. When pressed on his beliefs, he did not retract them. I appreciate his interest that parents be there for their child’s studies. It would be nice if both parents were not working minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet, and thus had time to attend after-school conferences without the penalty of lost wages or being fired for taking some part of a day to go to conferences. It would be nice if all families could afford school lunch at full price because they were making enough to do so, and didn’t have to rely on subsidization to ensure that their children received enough nutrition at school that they could think about their studies, instead of their bellies. It would be nice if our schools were funded sufficiently that education could truly be education, with enough instructors to maintain optimal class sizes, where arbitrary standardized tests did not determine whether a school would be funded fully or have its funding cut and be told to make students succeed on even less. It would be fantastic if our society were set up in such a way that everyone could be assured of the basic needs of life and then pursue their passion without worrying some self-righteous bastard would look down on them and then try to take away what scraps they have because he felt they were lazy welfare queens interested in scamming the system. It would be beautiful if our education was comprehensive enough to talk about oral sex, the dangers of unprotected intercourse, and all the methods that reduce the risk of those dangers, instead of the one proven not to work but that religious figures thunder is the only way. I’d love it if our society were relaxed enough about sexuality to be willing to provide contraceptives to those who need them, information for those thinking about experimentation, and emphasised the proper use of contraception, information, and respect for someone else’s sexual expression, whether in orientation, fetishization, or number of preferred partners, as a part of normal sexuality. I want those things. For right now, though, I want Andre Bauer to set aside his rich trappings and truly live the life of the poor for however long it takes him to truly understand the situation and work toward fixing the problems, instead of calling for the starvation of the poor of his own state.

Last for tonight, an item claiming to be the Church Handbook of Instructions for the Latter-Day Saints, supposedly adopted 1998, scanned and put on the web 1999. I’m guessing this is intended to be the showing of Forbidden Lore, but I also wonder whether the item in question has been superceded by a later publication or version.

There’s also an audio collection of lectures given by many famous poets at Naropa University.

And the residence created from a hole in the ground. A perfect place for a literary piece like I, Cthulhu. Or somewhere to hide your manga that teaches General Relativity, using girls to do so. Or maybe it’s where you display your collection of the complete set of Crayola colors from its inception to modernity or your collection of Lego scenes that reflect famous photographs.

Greetings, troops, protesters, and rabble-rousers. A question to ponder - what would Martin Luther King Jr. have tweeted if Twitter were around while he was alive? How would he have reacted to the people like this against integration? And would he have had good humor when a plaque mistakenly celebrated his assassin instead of the African-American actor it was intended for? After all, there’s a lot that people still don’t know about him, including his strenuous opposition to the Vietnam conflict and his aggressive stance toward reparations for African-Americans in real terms and not just affirmative action preferences.

The Century of the Fruitbat makes a remarkable step forward - the nation of Pakistan has formally recognized a third gender, hijra, which includes transvestites, transgendered persons, and eunuchs. How hard would it be for us to do the same thing? It would certainly remove a lot of the identity angst.

Deserving of a top-billing and Worst People mention all at once, a manufacturer of rifle sights for the military has been inscribing references to the Christian Foundational Writings next to their serial numbers. Because giving justification to religious extremists that you are fighting them in a religious war is always a good idea, shit-for-brains. Worse, I know there are people who do see it as a holy war against false gods, and a lot of them are in the military. Worst, the people manufacturing it are dismissing the group raising the objections as “not Christian”, as if that solved everything and made it so they can be laughed off. I have a suggestion for the lot of them - both sides convinced of the holiness of their cause to the Sahara, and nobody leaves until they’re either cured of their bloodlust or dead. Might even help the overpopulation crisis.

Additionally sharing the Worst Persons honours are the people who did something that resulted in the death of three Guantanamo Bay inmates at a camp of the prison not previously known to exist, the other people who covered it up and ruled their deaths to be suicides, and the administrations that have not investigated this and all the other crimes of Guantanamo and the Concept War seriously, flagrantly in dereliction their duties under the Convention on Torture and other applicable laws and accepting, in this case, an official account of events that is impossible.

Two different religious organizations are sending what they believe to be relief to the Haitian people - Scientology is sending along e-meters, the basic measuring devices of their belief, and a Christian group is sending solar-powred bibles that speak the writings aloud. Faith may be needed in Haiti, but money and supplies are needed more. Afterwards, perhaps, you can send your Bibles and e-meters.

Fat lot of good either of them will do as a 5.9 Richter aftershock hits the country, making rescue work that much more difficult as already collapsed objects shift around and new items collapse.

On saner ground, a tradition of sixty years may be skipping one, as the person who comes to toast at Poe's grave on his birthday has not shown. In other literary stuff, the New Yorker examines Neil Gaiman.

The Dead Pool claims Glenn W. Bell, Jr., creator of Taco Bell, at 86.

Professionally, Libraries are, of course, one of the biggest reasons why publishers don't make as much money as they could.

And finally, the rise and fall of many magazines on the topic of Anime, of which we have in print the oldest and one of the newest, the others having gone belly-up.

Out in the world, those text-message donations people make? Could take a long time to get where they are intended, because, y’know, they go through when you pay your bill (unless you’re on Verizon, and they’re going to send it along trusting you will pay).

A new report suggests that Iran did not stop work on nuclear proliferation and weapons design, contradicting an earlier report saying they has stopped.

Yet more evidence that one cannot racially profile a terrorist.

Domestically, California steps closer to legalizing marijuana possession in the state.

The previous administrator, now tasked to help with Haitian relief, pushed back against the comments made by Boss Limbaugh, perhaps indicating that once out of office, one is free to express opinions that would be heterodox to the party.

The Massachusettes special election has gone ot the Republican. For hose looking for reasons why, other than the mailed-in campaign by the Democrat, perhaps the people in the “fuck you” constituencies that bradhicks says could stay home for that election, because they've been milked for money and hours without any discernible effort toward getting their issues into play decided to stay home and let the Republican have it. Some in the commentary circles suggest the Republican election is good, as it will require the Democrats to get off their asses and do stuff, and others suggest it’s bad, because now it will let Republicans filibuster-threaten everything into a deadlock. All told, however, the people who expected Mr. Obama to be a liberal instead of a centrist are voicing their displeasure.

