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Right, then. - 01 March 2007
Mar. 2nd, 2007 01:46 amOkay, so that was that - the last assignment that’s due when I get back has been put away. I can relax. Thank goodness it’s Thursday? Or something.
A bill on the floor of the Senate may run into difficulties and challenges from the President...because one provision in it aims to provide limited collective barganing rights to airport screeners. Mind you, they won’t be able to strike, but they will get things like whistleblower protections. The bill itself aims to implement many of the recommendations of the 11 September commission, which have stalled out in the current Presidency. I’m not entirely sure what’s so harmful about allowing airport screeners to have collective bargaining, but it’s obviously important enough for the President to ask his party members to quash it. In other things pertaining to the administration, the FOIA report card is in, and performance is at an all-time low. Things are pretty backed up, even with less requests and more outright denials, so much so that the agencies are struggling and failing to meet statutory deadlines for “simple” requests. It would probably be easier for the Administration to just deny all requests, but that would require secrecy to a degree that the courts would probably step in on the Administration. From there, the Office of Women's Health got a nasty surprise today - $1.2 million U.S. of their allocated operating budget was being withheld for use elsewhere in the FDA. The Post article provides no details as to why this decision was made, but the speculation is that this is a clandestine sort of revenge for the controversy that the OWH stirred by supporting the legalization and availability of Plan B, the emergency post-intercourse contraceptive. If this budget cut happens, the office will have to shut down operations for the rest of the fiscal year, as the money they have already been allocated has been spent. This could be a serious problem, especially with the focus turning to HPV and possibly recommending a nationwide mandatory vaccination programme for it. A new estimate, reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, says that there are almost 7.5 million girls and women aged 14-24 that have a strain of HPV. Only two strains are cancerous, apparently, and this new study says that even though there are more women with an HPV strain, there are less than previously thought that have the known cancerous ones. Finally, for all the flak that was raised about the conditions at Walter Reed, the official solution appears to be early inspections and a gag order. All for talking and showing the media that the injured and hospitalized troops deserve good support, too. As the Slacktivist says, though, there's no way we can call any death or injury "wasted", and so I suppose that this enforced silence is part of the same philosophy, because not getting proper care would imply that people are, in fact, being wasted because of this conflict. As a bit of a capstone on all of this national-level stuff, Philip Zimbardo, in Yale Alumni Magazine draws our attention to Milgram’s experiment of electric shocks to show us that a lot of people become torturers or will do what we would normally consider unthinkable if the situation and the authority control is just right. When Good People Do Evil reminds us why “I was only following orders” really can be the cause of atrocities, but that people should recognize the signs of that kind of coercion and fight it off before things get too far. Before doing anything that could lead to immoral and unethical behavior, sleep on it. A lack of sleep might impair your moral judgment, according to a study done on active-duty military personnel.
Going down to the city level, the city of New York has banned the use of the word "nigger". There’s no legal weight behind it, so no fear of enforcement, but the city has decided that nobody should be saying “nigger” anymore, not even those for whom it has become a more positive term. There’s probably a big analysis that could be sone about how it seems acceptable to go one way with that word, and not acceptable to go the other, but that’s ground that’s been tread, no doubt, and I’m not versed enough in the history and the other sciences needed to do it.
I suppose it was the Conservapedia thing - once exposed to one element, I tend to see more appear in the same vein. Thorough Metafilter, I was exposed to the two competing “thoughts” in evolution, both wikified - CreationWiki, which forbids non-creationists from revising more than spelling and grammar errors, and EvoWiki, which aims to promote evolution education. It’s a new (relatively) front for the ongoing war. Both of these have probably been around for a while, but since they’ve been brought to my attention, now they’re brought to yours, audience.
Going offbeat, a gent tried to cash a $50,000 U.S. cheque from G-d. Needless to say, the bank wouldn’t do much with it, and the gent is now charged with attempted check fraud. Thus, the phrase “In God We Trust, All Others Must Pay Cash” is not entirely always true. And on that note, we’re going to fade into the background for tonight. G’night, everybody.
