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"He [The President] shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." - Article II, Section III, United States Constitution.

This has turned into a yearly address, by tradition. It's not so much about the State of the Union, as is it is the recommendations for consideration. The speech is usually peppered with anecdotes of various United States citizens where they slot into the political goals of the speech. Afterwards, the Loyal Oppositiotn gives a response to the speech and the political ideas contained within. It's the closest the United States ever gets to Question Time, and even then, we don't let the backbenchers actually ask questions of the President or the ministers during the time.

Anyway, to the substance! The President's speech was divided into the following areas:

Boasts: The President started his speech with some boasts:
- The United States was completely out of Iraq, honorably and with Mission Accomplished.
- Osama bin Laden is dead, as are many of the officers of al-Qaeda, and the world is safer because of it.
Later on in the speech, there were some other boasts:
- The United States automotive industry is doing well again, with General Motors once again on top of the world.
- Exports from the United States have will reach targets set at the beginning of this Administration well ahead of the schedule laid out for them by the President. (Assuming everything continues on its present track.)
Scolds: After the boasts of the good stuff that's happened on his watch, the President turned his attention to the Loyal Opposition and lambasted them for their unwillingness to compromise or even work together with the Democrats on serious and necessary issues. After an extended riff on how much the military works well together and puts aside their differences and how the World War II veterans built themselves an economy and a middle class that were the envy of the world, the President talked about how the current crash was orchestrated by banks giving mortgages to hose who couldn't afford them, companies sending every manufacturing job they had overseas, and the deregulation over the last decade prevented the government from doing anything about it. Afterward, he mentioned how well the economy is doing now, thanks to reversals of those trends under his administration, and his support and bailing out of General Motors. He would return to this point near the end of the speech and call for less heat and more cooperation.

The other large scold of the night was directed at China and other governments whom the President accuses of not playing on a level field for their good, financial products, or other items in the marketplace, including the deliberate allowing of unsafe products from other countries to be exported and imported.
Plans: Having boasted of his own accomplishments and taken his opposition to task for their unwillingness to get things done, the President laid out some major ideas that he wants to see done.
- Tax code reform: Mr. Obama believes in a tax code that doesn't allow rich people and corporations to pay less in taxes than the people they employ (the "Buffet rule"), that penalizes those who offshore jobs and rewards those who keep or bring them into the United States, and that provides a minimum tax for corproations, but also lowers their rates from something very high to a more competitive rate, and that keeps tax relief for the poorer and middle class people that need it, instead of the richest people who can find them (or buy them).
- Jobs: The President wants to partner up companies and workers so that the workers get training for positions that the companies need to have filled. People get to go to work (and thus get off and stay off of unemployment compensation) and the companies get to fill their positions. He'd also like to coordinate all of those things under one agency instead of many. He also wants kids who are here illegally to be able to find citizenship options, since we've invested in them, invest more in basic research
- Education: In addition to job training for those already graduated, the President wants more money into the K-12 education system, more teacher creativity so they can not teach to the test, and to see students stay in school until they're 18 or graduated. Past that point, though, he wants to have the cost of college find some control, or he'll have their federal subsidies slashed. (For some of that, he thinks that doubling work-studt availability will help control costs.)
- Energy: The President wants to develop clean energy and jobs relating to that. Until we get to that point, though, he's okay with a lot more oil and gas drilling.
- Regulation: Red tape begone, says the President! And in doing so, we'll be able to rebuild infrastructure. At the same time, reverse the harmful deregulation of financial products that put us in this mess, and make sure there's no way this kind of problem happens again.
- Defense: Team America, World Police - just with slightly less in the military attack budget, more in the "Taking care of the vets" budget, and absolutely no change in the mentality that says we know best when it comes to who should and shouldn't get nuclear weapons.

The major problem with proposals afrom the executive at this point is that he still needs a legislature that will send him what he wants. Or at least a legislature whose opposition doesn't believe that the destruction of the executive's plans is the best thing they can do. As the official response from the Opposition will show, they're not really inclined to go that way. I suspect a lot of liberals would have wanted to see more in boasts and scolds about what has been accomplished by his administration and what's been stalled becaues of the opposition, considering it is an election year and they think the President needs to make his case for re-election early and often. The wait and see approach may turn out to be more fruitful, if the continued attacks between the Republicans do the work of making the candidates appear utterly unfit.

There were, thankfully, no audible boos from the audience, nor any persons caught making statements about the veracity of the claims of the President.

The Opposition speech covered the following matters:

Blame: "The President's policies have failed" because there are a lot of people still unemployed, despire the stimulus spending. The borrowing for the stimulus plunges the country into a bigger amount of debt, which only makes the economy more fragile and leads the United States down the paths of European governments that are collapsing under their own debt. And because the President Hates Businesspeople, the greatest thing to drive economic recovery sits untapped, fettered by the demands of environmental extremists and other liberals.
Plans (but not that specific): Mr. Daniels says that loopholes should be eliminated, taxes lowered, domestic energy exploited, Social Security and Medicare "reformed" so as to be a program the only poor people get and the government always defer to the private sector. Details, if pressed, are always a bit sketchy.
Attack: After blame and gestures toward some sort of grand plan, Mr. Daniels claims the President's agenda is to divide people among their various ethnicities, social classes, and other divisive classes, while the Republicans speak the language of unity and patriotism (QUILTBAG people and non-Christians need not apply, of course.) The other main line of attack is that the President, as a Democrat, believes that government is the solution to all problems and wants to expand government to the point of crushing everyone's freedom.

As an opposition speech, this was rather unconvincing. For one, those arguments have been made before, and lots of people are making the case that the government was not solely responsible for the crash and the continuing inability of workers to find work, and that the debt is a result of a skewed tax policy that favors the rich. The plans put out are mostly a rehash of the Ryan budget that lacks credibility. And the attacks about the President being a divider and trying to play to certain interests can easily be leveled in both directions.

As speeches go, really, they were both kind of duds. The virtues of cooperation were espoused in an environment that is not conducive to cooperation, and the attack response from the opposition was to rehash that which had already been done before. I would hope that our politics can do better, especially in an election year.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Mad World - Breathe!

Welcome, everyone, to a world where, in the past, coffee was considered a particularly evil vice.

Elsewhere, Apple's iBook Author software claims exclusive rights to sell your work if you use the software, as part of a EULA that doesn't show up when you first run the software (not that most people would read it).

In the races of the Republican primary, evangelical leaders claim to be united behind Mr. Google Problem, but that's not necessarily the case. Several of the evangelicals present at the conference called shenanigans on the process that supposedly resulted in the endorsement of Mr. Google Problem.

Such an endorsement, fraught with problems as it was, did not help Mr. Google Problem, as Newt Gingrich captured the popular vote in the South Carolina primary, riding a wave of people who thought he did quite well in televised debates, but Mitt Romney came in close behind in second place. The conservative establishment is sufficiently afraid of the idea of a Gingrich candidacy that the Murdoch paper is still calling for new candidates to enter the race. That same bellicose rhetoric and attitude earns Mr. Gingrich a ringing endorsement from those who believe the media and the establishment want weak conservative candidates to beat up on.

Having been thrashed soundly in South Carolina, Mr. Google Problem doubled down on his rabidly right-wing pro-life stance, believing it will lead him to victory in the remaining primaries.

Last for the headlines, the Dead Pool football squad signs Joe Paterno, long-time coach of the Pennsylvania State Nittany Lions, at 85 years of age.

Out in the world today, tax dodgers in Africa are shortchanging the governments they operate in to the tune of billions of USD in lost revenues. The poster also blames government officials not being willing to enforce the taxation laws, but it seems like in a lot of strongman or junta countries, the tax laws are at the whim of the people in charge, as are the posts in the government like being the tax collector.

Pakistani officials suggest that the United States military will be able to return to the country to continue fighting millitants, but on the condition that CIA-operated drone craft never cross into the country.

The European Union adopted formal sanctions on Iranian oil. In response, Iran threatened to simply close the Strait of Hormuz, a major shipping line, and prevent any goods from passing through. (If you ask conservative writers, they want to see the same sort of definitive moves and more coming from the United States.)

Finally, the newly elected Egyptian parliament met for the first time since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.

Domestically, the Republican leader in the House has instructed his subordinates to ensure that no proposal coming from the Obama administration passes through his domain unscathed.

In technology, Code Year, a project designed to get people to follow some self-directed lessons and learn how to do some coding, starting with Javascript, which they say is a beginner-friendly langauge.

Mr. Wheaton is incensed that $94 million USD from the media cabals generates immediate cooperation in Congress on things like SOPA and PIPA, but important things like the budget and unemployment are grounds for gridlock.

Former Senator Dodd explicity threatened Senate colleagues to do what the media cabals tell them to do, because they've already taken their money. Which sparks a lot of calls for bribery investigations.

All in all, though, the votes are just delayed, not necessarily dead. And, as Mr. Greenwald points out, the Government already claims the powers that SOPA and PIPA would have given them, and they will not bother with anything like due process or the requirements of law to do what the media cabals want. All on unfounded accusations that were not proven in a court of law.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that in some cases, federal authorities might actually have to get a warrant before attaching a tracking device to someone's car.

And finally out of this section, a tool lending library in West Seattle, where things are free to use (but donations always welcome). Some people in the library world think that something like this will be helpful in keeping libraries relevant as books and media items start digital, stay digital, and become available inexpensively in the digital realm.

Into opinions, where Mr. Greenfield would have you beleive the State Department won't be investigating the punishments countries under the rule of The Boodthirsy Religion mete out for those they consider to be blasphemers or questioners of Islam. He frames it so that it looks like people are just speaking the truth about the bad bits of Islam and getting punishment for it, but the statemetns in question are fairly inflammatory and obscure their truth value in rhetoric more pleasing to the Chrisians that believe Islam should be eliminated. He'd probably be right with Mr. Ibrahim, who wants you to believe that unstable places that happen to have Islamic governments are representative of all Islamic governments in their treatment of Christians.

Tait Trussel alleges that universities have abandoned the study of Western culture because they no longer teach hagiography, jingoism, and "American exceptionalism" as history. The ability to analyze the culture means that our university students are being divorced fro their culture and the pride they should have in their country, instead of perhaps thinking that the hagiographic history was already taught to them in their schooling and that university is a time to move beyond that, look at it, and see if it is actually true.

Mr. Pyle attacks the President as anti-jobs because he did not approve of the Keystone XL pipeline, and paints him as being on the side of radical environmentalists instead of acting in the best interest of the country, and that if you ask any conservative media outlets, such a decision has obvious dire consequences that harms the middle class.

And out of opinions, Bill'O succumbs to the temptation of calling all the people who want the top income brackets to pay their fair share in taxes jealous of his work ethic and his bootstrapping.

Last for tonight, an article on what SUP's Livejournal plans to do in the future - try and attract new faces to the service, with a throwaway quote that should make someone in PR call for a short sword and a second to make sure they did the job properly. Predictably, the small-but-loyal userbase, like those of us who came in when it was still Brad's place and you needed invite codes, were less than amused at the very public dismissal.

I'll talk about the presidential speech and its official response in a separate posting.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: Daisuke Ishiwatari - Holy Orders (Be Just or Be Dead)

Greetings, everyone. Be reminded that this world will sometimes forget about important things, like the race-motivated bombing of a church that killed innocent children, in their desire to believe that all is well and equal. They will argue for the arming of every citizen as a crime deterrent, even though that would really result in more guns in the hands of criminals. (That would be the commenters in this entry, not The Infamous Brad himself.) And sometimes, they think that juxtaposing legends and the people behind those legends is worthy of news columns, when all that we really need is to remember that legends have flaws, despite their stories.

Elsewhere, in the United States, the proposed bills to ban user content on the Internet move toward votes. One will be snarled by Senate processes and a Presidential veto threat, the other is still up for its vote. Let's recall - the bills are impossible to enforce fairly, and will be used partisanly and at the behest of media cabals. And the bills give the power to completely isolate and destroy a website and prevent anyone from interacting with them. If we want an example, then we can look at The United States federal government shutting down a website of a company based in Hong Kong, with a CEO who has no citizenship in the United States, because the media cabals said that it engaged in massive copyright violation. Their jurisdiction claim was over servers that Megaupload leased in the United States, despite the grand majority-to-everything about the company not being in the United States. We note that this also provides a convenient distraction from some of the real problems involving how big corporations crashed the economy and got away without prosecutions.

On this point, we should be reminded: the Law is a club, not a scalpel, and should be thought of as such when someone wants to wield it. In this case, it's more like a carpet bomb than a club.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering - there's no putting the jinn back in the bottle about remixing and repurposing - one can embrace, or one can die the death of bad PR and thousands of paper cuts.

So maybe we should be happy that the public opinion voiced on this matter was sufficient to derail the current incarnations of the bill and prevent them from arriving for a vote. Which only means they will return later, and hopefully they will be met with the same outrage then. (We're ambivalent about the Anonymous-claimed response: a DDoS against the major players that support SOPA and PIPA.)

At the same time, The Supreme Court of the United States said that works could be removed from the public domain and re-copyrighted, a gigantic "fuck you" to the idea of copyright as the limited monopoly, to the purpose of copyright, and to anyone who wants to use older material for their own projects.