They’re probably finding more material as the government is unable to find fraud cases against wall street firms, which makes the liberals scream “Not fraud, morons! Profiteering! Selling products that they knew were unsafe and were betting would fail, and then leaving the buyer with the bag.” and other such things that are still legal, distasteful and cannibalistic as they are. It offends the sense of fairness, but isn’t necessarily illegal.

They may be of a more mixed opinion about states planning on passing nullification laws to whatever health care package, if any, passes the federal government, depending on how they feel about the federal health-care package. Mr. Armstrong Williams believes the current plan is full of bribes to individual constituencies, and should thus be killed. By the way, lose, not loose. A published columnist should not make such mistakes.

In their bids to become ecologically green, some couples are actually having fights about their various levels of green-ness, much like they would potentially fight about what religion to raise the children.

In the science and tech department, it may be possible to create liquid diamond on outer planets in the Sol system, a slug that produces chlorophyll, three-dimensional printers from HP, a walking robot maid from South Korea, cultural commentary suggesting that the Japanese are afraid of the Internet because the things that make the Internet awesome are things that are societally not accepted in Japan, a suggestion that loneliness is contagious (and that contagion possibly can be modelled), a twit tweeted and got arrested on attempted terrorism charges, which shows paranoia in the government, and thus it will be that much easier for someone else to commit actual damage against them, and a sound cannon that can kill a person if fired less than ten meters from them.

Oh, yes, and ten robots, available free to those with the ten best pitches on what they’re going to do with them.

Furthermore, Two governments, first Germany and then France, warn against the usage of Internet Explorer, because it is a security risk.

And last out, tailor your encouragement based on the person you're encouraging - the perfectionist does better when told to strive for excellence, the less-motivated person does better when told (and shown) it's fun.Textbooks for the achievers, Math Blaster for the slackers! (Or something.)

In the opinions, a big question mark to CBS, who apparently found some lost archives of Jack Benny and then decided to leave them lost, even with the blessing of the estate and an offer to have them produced at no cost to CBS.

The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department has a laugh - although with no real scientific backing to make correlations with, states that ban homosexuals from marrying have a harder time keeping their heterosexuals married. That’s not going to stop anyone, though, from trying to pull together groups that campaign against Houston because of the openly homosexual mayor and a large Planned Parenthood clinic. But, lest one demonize all conservatives and Fox-viewers as completely against homosexual marriage, at least one anchor is for it and is working to make things equal. Perhaps, instead, the anti forces could do something more about the best man robbing the DJ at the wedding reception?

More seriously, Haiti’s earthquakes have generated a lot of opinion, both on why things happened the way they have, and various calls to smite others as stupid or uninformed. For example, when David Brooks assumes the underlying causes of the poverty are related to child-rearing practice and a lack of being dictated to by others how they should do things, because other countries have other factors Haiti has, and they’re doing fine, he gets hammered by The Professor for myopic and wrong-headed thinking, for insisting that his preferred filter is the only explanation. Doug Giles's attempt to twist the natural human impulse to help into "look how wonderful these Christian Americans are" praise, complete with “Libruls hate America and badmouth it constantly, so they won’t help any in this” is turned back by the Non-Believers Giving Aid fund, as well as the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department quietly pointing out how many more people identify as Christian in the country before bashing him upside the head with the conclusion: “So it would naturally look like Christians are giving and doing more than others.”

For a more historically-viable explanation, bradhicks takes things one step further - it’s not that Haiti has just been dirt-poor and thus is affected heavily by the quake, it's that Haiti has been the victim of a sustained financial war against them by America and Europe to ensure that nobody in the world ever sees that a true slave revolt can be successful, using dictators, weapons, and economy-crushing loans with murderous strings attached to make sure Haiti cannot ever have a functional debt-free economy. Naomi Klein comes to the same conclusion, and hopes that those forces are prevented from reasserting themselves on the country. How about a $100 million USD grant to Haiti, instead of a loan, huh, IMF? Mr. Stephens says, instead, we should stop all aid to Haiti past humanitarian aid, because Haiti has no capacity at all to handle it, and it will all only go to corrupt politicians and black markets. Which, if Mr. Hicks is right, has been happening by design. Stopping aid will probably not fix that problem, instead, the corrupted system would have to be overthrown and the war against Haiti would have to stop.

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown have got the cause of Obama's sinking numbers: It's the spending, stupid, choosing to blame the stimulus bill and the possible second (or fifth, depending on your count) stimulus as only making the problem worse. Pretty standard stuff from the conservative side.

Dick Armey, chair of FreedomWorks and likely a host of other astroturf, corporate-sponsored entities masquerading as grass roots organizations, talks about the potential for Republican leadership coming from the tea party movement, a movement he, his organization, and their as-yet-undisclosed corporate backers have had quite a bit of influence on. He could almost qualify for some sort of Worst Persons nomination, because he’s serious about this, but then again, someone might actually generate something sane out of all the insane energy expended so far, so we’re giving the tea partiers the benefit of the doubt.

Besides, he’s outclassed. Witness Phyllis Schlafly, harping that achievement in schools is directly tied to whether there is a father in the house, and blaming social assistance programs for creating "a society of single moms", and insisting that a curriculum redesign in Minnesota that will make explicit notions like white privilege, heternormativeness, and male privilege will teach children that America is oppressive, racist, sexist, and a host of other bad things. We’ll call it American History, Ms. Schlafly, which as far as I know is still mandatory. Your final suggestion, a plug for your book and an insistence that the best thing minority children can get is reading by phonics by first grade mars good advice (everyone should be able and willing to read at a very early age) with shameless commercialism and an unwillingness to accommodate different learning styles. As someone who is actually involved in reading and literacy, let me tell you - there are as many successful methods of fostering reading as there are readers.

That said, it’s tough race for silver (the gold having already been given above) between her and Mr. Prager, who believes that America is no longer making men, but instead has young boys and older boys. The older boys don’t provide the atmosphere of respect men command, don’t have older male role models (lack of fathers and male teachers, doctors, and macho film men), masculinity and femininity have been deleted (and there are no male roles), by which he means men are raised as women, without Male toys like soldiers and Male games that allow rough-housing, we’re all whiners about our rights instead of being backhanded across the face and told to live up to our responsibilities and “be a man”, there are no places for men to bond with other men, like sport teams, the military, and the Boy Scouts, our religion is feminized by having a loving, caring God, and worse, female clergy, instead of the judgemental bastard of the Old Testament who only wants boys in his club and thinks women aren’t fit for it, machismo is being discarded in favour of “feelings” and there are no winners or losers anymore, and nobody’s getting married, so there are no models for male-dominated single provider households with barefoot, pregnant, and cowed women taking care of the domestic tasks and the children, afraid to leave. And as a final insult to women, he believes the increased depression rate of women is because they’re taking on male roles that the men are abandoning in droves, roles they are unsuited for, as frail and fragile women who need big strong men to dominate them.