A bill on the floor of the Senate may run into difficulties and challenges from the President...because one provision in it aims to provide limited collective barganing rights to airport screeners. Mind you, they won’t be able to strike, but they will get things like whistleblower protections. The bill itself aims to implement many of the recommendations of the 11 September commission, which have stalled out in the current Presidency. I’m not entirely sure what’s so harmful about allowing airport screeners to have collective bargaining, but it’s obviously important enough for the President to ask his party members to quash it. In other things pertaining to the administration, the FOIA report card is in, and performance is at an all-time low. Things are pretty backed up, even with less requests and more outright denials, so much so that the agencies are struggling and failing to meet statutory deadlines for “simple” requests. It would probably be easier for the Administration to just deny all requests, but that would require secrecy to a degree that the courts would probably step in on the Administration. From there, the Office of Women's Health got a nasty surprise today - $1.2 million U.S. of their allocated operating budget was being withheld for use elsewhere in the FDA. The Post article provides no details as to why this decision was made, but the speculation is that this is a clandestine sort of revenge for the controversy that the OWH stirred by supporting the legalization and availability of Plan B, the emergency post-intercourse contraceptive. If this budget cut happens, the office will have to shut down operations for the rest of the fiscal year, as the money they have already been allocated has been spent. This could be a serious problem, especially with the focus turning to HPV and possibly recommending a nationwide mandatory vaccination programme for it. A new estimate, reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, says that there are almost 7.5 million girls and women aged 14-24 that have a strain of HPV. Only two strains are cancerous, apparently, and this new study says that even though there are more women with an HPV strain, there are less than previously thought that have the known cancerous ones. Finally, for all the flak that was raised about the conditions at Walter Reed, the official solution appears to be early inspections and a gag order. All for talking and showing the media that the injured and hospitalized troops deserve good support, too. As the Slacktivist says, though, there's no way we can call any death or injury "wasted", and so I suppose that this enforced silence is part of the same philosophy, because not getting proper care would imply that people are, in fact, being wasted because of this conflict. As a bit of a capstone on all of this national-level stuff, Philip Zimbardo, in Yale Alumni Magazine draws our attention to Milgram’s experiment of electric shocks to show us that a lot of people become torturers or will do what we would normally consider unthinkable if the situation and the authority control is just right. When Good People Do Evil reminds us why “I was only following orders” really can be the cause of atrocities, but that people should recognize the signs of that kind of coercion and fight it off before things get too far. Before doing anything that could lead to immoral and unethical behavior, sleep on it. A lack of sleep might impair your moral judgment, according to a study done on active-duty military personnel.
Going down to the city level, the city of New York has banned the use of the word "nigger". There’s no legal weight behind it, so no fear of enforcement, but the city has decided that nobody should be saying “nigger” anymore, not even those for whom it has become a more positive term. There’s probably a big analysis that could be sone about how it seems acceptable to go one way with that word, and not acceptable to go the other, but that’s ground that’s been tread, no doubt, and I’m not versed enough in the history and the other sciences needed to do it.
I suppose it was the Conservapedia thing - once exposed to one element, I tend to see more appear in the same vein. Thorough Metafilter, I was exposed to the two competing “thoughts” in evolution, both wikified - CreationWiki, which forbids non-creationists from revising more than spelling and grammar errors, and EvoWiki, which aims to promote evolution education. It’s a new (relatively) front for the ongoing war. Both of these have probably been around for a while, but since they’ve been brought to my attention, now they’re brought to yours, audience.
Going offbeat, a gent tried to cash a $50,000 U.S. cheque from G-d. Needless to say, the bank wouldn’t do much with it, and the gent is now charged with attempted check fraud. Thus, the phrase “In God We Trust, All Others Must Pay Cash” is not entirely always true. And on that note, we’re going to fade into the background for tonight. G’night, everybody.