Then, there are the people who protest against a legal requirement for sterilization to accompany gender reassignment surgery in Sweden, who censor websites about Wicca and then report anyone who wants to access them to the police, and who take revenge against a sexual harrassment report against them by claiming the reporter is a terrorist...and the FBI investigates, because she's a Muslim.

Wouldn't it be better just to be able to accept everyone, big, little, QUILTBAG or no, and just treat people as people? And to take criticism as such and strive to improve, rather than trying to turn criticism into something that can be dismissed as "oversensitivity" or some sort of trolling to find offense.

After all, words do hurt, especially thrown in childhood. And actions hurt just as much if not more. It's not a question of degree, really - they all need to be stopped. And we've been warned, repeatedly, about what the consequences are for indulging both Ignorance and Want.

Thankfully, they're not ignoring the fact that soldiers coming back from battles these days are disproportionataely committing suicide.

Elsewhere in the world, India marks twelve months since the last reported new polio case, which is a great sign. Hopefully, the numbers of active cases start going down.

Coptic Christians in Egypt fear that a majority-Muslim government will not respect their right to worship, with extremists already starting to try and blame them for attacks that require reprisals. In Uganda, a preacher demanded the government go after men who threw acid in his face because of his evangelism. The quotes about The Bloodthirsty Religion are just what an audience in the States that believes themselves oppressed or under siege want to hear. The Times didn't need to print such material.

They could focus, instead, on how the majority Shiite set of Iraqi ministers responded to a boycott by the Sunni minister block by declaring them suspended and their decisions voided, and draw some parallels to how other majorities have responded to a protesting minority elsewhere in the world.

Just outside the United States, officials are tightening their mail review and interception procedures after they announced that a magazine from an al-Qaeda branch was discovered in an inmate's cell at Guantanamo Bay.

In the United States, having been forced into making a decision, the Obama administration rejected the building of a large pipeline from Canadian tar sands. Cue complaints that the decision could have been made at any time previous to this, were it not for those damned environmentalists and their anti-energy, anti-jobs agenda and the unwillingness of the President to tell those left-wing nutjobs to shut up and go away.

The same technology that TSA agents use to take naked pictures of you at the airport is now up for usage as a hand-held device to scan you for weapons you may or may not be concealing. The ACLU is arguing about the nature of the Law as a club, no matter how much law enforcement claims its a scalpel, and that "the right of persons to be secure in their persons" actually does apply when the police start scanning your body without a warrant.

And finally, thanks to the Citizens United decision, there are a lot of multinational advertising firms that are salivating at the opportunity of dumping billions of dollars into campaigns, advertisements, and television spots.

In technology, the first science fictino movie made in space, using some astronauts and a cosmonaut. It's all of about eight minutes, but NASA's not interested in giving permission for it to be seen.

The LHC reported they discovered a new particle, composed of the beauty quarks. And have known this for about a month now.

And in the sciences, the transition from unicellular to multicellular life at the beginning of the evolutionary process may not have takes as long as previously theoreized, based on an experiment with yeast cells that took only 60 days to start behaving like multicellular organisms that are individuals.

Welcome to politics and opinions, where a Murdoch-owned paper would like you to believe that the strategies employed by Baen Capital and other hostile takeovers in the 1980s stopped the United States from having weak economic foundations in modern days. And then want Mr. Romney to defend private economics against the Obama narrative of rapacious capitalists destroying jobs and pocketing the profits, claiming that nobody should ever feel entitled to a job in the world of global capitalism, and that trimming the fat is a necessary part of staying in business.

That selfsame paper also wants you to believe that the record numbers of persons on food assistance is solely because the government wants to turn it into an entitlement, instead of the program to help the desperate that it was intended to be, rather than because of the economic downturn and the continued refusal of the private sector to hire any workers, preferring to line their own pockets and proclaim they don't want to hire because they're "uncertain" about the future.

Mr. McGurn, after some smugness about how the current administration has adopted and expanded the excesses of the last, opines about how much Mr. Obama has driven ordinary people to read and interpret the Constitution for themselves, sparking a populist revolution against his own excesses. Neglecting, of course, to mention the other populist uprisings against the Republican governors, the corporate speechifiers, Wall Street, and other excesses that impoverish the already poor and make the rich richer, more powerful, and more able to ignore populism. I wonder if he also believes some form of the widespread belief that the mainstream media are really just the propaganada arm of the liberal side of politics.

Mr. Knight accuses liberals of wanting to perpetuate voter fraud through the ACLU suing to stop laws put in place that require specific forms of identification to vote, the kind of identification that not all people can get, or that lack the documentation or mobility to be able to get - but it's liberals who want to corrupt your vote, go after them.

Mr. Shapiro paints a different picture - the narcissist who cries too much and feels limited by his office, grasping for unlimited power and brooking no criticism. Would love to know which Obama they're going to go after in the campaign - the autocrat who wants to use government to control all aspects of your life (to the point where the commentators consider any suggestion from the President about reforming the government a laugh line), or the man who can't get anything done and blames everyone else but himself for it.

Mr. Sowell wants you to believe that if there are any disparities in your life, or your child's life, then it's entirely your/their fault and there are no other circumstances that contribute to your success or failure. Anyone saying otherwise, he says, is trying to make you feel and act like a victim and be dependent on someone else, rather than bootstrapping yourself up and making your own disparity between yourself and everyone else.

Last out of opinions, Mr. Helprin calls for the immediate destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, including any ones the United States thinks might be used in a launch, bassed on his opinion that Iran will never act rationally with regard to the use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the U.S. should act unilaterally to protect itself from the possibility that at some time in the future Iran might have the capability to acquire nuclear weapons.

Last for tonight, the cost of books, in today's dollars, hasn't changed in fifty years, which is why it's great to grab free stories from P.K. Dick and free material from Neil Gaiman.

And the differences in narratves between doing thing for the paycheck and doing things you like, and happening to get paid for them. If you're doing it for the extrinsic rewards, the motivation is particularly difficult. If you're doing it for the intrinsic rewards, so long as you get enough payment to handle the problems, you're good.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Music: Holst - Second Suite in F, Mvt II

For the non-playground-enabled, the full taunt goes this way:

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Although, more often than not, the saying isn't used as a schoolyard retort any more, but as some sort of sage advice passed on from adults to children about the transience of the mental anguish of childhood and bullying that hasn't yet escalated to the physical.

Take a moment, if you need, to learn about how many youth take their own lives due to bullying, whether mental, electronic, or physical. How many more do so because in their minds, things have gone from bad to worse to unteneable, and they cannot see a way out nor do they have someone they trust to talk to about all of it that knows what to do with that information. (Add in the lot of adults that do the same, or commit murder-suicides, if the numbers that you have aren't sufficient to point out the problem.) And this is with projects trying to counter the negative messages those kids receive.

That's just the amount of people that take their lives. We haven't touched the even bigger swath of abusive relationships that never have any bruises or visible marks on them, but that do just as much damage or more as if they were physically beaten. Or the assaults that come from the media, from dittoheads, pundits, shysters, image manipulators, moving picture studios, and advertising agencies whose sole purpose it is to tell you that you are lacking and that the purchase of this product or service will remove that lack, allow you to cover it up, or give you a reason to attack your peers for their lacks.

Do you have a significant other? Are you able to please them in all ways, including those deep secrets in their brains that they haven't revealed to you but that they really, really, want? No? Then they're either cheating on you or planning on doing so. If you want to keep them, then you'll want to purchase this magazine with our sex tips that will bring their attention back to you. (At least, until next issue.)

Are you wealthy enough to pay all your bills and have enough left over for emergencies? If not, penury will soon haunt you, unless, that is, you choose to purchase our book / invest in our gold firm / take this job.

And what about the children? If you can't send them to the very best schools and give them everything they need, they'll FAIL horribly and become drug addicts living in the ghettoes and it'll be ALL YOUR FAULT. What kind of horrible parent are you that you don't want your children to do well? Nevermind the tuition cost, THINK OF THE CHILDRENS.

Men! You're not virile enough! Why? Because your wives and girlfriends don't want to have sex with you every time they see you! Thankfully, all it will take is our product to make you the stud they are fantasizing about while they're with you!

Women! You're not attractive enough! You need to lose/gain weight, put on/take off your makeup, wear more/wear less so that you can be like our models and turn heads!

Children! You're not cool enough! You don't have the latest fads in toys! Teens! You're not cool enough because you aren't fully with the fickle winds of fashion, you're too smart / too dumb / too weird / too conforming for your peers, and because your social status is too high / low! Just do what we tell you to, and you'll be cool in no time!

Sticks and stones will break our bones, but names will really hurt us. Not just the ones that are slung about as insults, put-downs, and reasons to invoke discipline on you by your employers, but all the other ones that are more subtle, and most especially all those names that we take on and tell ourselves are true. Even if they're totally not true, and everyone else can see that they aren't true.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Bryce Stillman - Reminiscence

Welcome again. Read a piece about Danny Chen that shows how deep the rot in the Army had gone that resulted in his suicide...a lot of his tormentors were officers above him in rank. If there aren't Courts-Martial over this incident, there will be more than a few cries for heads to roll.

Instead, a general court-martial is recommended for PFC Bradley Manning, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to the Wikileaks organization.

And for those following the Republican nominations, several more reaons why Ron Paul is not the selection you should be going with. (Not that the others are doing that much better, but moneyed conservative interests certainly seem to be coalescing around Mitt Romney. And they've got quite a bti of money in the war chest to spend.)

Willard "Mitt" Romney wins the New Hampshire Republican primary. Even though some New Hampshire Republicans want lawmakers to cite the Magna Carta for the justifications for their laws. This seems like a clear case of trying to be more X-TREME than those Constitutional-Authority Tea Partiers.

Last for the beginning, a letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King threatening that they will ruin him. A reminder that Dr. King was considered dangerous for all of his views, not just the ones that people think he had because the textbooks choose not to show them.

Out in the world today, go vote for whom may be the worst multinational company of 2012 - a strong leader at this point is Tepco, the atomic power company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.

Ireland scraps voting machines purchased in 2002 and tested in 2004, because the things would not work for them at all and could not pass appropriate tests for usage. Yet here in the States, we have machines that are routinely found to be hackable and insecure and they get rolled out for each election, seemingly regardless of whether they pass the tests or not.

Canada's justice minister declares that all marriages performed in Canada are legal marraiges, having been alerted to the effects of some other laws interfering with the legality of those marriages.

A Catholic priest in Germany admitted to 280 counts of sexual abuse of young men in the past decade, claiming that he did not believe he was doing any harm to them when he abused them. Sorry, did someone say those were all things in the past that were being dredged up and that the Catholic Church was totally clean now? Try again.

Several conservative religious leaders put out a statement claiming that gay marriage must be stopped if the liberty of the United States is to continue, because recognizing such unions means we've abandoned our moral center, and you know what happens after that. Mr. Santorum articulated that position, I believe, and it earned him his un-Googleable status.

Belarus passes a law banning anyone in the country from visting web sites that originate in domains outside the country.

And finally, crap. India reports a strain of tuberculosis resistant to all current drug treatments, and Woo-hoo! Green light given to test a possible HIV vaccine in humans, and Eh? Exposure to young blood in mice allows old blood to reactivate its stem cells and fight damage from diseases like multiple sclerosis.

Domestically, Texas's requirements for invasive ultrasounds for women appear to have passed an appeals court challenge, making the state add insult to injury to most abortion seekers.

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld that religious organizations have the right to discriminate and fire their employees based on what would otherwise be protected classes under the law, and then granted those organizations very wide latitude to determine which of their employees are exempted from the protections.

The Montana State Supreme Court issued a ruling indicating that the Citizens United ruling of the United States Supreme Court does not apply in their state.

Elsewhere, it is permissible for a police department to not hire an applicant because they had too high of an IQ according to the tests. Perhaps because they would be flabbergasted at the sequence of events where in attempting to shoot a mouse with a gun, a house resident shot one of his roommates and exposed an affair another roommate was having with an underage girl.

In technology, the app iOnRoad, which uses the components in an Android phone to monitor the distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of it, with alarms visible and audible when the distance closes swiftly to dangerous levels.

Google (or a contractor thereof) is caught being quite evil - trawling a database, calling the clients in that database and then lying to them and trying to sell them services that would cost them significant amounts of money.

Also, five years of iPhone, and the beginning of the eighth year of the Spirit/Opprortunity mission to Mars, a mission that has outlasted its original run time by more than seven years. The engineering team that built those rovers should be enshrined and emulated in future projects.

For your handy reference, dogs acting out the various HTTP status codes, inspired by cats acting out the various HTTP status codes.

And last, some bath tissue boxes were mysteriously contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60 - thankfully, of sufficiently low doses that wouldn't be dangerous.

In the opinions, where we find how one can derive moral and ethical behavior without the need for G-d or any other gods.

From there, we look into the struggle of one woman to reconcile fantasies of non-consensual sex with the upbringing that demonized sex, a sexual assault, and the society that surrounds her regarding sex. If you are triggered by the description of sexual assault or of such fantasies, best to avoid the link and the comments, as they are likely to contain several descriptions thereof. If you wish to discuss how the culture affects male/male-identified sexual fantasies, there is a companion thread talking about how culture and upbringing affects male sexual fantasies, so as not to derail the original.

