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Sequence #2 finished - 14 November 2007
Nov. 15th, 2007 12:00 amTwo down, substituting for my co-worker’s storytime tomorrow, but after that, no more storytimes for a month and a half. I did it! I survived the eight-week sequence! Of course, now I need to plan out the next sequence, for five weeks. The fun never stops, really. And then there’s summer reading planning, and other meetings, and all that sort of stuff. If you thought librarians sat around and read at the desk all the time, well, you’re wrong.
Del Rey tortillas under recall on suspicion of making students in Wisconsin sick.
As a follow-up to my snarling rant about how much the *AA cabal is forcing colleges to do things they don’t necessarily want to take up, I get sent an article about what happened when the University of Michigan stopped acting in loco parentis. The world did not end, the students did not riot, depravity did not reign supreme. The students did their thing. And there was never a threat to get rid of all the funding to the school if one of the students acted out of line, or they stopped enforcing the strict codes that others believed in.
Our Cool Stuff department leads the way with the tantalizing promise of high-definition video of Earthrise from the moon - the YouTube that is linked to is obviously not the same, but high-definition space pictures and videos will probably find their way into various other applications here and there (think of HD Earthrise as a screensaver...). Other Cool Stuff involves a synthetic molecule that supposedly triggers a suicide impulse in cancer cells. You know, there’s been a lot of things I’ve seen over the last couple years about ways that supposedly make cancerous cells die without the healthy cells blinking. Are all of these in early research phases, so that we won’t be seeing them in trials and treatments for years yet?
Cooler stuff, and hopefully cooler stuff that will arrive on our shores soon, Smart cars, the tiny, fuel-efficient vehicles perfect for commuters and those who don't need anything for truck space. With continued increases in fuel costs, tiny, fuel-efficient cars like the Smart will hopefully take off in popularity.
The hype begins on Google's mobile phone platform, even though we won’t see products for at least nine months, if not a year. Plenty of time for hype and for Apple and other competitors to build devices and mobile-OSes that will have comparable features.
Coolest stuff, however, comes from Dave Roman's guide to fledgling artists on how to land themselves freelancing contracts. It’ll still be along, hard slog ahead, and the financial security isn’t going to be great, but if you’re determined, this is a good reason for figuring out how to break into the market.
A new study compares individual states' Math and Science scores with other countries'. They find that most states are still better than many of the countries in the world, but that they lag behind Asia in the maths and the sciences. Which is something we’ve known for a while now, I believe. So it’s supposed to be mixed news - our lowest-performing states still outstrip much of the world, but our highest-performing states still lose out to Asian countries. And that’s disregarding all the minefields possible in trying to compare the various performances across countries. A stray thought in my brain says “Wait, weren’t we refusing to participate in that kind of testing, because it was too expensive?” With a result like that, what would the Bush administration have to fear? They might even manage to spin it into something that would promote their education policy and the bills they’ve passed.
Alas, there is only so much Cool Stuff. Now we turn to the uglier parts of society - Pakistan's opposition leader now is calling for Musharraf to leave his office. Which, according to the article, has the United States quaking in their boots that extremists (and possibly Osama bin Laden, if you believe that he’s in Pakistan) will take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Georgia’s president, who also declared emergency situations earlier, has decided to remove the emergency situation, so one situation seems to be working toward resolution.
One of HarperCollins's publishers, Judith Reagan, has filed suit claiming she was fired preemptively and encouraged not to disclose information regarding Bernard Kerik, in a bid to protect Mayor 9/11 from even more of the dirt that has already been dug up on Kerik. Reagan was also the publisher for the O.J. Simpson book project, and claims that the whole item was a set up to dismiss her and blacken her character. Reagan is seeking $100 million U.S. in damages.
Republicans fracture on just about everything else, but there's one thing they can agree on - they'll die before they let Hillary Clinton into office. If there’s one thing these primary campaigns seem to agree on, it’s that they want to distance themselves from her or slam her at every turn. Almost makes me wonder if the voters will overwhelmingly vote for her, on the prospect that she’s got to be good, because her opponents are spending so much time deconstructing her. Of course, it could be something simpler. I mean, if Fixed Noise's commentators fail to convince anyone that they can describe people accurately, then the Republican Party may not have the highest of abilities when it comes to making sound arguments.
Supposedly breaking ranks with the White House, Mr. Mukasey asked for, and got, security clearances to reopen the warrantless wiretapping investigation. But not likely on the matter as to whether the program was legal, but whether the people involved in it did their jobs correctly. Not that Mr. Mukasey would necessarily get much from the secretive Bush administration, who had to have a court order requiring them to archive their e-mails levied against them, rather than simply doing so because it was required under the Federal Records Act, which says that only the Archivist of the United States has the authority to clear records for disposal and destruction. Wasn’t this the reason why there was a flap about using non-whitehouse.gov e-mails a little while ago, so that they wouldn’t be archived according to the requirements of the law? I can only hope that this turns out to be something like seventeen minutes of dead air for Mr. Bush and his administration.