The short response to such a screed is two or three words, with one of them being some variant of the F-word. It is clear from his piece that Mr. Prager is under the impression that Real Men are square-jawed, are physically incapable of a full range of emotions, at least not while there is someone watching them, glorify violence, strength, and winning above all, believe women to be second-class persons, only good for bearing kids, raising them, and keeping the dwelling clean, and is a fundamentalist evangelical homophobic Christian who favours judgement and wrath over forgiveness. He may also be a father who beats his children to discipline them, but at that point, I’m speculating. He’s the worst of that high-school jock and Fred Phelps. He’s a member of a mythical past that doesn’t exist but that people like Mr. Prager believe was real a mere two generations ago. He is a Cross-Eyed Knuckle-Scraping Moron, and we are better off not trying to emulate him. We are better served as a species by our continuing attempts to make it acceptable for women to wear pants and men to show emotions other than anger, violence, and rage.

Last for tonight, a Florida teen walks for her senior night. Which would not normally seem different, but for the fact that she has one leg gone and another that is still building bones. In contrast, the faith healing rooms, a reminder that people will latch onto whatever they can to have hope - thankfully, this group doesn’t advocate for only faith healing or against the use of medicine and medical professionals. To sum it up, perhaps in pictures, Fire and Ice.

This year has been a year of changes. The one constant of the universe is that everything changes. People die, people are born. Relationships begin and end, careers finish and begin, and the Wheel of the Year continues its turn. Whether you think the Wheel is perpetual-motion or powered only by our striving, it certainly hasn't come anywhere close to stopping. It may have even sped up some on me. Despite that, there were only a few strong events in my personal life, or at least strong enough to have made an impression by this time of year.

January opened fresh with the news that eight years of the previous administrator were coming to an end. The result of the historic election (and it was going to be that way, regardless of who won) had tapped a man of dark skin color to be the President of the United States. What we didn't know was what was yet to come. Middle East violence, both of our own making and of others making against each other, was still in the news this month and would stay that way for a very long time. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan would stay the focus in various strengths at various times through the year. The economy was still in the tank, housing was still crashing, unemployment was still going up, but hey, new person at the helm, maybe they can right the sinking ship.

Those attempts shook themselves out into a few specific areas for the fight - health care, which we were hoping would resolve quickly, but hasn't, an economic stimulus, which there is still debate about the effectiveness of, matters on climate, the environment, and the economy, and a set of foriegn policy proclamations intended to bring america away from the isolationist camp back into participating in the world's affairs. And then, off in the fringe somewhere, were the accusations that the President has a socialist plan for America, that he is somehow the Antichrist, a tyrant, and, *gasp* a liberal. We'll get to the really big whoppers in time, but the point to recall is that the Republicans entrenched themselves even this early on as the opposition that would approve of nothing, supported by conservative personalities and elements that would, at times, make the Republicans look like concessionary moderates and well-spoken intellectuals. Who took Fox News as their standard of objective journalism, and cheered the Republican tactic of delaying everything for as long as possible.

January also made a hero out of Captain Sullenberger, for making a successful water landing after both of his engines failed soon after takeoff, and his crew, for getting everyone off the plane safely without injury or fatality.

After such a thrilling first month, February had high standards to live up to. There were ongoing detail revelations in pastor sex scandals, the stimulus bill passed and was signed into law, where it would fade into the background, excepting when someone wanted to make a point about hwo ineffective it was. The matter of TARP funds and their uses would rise up, because people are understandably chuffed when their tax dollars pay an incompetent executive's annual bonus.

February also had the beginnings of the sneaking suspicion that the current President was not all he was elected to be, especally on issues of executive power and secrecy, Blackwater changed its name to avoid scrutiny, and the first of many race-charged events happened when the Attorney General declared the country basically cowards on the issues of race. Furthermore, the GOP in exile still seemed to be abdicating its leadership to the right wing talk radio pundits, letting them dictate policy instead of the RNC or other official organizations.

We also got treated to Governor F-Word and his scandalous scandals of selling a Senate seat, coarse language, wild hair and all.

March came to us riding a wave of... something. The beginning signs of the health care debate to come, climate change and carbon taxes beginning to enter the fray (so we're now juggling three different chainsaws, with the occasional resurgence of the fourth one already supposedly put down), and the naissance of the Tea Party movement, originally conceived to be a protest on April 15, and which became far more powerful than anyone imagined. GM and other automakers were wobbling, but not falling down yet. And of course, there was the general undercurrent of "Iran's getting nuclear weapons and extremist Muslims are infiltrating everywhere to turn us into a Muslim country." The economy was a mixture of stimulus spending and TARP money and there were calls for bigger oversight of Wall Street and banks and calls for even less oversight of Wall Street and the banks. (Continue to remember, too, that a non-insignificant portion of the opposition beleived the President was a socialist bent on turning America into the United Kingdom.)

The big thing was that it looked like the Obama Administration was going to get serious about investigating the allegations of torture happening under the previous administrator's watch. As we now know, that idea popped like a soap bubble, but not without a lot of heat generated about the partisan witch-hunt that was happening. Despite the laws requiring the investigation of those allegations as far as they would go. Instead, it would all get swept under the rug, even as successively more damning evidence arrived, like torture memos in April, which ignited a storm of "the ends justifies the means" justifications and conveniently ignored that the U.S., as a signatory to the Convention on Torture, is obligated to investigate and prosecute allegations, the revelation of briefings of Congress in May (with some discussion about whether the CIA was entirely truthful in their briefings), one of the big witnesses/persons in the torture case saying he lied to stop the torture (in June), the discovery of a program the CIA was ordered to keep secret, even as it would turn out to have never gotten off the ground,

April had big things, too. A flap over the pro-choice president going to the Catholic universtiy as the commencement speaker, the beginnings of what would become an ACORN investigation and condemnation that would ultimately turn out to be done out of spite instead of for any real reason. The war dead could be seen again, if the families wished it, even as the pressure continued to not accurately diagnose those coming back with dsorders. The Tea Party adopted the nickname "teabaggers" as their grouping moniker, much to the snickering of the rest of us, followed by NOM's 2M4M, the birthers were still around, although they were not yet the prominent voice that later time would give them (even as they were darlings of the fringe ever since they appeared), Al Franken was declared the winner in the November 2008 Senate race, starting the appeals process, and a memorandum went out and was recalled from DHS that said we were growing our own terror cells, and that they would take an interest in veterans because vets had combat skills.