There's also why giving advice to victims about how not to be a victim goes over like a lead balloon, no matter how well-intentioned you might be in doing it.

For something both light-hearted and serious, an author attempts to match the poses for the female characters gracing the covers of various fantasy and paranormal romance novels. The results: Holy [BLEEP]ing back cramps, Batman! And if you thought it was just because that author wasn't flexible enough - a martial artist and contortionist can't match those poses, either. Furthermore, those kinds of poses are really kind of unnecessary to show off the sexiness of female characters.

And then there's politics as usual, where conservative commentators claim George Stephanopolous had trouble being fair to the Republican candidates in a debate he moderated, but they use disgraced propagandist L. Brent Bozell III as corroboration and defend both Newt Gingrich's claim that Catholics are victims of secular bigotry because they refuse to allow adoptions by gay couples and Mitt Romney's assertion that no state wants to ban contraception, despite the demonstrable consequences of such things as personhood amendments. Mr. McGurn attempts to find more positive spin in this, claiming it a lesson on how to refute media bias against conservatives, pointing out how artful dodges of questions are really great ways of making your interlocutors look foolish, rather than, say, answering the questions that are on the minds of the people.

Mr. Tankerton gently chides people who are concerned about the overt Christianity in football players, pointing out that G-d doesn't really care about who wins the game, and that we should instead be glad that there's a high-profile quarterback who is living up to being a role model instead of getting in trouble with the law. I suspect there are a lot of unspoken assumptions in there about race, class, and religion issues in the way this is framed, but I'm not nearly good enough to pick them apart without committing some stumbles or fails myself. And I'd probably reference how Rush Limbaugh repeatedly talked about the NFL wanted Michael Vick to succeed, because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed, and how it seems like the players always getting in the news for being bad seem to always be black...

Director George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, says that major Hollywood studios are not willing to release his film about the Tuskegee Airmen because there are not white people in any major roles - a decision that would be rather flagrantly ahistorical, as the Airmen were an all-black unit.

Ms. Coulter wants you to believe that the worst of the worst of government employees will never be fired from their jobs, and that those worst of the worst are in jobs where they hold power over you, hard-working normal person.

Last out of the section, Heritage wants you to think that government spending and regulation is the reason why you're less economically free, and so you should get rid of government to get the ability to spend your money the way you want back.

And last for tonight, several letters or note, including Groucho Marx saluting the troops, Mr. McLaren saluting his animators, one Mr. H.L. Mencken warning someone away from joining the ranks of editors and E.B. White saying that there is always hope in the world.

And there is snow. Glorious, wonderful snow. A white winter - finally.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Watterson / Calvin - The Snow Chant

Greetings of the new year to you. Thank you for your well-wishes and correspondence, especially the very cute Pu-present-postcard I received from

tinchen and the postcards with snow. Nature did not provide us with any snow for the holidays, and so having pictures of that was nice.

For those of you in Iowa or elsewhere, have a quick reminder as to why Ron Paul is not, in fact, a good candidate for President. Not that it mattered, as Santorum, Paul, and Romney split one-quarter of the vote between themselves, and the remainder was fought over by the other candidates. No clear frontrunner, certainly. (I think it has to do with none of the candidates having any sort of clear background. - Mitt Romney's work at Baen Capital makes him a favorite of those that want to gut the economy for their own profit, for example.) It's easy to forget the dance of the marionettes sometimes, but it's always true that nobody (or near nobody) in politics has your interests at heart.

Elsewhere,

xenologer does a pair of linkdumps of excellent information for building your storehouse of knowledge about how other people see the world. Topic One: Misogyny, or why most men have the perfume of Privilege. (And the reason why that person is mad at you for what you thought was innocent or complimentary.) Topic Two: Racism, or why being White still has advantages, even if people aren't so explicit about saying so.

Perhaps as the proper final note to these things, Kate Harding points out that when your first instinct to a problem appearing is anything other than "How do we fix this problem?", then you are auful, too. Because there are a lot of Unfortunate Implications to many of the common responses to seeing jerk behavior on the Internet and in your circles.

Out in the world today, the cost of the Iraq War is not just in treasure, although it cost plenty of that, certainly. Lots of blood, lots of lives shattered, lots of costs that are not quantifiable, but will definitely be felt. All because fear allowed falsehoods to take over and pride prevented rationality from allowing an exit.

Israel is treating a credit card data breach as if it were a terror attack and vowing to retaliate against it.

And finally, a new constitution in Hungray has demonstrators and international observers concerned that human rights in the country just took a giant step backwards, as marriage is codified solely as one man, one woman relationships, life is officially defined to begin at conception, and the statutes provide no discrimination protection against QUILTBAG individuals.

In the domestic sphere, authorities have petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States is deciding whether or not an alert signal from a trained drug-seeking dog is sufficient grounds to obtain a warrant to search a private home for drugs. SCOTUS has not yet decided on whether or not they will hear the case.

The investigation into the race-based abuse and harrassment that drove a Untied States Army private, Danny Chen, to suicide, continues, with the family of the soldier asking for open proceedings in the United States to ensure that justice is done. The allegations include additional work details, degrading treatment, and excessive physical punishment.

Operators of a livestream feed for the Occupy Wall Street movement were arrested by the New York Police Department and their livestream shut down. Elsehere, a protest of senior citizens over usury to those with fixed incomes closed a Bank of America branch in San Francisco.

Appointees of anti-union activist Scott Walker (when he was a county executive) have been implicated in a scandal where they stole almost half of the government money allocated for veterans and used it for their own pleasure. That's of the charges that have been leveled so far - there may be even more charges coming.

The United States Justice Department has updated their official definition of rape to include men and those who are intoxicated or otherwise unable to give consent. Better late than never, and hopefully more accurate statistics will help Justice realize what sort of resources they should devote to it.

Last out, continuing the march of progress, transgender individuals are trying to get New York state to change the requirements for getting their legal sex changed to something less onerous than gender reassignment surgery. Because of the requirements to show birth certificates for many documents and services, transgender persons often find themselves dealing with clerks that will misgender them based on that certificate information and not on their presentation.

Oh, and thinking that Michigan's attempt is worthy of emulation, Tennessee lawmakers have advanced a bill that would class anti-QUILTBAG speech on religious grounds as not-bullying, so long as the speaker was not advocating harm or property destruction.

In technology, CVDazzle, a set of tips on how to apply makeup and paint to fool software from recognizing your face, yet not appear to be wearing a mask or other face-covering that could be illegal.

Microsoft was awarded a patent for a mechanism that would allow a GPS to plot a route to "avoid the ghetto", lest a driver be disturbed by the sight of the working poor.

Unsurprisingly, media outlets who support (or whose parent companies support) the control of the Internet by media cabals are not devoting much time to covering legislation that allows those media cabals to take over.

Finally, the Mandriva Linux distribution is in danger of abandonment, as the Mandriva corporation that supports it faces bankruptcy. One can only hope that the distribution and it's progression is open-sourced and given to the Linux community should the corporation fold up.

Last for tonight, what a truly universal and generic version of the Christian Lord's Prayer might look like.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Mazedude - Slick Rippin' Keen

What happened to the topic before, according to official LJ Idol chronology? Well, it was a traveling travesty all by itself, and didn't need much for elaborating on. Besides, I've already talked about things like the Tea Party Express before.

And thus, we move on to the next topic, by giving spring and summer a miss and moving straight into fall.

The United States does not directly elect its President. This will become important this year, as there are candidates vying for the highest office in the land.

Did we mention that the salary of the President of the United States is $200,000 USD / year? For comparison, Johnny Depp, of Pirates of the Carribean, Alice in Wonderland, and other Hollywood movies, is estimated to have made $100 million USD in 2010. That's approximately 500 times the amount of money the President makes. For a large part of the country, that would be a step up in salary. However, to get that $200,000 USD, each of these candidates will spend several millions USD, plus will have several hundreds of millions of USD spent on their behalf by organizations that are theoretically dedicated to "issues" campaigning, bankrolled by rich individuals and corporate coffers...all without anyone having to admit that they've spent that kind of money.

Okay, so what everyone thinks of as Election Day in the United States is not actually a direct election of the President.

At this point, by the way, we've gone through caucuses (where people gather in specific places to talk about whom they want to nominate for their party's platform), primaries (formal votes to decide who gets the nomination for the party platform in their state), and the grist of finding scandals, endorsements, mudslinging, negative campaigning, and an endless parade of advertisements.

So, yeah. The votes that are cast on Election Day are not a direct democracy, but could very well be considered a national opinion poll. A body called the Electoral College casts their votes for President and Vice-President. At best, the votes of the people are tied, by law or by contract, to determine from which party the electors sent to the Electoral College will come.

The electors themselves are usually tied by contract to vote for the party they represent, but there's always the possibility that the electors will choose not to vote with the popular opinion and elect someone else. Generally speaking, the only situation that would happen in is if there were someone who had giant popular appeal, promising impossible things to a vulnerable populace, and that would have obvious negative consequences to the country.

Which has a lot of people saying, "Well, excepting for that highly-improbable scenario, why don't we just do away with the Electoral College and just directly elect the President?" That would be the intuitive way to do things...

...except that even in a first-past-the-post system with a very winner-take-all flavor to it, like the U.S. system is, the Electoral College actally allows for subtlety. (Admittedly, it's a very Jaegermonster-type subtlety, but subtle nonetheless) Not all states are winner-take-all from their elections or electoral colleges. Some of them prefer to deal out their electors according to the percentage of the vote received in their opinion polling, which makes some states important to campaign in, even if one might not win the state.

And that's the big stuff. At your own election site, of course, it could be a church, despite it being a secular election.

It's a wonderfully convoluted process for something that should be fairly straightforward, and thus, we think that it fits nicely in the definitions of "counterintuitive."

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: John Williams - Hedwig's Theme

"It was the best of times...it was the worst of times."

It was a year of ups and downs...a lot of downs, looking back on it right now, anyway. The year began with many changes, some of which would turn out to have consequences far beyond what were envisioned at the time. Tom DeLay was finally sentenced for misconduct in 2002.

NBC merged with Comcast, the first of many big big merger attempts for the year.

The recently-elected Republican majority in the House of Representatives arrived, with claims of reform, transparency, and Constitutional Authority... and then they botched a swearing-in, the reading of the Constitution, and they violated their won rules about transparency almost immediately. Ah, and the grand agenda started faling apart almost immediately at the natinoal level. Mr. Steele gave way to Mr. Priebus (and Mr. Steele went to MSNBC, where he beecame a much better person when not having to spout official Party Line) Those seeing omens at the time are to be congratulated for their foresight.

Huck Finn got a new release where all instances of the word "nigger" were replaced by "slave", in an attempt to get the book back into classrooms. Problem is, in doing so, one loses a very good vehicle for discussing "n-word privileges" and the history behind the word.

Anti-union sentiments finally found themselves outlets in the new legislatures and the new House of Representatives. Their specifics were yet to be determined, but would be explosive. Libraries were on the public's chopping block repeatedly, along with other city services, all in the name of austerity and budget balancing. As more people needed unemployment insurance, food assistance, and other government help, states and local governments continued to cut back because they did not have the funding.

And just about everyone with an R after their name went after women's rights with a relentless vengeance.

Southern Sudan was born. Lebanon's government collapsed. Tunisia evicted their leader through popular uprising. Egypt began what would be a months-long struggle against their strongman.

A sitting Representative of the United States House of Representatives was shot by a conservative fanatic full up on inflammatory rhetoric. If not for the swift action of a staffer, the Representative would have died. As it is, the Representative began a long journey of healing and rehabilitation, and the United States cheered the fact that she opened her eyes on her own only a few days after being shot.

Another fanatic planned on detonating explosives along a parade route intended to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Through the good work of spotters, the plan was foiled. Later on in the year, the person responsible would be apprehended and charged.

And the problems of Wikileaks as scapegooat, PFC Bradley Manning, a void of investigation into the previous administration and the current administration's continuation of most of their over-reaches, and a lot of spillover from the Interference Model of 2010 taking up residence in 2011.

(Oh, and I stuck my foot in my mouth pretty well, too.)
-------------
"Eh, who am I kidding? It was really more worsts than bests."

With Janus's month over, the shortest month began. The Arab Spring continued in full force, with Egypt's leader stepping down, Algeria igniting their own revolution, Yemen joining in, Syria desperately trying (and eventually failing) to stave off their own, Libya and Iran going straight to the violence to try and stop anything getting going in their countries, and Bahrain getting quite hot in their own country.

A person died in Guantanamo Bay without ever having had access to a trial, a lawyer, or any of the due process of American law.

Anti-Islam, Anti-women, Anti-QUILTBAG, and Anti-public sector sentiment was regularly raised, stirred, and sometimes legislated or decreed in the states and the House of Representatives where Republicans held sway and control. Governor Walker of Wisconsin explicitly took away the ability of state workers to collectively bargain. And got more than just an earful for it from all the people and union members he pissed off in doing so. The Capitol building and surrounding city were constantly full of protestors and citizens making their grievances known.

Pushback against these measures also resulted in demonstrations outside of businesses asking them to pay their tax shares, rather than to duck them and insist that government cut services instead.

