Late day tonight - 12 November 2007

Working those late shifts just really does bad things to one’s sanity. I think the tea helped to tide me over and keep me warm. Others might enjoy drinking chocolate, which probably is a lot more unhealthy, but probably a lot more palatable to the general populace than the jasmine tea I had. It’s getting in the rainy and windy seasons, so things are about to get cold and damp. That will make for fun walking to and from work, but I intend to do it - y’know, to be the good enviro-conscious person and walk on those days when I don’t have to drive elsewhere. Probably saves me a little bit of money every time I do it.

Before we get into roiling political and ideological warfare, we point out that until November 26, people in first world countries can obtain a One Laptop Per Child laptop if they buy one for someone in a developing country. For a donation of $399, $200 of which is tax-deductible, you can get one and give one. Here's one review of the OLPC laptop, conducted by an adult, and one review conducted by a child.

Speaking of money, what would $611 billion US, the current cost of the war in Iraq, buy? Probably things a lot more immediately and long-term useful to the country and the world. And while its laudable that Mr. Bush is visiting the wounded and amputees, assuming he’s not doing it just for the photo opportunities, seeing what war can do to you makes me wish we could get past a large part of that biological nature.

And in domestic politics, expect to see a whole lot more of "Swift Boat"-style campaigning, where supposed issue groups campaign for or against candidates, under the veneer of championing an issue of some sort. Why there? Unlimited spending on the issue and not much for required disclosure.

A new book suggests that the reason people start flipping out at Hillary reasserting that she is biologically XX is because women leaders fall into two stereotyped categories: cute, nice, but dumb incompetents, and iron-powered frosty bitches. To make the transition from ditz to dominator, most people assume that the woman has shed her warm and cuddly side, even if it’s not true at all. Although Hillary and other Democrats may take much more fire from the loyal liberal base as they dance around actually calling themselves liberals, preferring “progressive” and shying away from what they consider a tainted term. I’d be more inclined to say they don’t call themselves liberal because they aren’t, and this is a matter of actual truth-telling. Liberals are like the seven four socialist workers convicted and executed for deaths they were nowhere near, with one more comitting suicide and three more getting life sentences (thanks, Red Rabbit), having had their writings used as evidence to convince the jury that they were responsible.

If you want to save some more money... and are okay with learning how to do these sorts of things, you might try some extreme cooking, where the car, the dishwasher, or a slow-moving lava flow could be the perfect cooking tool.

J. Michael Straczynski weighs in with his take on the writer's strike, showing that we already believe that residuals and royalties are good ideas to keep writers writing by keeping them in food and other essentials by paying them regularly when people view and buy their work. We do it for authors, why not for other writers?

In the “if we knew then what we know now” department - drugs don't treat ADHD well in the long-term - after about three years, therapy and drugs are about on par with each other for effectiveness. Plus, long-term drug usage like that might make for shorter and lighter kids. Additionally, babies and toddlers with disorders may be driving robots to help them explore the world. More science stuff includes using radio waves to make a scanning tunneling microscope scan about 100 times faster, which could also mean that the microscopes get much more precise and accurate in their measurements. For those interested in agriculture and genetics, plants may be bred to cause RNA interference in pest insects, effectively killing them when they try to eat the crops and stopping them from spreading or causing too much damage.

Wired is running a small article on the best conspiracy theories of both past and present, and having people vote up and down some of the user-submitted ones. This could be a good way to know what your fellows are thinking (or at least have heard on the grapevine).

Knowing what say, Kent Hovind and others who like young-earth creationism are thinking requires touring their museums built to the glory of the creator. There’s plenty of quiche ingredients there, just waiting for people to use them.