Oh, and there was Carrie Prejean. She of opposite marriage sparked another massive debate, after we'd just gotten through the Proposition 8 fiasco, and so homosexuals continued to be part of the national conversation for a while.

Professionally speaking, the big thing was the new Consumer Product Safety Regulations, which could have required all books in the library to be tested for lead levels before they could be safely returned to them. At great cost and expense. And the scratching of heads that said "Books are not major sources of lead, y'know."

But we survived to May.

I went to Anime Central and had a very fine time with the JAMS crew as we did our best to soak up nostalgia from the American attempt at tokusatsu, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

After a defection in April, and the final certification of Al Franken this month, the Democratic caucus had sixty of one hundred votes in the Senate, assuming everyone voted the party line. The President made noise that he might actually do something about the way the banks were handling their TARP money, H1N1 arrived on the scene as the flu of choice this season, a new Supreme Court justice nominee was attacked for a single remark, "empathy", and for being a woman and a minority, instead of trying to take issue with her judicial record and career (she beat the rap and was confirmed), the boss of the Republican Party (no, not Mr. Steele) challenged his detractors to go thirty days without him, figuring they were feeding off his fame, and got middle fingers all around in response, the death of Doctor George Tiller, killed by a domestic terrorist, and the Republican Party almost passed a resolution declaring the Democratic Party should change its name to the Democrat Socialist Party.

Thus, June. Professionally speaking, June was the start of summer and Summer Reading, which meant school visits, stickers, prizes, and the best insanity there ever is, continuing for three months or so. Elsewhere, in West Bend, WI, four nuts demanded the removal and public burning of Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop as well as $120,000 to cover their pain and suffering at having been exposed to such a book.

We also tossed in our lot with the Dreamwidth Studios beta release of their Livejournal code fork, and we've been pleasantly satisfied with what has been available so far. The only major difficulty we have is that we cannot yet aggregate our LJ friends and our DW circle onto the same reading page, which would simply be awesome.

There were still big rumors that Israel would strike against Iran's nuclear facilities and precipitate an international realtions disaster in June. And then, elections happened, elections were disputed, and protests broke out in the country. That certainly put the rumors of nuking Iran on hold, at least until the protest resolves itself one way or another. Twitter suddenly became a news outlet with dispatches and updates and information, and YouTube delivered video content.

There was the first mention of prayers to kill President Obama (which would continue on), "public option" was currently the talk of the health care debate, and would continue to be so through the end of the year, Al Franken was finally declared the winner after the appeals process, and a reversal on a firefighters promotion test that was thrown out because minorities did not score well on it and they were worried civil rights lawsuits would follow. The news cycle was never dull, although it could be repetitive at times.

We're past the halfway point in July, and the major holiday and my birthday happened. Another year older, another year more experienced. Have no idea whether any wisdom came with that year. Some entertainment value from the indiscretions of a Governor, gone to Argentina without telling anyone where he was, and then getting busted as he arrived back, who followed on the heels of indiscretions of a Senator, who employed the mistress and her husband, then fired them, and then attempted to get his family to pay them off. Failed Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin became failed Governor of Alaska, resigning her post to join the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and tour the lecture circuit (also, to have a book at least partially ghostwritten published). A riot went off in China, where an ethnic minority rose up in protest and the Chinese government moved swiftly to stomp them back down so they could pretend nothing happened. The actual hearings of Sonia Sotomayor happened, a day camp of black children went to a poor at a club and were refused entry, because the club members were apparently concerned that black children were getting into the apparently whites-only pool, the White Sox sent twenty-seven men down in order, issuing no bases on balls nor allowing any hits in the process, Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, a satirist, was named the most trusted newsman in America, and the conservative side of the aisle made mountains out of molehills from a remark the President made about the stupid actions of a policeman. There would eventually have to be beer at the White House before those conservatives would shut up and stop distorting the facts to their advantage.

We're not even at the fun point yet. Congress took their traditional break for August, and boy was it a doozy! The Lie of the year appeared in full force - Death Panels! There were tea party type protests, claiming everything from Socialism! to Naziism! and more. Birthers, Deathers, teabaggers, and big, big lies. This was the background of the Congressional recess, an attempt to prevent the dissemination of real information, any sort of productive conversation, and to give the appearance that the whole country was against the idea of passing health care reform.

Additionally, the program intended to get people to buy more fuel efficient vehicles received a second infusion of cash after wild success, the Iran protest movement retreated for a little bit when Ahmadinejad was certified as the winner after a recount, and he took the oath of office, Sonia Sotomayor took office as a Supreme Court Associate Justice, Megan McCain was a brief flash of optimism for the Republican Party before they were once against totally swallowed by the teabagger menace, someone accused the UK's NHS of wanting to kill Stephen Hawking and thus snuff out a brilliant mind, only to be reminded that Stephen Hawking has been under the care of the NHS as a UK citizen for his entire life, disney bought Marvel, and there were a couple rumblings that there might be actual prosecution of torture, but those were just rumblings.

That, and I sat through the entire Ring opera, all four parts. There was a lot of good singing - the staging wasn't quite as good, and the story took four nights to tell what it could have done in two. Not to mention how many times the story could have come to a successful conclusion and it didn't, apparently because of the corrupting power of the ring.

September brought with it a cry of "socialist plot to indoctrinate the youth of America!" based on the supplemental materials the Department of Ed was going to distribute to help students get context and questions out of an Obama speech on the merits of education, The Republican Party having to defend government-run healthcare as they campaigned against the possibility of government-run healthcare, contractors in Afghanistan taking pictures of doing alcohol shots off each other's rectums, a teabagger-heavy (and wildly inflated, in terms of attendance numbers repeated by conservatives) movement attempting to capitalize on 9/11 while hiding behind Glenn Beck's cover of values and norms creating a 9/12 rally, "You lie!" shouted at a sitting President while he addressed Congress, and a former President saying opposition to the current was was founded mostly in racism, an ur-conservative awarding an entrepreneur award to a gentleman's club in exchange for a donation, which was promptly refunded and the award rescinded once the conservative found out what type of establishment he had just supported, the stripping of ACORN on trumped up charges and heavily-doctored video that needed multiple tries before the footage they wanted was obtained, announcement that there is actually water on Luna...