Georgia and Nebraska considered bills that would have made fetus death a criminal offense and would have ruled the killing of an abortion provider a justifiable homicide, respectively.

The Borders bookstore chain filed for bankruptcy, a victim of the same techniques that it had used to get smaller bookstores to close their doors.

The supercomputer named Watson defeated two Jeopardy! champions in the game.

We lost the last United States veteran of the first Great War, and thus our last chance to obtain primary data about the experience. I hope we got enough.

And I had to make the decision to end the life of one of my pet cats. I still miss you, Gandalf, and I cry every time I think about it.
------------------------
"But the worst was yet to come..."

March! The march of time progresses. Governor Walker got his anti-union bill passed, despite the clear lack of quorum to do so, which kicked protestinto a completely new gear, including recall petitions for state senators that passed the bill. Michigan continued to suffer under the new super-powerful emergency financial manager law that gave fiat to a state-appointed person and overrode any shred of local democracy.

The Republican plan to vote to de-fund everything publically funded that might help people continued, as did their anti-women agenda in the states and nationally (symbolically nationally, thankfully). Trhough all of this, the population got a good history lesson on just hwo much of what they consider normal working conditions were the result of union struggles.

An underwater earthquake off the coast of Japan exposed the weakness of a power plant, the fact that the weakness was known about three years before the tsunami, and a very tense scenario began where the world waited and hoped that the cores of the nuclear vessels did not cause full-scale highly-radioactive meltdowns.

Protests continued in several African, South American, and Eurasian locales, as the struggle for democracy didn't fizzle, but grew. A NATO coalition, backed by the UN, began air strikes against Libya in support of rebellion forces that would be followed u pwith the presence of ground troops.

American Telephone and Telegraph made a bit to buy Deutshe Telekom's U.S. arm, T-Mobile, a bid for which they would ultimately be unsuccessful and withdraw in December.

There was a bright spot. Vermont passed a signle-payer health care plan for all the residents in the state.

Elizabeth Taylor died, as did Dianna Wynne Jones, Lanford Wilson, Geraldine Ferraro, and Paul Baran (inventor of packet-switching).
------------------
"Your optimism is regfreshing, if a bit misplaced."

April! "Personhood" bills designed to outlaw abortion and miscarriage by caling it murder. The highest court in the land declaring there is a Constitution-free zone that extends one hundred miles from any border of the United States, where the Customs and Border Patrol can do anything. Withdrawals of states from social programs. And more...

The big talking point of April was the Paul Ryan "Let's Kill the social programs" budget that plenty of Republicans and pundits signed on to publically. The government also barrelled toward a shutdown based on debt ceiling rules and an unwillingness to raise such. For supposedly being about jobs and debt, the Republican Party has made remarkably little progress on either, often acting to obstruct things that would have been beneficial, or turning their attention elsewhere whenever subtantive measures appeared.

The Ivory Coast rebellion succeeded with the arrest of the incumbent leader that had refused to give up power. Yemen's leader stepped down after delivering several barbs about women. Uganda's opposition movement gathered steam.

A school in Michigan that helps pregnant teen girls finish their schooling and get on to university was slated for closure thanks to an emergency Financial Dictator in Michigan.

We lost Jerry Lawson (architect of the software catridge) and Elizabeth Sladen (best known as Sarah Jane Smith, companion to The Doctor)

And my vehicle was broken into and a musical instrument stolen.
----------------------
"Well, that was an object lesson. In what, we don't know yet."

The fifth month opened with news that Osama bin Laden has been killed. The longtime frontperson and spokesperson for al-Qaeda was killed on a raid operating inside the borders of another country, without their permission or awareness. The matters of ends, means, justification, who actually won the fight with bin Laden, and the legality of black ops in other countries would be the fallout for those discussing the matter rather than thumping their chests in jingoistic pride and refusing to hear anything else. The death of Osama bin Laden did not deter in the slightest the conservative opinion narrative that Muslims, acting as a united transnational front, were planning on taking over democratic countries and instituting the most repressive form of Islamic society on their newly conquered subjects.

The economy was still pretty awful, with more than one million applicants fighting for 50,000 jobs at McDonalds.

The Republican candidates for President in 2012 held their first Presidential debate...in May of 2011. Soon, the campaigns will begin after the swearing-in of the last elected officers.

In May, the very last known living veteran of the First Great War died.

We found out that the Fukushima plant in Japan had suffered at least one meltdown from the flooding and lack of power, quite some time after it happened.

The first of several bills that would give the multimedia industry control over the Internet and require the government prevent ISPs from resolving sites that the media cabals consider pirate sites appeared in the Congress.

The government continued to routinely act in a manner inconsistent with the stated principles and laws of the United States, sometimes to worser degrees than the previous administration, and justify it or otherwise get it through without challenges. They also vigorously employed character attacks and vaguely-worded laws to discredit anyone significant objecting to their actions.

And the big word on the lips of politicians in the United States were "debt ceiling" and what they were going to let die or be harmed so as to get their budget cuts.
---------------------------
"What, exactly, were you expecting? A happy ending?"

At the halfway point of the year, a push was on, from liberals and the President, to actually put someone in charge of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that had the teeth and power to be able to actually regulate unfair practices and deceptive fine print. There was just as much a pushback from the Republicans in the Senate, who did not want to see such a thing come into being.

A small flap erupted over a columnist that claimed teenagers needed to be readng happier material than the current YA crop, with a lot of people, authors and readers alike, saying how much those dark teen novels helped them cope with their dark lives. YA Saves (and always has).

A concerted effort against Planned Parenthood by Republicans in state and federal governments indicated how much the anti-women agenda had play and popularity in the party that nominally professes to believe in small government.

The Catherine Ferguson Academy was saved from closure by being sold off and turned into a charter school. Yay, school exists, boo, that the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools didn't want to hold on to a school that was working.

Ah, and there was a debate between candidates for the Republican ballot for President. There was no rejoicing, only a lot of "Ick."

Peter Falk, of Columbo fame, died.

There was also a bright spot - New York made it possible for all persons to be married. And Greece erupted in protests over a plan to sell off state assets to pay the debts of the banks and rich people that got them into their problems.
----------------------------
"Just repeat to yourself, it's just a show, it's just a show."

This is where things really started to turn southward, although I didn't really know it at the time - I thought it was a one-off, but instead, it was the harbinger for things to come. And that's about as clear as I'll get about it.

The march of the Corporations continued, without interference from the government to restrain their excesses or to persuade them that an economy that requires people to be able to make enough money to spend on their products. And the police continued their willingness to use excessive amounts of force when a small amount of diplomacy...or sense...would have gone much further.

A Murdoch-owned paper was implicated in a scandal that involved tampering with the voicemail box of a missing person in the hope of having more voicemails come into the box. After the outcry and worse, the paper itself was shut down.

Ah, did we mention all of the states that want or pass laws to force people on government benefits to be tested for drugs? Because poor people need to be shamed more for getting assistance. And the continued manufacturing of a crisis regarding a debt ceiling that was entirely self-imposed?...
--------------------------
"It goes downhill from here, doesn't it?"

...that led into the Gang of Twelve - a group that was supposed to figure out how to make cuts in the budget...assuming they could get over the vicious partisanship and obstruction that has been Repblican politics of these past years.

That's in addition to the assumption that black and brown people deserve to be stopped and have their citizenship papers demanded of them, the assumption that women are merely incubators whose fetuses are more important than they are, and the strident effort to ensure that only their brand of morality is ever legislated and those they consider sinners should be punished and driven underground.

A credit rating agency downgraded the credit of the United States government one notch over the flap regarding the debt ceiling manufactured crisis.

Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, died from cancer at 61.

And my current nightmare finally made itself known that it wasn't going away...

However, one very bright star shone in this month - Representative Giffords returned to the House chamber only a few months after being shot, to a standing ovation from her colleagues and the gallery inattendance.

And a woman achieved the highest rank of black bet a judo master could achieve.

August was an interesting month.
-------------------------
"Downhill is relative. But I do sense some extra cynicism."

In September, anti-unionism continued to be a popular talking point even as efforts undertaken to repeal anti-union measures continued to gather steam and to be put on ballots for November elections.

The Borders bookstore chain closed its doors and liquidated its assets, as it could not compete with Amazon.

A collaboration betweeen YA authors was told they needed to change the pairing or the story wouldn't be published. The authors refused. The editors and their published stood fast. Several other authors withdrew their names from the collaboration. A bridal shop refused to sell a wedding dress to a lesbian, claiming she didn't want to participate in "illegal acts", despite LGBT marriage being legal in the state she was in.

The founder of Project Gutenberg died, but his legacy lives on.

The Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that officially dismissed openly gay soldiers died a long-overdue death this month, sparking rejoicing everywhere, inside the service and outside.

The Occupy Wall Street started to occupy Zucotti Park, setting up a semipermanent settlement near the halls of money, protesting the manner in which corprations have controlled and continue to control everything. This is the first stage - being ignored.
---------------------------
"Define 'Cynical'."

In October, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak, died at 64 years of age.

But we also found a vaccination for malaria strains.

The Republicans savaged each other with greater fervor, as the electorate continued to fawn over one candidate, then find some reason to not want them, and then get sweet on another candidate. This cycle continues on throughout not just this month, but through the rest of the year. There's no reason to believe that the Republican electorate is satisfied with any of their candidates...but they most definitely don't want Mitt Romney to win.

Mississippi put forth their own "personhood" amendment, to criminalize miscarriage.

Libyan leader Gaddafi was killed by the rebellion that captured him and his remaining stongholds, starting on the difficult path of rebuilding a country that was under the control of a strongman for decades.

The second stage (or is it third?) began for the Occupy movement - police in various cities were called in to forcibly remove protesters from their encampments. SWAT teams and riot police attacked a peaceful protest with violence.

The government proposed rules that would allow them to lie about Freedom of Information Act requests.

And the United Nations granted member status to the Palestinian Authority.
-----------------------
"Would that be the party that's supposedly focused on jobs doing everything but jobs?"
"No, that's not cynical. That's politics."

There was an election at the beginning of the month. A lot of states decided that new ID requirements were in vogue, neatly disenfranchising many poor and minority voters who don't have those IDs and can't spare the time, the money, or don't have the means of getting to the offices to obtain such things.

The anti-union measure in Ohio got WHOMPED. Mississippi's personhood measure got a hearty "Fuck. Off." And the author of the Papers Please law in Arizona got recalled. (Oh, and Washington State was told to give up its liquor monopoly.)

Joe Paterno was fired from his position as head coach of the Pennsylvania State University football team for his role in a cover-up of a coach sexually abusing players.

Another series of bills appeared in the Congress that would turn over control of the Internet to the media cabals to block as they wish on even the suspcion of privacy.

The might of the police was turned upon the Occupy Wall Street encampment, with property seized and destroyed and the movement forcibly driven out of Zucotti Park, even with a court order allowing them to be there.

The Gang of Twelve failed, triggering several automatic cuts to the budget. The Republicans immediately started trying to find ways to not have those triggers actually come into being. The President smiled and said "No."

The nightmare continued, and mutated, and worsened.

(And we lost Joe Frazier, Andy Rooney, and Anne McCaffery.)
-----------------------------
"Dear Lord, that's the loudest profanity I've ever heard!"

And thus, we come screaming into the last month of the year. Not because it's been fun, but because there's really only one way of getting a year's worth of anger, fear, and rage out quickly.

There were elections held in Egypt. Near them, though, governments of Syria and Iran attacked their people and other embassies.

The Defense Appropriations Bill passed by the Congress contained language that permanently instituted imprisonment by military without trial, tribunal, or recourse to the law.

AT&T withdrew their bid to buy T-Mobile.

The Iraq War ended, officially, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but barely any noise at all.

And the nightmare continues. I can only hope that we will wake from it soon.

That was your 2011. It followed Sturgeon's Law to the hilt. Next year will hopefully be a lot better.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: Billy Joel - Pressure

In the spirit of keeping your blood flowing, we present what would normally be flamebait, but instead is normal functioning of the United States of America.

Furthermore, instead of comtemplation and resolutions to never do something that stupid again, the Iraq War passes into history without analysis and with a lot of people claiming that such a thing should not have ended yet. A lot of these same people also support the idea that indefinite detention without trial is a tool that the United States needs, instead of decrying it as a violation of everything the United States holds Constitutionally holy.

The Dead Pool Technologists Group says "Well done, good and brilliant manager. Come inheret the PARC that was prepared for you from the beginning of time", or, Xerox Pao Alto Research Center founder Jack Goldman dies at 90. The Xerox PARC is responsible for many of the inventions that we enjoy today in our interconnected lives. (This following on the death of the inventor of the LISP language and the coiner of the term AI in October.)

Finally, in addition to the ire raised by the latest LJ rollout in terms of design and visual components, users find their automatic payment options have been turned back on when they were previously off, and that the site is designed to enroll people in auto-payment, even if they choose "manual payment" and that the actual manual payment is "one-time payment", instead. For those considering trying out other services, a comparison list between LJ and DW services, for example.

In the international realm, The vice-president of Iraq had an arrest warrant issued for him on suspicion of ties to terrorism and bombings in the country.