Going one step back from the really out-there fringe to the regular fringe, a panel of Idaho representatives are considering repealing no-fault divorce and trying to find ways to get mothers to stay home with the kids. Warm and fuzzy family values sort of stuff, right? The kind that you’d find on Fixed Noise, no doubt. Because single-parent households headed by women have higher drug and crime rates, apparently, and divorce contributes to this. Some of the members are smart, however, and say that we should be helping families of all stripes, not trying to turn back the clock and force women back into marriages that they can’t easily get out of, back into roles as caretakers and such. You can hear the apron strings tying around a woman’s neck and choking her, can’t you?

And with more of those kinds of family values, I’m letting Keith Olbermann’s show tonight influence the blog posting. His #1 story talked about how much Fixed News uses all sort of sexualized imagery, while at the same time, decrying the increasing sexualization of the culture. In these cases, it’s not just Bill’O who’s responsible for this, but just about every Faux show there is does this. The push of the actual piece is to demand the ability to choose only the channels that you want to support to make up your cable package, but there’s a lot of snickering that can be done at the apparent hypocrisy here. So, one more reason to point and laugh.

The winner of tonight’s quiche-to-the-face competition is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which attempted to find Iranian terrorists by tracking the purchase of Middle Eastern foods. There were no prosecutions, and the program was scrapped quickly after coming into existence, but there were some massive amounts of stupidity somewhere that allowed it to get off the ground in the first place. Yes, even bigger than Fox “News”.

Early morning tomorrow, so it’s time for bed now. G’night.

Going for even more - 13 November 2007

Whee for yet another day of being able to influence kids that books are good for you! And remember, people, as cmpriest comments, even if you think that writing is the easiest thing in the world, being a professional at it is not. Thus, those who do it for a profession deserve to get income for all the times their writing is used. Otherwise, they tend to stop writing because they can’t afford having such an irregular job.

Out in the rest of the world, however, things look pretty... sucky. The opposition leader in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, has been put under house arrest again to prevent her from staging and joining marches against Musharraf. Musharraf continues to look weaker and weaker the more he tries to repress Bhutto’s campaign. In fair and free elections, he’d probably take a beating now. So the question then becomes whether fair and free elections will be what we see in January.

Ratzinger plans to visit the United States at some point next year. He’ll tour New York, including the site of the 11 September attacks, and speak at the Untied Nations. (Edit: That's actually the United Nations, but unintentional comedy has resulted from this, so it will stay.)

Giant trash piles in the Pacific ocean create giant trash piles washing up on the beach. In Hawaii. Nothing says suckitude like turning a paradise spot into a trash-riddled heap. Why not, instead, created inspired fashion like dresses made entirely out of clothespins?

Fox Noise decides it’s a good idea to talk about stuff we really already know. Although I’m not sure which is worse, Faux reporting on the results, or the study that determined that heroes tend to be good leaders, selfless, and often don't see themselves as the unafraid superheroes of the movies. I wonder where the money for that study came from.

More serious matters. Ron Paul may be in line with Bill'O with regard to the nonexistent "War on Christmas". Admittedly, the source material is from 2003, but that doesn’t mean that Mr. Paul might still believe in such things. Have a read for yourself.

Taking advantage of fuzzy matching algorithms, synthetic identity theft is now the main way of stealing identites. Rather than masquerading as someone, the thief gets a second file opened in their name and someone else’s information or SSN, builds up credit, then vanishes in a flash, potentially sticking the real consumer with debt collection and bad credit reporting. What’s worse, is that it’s not necessarily going to be caught by simply getting your credit report checked up on.

Democrats continue to try to prove to the country that they actually have done something other than get walked on. They’re still not succeeding. I think they’d have to actually stop war funding for anyone to believe they’ve done anything. Yet I suspect they’ll get a little longer lease, assuming a friendly president is elected. A Red State columnist is vehemently opposed to putting a Democrat in the White House, because while the U.S. dollar is weakening, the effects are being felt more by other countries than the United States, and that this sort of trend should be allowed to continue, trusting businesspeople and the market to work things out on their own.