...and Operation Iraqi Baseball, where American sport companies and regular people donated and outfitted the entire Iraqi national baseball team with appropriate gear. That, and Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom we have to seek forbidden lore in spite of all the people who think that lore should be forbidden. Yes, that means me, too.

October began with some acceleration. My personal life took a big and major step forward, of which I'm not sure I've felt all the consequences of yet, but so far, I seem to be on reasonably stable ground. My work life braced for impact as the system found it had to shed more than $1 million of budget, which it did through efficiencies, early retirement buyouts, and layoffs. Mostly buyouts and layoffs, because people are always expensive. This put a lot of people on edge, because contract negotiations and other actions meant accurate information was scarce, and what little there was wasn't forthcoming at all.

Elsewhere, Sarah Palin published a book, Rio de Janerio became the site for the 2016 Summer games, and the right wing here had orgasms over the knowledge that Chicago was eliminted in the first round of balloting, and then they had inflamed ranting when the President was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the beginnings of the Conservative Bible, which is fairly oxymoronic, yes, 30 Republicans voting against an amendment that defunded feeral contractors that prevented their employees from taking sexual harrassment cases to court, the ramming of Luna with a missile to analyze what sort of elements and water content was available there, a Raplh Lauren model first suffering a Photoshop Disaster, then being fired by the company when she complained about how unrealistic she looked, a judge's unwillingness to marry interracial couples, which reulted in his eventual resignation, the Matthew Shepard Act signed into law, the committees finally all managed to pass out variations on their health care bills, and a mainstream Republican candidate quit a race over being accused of not being conservative enough and was "replaced" in the race by the Teabagger party candidate, an act that would eventually elect a Democrat in November to a seat that hadn't been Democratic for more than a century.

So yeah, we did to that voting thing in November. Washington went all-but-marriage while Maine stumbled at the end and fell down, and there were lots of school and library issues (we got an annexation) as well as local offices and initiatives. Carrie Prejean rather swiftly dropped from the limelight after tapes of her engaged in premarital self-sex emerged, the House of Representatives passed their version of health care, a shooting on a military base, the economy still continuing its sluggish movement while Wall Street executives continued to rake in giant bonuses, more disillusionment of the people who thought the President was a liberal, as he argued in favor of warrantless wiretaps, libary workers fired for flagrant violations of patron privacy and intellectual freedom, suspects in the 11 September attacks were scheduled to be tried in civilian courts (yes, that's eight years after they were involved in the attacks), the Iranian protesters revived with a vengeance, a Bible verse was put to potenially dark purposes, a hacker released e-mails that, out of context, made it look like climate change scientists were deliberately trying to cover up opposing viewpoints, and we all tapped our feet impatiently waiting for the Senate to Do Something on their health care bill.

Last month, but no signs of slowing! The e-mails previous preceded a climate change conference in Copenhagen happening later on in December, the President sent an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan while providing a target draw-down date, escalating a war many had hoped he would end swiftly, the marriage of a three-dimensional and a two-dimensional character, the first appearance of the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda, the apparance of what was originally SpaceShipTwo, now christened Enterprise, the President's Nobel acceptance speech, a terrorist almost when an underpants bomb fizzled instead of exploding, and the abandonment of the public option in favor of extending Medicare benefits so that 55 was the minimum age, which in turn was abandoned for an individual mandate to buy insurance without any sort of serious cost control or competition for a bill that stayed in debate all the way to the 24th of December before finally passing out of the Senate chamber, limping, ragged of breath, and with sucking wounds to several of its major organs. There was also much complaint over a stage performance by Adam Lambert, mostly over the idea that children might be watching a late night music show and thus have their parents offended by displays of mock sexual acts and possible S&M-themed displays.

...Really, at the end of the year, we're all waiting for the Democrats and the President to make good on their major campaign promises. They may even have to accelerate the process, with midterm elections appearing, which might shake some of their members from the rolls. One can always hope that actual liberals get elected in significant numbers, but we'd settle for the Democrats behaving like the liberal party. Otherwise, their sinking numbers will only continue. Not that the other party is experiencing a resurgence - the only people who might be gaining popularity are the teabaggers. And most sane people I know feel that giving those kinds of teabaggers any sort of real power or influence would be a serious mistake.

And then there was the Dead Pool - Khan/Mr. Roarke, Number Six, the suit actor for the robot from Lost in Space, John Updike, Paul Harvey, prominent and helpful librarians, The Host (from Angel), Marilyn Chambers (Behind the Green Door), Sir Clement Freud (Just A Minute), Judith Krug (ALA OIF director), Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp, Dom DeLuise, Hugh Van Es (iconic photographer), George Tiller, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, Billy Mays (still selling products even though he's dead), Robert S. McNamara, Oscar Meyer, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes), John Hughes (Breakfast Club), Les Paul, Eunice Kennedy Shriver (founder of the Special Olympics), Robert Novak, Don Hewitt (creator of 60 Minutes), Senator Edward Kennedy, Reading Rainbow, Norman Barloug (high-yield crops), Patrick Swayze, Irving Kristol, Mary Travers, Henry Gibson, Peg Mullen (antiwar activist), Captain Lou Albano (wrestler and Mario), Soupy Sales, Mac Tonnies, Geocities, and Oral Roberts all went to their final rest. It always seems like the list gets bigger every year.

Against that stream of the dead, though, the Century of the Fruitbat took control - Sweden, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia, Argentina, all legalized homosexual marriage or domestic partnership. Maine's already-legal marriages were then put to a ballot question and then repealed. California's killer Proposition 8 was upheld, although all the people who rushed to get married are still married, and all their domestic partnerships are still completely valid. Washington state survived a challenge to their domestic partnerships, and it became all-but-the-word, basically. New York tried for homosexual marriage...and failed. Don't Ask, Don't Tell continued to fire qualified military personnel for being gay, India finally decriminalized homosexual acts, the Episcopalian Church said homosexuals could be ordained as ministers, while at the end of the year, Uganda introduced a bill that would kill known practicing homosexuals with HIV and levy stiff fines on those who knew where homosexuals were and didn't report them, and there were possible ties between that bill and American evangelists, who since came out against that bill.