In Afghanistan, despite the blood and treasure spent there, rngtones with Taliban propaganda do brisk business because arriving at a checkpoint with the wrong kind of stuff can get you killed.

The locale of the stones that were used to build Stonehenge has been discovered...which raises the question of how the stones were moved from one place to another. Thankfully, we know that big projects are doable by societies that do not have the benefit of heavy petroleum-powered machinery, so we have an idea of what to look for.

Domestically, the bill that would turn over control of DNS to the media tyrants stalled slightly in committee. Additionally, Louis Vitton sued Warner Brothers for marking and calling a knock-off bag a genuine Louis Vitton in a movie.

In North Dakota, a sheriff's department used a Predator drone to coordinate when to raid the farm of suspected cattle thieves, after they chased off the sheriff by brandishing guns.

In Denver, the Auditor's office has requested that the city prove that the installation of traffic cameras have improved traffic safety in the areas the cameras were installed in, lest they be seen merely as revenue generators for the city. I like the way this Auditor Office thinks.

The EFF had a lawsuit reinstated against the government that said they illegally funneled communications to the National Security Agency withoutthe requirement of a warrant. However, the same court told the EFF that they could not sue the telecommunications companies that did the alleged funnelling, as retroactive immunity granted to them by the previous administrator still held.

A survery of teenagers and their sexuality shows that more young girls are claiming sexual experience with other girls. And that they're not getting pregnant as much, perhaps related to the decrease in sexual contact with men. I'm actually hoping it's comprehensive sexual education that's doing it, but it's a good thing that we have enough out people that young girls feel comfortable saying they've had sexual contact with other girls.

Speaking of being comfortable in one's sexuality... AlterNet talks to professional dommes about how sex work can be a buffer against a bad economy, but that there's lots of competition, and it's not actually easy to make money at it.

Last out: anonymous donors are paying the layaway/layby tabs of various customers in department stores.

In technology, overbroad patents means British Telecom is suing Google over Android.

Google may be working on an alternative to Apple's Siri called Majel, after Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the voice of the computer in many a Star Trek production.

American Telephone and Telegraph drops their bid to buy Deutsche Telekom's United States arm.

Most telecoms tell Senator Franken's investigation that by signing the contract to get cell phone service, you consent to being monitored by software like Carrier IQ that is installed with your default handset loadout and never announces its presence. That said, some companies say they don't use it or are stopping its use, now that there's an outcry.

Security researchers and consultants attempting to attack Google's Near Field Communication service and encrypted wallet were not able to easily access any data. More testing is recommended, of course.

Internet Explorer will soon start automatically updating itself, something more like the Google Chrome model. Which means those people who still have Internet Explorer 6 will soon be forced to upgrade to a standards-compliant browser. Good riddance, IE6.

MIT launches some courses on-line for free that will result in a certificate from the institute upon completion. And then Stanford offers some of their computer science coursework online for free. It's too bad that none of these courses could result in, say, a degree that could be obtained for free.

It was a bad year for technology innovators continuing to live.

And finally, the technology to fool photos and other records only gets better as the technology used to record those records advances.

In opinions, apropos for the VEWPRF, the Infamous Brad mentions the difference between empathy, sympathy, and whatever it is that so many who profess to have both feel in the way they act toward the homeless, the abused, and those that the economy and the country seem to believe are excess or useless people. Especially those that call themselves Christians.

Staying vaguely close by in language, an older post on the viability of policing other people's language choices by yor own preferences.

Last for tonight, that poem? It does not mean what surface readers and high school English teachers think it means.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: John Williams - Hedwig's Theme

Good morning. Now that we're in the season of the VEWPRF, stories that might have otherwise not gotten coverage will jump to the forefront. And thus, we say there is no excuse for a student to be bullied in their classroom. Not by students, and especially not by a teacher. Furthermore, any teacher that answers genuine inquiry with personal bigtory is asking for discipline at the very least. when the school is overrun with teachers and symbols of one religion and displays hostility to anyone else not of that religion, learning becomes very difficult.

And yes, the nonexistent War on Christmas is on again, with people tracking the mention or lack of mentioning one particular holiday as some sort of guide as to whether to shop there.

On 6 December, 1989, a man who could not fathom that there were women students that qualified for university while his own suit was rejected went to the grounds of the École Polytechnique with a gun and started shooting. All in all, fourteen women died - Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student, Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student, Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student, Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student, Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department, Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student, Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student, Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student, Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student, Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student. They are a fraction of the women who are physically harmed or killed by men who cannot believe that women have the ability and power to hold jobs, attend university, practice their chosen profession, or exist as a person worthy of respect. They are a fraction of the women who are mentally harmed, have their dreams abruptly killed, or who are fed negative messaging about what women can and cannot do in society each day of their lives by men who cannot conceive of the idea that women are people deserving of respect, support, and admiration for their accomplishments, dreams, and desires. In remembering the names of the dead, in remembering the work that is to be done, we are reminded starkly that the world that we live it has not achieved the optimum, and should not be content merely with an equilibrium.

Elsewhere, a Fox News commentator who claims Disney's The Muppets movie is a vehicle for anti-capitalist beliefs receives a small fraction of the mocking they roundly deserve.

Appeals on the ruling that overturned California's Proposition 8 continue. Even though the United States Secretary of State declares that LGBT rights are human rights and that the United States will work to encourage other countries to stop discriminating against people.

And nonviolent Occupy demonstrators and protesters are being subjected to intense pain and conditions that would be considered and decried as torture if it were happening anywhere else in the world but the United States. When arrested, Occupy protesters are subjected to intentional delay and slowness so as to keep them in prison conditions as long as possible and attempt to break them. Their charges? Tweeting without a press pass at a public demonstration where police are presence.

Out in the world today, the United States military mission in Iraq formally ended today with a simple ceremony. Cue up columnists claiming Iraq is unable to defend itself against external threats, especially Iran.

Speaking of, Iran has said they will not return a United States drone aircraft they captured after claiming it had violated their airpsace.

Domestically, The FDA allows a component of antifreeze into food as a filler, so long as it doesn't exceed a certain percentage. And it's probably not the only toxic item allowed in food in small amounts.

The production of dolar coins was suspended in the United States, due to a lack of consumer demand for the coins - the Mint was hoping that durable coins would be able to replace the paper bills. The Mint has still not quite figured out, it seems, that persons like their coins to be distinguishable in a pocket by size - dollar coins and quarters are still too similar in size for most people to want to use them. If they were something more like, say, the Canadian two-dollar coin, adoption might be better.

In technology, Kaspersky Labs, creators of anti-virus and other software, have left the Business Software Alliance because of the support of the BSA for the Stop Online Piracy Act that would give content owners control of the Internet to do with what they like. Additionally, Senator Wyden of Oregon is investigating domain seizures by Homeland Security and offering an alternative to SOPA.

Mother Nature wins again - Monsato GM corn falls prey to larvae that it was engineered to be resistant to. As one builds better mousetraps, nature evolves better mice. Although, in this case, the superinsects evolved because the directions on how to use the corn were not followed.

OpenDNS offers a preview of technology designed to have authentication between a client and DNS servers, which would make cache poisoning and other DNS-related attacks more difficult, as the requests would no longer be sent solely in plaintext.

The National Transportation Safety Board suggests that a ban on cell phone usage, hands or handsfree, for all drivers.

A study suggests that men who think highly of their own good looks, and are looking for a quick sexual encounter, are more likely to think that women are attracted to them.

Finally, at the moment, the newest Kindle device can be rooted through the playing of a specially-scrafted MP3. Which exposes that the device is actually pretty col - it runs HTML 5 and Javascript. New apps that take advantage of such root status are proably being developed as we type.

In the matter of opinions, when discussing issues that affect the dominant population as well as a minority population, the dominant population should never run roughshod over the minority in terms of what's important. Support, solidarity, sure, but not "But what about meeeeeeeeee? I'm more important than you!" Some people don't realize that's what they're doing (privilege blinders, y'know), but such things need to stop.

Mr. Marks outlines how he feels poor minority kids can lift themselves by their bootstraps through the use of technology and a work ethic, saying that it's hard but not impossible for those poor kids to be able to get themselves into college and make a life for themselves. Which pretty well ignores a lot of the other factors involved, like how being a black kid, poor or not, has people making assumptions about your intelligence and aptitudes, how white moderns believe that they would have righted the wrongs of the past to black people, ignoring the historical record that said most white people were actively trying to perpetuate those wrongs...and how many white people continue to try and perpetuate wrongs of the same type to different groups even now. The reactions to the post are a fairly strong dresing-down. As I heard, rather succinctly, from a co-worker discussing that kind of situation in our neighborhoods, "It's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don't have any boots, and you can't afford any, either."

Mr. Sowell believes that the power of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) will allow President Obama to be re-elected, because Congressional gridlock prevents social engineering and allows The Market's (A.P.T.I.N.) power to shine through and recover the economy. Furthermore, he says tha the historical example proves that government intervention in crises worses and prolongs them, discounting other factors like wars and other large demand-starters.

Mr. McGurn attempts to paint the Health and Human Services Secretary as a zealous baby-killer based on her intent to require insurance companies cover contraception and not strengthening "conscience exemptions" for nurses or doctors who don't wish to perform abortions. Mr. McGurn's thinly-veiled attack on women uses the Catholic Church as his proxy, trying to paint the Church's well-known anti-women stance as something that should be respected and exempted. Taking that to a logical conclusion, does Mr. McGurn support an insurance company underwritten by Jehovah's Witnesses to deny funding for blood transfusions, or an insurance company that believes vaccinations are evil to deny those vaccinations? And is he okay with the potential calamities that will result from that?

Mr. Brown applauds an action that may very well be in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the Harper Government's decision to prohibit the wearing of face coverings during citizenship ceremonies for immigrants. More specifically, he argues that acting in violation of the Charter is sending a great messge to immigrants about the importance of adopting Western and Canadian values in their new country. I would think that immigrants will read:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association.

and then have a look at the face covering ban and feel that one thing is being said and another done...

Last out for tonight, women are. Bodies are. There are no should bes when it comes to the look of a body or what it identifies as.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - Terra

Here's a swift update on the state of the Silver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXuCeZyPfmM

For those of you that, for whatever legitimate reason you have, don't watch YouTube clips, have a handy transcript:

[HOMER J. SIMPSON, Everyman, is lowering a letter that he has just finished reading. Barely-concealed anger is visible on his face]

HOMER: Kids, would you leave the room for a minute?

[His son, BARTHOLOMEW, and daughter, LISA, scatter to the four winds as Homer stands up and inhales.]

HOMER: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF--

[Smash cut to church organ as ORGAN CHORD - F Major plays over any further sound from Homer]

[BIRDS flutter from their perches on a tree behind the house]

[NED FLANDERS, holier-than-thou stereotype of an evangelical Christian, who moonlights as either the Devil or the Ruler of Everything, depending on which Treehouse of Horror episode you're in, pokes his head out an open window in his house]

NED: Dear Lord, that's the loudest profanity I've ever heard!

[END]

Or perhaps put more succinctly: %&$, and :; too.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - A Fight To The Death

Before getting to the Shadow Idol entry, I thought I'd mention another anonymous love meme appears - go comment on your favorite DWers and make them feel wonderful. If you want to know who has already been put up, there's an index list. And now, your Shadow Idol entry...

"Bupkis".

bup-kis, from Yiddish: Used as a noun, it tends to mean nothing, zip, zero, the lack. That can mean the lack of things ("We got bupkis."), but it can also mean the lack of less tangible items ("He knows bupkis about that."), and actually tends toward a pejorative when used in that way.

Since it's a topic about nothing, that means there are almost infinite directions to take it in. Just in the United States alone, there's the bupkis that is the basic score of how the political parties interact with each other (bupkis getting through that might have an impact), the bupkis that is how much is done in terms of criminal charges against the people who wrecked the economy and the people that legalized torture, the bupkis that is the relief to ordinary people who are suffering the consequences of that economy-wrecking, the bupkis that is what's being done to respect the rights of people who are assembling peacefully to request a redress of these grievances.

We could drill down more locally and talk about the states that have their budgets out of whack, the states that passed laws evicting unions from the public sector (and then the repeal of some of those laws and the lawmakers that made them), the continued dismal funding of education and libraries, the problems of pensions and how everyone is being thrown to the wolves, and the declining ability of states to provide temporary relief for the unemployed and the poor. We could go hyperlocal about schools inundated with religious messaging with the full consent and participation of the teachers inside, the epidemic of bullying in the schools and the general apathy outside to fixing it, the issues associated with being out about something that society wants you to stay closeted about, or even the towns where the democratic process has been usurped and the townspeople are literally left with bupkis for elected officials or say in how their town is run.

I could talk about my personal life, the struggles of making sure there's enough money to meet the bills, the problems associated with mismatches of management styles with employees, the trends going on in my workplace that are disturbing and that I can't really stop, the need for upper management to think for a moment before barreling ahead with this, that, or the other thing, the stress of being put in the disciplinary process for things that shouldn't warrant it (and knowing the management is unlikely to budge on those issues because they're stubborn and insist on Making A Point, and that they think a 50% chance of not being fired is something to be happy about), and a lot of other things that are intensely personal - bupkis in the grand scheme of the universe, but relevant to the poor soul down here.