Kimberly Kagan, at the Weekly Standard, describes in detail how the surge is working - and then slips up and gives away the game. After stomping on Iraq and then having trouble dealing with the fallout, we’re supposed to be cheering that our military managed to buy sufficient time for the Iraqis to reorganize, get a police and government under their belts, and then start kicking out the radical elements of their society themselves, occasionally asking for help from us on particularly thorny spots. So if anyone deserves praise for routing all the militias and al-Qaeds in Iraq, it’s the Iraqi government and police, not the United States Army. Kudos to the Iraqis, then. The warhawks are flapping mad that the mainstream media seems to be moving on to other things just in their moment of triumph, and that even with all their accomplishments displayed, the American people still seem rather set against admitting that their sandbox excursion was a success. Even signing bombs that will be dropped on insurgents doesn’t seem to hold the thrill it did before, eh? More on why the American populace might still be pissed at the war even with such great progress later, in the quiche-tossing competition.
Want good evidence on why torture doesn’t work? Check this out - Saddam Hussein supposedly cried at his last meeting with an FBI interrogator that befriended him. Yep, that’s right, the person questioning him didn’t have to whip him, waterboard him, or anything else, and the dictator broke down in tears after having confessed to his crimes. All without even having to look crosswise at the Geneva convention.
This is tragic - New York police shot a teenager who was walking toward them with a black object in his hand. The object turned out to be a hairbrush. I suspect the police fired because they were worried that the object was a gun. This is one of those places where non-lethal force might be useful, as well. For as much as we complain about how they’re used in situations that don’t need it, a taser might have been just the right thing to use. Most of those nonlethal weapons, though, would require an officer to get within firing range, had the item turned out to actually be a gun, wouldn’t they? *sigh* No winning situation here, I guess.
This is worse - as foreclosure and defaults on home loans continue to rise, the vacant hosues left behind are being appropriated for criminal purposes, which drives down the value and ability to sell houses in the affected neighborhoods, as well as driving up the violent crime rate and introducing a lot of “low-income, inner-city” problems to more suburban areas (even if those suburban areas might have had those same problems naturally). Houses that don’t have people living in them don’t get regular upkeep, and one overgrown house can ruin the effect of a whole neighborhood. This is one of the ripple effects from risky loans collapsing.
This is worst. If I haven’t stated it before, when I say that children are cruel and vicious to each other, I mean it. That our culture seems to find this a natural thing and that while egregious violations of the social code are given swift retribution, that a low-level hostility is allowed to develop and exist between the inmates at schools is very strange. Sure, we can’t be everywhere, but when did picking on someone ever become an acceptable or tolerated activity?
Second, the upcoming article shows off why doing something for the lulz is a Bad, Bad, Idea. And doing something for revenge is even worse. Putting the three together makes a combination of events so horrible that the victim of a ruse where she thought she had found a boyfriend on MySpace and was then subjected to a barrage of insults supposedly from her boyfriend ended up committing suicide. Things were going well for the victim - new school, positive body image improvements, thought she had a boyfriend. As it turns out, the “boyfriend” account was created by the parents of a girl that Megan had decided not to be friends with anymore, and then on a particular date, the boyfriend and the MySpace accounts of several of her friends all started posting derogatory messages about her. En masse. In succession. Calling her everything from fat to a slut. Under such a concerted attack, which had been described as a joke by one of the other parents on the block whose daughter was participating, well, we know the result. The kicker is that there are no charges being filed, because with the Internet being the way it is, and the fake boyfriend’s account disappearing, there’s no real way of concretely connecting the event to the parents and determining that the hate-filled messages were the cause of the suicide. According to the police report, after the incident, the mother who created the profile said she felt that the joke had contributed to the victim’s suicide, but that she didn’t feel “as guilty” about it because the victim had attempted suicide before. And just for icing, there’s the comment section, where the opinions range is as diverse from a strong want to push criminal charges to putting the blame on the victim’s parents because they let their child get on MySpace.
Children are vicious to each other. We strongly suspect they learn it from us. Who else would teach our children about how it’s okay to toy with other people’s emotional states, because that bitch dumped our daughter! Where else can we learn the great values of deceit and spying, so as to find the best way to provide maximum impact when the “joke” (and it’s always a joke) goes off? In what other situations can we learn the value of taking advantage of trust for laughs? Who else would provide such a stirring story of how it’s okay to ignore one’s conscience? And then, add into the mix a fragile teenager, working toward positive results, who thinks luck just might be turning for them.