At the end, though, whether we believe in the Decade of the Big Zero or a whole lot of fibs, from the beginning onward, this year has been most interesting to watch. The next year promises to be at least as good, if not better in some ways. (And likely worse in others.)

Good morning, everyone, after quite a hiatus. Lots has happened while we were away. I think the best advice is the one outlined on the sign.

For those looking to revisit their childhoods, or just have a great way of getting down the stairs, spiral staircase up, slide going down. Other people looking for uplifting materials may want to see an artist who did Ren and Stimpy encouraging a young artist to develop good habits. As part of a bigger site, Letters of Note, which looks to be pretty awesome.

And then there are the science fiction vanity plates. To continue the laughs, a poorly-thought, poorly-researched tract claiming Christians should beware of science fiction, because so many atheists, humanists, evolution-believers and God-deniers wrote really good science fiction. Noting one person in sci fi not mentioned - Orson Scott Card ,who has shown himself to be quite the religious person...but I doubt Ender Wiggin is.

In matters pertaining to my profession, after the abrupt firing of their director by the trustees, a library in Vermont has closed because the rest of the staff walked out in protest. Apparently, this is things coming to a head after several other disputes involving library trustees criticizing budget decisions, accusing the director of lying, and accusations that the trustees violated open meeting laws as well. For something different, The Analog Divide is rather aggravated that someone is calling out the library to...do the job the library has been doing for years, but apparently, the message isn't getting out. Perhaps because a lot of people use us for free DVD rental among all our other tasks.

In the real news world, the Dead Pool claimed Miep Gies, the last living member of the family that helped to hide Anne Frank, at 100 years of age.

Haiti suffered a Richter 7.0 earthquake o n12 January and several strong aftershocks, leaving buildings flattened and infrastructure collapsed. International aid arrived very soon afterward. For some, the disaster is as big as it is at least partially because humans, both local and foreign, funded and built things in places they shouldn't have and without any codes or considerations of the local population and economy. For others, it was the result of a pact with the devil. More on who spouted that nonsense in Worst Persons.

Google and other companies suffered a hacking attack intended on gathering information about dissidents in China. Needless to say, Google was not pleased. The United States government and Google asked China to look into the hacking attacks, As a result of this, Google said they would stop censoring their results for Chinese IPs, setting themselves up to be banned or blocked in those IPs. Which would mean China would shoot itself in the foot. The sound of the shotgun cocking? China blocked Google's threats of pulling out of China. I'm not sure if that's a tail-bite or a downward spiral, but it produces the same effect.

Domestically, in Michigan, UAW protests outnumber the teabaggers. Plus, the very interesting contention that there are no teabaggers in soup lines, presumably because anyone affected by that much poverty is unlikely to be against things like providing real health care reform.

A Guantanamo Bay prisoner spent some time with one of his guards, outside of the prison environment - the guard apologized for treatment given there, the prisoners recounted their tale of wanting to go somewhere and smoke dope...which somehow landed them in the prison. Context is everything, really.

Former half-term governor of Alaska Sarah Palin joins up at Fox News. This was certainly an expected result of things. We'll see whether she can compete with the likes of Bill'O in keeping her inflammatory remarks up enough to stay there.

Not that the Democrats can stay out of stupid statements, with Senator Reid in 2008 also talking about the "articulate light-skinned black man" angle we thought was the sole province of Joe Biden. Why does this return? Book came out with the quote. Why is it still here? The GOP threw a s--tfit because people weren't calling for Reid's head like they were calling for Trent Lott's when he remarked that if America had endorsed the segregationist candidate, we wouldn't have nearly as many problems as we have today.

The court trial of Proposition 8 was going to be televised...until the anti forces got an emergency decision to prevent the broadcast. And thus, we lost out on a great educational opportunity, and the opposition successfully managed to make it so the populace couldn't put faces to the people that kept couples from their marriages. And we don't get to see the big slog and legal battle and ugly commentary being played out live for us. That's really too bad. We really did lost a big learning opportunity here. In its wake, I would hope that all persons, Christian and otherwise, adopt the John Shelby Spong manifesto and declare that they will no longer give time nor energy to persons who wish to discriminate against homosexuals and instead treat homosexuals as full persons in their government and in their churches.

Marvel, now owned by Disney, is suing the heirs of Jack Kirby to prevent the reversion of copyright on Kirby's characters to his family. What, Disney couldn't just get a law passed declaring those copyrights were theirs? Do they not have a patsy in the Legislatures that will do their work for them?

Brian Williams talks about the indispensable nature of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, as well as the fact that because the Daily Show doesn't seem to ever run short of material, there's a lot of error-prone journalism going on in the world, too.

Last out, a seasonal ingredient finder. Tell it where you are, it will tell you what's local and where to find it.

In technology, those full-body scanners in vogue right now can transmit images to a remote place when in test mode, which we are assured is turned off before shipping. And also, implicitly, that machines like that cannot be hacked to transmit their images. Yeah. In protest to such devices, some Germans converged on a particular airport and then stripped off their clothes. For thsoe not willing to bare all, AppleGeeks suggests a different way of protesting.

A three hour technical support call to Verizon has become the inspiration for a new song. No, it's not going to be a positive review. And Verizon might find themselves on the end of some very negative publicity if the song gets popular.

Note to Amazon - if you're going to include text-to-speech, don't half-ass it, make it so all of the components have text-to-speech, and that way you avoid complaints that blind users can't use your device.

As for the sciences, how about an ant species that has no males, and the Chinese population, which has far too many in relation to their women, and the Y chromosome as one of the genome's fastest evolvers, which makes maleness possible.

Also, transforming wood into bone-like structure, which segues, sort of, into the 13,000 year-old tree, the worlds oldest currently-living organism, impersonal cameras documenting a Google Street View vehicle-deer collision and uploading it to Google Maps, where it stayed until someone noticed it, a break down of body parts mentioned in song genres, a feature on the increased usage of unmanned drones and the people being rush-trained to fly them, and more cool pictures from Mars taken by unmanned robots. Which hopefully means when we take people to Mars, we find all sorts of really awesome stuff.

Starting off the opinions, Mr. Arends says that anyone believing California is about to collapse needs to take a closer look at the numbers, and see that there's actually very good structure in place to make sure California doesn't fail.

Mr. Mitchell notes that one of the best ways to ensure that stupid people gain no followings or traction is to let them talk about their ideas openly, instead of trying to ban them.