But truthfully, even though I could opine and suggest solutions and rail and rant and rave, when it comes down to being actually able to implement the changes, I have neither the means, the power, nor the influence to actually do so. Thus, I am reduced to being an NPC in my own story, tossed about by forces greater than myself, and having to perhaps settle for the idea that I might be able to affect some small local change, but that Big Things are likely going to be beyond me for this life.

What does that leave me with?

Bupkis.

Current Mood: listless
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - Freya's Theme

Up top - your children are not being taught how to evaluate validity, provenance, and research usefulness of the sources they find on the Internet, unless, by happenstance, they have a librarian (public or school) that is instructing them in the course of such during their research. As more information moves on-line, this lack of ability to discern is most disturbing.

Speaking of libraries, Warner Brothers has decided that they will prevent libraries and other rental companies from getting the latest theatrical release film on the day it goes into stores, and that libraries and rental companies will be forced to purchase copies that feature only the film and no subtitles. Because, apparently, we're cutting into their market with all the people in an economic disadvantage that can't afford their full-featured disc in the stores that have it on hold at the library. The "rental" discs thing? Makes me less likely to buy your movie disc, because it means I judge the movie solely on the movie - and if the movie wasn't good enough, the special features will never get seen - they could have meant a sale, if only you had let me watch them.

Out in the world today, Iceland went bankrupt in the banking crash, and then disappeared off the news radar. Perhaps because they successfully managed to re-wrest control of the country from the banks and their paid politicians...through the drafting and creation of a new Constitution.

Pakistani officials are outraged at a NATO airstrike, launched from Afghanistan, that killed 24 soldiers. And the airstrikes that kill children in Afghanistan continue, because of the apparent desensitization of the American public to the horrors of war.

Did we mention as well that the United States attempted to stop the ban of cluster bombs, preferring to have them merely regulated, and joining with China and Russia in their push? Despite obvious examples of the harm that cluster munitions can cause, both when they explode properly and when they sit as unexploded ordnance?

The orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq continues, with the Saddam-palace-turned-military-base Camp Victory turned over to Iraqi forces, and several other bases packing up and rolling out. Cue worries and insistence that Iran is gaining influence in Iraq (additional example saying that Iraq's military are meeting with Iran's Revolutionary Guard) and will soon subvert it from a Western-friendly environment to an Iran-friendly one, despite assurances from the Vice-President that Iraq can stand by itself.

Upon their return, soldiers may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder...and now, we find out, so may many of the dogs that are used.

A report from the United Nations accuses Syrian military forces of attacking, killing, torturing, and raping children in a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Tunisian students favoring a more hard-line Islam clashed with more secular students over gender integration and costume.

Elections in Egypt! Early results indicate that parties that use Islam as their guiding principles will win several seats in the new parliament. And thus, cue broad statements claiming that Egypt is now on a decline and that it's very likely that Egypt will soon become a hardline Islam government and abandon democracy entirely.

Finally, after an attack against the United Kingdom embassy in Iran, ostensibly by students and concerned citizens protesting the United Kingdom, the UK expelled the Iranian ambassadors in the UK and accsed the Iranian government of complicity in the attack. France recalled their ambassador from Iran for consultation, and Norway closed their embassy in Iran after the attack. (Comparisons to the embassy crisis for the United States are swift for columnists there.)

Domestically, the "Occupy" movement runs into difficulty when trying to recruit people who have experienced occupation or who are experiencing occupation because they're not talking about those occupations. Which is a problem - although the problem of cities spending lots of money to evict the nonviolent movement as they continue to close down services for the poor and homeless is one that should also be highlighted, if only in a "Priorities, huh?" kind of way.

Also, an open letter to the police forces to remind them that doing their job does not necessarily mean following the orders they receive.

Senators in the United States Congress are inserting language into the Defense Appropriations bill that would allow the military tribunal, rendition, and detention system to operate inside and outside the United States against anyone the military deemed to need that system. And, having done so, they passed the bill that contained all of that language inside.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services issued new rules today for what qualifies as expenses private insurance companies can count as expenditures toward their required medical loss ratio - the part of the PPACA that requires 80 (or 85) percent of premium income taken in by insurers be spent on actual care for their policy holders. Elsewhere, the continued drive for austerity and budget cuts has lawmakers raiding monies set aside for PPACA to pay for more immediate spending needs.

Arizona lawmakers are again taking immigration issues into their own hands and saying they will build and maintain their own border fence between the state and Mexico, believing that current federal policy on the border is ineffective.

Wall Street begins to reap the whirlwind of their action, with cuts and job layoffs at their own finance houses and firms, as their incessant search for psychopathic tendencies to lead their companies and the policies that followed that destroyed and concentrated wealth undercut the rest of the people that are a necessary support structure in their economy, and then prevailed upon the central banks to lend them money at below-market rates, which they have since profited off of.

Mr. Herman Cain, having been struck by a scandal or two involving an extramarital affair, has decided that he's going to get out in front of the next scandal by admitting to a long-term friendship with a woman who claims that the friendship is actually a sexual affair. After this latest battery, Mr. Cain indicating he was suspending his campaign, which clears the way for the next challenger to try and take on Mitt Romney for the candidacy. (Not that conservative media columnists and establishments want Mitt Romney as the candidate, for several reasons ranging from "he's too much like Obama" to "he's nothing like Obama, but also nothing like the candidate we want.") For those whom Mr. Cain is the Black Savior of Conservatism, personal attacks and victim-discrediting and making out the accusers to be "gold-diggers" is the order of the day.

Education is going back to the building blocks - quite explicitly, as unit blocks and building / play programs help to give children the unstructured play and social tools that their overly-academic preschools and kindergartens are not providing. And for those studying for advanced degrees, therapy dogs are helping law students de-stress around their examination periods.

In technology, the latest iTunes update finally fixes a vulnerability first reported to Apple in 2008, one that would have allowed places with Great Firewalls and control of the Internet to fakesign any program, spyware-infested or no, as a legitimate update to iTunes, and then, of course, control to the attacker and all that.

The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is on hold, as AT&T withdraws their offer to buy under the pressure of the FCC and the Justice Department. But as son as they can solve those objections, they'll be back, ready to purchase and crush a competitor.

While they squabble on that, the Justice Department wants you to snitch on your fellows if they remix IP into new forms, or otherwise use copyrighted material in ways likely covered by the First Amendment.

And there may very well be keylogging software on your Android phone. And once discovered, there were quite a few people, Senators included, who were not happy about this. So that leaves the company saying "Hey, sure we're grabbing large amounts of data from phones surreptitiously, but we protect it, encrypt it, and anonymize it before we pass it on to your phone carriers", which is not saying "We think this is an invasion of your privacy and that the carriers have perverted our software to do things it was not intended to do", which would have been a better response, were it honest.

Finally, a software programmer and his team developed a method of reassembling shredded papers...even very shredded papers. Which makes me think it might be a good idea to start including shredded documents in the categories of "things that require a search warrant for law enforcement or others to search and seize."

In opinions, the WSJ reviews a book that talks about sex-selection and cultural pressure to have sons rather than daughters and claims it's a fantastic reason to outlaw abortions everywhere, because all those daughters are being killed senselessly and need protection. And nothing to be said about the culture or the practices of, say, competing for the few women that are left that leads to mail-order brides. Why not take a look at sex selection from a perspective that doesn't have a pre-ordained conclusion about getting rid of abortion. [PDF]

And then, once you can tell the difference between a paper designed to foster discussion and one that's meant to draw its pre-determined conclusion, observe Mr. Sowell's column basically telling undocumented immigrants to go home and that the national government should zealously pursue them to deport them, no matter how long they have lived in the United States as an exercise.

The WSJ is more than happy to devote column inches to the idea that the oil and gas industry are industries where there are jobs to be had. They do neglect the part about the record profits that might be driving some of that...and the oil and gas industry's notable lack of safety, whether to their workers, the environment, or to the water supplies that fracking often makes flammable.

Elsewhere, Mr. Delingpole takes the holier-than-thou ground, openly suggesting that scientists who support the human-caused climate change hypothesis should just stick to their science and disprove their critics that way, instead of looking to expose the connections those critics may have to, say, the oil and gas industry. Which, of course, wouldn't be important at all in terms of sanctity of data. Mr. Botkin joins him on that high horse by claiming climate scientists insist that they are right and questioning them is folly, contrary to the scientific principle of continual testing of hypotheses. Mr. Stephens believes global warming, as a religion, is in its death throes, mostly because it couldn't generate enough revenue to implement its green policies, but also because it doesn't really have great leaders, according to him.

Ms. Noonan expresses contempt for the supercommitee's failure, disappointment that the President didn't order the Democrats to give the Republicans everything they wanted in the name of having a success, and raises eyebrows at the Republican candidates' continuing escalation of warlike rhetoric.

Regarding that failure, Mr. Krauthammer insists the Democrats are rejecting real plans to raise revenues through loophole closures in favor of tax rate increases that won't raise enough revenues by themselves. Surely, we could do both? Close loopholes and raise rates on those that can more than afford to pay it, so that there's plenty of new revenues to go around?

Mr. Williams unveils his latest Take That against the 99 percent - the income inequality they rail against is their own fault, because they buy J.K. Rowling books, basketball tickets to see Lebron James, and goods and stuff from Wal-Mart. So, he says, how do you stop those millions of people who create such awful income inequality? We point out that the concerns of the 99 percent aren't against Jo Rowling, Lebron James, or Sam Walton's kids - unless, that is, they're tax-dodgers or they take unethical actions to get themselves richer and pass the consequences onto employees or people with less income than they have. Or they make their money from usury, usurious fees, and arranging things so as to squeeze the most money from their suppliers/customers to enrich their own pockets, and then tax-dodge and otherwise refuse to pay their fair share of the social structures that help to make them wealthy and safe. It's not that people and corporations make money...it's what they do with that money (or don't do with that money) that causes problems. So no points for you, Mr. Williams, because you missed the premise entirely.

Mr. McGurn sees an opportunity for Mitt Romney, as a successful businessman, to capture white working-class voters by praising states whose economic policies are actively hostile to the Democratic base as exemplars. He does so with the suggestion that the Democrats and the President are abandoning the white working-class because of their hostility to the private sector, a hostility that Mr. Will believes is expressed in regulations and rules that make the private sector not know what their costs will be, and thus stop investing in their companies as much as possible, which means no new jobs. Elsewhere, the WSJ claims the Democrats of the National Labor Relations Board are union patsies and attempting to push through new rules that would rig the elections process in favor of unions by shortening the time that companies have to make their case against unions before the secret ballot is held, letting unions ply the workers and not giving the corporations enough time to react. Then again, the corporations have quite a bit of time to squash any attempts at union organization - after all, after a Wal-Mart store employees made their vote, the corporation closed their location. And then there's all the non-explicit anti-unionism that management can bring to bear at any time, be it finding an excuse to fire an overly union-friendly employee or other means. Mr. Brownfield focuses his ire on the EPA's new fuel efficiency mandates, believing it will price Americans into smaller cars that nobody wants and that will crumple and kill anyone who gets in a collision.

Mr. Sowell believes that going to the extremes is the way to capture nominations and elections, because standing for something will always attract voters compared to capturing "the center" who apparently stand for nothing at all.

Not that the Republicans are the only party of speculation. Mr. du Pont suggests that the President might want to ditch Joe Biden and take Hillary Clinton as his vice-president nominee, and Mr. Curl believes that President Obama doesn't really have the fire to campaign again, suggesting that he should step aside and let Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee of 2012.

Mr. Shapiro insults university students by claiming most of them are there to party and then pick up a useless degree, instead of following a calling for a job that requires university, then insults Occupy Wall Street by claiming most of the people in the Occupy movement are those same college students with useless degrees demonstrating so they can become more dependent on government. At least Ms. Neal confines her complaints to the focus on athletics and endowments instead of giving quality education as she indicates the Penn State scandal is an exemplar of a lot of things that are wrong with out collegiate institutions today.

In the "blinking clock is right twice a day" department, Ms. Malkin criticizes the current administration's lack of follow-through on their commitment to transparency in government, and while she tends to focus on why the logs don't show visits from people she doesn't like, she does point out that the administration has done more than a few things to be obscure. Although, her criticism that this administration touts itself as the most transparent ever maybe off the mark - this administration could very well be the most transparent, but that reflects on how dark the previous administrations have been.

Last out of opinions, because we haven't had some old-fashioned gay-bashing from the conservative columnists in a while, Ms. Kelley assumes that the school systems in states that have legal marriage for all will devote plenty of time to explaining to children the specific mechanics of gay sex, something for which they are clearly too innocent to learn about at high school age. And then there's all the other parts about how people who favor hetero-only marriages will be called bigots and subjected to discrimination. (And the article links to a post suggesting that marriages between two men or two women be called "gender-segregated" marriage, intending all the Unfortunate Implications thereof from racial segregation. The Fail there is head-deskingly awful.)