Michelle Malkin thinks that its "seditious" that children appear at anti-war protests, calling them "human shields", after a protest stopped a caravan of military supplies from leaving the area it was in. The protest did something potentially very stupid - they blocked the road. The children were likely the reason they were saved from being savaged for their stupidity. Stupidity all around - laying down in front of the road will likely get you run over, but saying that people brought their children along to intentionally put them in danger like that is also pretty stupid.

The stupidity, however, increases in leaps and bounds in the next segment. In continuing to note the striking similarities between schools and prisons, a school in New Jersey has a live feed to the police department. So not only are the cameras rolling, but the police have the opportunity to scrutinize things live. This is purported to be something that will help with the whole school shooting thing, but I also wonder whether police will start showing up and citing/arresting kids for things they do in school, because the cameras saw them. Best behavior, all, Big Brother is watching.

A pop art exhibit at London's National Portrait Gallery unwittingly makes social comment on itself - while the artists were shameless about remixing things, taking things that were copyrighted, with the aim of producing new art, where things that might come out of it are something like the Ming period aluminium soda cans, the exhibit has a very strict “No Photography” policy, because all the images and art are under copyright. Even the No Photography sign couldn’t be photographed, because the layout and typography of the sign was also under copyright. So in celebrating the culture that thought of copyright as a guideline to prevent duplication without invention, we prevent anyone from violating the copyright on the images. If that was the intended effect, bravo. If not, perhaps they should consider that sort of thing.

And then it tops out with the account of a woman being drowned during an exorcism ceremony. Not only that, but there were family members there that didn’t move to stop the ceremony. The girl was dead nine hours before family contacted police. The ritual was supposed to get rid of a curse, but instead it ended up killing her. Can we please not have the ceremonies where there’s the chance of dying going on? Something like this is a quiche-worthy event.

If you have fears of things, including colors, the following page may not be for you - The Absolutely Scariest Colors Imaginable talks about people who are afraid of certain colors, and the color profiles for other, potentially more common fears.

If your fear is, however, that you’re not getting all the story about events and ideas, then maybe The Hour's Disinformation segments will be of use to you in filling in all the cracks, or finding where the cracks are in the first place.

ldragoon says that cliches about gay men are so beyond passe and are signs of horrible writing. There’s a lot of good characterization going on in graphic novels. In fact, DC’s Vertigo imprint manages to take cliche characters, the fables of our tales, and turn them into three-dimensional characters. The least that someone in the regular superhero genre could do is provide three-dimensional characters rather than cliche cutouts. Is it really that hard? If so, perhaps some character series need to gracefully fade away? And sooner, rather than later, especially if Think Progress’s belief that Mr. Bush will appoint a homophobe for Surgeon General when the Congress is in recess is accurate. For all we know, he’s drawing on those kinds of cliches in making his appointments.

ABC news speculates that about one in ten men has multiple sexual partners, taking a reported rate of about 6.6 percent and suggesting that it might be as high as ten percent because some men aren’t reporting, remembering, or otherwise admitting to it. The article notes that multiple partners could potentially permit the quicker spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, because someone could infect someone else before even the first symptoms of an infection appeared. They then say that having a good HIV-prevention and education program is an excellent idea and a good vector for stopping this potential problem. So far, so good. Then the Family Research Council weighs in. Rather than being concerned about the statistic in any form, the FRC decries the report as "a club to bring graphic sex ed straight to your kids", also believing that it's easy to spot the men who have multiple sexual partners, thinking that it’s confined to a couple subgroups. The Slacktivist pops an eyebrow at this conclusion, and says "Y'know, when you say that, you're telling women that if their partner is roaming, it's their fault", in addition to noting that the FRC seems wickedly obsessed with sex in all forms, be it education, infidelity, or multiple partners. More and more, the Republicans getting caught out in sexual indiscretion seem to be just doing what their backers are championing. Or something.

Being made of large quantities of Win is the story of firearms versus computer. Additionally, Space Cookies are yummy, nutritious, and win-filled. They are unlikely to cause food side effects that may not be known to all.

Also made of much win is sleep, which I will now be attending to.