Some analysis on what prompted th eLeno move, and why it's turning out to be a bad one, with the reversion of Leno to late night and the possible pushing of Conan later.

In our Worst Persons in the World tonight, the bronze to Galatically vile hate-monger Pat Robertson, claiming that the Haitian earthquake was a result of residents making a pact with Satan two hundred years ago, and is just the latest in YHWH's vengeance upon them. Pat Robertson, who believes that all natural disasters are punishments from on high for whatever deviant behavior he's fascinated by this time. Odds are good this time it's because a lot of Haitians practice a religion other than his. Worse, he claims that the pact and the disasters that followed are well-researched scolarship...from people who are religious figures. Our prognosticators have looked into the future and have what we feel is a fairly accurate transcript of the conversation Pat will have when he meets the god he claims to follow.

The silver to Wal-Mart, who continues to destroy unsold goods and then throw them out, instead of donating them to charities or other organizations that would make much better use of them than the dumpster. H&M used to do this, but has supposedly stopped the practice.

But full marks and a high-velocity golden quiche to the Monsato corporation, not only for their practices that encourage monoculture, prevent farmers from saving seed stock, and patenting a different variety just so they can keep making profits and don't have to release their seed to the public or competition, but also for developing seeds and grain that, because it tolerates herbicides and pesticides, permits those chemicals to persist in the fully-grown grains... to the obvious detrimental effects. Save the world by feeding it, yes, but do so in a manner that is sustainable and won't, y'know, poison the people eating it. Plus, we're waiting for the blight that will affect the Roundup Ready strain and kill it off, devastating entire stocks at a time. Nature does not like monogenetic breeding and engineering.

Sharing that honor is Rep. J. Gresham Barrett, introducing legislation that would deport everyone who entered the country from Iran, Yemen, Syria, or Cuba and ban anyone from those countries from entering. He's doing this in response to the Fort Hood shooting and the Fruit of the Boom bomber. The problem? His legislation wouldn't have stopped either of them from what they did. Instead, he just wants to display his prejudices and try to get them implemented as law.

Last for tonight, another example of the correct way for corporations to use their social media presences - responding to customer complaints swiftly and keeping them in the loop. Perhaps Google's new interface will generate similar stories of complaint and response.

And, on a postscript, One hundred game cupcakes. I got 89/100. Would have had more, but the games that I thought they were ended up being later on, so I was right, but I was wrong at that point. This, and the sarcasm punctuation mark. Really.

Despite the lack of fluffy white stuff here where we are, in China, and elsewhere snow has fallen in sufficient quantities for some pretty awesome sculpturing.

Oooh, look, new winners for the Darwin Awards, the contest that tries to find the people who assisted the gene pool of humanity the most by removing themselves from it.

On the international stage, those body scanners that the UK was complaining about child porn over? Canada has chosen to purchase and install several of them in their airports.

Cyber Sitter sues the Chinese government for billions of USD, alleging that the government stole code from their program and used it in creating the firewall program they require installation of for computers in schools and Internet cafes in the country. As thewayne put it, "I love it when good things happen to bad people."

Here we go - Yemen, al-Qaeda militants, clashes, embassy closures, and what might very well be the opening of another front in the continuing concept war.

The recent attack that killed several CIA members came from an agent who claimed to have information on the second-in-command of Osama bin Laden, thus he was invited inside where he could detonate his explosives. In seeking intelligence, an attack. An effective vector, unfortunately.

Not that Pakistan has suddenly vanished - One of five Americans detained as seeking to become terrorists denied links to al-Qaeda while acknowledging their intent to beome "jihadists" and attack America.

Domestically, TPM would like to know if the NRCC is trying to get people to vote against the Democratic candidate for a Tennessee Representative seat by implying he's a homosexual. The official line from the opponent is that they're attacking his liberal record and his supposed running away from that record to be palatable...while making comment about his personal blog's many comments about body image. When looking at the opponent, however, Americablog has to wonder if this isn't a case of projecting your own insecurities onto your opponent.

A human interest story of a bugler and his compatriots across the country traveling to the funerals of military veterans, after Congress authorized the playing of a recording of Taps because there are not enough buglers to meet the needs of the dead.

In the matter of reconciling the two health care bills, the method that presents one unified bill to the President may schew the formal conference proceedings so as to deny the party of delay the chance to engage in more delaying.

Leading the opinions tonight, the slacktivist gives hell to all religious authorities that require heresy police and put people to death for practicing sorcery, because their faith in their own religion is so weak they think other religions have powers that could be combative to theirs.


In our more normal fare, Mr. Olasky can't decide whether he wants to make commentary about the disillusionment of the populace with President Obama after narcissism about how they were electing a black president, or complain that the mainsteam media has been fawning all over said President since we were introduced to him on the national stage. I think the narcissism commentary wins out, but it's pretty much a mishmash of both the whole way through.

Messrs. Becker, Davis, and Murphy conclude that the current tack of domestic economic reform was a mistake because it hampers the groteh of the economy by making even more uncertainty in an already uncertain era, harming private enterprise and the desire to invest and/or hire because of an unknown amount of new costs associated with those actions. The other possibility is that in the economy, it's the right time to change the rules, so that we can build an economy that's strong on those new fundamentals that will hopefully be better sustained and regulated than the previous version.

Mr. Gleming tells us a shaggy dog story about Prohibition and its effects to say, basically, that letting moralizing mobs dictate public policy is a bad idea. Which he intends to apply to 2010 and our current crop of liberal overlords oppressing everyone, but can just as easily be applied to the screaming sidhe that insist this country be run according to their strict interpretation of their version of Christianity.

Mr. Hanson continues to try and reconcile his requirement that President Obama be a doctrinaire anti-war, Muslim-appeasement liberal with the actions the President has taken regarding terror attacks and incidents, this time concluding that the President has had to take and continue the previous administration's playbook because it is effective against terrorists, and thus, the President was wrong about being able to reset relations with his charisma alone. Never mind the cariacturing of the President going on (because he was definitely not a doctrinaire liberal by his own campaign statements), his contention that one third of terrorist plots since 11 Sept 2001 have been in 2009 provokes the ire of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department, who would like to know precisely what they called all the bombings, IEDs, shoe bombers, terror scares and other items that happened abroad and at home. "War." is most likely the response, so they can continue to believe that terror happens mostly when there are liberals in charge.