Last for tonight, a letter of note and admiration from one A. Einstein to M.K. Ghandi, and a letter from Dr. Stephen Hawking about the presence of equations for time travel.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Horovitz - Euphonium Concerto

My palate is fairly dead. I know this because I have eaten food that has been finely and delicately spiced with many things, and I can't taste any of them. Salt, yes, pepper, yes, and things like garlic and onions, yes, but the rest? Not likely. So I don't build a lot of food memories, really, at least, not based on when I came across the most sublime chocolate truffle and savored it for minutes on end. No, my food memories tend to be the time that I found I actualyl liked coleslaw, thanks to a $5 per diem and a fish and chips vendor who clearly had it going for them in terms of coleslaw. The fish, as I remember, was forgettable, but the coleslaw was excellent - and it was the closest to $5 that any of the food merchants had that might have been a filling meal. So it's not really a food memory, per se, because the memory is more "Huh. I found something that fit the budget. And apparently, I like good coleslaw now, which I never would have known had I not been trying to spend as little as possible."

Similarly, talking about waffles on Sunday morning at the house isn't really about the waffles - there were plenty of them, and they kept coming until everyone had had their fill (or we ran out of the big batch of batter), but it's not really about the waffles - it's about reading the Sunday paper, especially the comics section, after having rolled out of bed at a late (for me) hour, compared to the very early rise-and-shine that happened during the week for schooling (or for work - sad as it is, the wake-up times for both were about the same time), and looking forward to a day of doing very little, oft-ruined by my father's insistence that some of his knowledge about tools and such be passed on to his son. Knowledge that has been useful, despite my myriad attempts to not learn it at the time.

Bridge mix while playing Pinochle, Turtles and Girl Guide Cookies during Boggle, the ever-impressive spread of baked goods (and liquors) available on 24 December, green room snacks while waiting in between musical acts (as the audience went through the various courses of dinner), which leads to its own memory of trying very hard not to break out laughing while the wig of a male actor was torn off during an unscripted moment in "Sisters", much to the appreciative laughter and applause of the audience...

...anyway, the memories are never about the food. I suspect that's true for most people, actually - the food is what was on the table, but the memory is what happened at dinner, or how the food was really just a prop to use for the playtime that was the real main course, or this, or that. The actual memories, the part that hurts or brings a smile to one's face, those are the things we want when we go back to the food. Or try to stay away from it, thinking it will make us popular and pretty again.

We eat to recall the memories, and we eat to try and bury them.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Mitsuda, Valente - Black Omen

Yes, indeed, now that the November harvest festival has passed, we can talk about the VEWPRF. (Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival) As is my wont, and because stamps are something I feel I can afford, if you would like correspondence, in the form of a card, leave your preferred name and an address to send the correspondence to.

And, if I get myself in gear, hopefully it won't be late January before I get my year in review post completed. You never know, though.

Comments have been screened, and will be deleted after the address has been recorded.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)

Yep, frequency is definitely going down. This is a trend I'd like to reverse, but I also have to do things like eat and sleep, so I don't see any extra time arriving at any point. Could really use the Time Turner, now, if so that I could have a day at home along with a day at work.

Trying again to get their way, the United States Congress will be introduced to a bill that would turn over control of who is published to the Media Cabals. Link something the Media Cabals don't like? You can be blacklisted by the government and every ISP in the United States and disappeared.

The Dead Pool claims writer Anne McCaffery, creator of the world of Pern and its draconic inhabitants.

On the matter of the Occupy movements, the Oakland mayor indicated the possibility of conspiracy among mayors and others to simultaneously do police actions against the protestors in several cities. In New York, police were summoned to get rid of all the protesters in Zucotti Park. This is after the protest was allowed back into the park by court order. In all cases, the property of the movement was confiscated or destroyed by the police.

At UC Davis, the police officers forced pepper spray down the throats of protesters standing in support of UC Berkeley students attacked by police for their support of Occupy Wall Street. After that act of torture and sadism, when confronted, the police spokesperson lied about the reasons for the use of the pepper spray. A day later, after having to walk through a three-block deep silent protest of students, the chancellor is suddenly much more interested in this incident than before.

As an alternative, The Infamous Brad describes how the police, using the same nonviolent oppression tactics and some head-fakes, were able to sap the energy of the Occupy St. Louis movement, which has me wondering how much energy it had in the first place that it would be foiled so easily. That is, until I read the Madison method of handling large crowds and protests from police, and I realize that it's quite possible that the method that St. Louis was using is of the same family as this, which would allow both the peaceful protest and the police to protect what they are supposed to protect side-by-side.

In case you happen to be staring down pepper spray attacks...here's the advice of someone on the Internet on how to do it - but then here's also other advice on defending against tear gas.

Finally, note a self-described harcore conservative explaining why any anti-corporatist, left or right, should support the movement, and a suggestion that the movement adopt Krampus, rather than V, as their entity-to-emulate.

And perhaps, a little optimism about whether or not the people as a whole will end up on the right side of history over all of this.

Elsewhere, the difficulties in an occupy movement when privilege is still unaddressed, including when the men expect to maintain their position of societal power in a movement that is supposed to be about equality for all.

Out in the world today, The Infamous Brad suggests that Mr. Burlesconi is not actually stepping down from power, but just setting things up so that he'll be swept back in under the threat of anarchy.

In China, the slush pile forself-publishing appears to rely mostly on the crowd that wants to read it, at which point the authors with followings are invited to affix a small fee to their work for their fans to keep reading. It apparently works reasonably well.

Domestically, Mr. Cain asked for and reeived Secret Service protection, despite no primaries or caucuses having been held to determine whether or not Mr. Cain will be a viable candidate for the Republican Party. Yet he's getting threats...and apparently, a lot of dollars from being accused of sexual harrassment.

The Supercommittee Fails, surprising nobody at all, and the President threatens to veto any attempts to wriggle out of the triggers that were built into the legislation that established them. You dithered and didn't come to a deal, now eat the cost of your inability to do work. And don't let the Defense Secretary's scare-mongering techniques convince you to exempt Defense.

The top brass of the company Zynga, known for such games as FarmVille, have demanded that some employees who haven't yet vested their company stock return it so it can be offered to someone else. "Here, let's screw you out of money that you'd be able to get by selling your shares when we go public."

The TSA puts off a study that would help determine whether their backscatter radiation device is actively harmful to the people they shepherd it through at airports.

In technology, a rootkit for your telephone that was originally a way of gathering information after crashes, dropped calls, and other services, but has been modified by phone companies and carriers to collect so much more. Much of it without your knowledge or consent, and without disclosure as to what they do with the data, usually.

Last out for tonight, now open, the Hoxton Street Monster Supply Shop, for all your monster care and feeding needs, and life lessons learned from video games.

Oh, and money.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Koji Kondo - World 1-1

"Inconceivable."

There's something interesting about that word. Most people keep using it...and maybe some of them actually do know what it means. To someone several years ago, the concept of the Internet would have been something that people did with magic, rather than technology. Robots, though, they might have been able to figure out - steel golems, although they are missing the animating word.

And at times, I can mention the Past That Never Was, usually derisively. A lot of people mention it when they want to complain about how degenerate the modern society is, as if it were inconceivable that a society that was so upstanding, moral (and devoutly Christian) to have become this Roman (Greek?) parade of vices, idleness, and a lack of patriotism. Yet, if one goes back in time, one finds a few things - one, the graffiti is the same (right down to the penis comparisons and boasts of sexual contests), and two, the philosophers of the day were complaining about how degenerate the youth of the nation had become and how they were not living up to the Past That Never Was (or, perhaps, the Platonic Form That Never Can Be). "Inconcievable" goes back, well, a very long way.

I think, though, there are some things that the past would find inconcievable in us moderns. Mostly, they're to a particlar degree, though. The past, even twenty years ago, could easily conceive of partisan fighting, and feel like the opposition was deliberately doing all they could to get in the way of the Right Party (whether on the right or the left). I doubt they would have conceived of it as something powerful enough to gridlock the government into utter inaction. I don't think they would conceive of the abuse of the filibuster rule to force the majority into a supermajority. They'd have an inkling of an idea about the influence of the religious right in politics, but to them, the wife-beating apologist James Dobson, super-televngelist Pat Robertson, and the megachurches that routinely advocate "issues" to their congregations are not yet a regular fixture of their lives.

The Tea Party has not yet made their ascent, nor has Occupy Wall Street. I'm not sure either of those are inconceivable to the past...although they might find it inconceivable that we have once again managed to let the banks run away and crash the economy after the S & L scandal they just went through.

The future will look back at us and say "Hey, those people, they couldn't conceive of this. They couldn't conceive of the idea of gender as a spectrum, rather than a binary. They were stuck on portable devices, instead of implants. They thought surgery could just alter their form of humanity, and dying their hair was a radical statement."

But you know, we have people who can concieve of it, and then people that will build it, and then it will become normal. Whether our future is 1984 or Transmetropolitan.

Then again, there are some things that are inconceivable that shouldn't be. Like the idea that a peaceful protest can exist somewhere in the United States without droves of police being sent in with military-style gear and tactics to clear them out. Despite the constitutional protection that guarantees the "right to assemble, and to request a redress of grievances".

That we let the banks ruin the economy again with gambling practices, despite the S&L scandal.

That we continue to deny basic rights to people, even after black people rose up to get their basic rights, after the Hispanic farm workers rose up to get their rights, the Stonewall Inn incident, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and many others.

That our elections process has been hijacked by moneyed interests who carefully select candidates loyal to them and then tell us to vote for one.

That multinational corporations report billions in profits to their shareholders and claim legalized penury to the government to avoid paying any taxes, the government does not audit the living daylights out of them every quarter they do so, and that the legislature seems quite content to look the other way on this.

And that we let other corporations buy legislators to pervert the idea of trademarks, patents, and copyright so as to remain a money-making vehicle, rather than a vehicle to promote the useful arts and sciences.

That should be inconceivable. But instead, it's reality.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Gustav Holst - Jupiter

A wonderful writer has the necessary self-image to show the methods by which she has constructed excellent deconstructions.

Politicians court votes and popular opinion, keeping one eye on re-election as they make decisions that can affect millions. Corporate CEOs, Wall Street traders, and Capitalists of all sorts attempt to take as much money as they can without having to give any back, trying to predict the future and use it to make money.

People believe this is wrong and individually join their voices in the belief that they can change the system and make it fairer.

Religious officials of several belief system tout that they have all the answers to life's questions and problems contained in their book, in their interpretation of the book, or in their heads. (Librarians, educators, and researchers actually have them, but the necessary research time is an exponential function of the complexity of the question.)

The founding of the nation I reside in rests on persons saying they could build a better life in lands unknown to them than in staying in the society they were raised in.

Advertisements blare from billboards, media outlets, shopping places, and the people that I talk to. The obsession with proper branding and the label of the product trumps the actual functionality and utility of the product. Persons famous for things other than what they are barkers for rake in obscene amounts of money by lending their endorsement to this product or that.

Authors, screenwriters, and dramatists flatter us by presenting us with ways to vicariously live lives far more exciting that ours, in strange worlds or new dimensions. They generate emotional responses from us to their creations, they give us dreams of a world that may never come to pass in our lifetimes, and they inspire us to take action to change our world and ourselves.

An entire complex of media and product tell us that we are inadequate by ourselves, and that our goal in life should be to look like the impossibly beautiful, makeup'd and digitally enhanced persons staring back at us from the TV machine or the glossy covers of magazines.

An entire population of people are secure enough in their bodies and images that they push back against this as hard as they can, and generate beauty outside of that message.

To make music or art, to tell stories, to orate, or to toast, one or more people must be confident enough in their skills to play in front of an audience, even if just an audience of themselves.

Millions of us have blogs and social media accounts, and we have the confidence in ourselves to broadcast these thoughts of ours to others, to find others whose thoughts we like, dislike, agree, and disagree, and to have discussions with them on all of the subjects above.

We have the self-confidence to show the outer world who we are inside, to not be ashamed of our kinks and fetishes, our preferences, our orientations, our dysphorias, our headspaces, and to campaign for acceptance by the world around us, but not to be defined by it.

So, what does narcissism have to do with me? In as many ways possible, narcissism has everything to do with me. In greater and lesser degrees, it powers the very things that you and I use, follow, enjoy, and produce. In excess or deficiency, it becomes a hindrance, but with enough self-confidence and self-image, all things are potential.

In writing this, I am engaging in an act of narcissism, because at the root, I believe what I have to say is important enough that I want you to read it. Even if up in the conscious brain, society tells me that such things are Unacceptable and that I must deflect any praise received, lest I believe that I am important.

"But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free."
--Prospero, The Tempest, Epilogue.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Gustav Holst - Second Suite in F

Welcome again to our place and time. Be sure to file any bugs you might see in reality appropriately. We start today with a description of depression and working through it that resonates with a lot of people who must work with and through their own depression. No hyperbole in this entry at all.

Elsewhere, how to help make your links and blog posts much better for screen readers. Because not everyone on the internet can see you.

a response to the idea that games cannot be art that argues that context is important, to judge whether something is art is based on the experience of the person(s) who sees/listens/interacts with it, and that things such as games are art because of their underlying systems and mechanics as much as any pretty pictures and sounds they might also have.

And finally, a proclamation that picture books deserve care, thought, and decisions to produce quality materials, even materials that might be challenging, and that the format of picture books should not be seen as a barrier to talking about important things in children's lives.