Mr. McCarthy insists that because of the Concept War, anyone thought to be an "enemy combatant" entitled to no rights should be assumed to be one, guilty until the detainee can prove their innocence, whcih I'm sure is really freaking hard when stuck somewhere like Guantanamo Bay, without access to legal professionals or anyone else who can establish that innocence. Mr. McCarthy argues further that this determination is solely the responsibility of the legislative and executive branches of the government, and that courts have no right to interfere. Because indefinite detention without charge or even any sort of stringent requirement that the person being detained is hostile is perfectly acceptable when at war against an enemy that one routinely says wears no uniforms nor abides by the conventions of war. Because they break the rules, we can, too. Does that sound like a good position to take? Mr. Crovitz insists that we handicap ourselves against terrorism because we require something more than a hunch before we start putting people on no-fly lists, checking on their visas, or otherwise flagging them as someone needing additional screening. Y'know, because we perfer to think of our terrorism matters as possible criminal cases, instead of being at war where all the rules are off and everyone is a likely terrorist. Mr. Blackwell continues the line, hoping that President Obama will "bow to reality" and treat terrorists as enemy combatants deserving no rights to be held in black facilities offshore, and tha tCongress should block any funding for civilian trials to save us all from the "extremism" of the ACLU's interpretation that terrorism is still a criminal matter. A sane criticism of the way things were handled comes from Ms. Gunlock, who chides the Embassy official for doing only the minimum required when he or she could have done a lot more when presented with the information from the underpants bomber's father.

And, because we haven't had one in a while, and the columnists are really getting to that point, it's time to play Worst Persons in the World.

The bronze goes to both the lunatics above who are all in favor of suspending the rules when they think nobody else is following them and Mr. Sowell, using the single example of attempted Marxism as his reasoning why intellectuals made the 20th century worse than it started, using the flimsy logic that because intellectuals supported Marxism and Marxist attempts, they are personally responsible for all the deaths from those attempts. Then, in Part II, he expands it not to be just the Marxism attempts, but all secular ideas promoted by intellectuals that are bad and have made the last century worse, because when put into practice, all of those ideas have been bad for the world and resulted in lots of deaths. So, in Sowell-world, there are no days where everybody lives, and all the improvements of the last century were made by people who were not intellectuals, because they made products, where intellectuals only make ideas. Wouldn't that mean intellectuals are off the hook for what happens when someone puts the ideas into practice, making products out of the ideas? Of course not. People who are intellectual think they're smarter than you, of course, and so they have to be blamed when things go wrong - it's always because someone thought they were smarter or cleverer than you and did something that "everyone knows" would be stupid to put into practice.

The silver effort to Mr. MacKinnon, who ramps the fear up to 11 by claiming American citizens are on their own when the next terror attack hits, because the government can't stop them (too hindered by political correctness, among other things) and will be totally ineffective in organizing a response to the next attack, being too busy covering their asses or taking care of their loved ones, and because infrastructure will crumble with the next attack. Thus, he says, everyone should have their disaster-readiness kits in place for the next inevitable attack, because, after all, you'll be on your own when it happens. Now, disaster-readiness is one thing, definitely to be encouraged, but this kind of paranoia and government-distrust is only instilling needless panic. After all, plenty of places have suffered large-scale terror attacks and they recovered. The United Kingdom survived the Blitz, for Prime's sake, and did just fine in maintaining order. Actually, the United States survived having New Orleans flooded out, and we hopefully learned a lot from that about planning, readiness, and appropriate responses.

Our winners, however, because the self-righteous holier-than-thouness is more than enough to make your skin crawl, Brit Hume, who not only didn't apologize for his "covert to Christianity" comment to Tiger Woods, but repeated it on Bill'O's show, where they also talked about what the other winner is talking about. Mr. Mike Adams, also a gold quiche recipient, talks about how much discrimination Christians and people who put Bible verses in their e-mail sigs suffer from, because the words "Jesus Christ" send nonbelievers into a frothing rage (usually expressed in dark sarcasm, we note) and they immeditely try to ban everything Christlike in sight, and, when in an academic environment, to hide behind the separation of church and state, a nonexistent concept invented to justify banning Christ everywhere (He also takes a dig at feminists, considering dark sarcasm and cattiness of a department to be correlated to the number of feminists employed). His complaint is that Bible verses in signatures could be banned at his institution, while gay pride flags, Confucius, Nietzsche, and Egyptian quotations are allowed to exist without worry. He feels offended by the presence of pride flags and speech by "homosexuals and homosexual activists" and wants them gone (based on the rainbow being the solemn contract between the being represented by the Tetragrammaton and Noah, so clearly said being would not approve of its use by abominations like homosexuals), so obviously the "Bible verses may give offense" angle can't be true, and the university has only two options on how to respond to "discomfort" from anyone - complete neutrality through doing nothing about them, or complete banning of all forms of expression that might cause discomfort. Partial measures apparently are unnaceptable. Probably because they're going against him - if pride flags were banned and Bible verses okay, I don't think he would have a problem. The other part that draws ire is his presumption to know what Jesus would do, claiming he would likely harshly punish university liberals for their beliefs and actions. Recall, Mr. Adams, that while pushing buttons, whipping those doing business in the religious house, and agitating against the life of comfort and smug moral superiority, Jesus was known to sup with tax collectors and the unclean, not smite them because they were sinners. What usually gets people to express their eye-twitch at Christians who go around throwing Jesus' name is that the people who best exemplify the life of Christ are the people least likely to draw attention to their religious preferences or the name that Mr. Adams wants every Christian to take every opportunity they can to say in the presence of nonbelievers. Instead, they pray in secret, as their Father, who sees things in secret, commanded them to, instead of trying to convert someone to their religion by irritating them with the constant mention of how holy a person and their religious figure is.

As for the homosexuals, answer me this: What kind of religion forgets its own past as the people who were persecuted in their overzealousness to persecute others? If you tell me that Christians still are persecuted in America, please turn in your university faculty credentials at the door, as you have failed to Pay Attention in School and need to go back and learn some rudimentary civics and history.

In technology, we start with Godmoding your Windows 7 install, and proceed from there into Skype going 720p HD, a push for televisions to go into the third dimension, using light pulses of different wavelengths to turn off abnormally active cells, and robots that scour the web looking for news stories or other things of interest.

Last for tonight, the Ningen, creatures of urban legends of the Japanese that exist in the water and look somewhat humanoid. And a heartwarming story about a cat that survived being frozen out in the winter cold, now thawed, mewing, and hopefully reunited with the people taking care of the cat.