The Dead Pool claims Joe Frazier, boxer, at 67 years of age from cancer and Andy Rooney, long-time commentator on "60 Minutes", at 92

Out in the world today, the march of progress has not been marching very far in terms of economic and political equality for women, even with good gains in health and education.

Mr. Assange of Wikileaks has lost a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer to allegations of sexual misconduct.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States should be much more aggressive about deposing the government of Iran.

Domestically, supplemental Census figures that take into account costs such as medical expenses indicate that the record number of poor is even more record poor, and that seniors and the elderly are taking it on the chin as much as the rest of the 99 per cent. The system of medical insurances, expenses, reimbursements, and disbursements to large profitable companies is bankrupting the people who ahve to use those services.

On the matter of the Occupy movement in Oakland, The Infamous Brad suggests two theories as to why the Oakland Police Department basically facilitated the illegal* general strike and march into and through the port, but then raided with a vengeance when people attempted to re-open a foreclosed building that supported the homeless. Also, Occupy protesters closed down a Wells Fargo branch in protest over the bank's close ties to immigrant detention centers.

Occupy activists in New York were recruited to help bring a building up to code and fight against a landlord that refused to repair the building.

And a reminder - according to the police and the law, everything Occupy Wall Street or its cousins do is illegal, regardless of what the Bill of Rights, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or any other document that guarantees much of what the Occupy movements do is legal.

Then there's a history lesson - the change undergone by the Republican Party from being a party trying to control social spending to a party that tries and succeeds to starve the government of necessary revenues and stick Democrats with cleaning up the mess.

Inside the United States, the long-term unemployed are once again running out of their benefits time, despite a lack of jobs coming from anywhere.

Convicted felon Jack Abramoff interviewed with 60 Minutes and indicated several of the still-legal tricks he and ther lobbyists used to buy Congresscritters and their staff people.

The Republican House Oversight chairman called for an investigation into whether an organization solicited donations for one cause and then rerouted them to the Occupy Wall Street protest. If you cut through the "ACORN's Hand! There Must Be Something Suspicious!" frame that Fox puts the question in, you have the possibility that a major organization did serious wrongdoing and is trying to cover it up. But there's a large requirement of salt, because of the credibility of Fox News, and that they and very conservative media seem to be the only ones with interest in such a scandal.

Credit unions and community banks received large amounts of deposits from customers closing out their accounts with bigger financial institutions, trying to sever their ties to the institutions that routinely screw them, up and throgh charging ATM withdrawal fees to persons receiving unemployment benefits after the first few transactions, because unemploymemt benefits often get turned into cash to do a lot of small transactions. Or the debit cards they're tied to have fees associated with them.

Pennsylvania State University Head Coach Joe Paterno was fired for assisting in a cover up for child abuse by an assistant coach and for perjuring himself before a jury. When investigated to its core elements, the breadth and depth of the abuse scandal is frightening. In response to the sacking of their coach, a large amount of students demonstrated against the decision, favoring Mr. Paterno's record and role in college football over the allegations and his role in the coverup.

And finally, a letter of note from an issue so simple a child could understand it - and write a response.

In technology, the government of the United States argues that intercepting data sent by your mobile device to connect to wireless towers is not a search, and that even if it were, there would be no need for a separate warrant to set up a spoofed tower to capture that data. The government doesn't really understand the meaning of "secure in their persons and papers", it seems.

They're also quite fond of sticking GPS trackers on the cars of citizens without warrants and arguing before the Supreme Court that they should be allowed to continue doing so without warrants, something that the inventor of the GPS technology is strongly against. Said Court? Is apparently at least a bit disturbed by this turn of events and might not rubberstamp the practice.

The CIA is tracking the mood of people through their social media and blogging platforms, trusting that the crowd will show their attitude in the aggregate.

A security consultant demonstrates a truism of security - the weakest link in the chain of security is often the people themselves, and so an excellent social engineering attack, disguised as something like a fire inspection, will almost always work because people trust people who look like they belong there.

A new report suggests that junk food very well might have addictive properties...and that some people might be prone to being addicted to food in general, as their brains react in the same way to food as junkies react to chemically addictive substances.

In the opinions, the editors of the WSJ believe that the European debt crisis is the reckoning for their high taxes and generous welfare state democratic socialism. Wouldn't have anything to do with the bank problems or the casino-like gambling withassets, now would it, Wall Street paper?

Mr. Stossel insists that the Food and Drug Administration unnecessarily kills people and makes drugs more costly to come to market because of required compliance with their regulations. The Free Market (A.P.T.I.N.) would sort out anything the FDA might do, of course - and if you're lucky enough not to be the one that gets the drug that kills you, it does, eventually. But we kind of like not having things that can kill us exist on the market for long enough to kill us before the market decides they aren't safe.

Mr. Sowell belkieves that talk about income inequality is meaningless unless you pit the young against the old, by which the old, having the virtue of having lived, worked, paid off debts, and made money longer, are almost always richer than the young. "Income brackets", he says, are useless because they don't follow real people, who fluctuate in and out of income brackets. We note to Mr. Sowell that if the 1% are cpaturing ever more of income and wealth in the country, then there weill be ever fewer people who make it to that point, leaving the rest of us to fight and be mobile over a shrinking part of the pie. That's a recipe for widespread disaster and problems, Mr. Sowell.

Mr. Murchison perverts a message about the horrible nature of politics in the United States into a call to reduce the federal government's size and scope, because the perpetual campaign is a result of our dependence on the government, according to him. I'm more inclined to agree with the WSJ's original premise that he builds on - "normal" people don't take part in presidential politics any more. (Because they can't - it takes millions of dollars they don't have, provided by groups with their own agendas, and the nominating process requires unceasing fidelity to ideology instead of being able to be practical and hold opinions on multiple parts of the spectrum.)

On the matter of politicians, Mr. Elder suggests that the media had a double standard by not investigating as strongly into the affairs of Jesse Jackson than they are now into the possible improprieties of Herman Cain. Mr. Kuhner chooses better targets for his accusation of the same - Bill Clinton and Barack Obama

For a change, we'll let Mr. Cain speak about what he envisions his first 100 days in office as the President will look like - a lot of "repeal what the last guy did" and "we're number one, we're number one", from the looks of it. Mr. Boskin looks at the various tax plans and proposals of the Republican candidates and finds them all worthy, at least in the sense that they will all lower taxes and prevent the expiration of tax cuts put in place by the last administrator.

Mr. Krauthammer believes that because the Obama Amdinistration did not create a centrist government and did not renegotiate the continued stay of United States troops in Iraq past their scheduled drawdown date, Iraq will be lost to The Bloodthirsty Religion and this amdinistration is to blame. Not content to stay in Iraq, Mr. Gaffney, Jr. ups the ante and blames Barack Obama for the unraveling of the Middle East to the Bloodthirsty Religion, by allowing all of the religious parties to come to power in free and democratic elections, for which they will impose the harshest Sharia on the people. Because, if you believe Mr. Williams, democracy is impossible for a people that have always been ruled by strongmen, dictators, and religious zealots, and besides, according to Mr. Spencer, the Bloodthirsty Religion doesn't want any of those freedoms that might hurt their feelings or make fun of their sacred figures, and they'll use whatever violence they need to to accopmlish such a thing, according to Mr. Ibrahim.

Messrs. Biggs and Richwine insist that in terms of total compensation, retiree benefits, and other non-salary benefits, public school teachers are baid much much better than people of similar skills and qualifications would get in the private sector. Which is a nice double attack - teachers are less qualified than their private sector counterparts, and that teachers make too much - so nobody should feel bad about reducing teacher salaries and compensations, because they get too much and don't deserve it, anyway. How about we have a society that respects its teachers for a change, instead of insisting that they do the finest work of education on shoestring budgets, huge class sizes, and hostile environments?

Last out of opinions, Ms. Noonan sggests that the only reason the Democrats are more popular than the Republicans is that the Democratic brand is better and more fun, with taxing the rich and the glamour of spending, than the stodgy Republican brand of working hard and living within your means. Republicans not only have to recapture their base that fled them, they have to make their brand sexy again. Democrats, well, they're just living on the Time That Never Was. Ms. Noonan is far kinder than Mr. Pendry, who believes all of the college students, OWS protesters, and anyone else who has a liberal education or liberal politics is stupid, will never produce anything of value, and will hopefully be hit with a clue-by-four before they let communists (like George Soros and Van Jones) take over the country and impoverish everyone.

Last out, a timeline showing how ineffective DRM'd music is in making money for a company, considering how many DRM services have gone to the grave.

Oh, and prisons converted into hotels.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Gustav Holst - First Suite in E flat

I noticed another Thing while watching the TV shows - and once again, it's NCIS:LA that makes something in my mind go poit!

Setting aside the almost callous disregard that both it and regular NCIS have for the requirement that one get a warrant before searching things like systems or places (at least Timothy mentions concerns or the fact that things are illegal before doing them. He should know, of course, that "Just following orders" doesn't work as a defense.), this particular poit! involves what looks like a bit of...the trope of the Buddy Cop show where any hint of possible non-macho behavior is a point of either ridicule or uncomfortable shiftyeyes. I'm sure there's a name for it - and it's probably on TVTropes. (Something like HomOhNoBro)

Anyway, the situation is thus - in the "rec room" area, Deeks (combination of street cop, surfer boy, and wanna-be-playboy tropes, almost always negative) and Kenzi (The Chick Cop and Action Girl) are learning the Vienese Waltz, with the problems that Deeks in Uncultured and Kenzi is Uncomfortable In Heels getting in the way of anything resembling competence (We're all Trope-Tastic here at NCIS:LA), when Hettie (The Boss, who is a Four Foot Nothing Deadly Zen Monk) suggests to the other two in the room, G. Callen and Sam Hannah, that they should learn how to waltz as well, with each other as partners, as the coordination and training would be excellent for them.

Sam blows it off as Hettie joking - to which G. rejoins that she is not. Based on her character, Sam should know that she's not kidding, really. It looks like Sam and G will have to get intimately close and learn how to waltz, and the looks on both of their faces indicates that they will find this awkward at best and traumatic at worst. Eric, the tech person, appears in the nick of time to indicate that the next phase of their plan can go forward, thus allowing Sam and G to avoid having to be close.

And I said, "Convenient excuse. Also, that seemed a lot like 'look at how we're playing this potentially gay situation for laughs.' I think this is what the people on the Interwebs mean when they talk about seeing things through different lenses." The episode did not end with Hettie requiring Sam and G to go back to the rec room and learn how to properly waltz, which is a departure from other episodes - when Hettie wants something, she gets it, regardless of the feelings of the people involved. Yet when it comes to something that could be interpreted as de-machoing the main characters, Hettie's remarkable abilitiy is not put to work.

Truthfully, if football players can learn the grace required to perform ballet dancing, even those two ultramacho characters can pick up a waltz. And I'm not sure I like the Unfortunate Implications of a show that insists that even the smallest hint of two men dancing together, even in a nonromantic context, is something to be played for uncomfortable comedy.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: NCIS: LA - Main Theme and Title

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Page Summary

Speechifying on the State of the Union 2012.
Right, then - 21-24 January 02012
A week's worth of supply, all in one post - 16-20 January 02012
Shadow Idol, Prompt 10: Seemingly Harmless Things
Another long list of links - 9 - 15 January 02012
Your first linklist of the new year - 1-9 January 02012
Shadow Idol, Prompt 9: The convoluted path, not the direct one
This Was The Year That Was: 2011 in retrspective.
And that's a wrap, I guess - 16-31 December 02011
Managing a real post - 5-15 December 02011
The State of the Silver at this point in time.
Shadow Idol, Prompt 7: What Seinfeld was supposedly a show about.
A full-fledged weekly post 26 November - 4 December 02011
Shadow Idol, Prompt Six: The memory of food... or food evoking memories.
VEWPRF Correspondence 2011
Frequency of posting is dropping - 14-25 November 02011
Shadow Idol, Prompt 5: That which cannot be conceived of.
Shadow Idol, prompt four: A flower that bends toward water.
Another set of links and data - 7-12 November 02011
Thinky-thoughts: Two Men Dancing on U.S. Televsion.

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Nonsensical Ravings of Finely Tuned Insanity

Confessions of a Part-Time Discordian

Recent Entries

Speechifying on the State of the Union 2012.

Right, then - 21-24 January 02012

A week's worth of supply, all in one post - 16-20 January 02012

Shadow Idol, Prompt 10: Seemingly Harmless Things

Another long list of links - 9 - 15 January 02012

Your first linklist of the new year - 1-9 January 02012

Shadow Idol, Prompt 9: The convoluted path, not the direct one

This Was The Year That Was: 2011 in retrspective.

And that's a wrap, I guess - 16-31 December 02011

Managing a real post - 5-15 December 02011

The State of the Silver at this point in time.

Shadow Idol, Prompt 7: What Seinfeld was supposedly a show about.

A full-fledged weekly post 26 November - 4 December 02011

Shadow Idol, Prompt Six: The memory of food... or food evoking memories.

VEWPRF Correspondence 2011

Frequency of posting is dropping - 14-25 November 02011

Shadow Idol, Prompt 5: That which cannot be conceived of.

Shadow Idol, prompt four: A flower that bends toward water.

Another set of links and data - 7-12 November 02011

Thinky-thoughts: Two Men Dancing on U.S. Televsion.