“I Did It For the Lulz” is no defense in this or any other sort of bullying. I can’t wrap my head around why this started in the first place. I suppose there’s probably some lesson in here about keeping a safe distance away from people whom you don’t know well on-line, but I’m not sure that it would have helped in this situation. We’re very good at believing what we want to believe.
And this is politics. The veto wars continue - Bush knocks down a Democratic domestic spending bill, and in response, the Dems make threatening noises about forcing Republicans to filibuster the latest Iraq withdrawal bill. The veto is well in character for Mr. Bush, as is his laying blame at the feet of his opposition. Admitting to error has never been Mr. Bush's strength, if he ever actually does it. The choicest quote from him, showing just how blissfully unaware of the definition of “hypocrite” he is, is as follows:
This, coming from the sod who seems to think that every time he asks for many billions of dollars for funding an unpopular war, his opposition and the American populace should cheer and give him all he wants without asking why or for what the money will be spent on. For those whose memories are long enough to remember how, at a moment of great potential for unity and harmony, Mr. Bush squashed any hopes of elevating ourselves and spent any sort of good will the world might have had toward us. The same guy who rails and sends troops against dictators and people who aren’t free, in his opinion, as he signs legislation that continues to reduce the average American’s freedoms to the amount that the people we’re supposedly liberating have. The one who might not have been elected fairly both times he claimed the presidency. The one who keeps making threatening gestures toward yet another country. The one who’s spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in his attempt to try and outdo his father. Yeah, him. He’s complaining that spending is somehow getting out of control whenever a Democrat proposes something. Say, brother, is that a plank in your eye? Maybe you should work more on removing it than in insisting your eyes are clean and that everyone else has specks in theirs. I’ve heard a quiche-wash is an excellent way of noticing they’re there.
Liberal Eagle suggests that liberals are not patriotic, if patriotic means myopic, chest-beating, knuckle-dragging, we're-always-right, and such. And that not being patriotic is a good thing, in that case, because it provides a way of noticing when things are going wrong, and because it provides the way to wishing greater goods on all people, and expanding all the good things about this country to something that all countries should have.
The Slacktivist provides an excellent complement to this idea in noting journalism and politics these days is less about finding objective fact and truth in favor of what could accurately be describes as truthiness. The debate is no longer about who’s right, it’s about who you trust. The people who are supposed to be able to evaluate matters beyond the layperson’s expertise and produce information on who is telling the truth and who isn’t are saying the equivalent of “Math is hard, tee hee.” The value of an informed citizen is never greater, but the problem is that the pools that would provide information to that citizen are shrinking and drying up.
A good thing climbing up out from under all that morass, however, is the Pretty Bird Woman House getting plenty of donations to rebuild and reopen after arsonists torched their building in 2006.
After all that stuff, there’s one last bit of silliness to help lighten the mood, if it is needed - Paranormal restraining orders. Although, we do wonder whether any paranormal entity will actually respect the law/rules of terrestrial and matter-based beings and stay away. Good novelty, I suppose, but waaaaaay to many problems if attempted seriously.
And now, sleep.
Del Rey tortillas under recall on suspicion of making students in Wisconsin sick.
As a follow-up to my snarling rant about how much the *AA cabal is forcing colleges to do things they don’t necessarily want to take up, I get sent an article about what happened when the University of Michigan stopped acting in loco parentis. The world did not end, the students did not riot, depravity did not reign supreme. The students did their thing. And there was never a threat to get rid of all the funding to the school if one of the students acted out of line, or they stopped enforcing the strict codes that others believed in.
Our Cool Stuff department leads the way with the tantalizing promise of high-definition video of Earthrise from the moon - the YouTube that is linked to is obviously not the same, but high-definition space pictures and videos will probably find their way into various other applications here and there (think of HD Earthrise as a screensaver...). Other Cool Stuff involves a synthetic molecule that supposedly triggers a suicide impulse in cancer cells. You know, there’s been a lot of things I’ve seen over the last couple years about ways that supposedly make cancerous cells die without the healthy cells blinking. Are all of these in early research phases, so that we won’t be seeing them in trials and treatments for years yet?
Cooler stuff, and hopefully cooler stuff that will arrive on our shores soon, Smart cars, the tiny, fuel-efficient vehicles perfect for commuters and those who don't need anything for truck space. With continued increases in fuel costs, tiny, fuel-efficient cars like the Smart will hopefully take off in popularity.
The hype begins on Google's mobile phone platform, even though we won’t see products for at least nine months, if not a year. Plenty of time for hype and for Apple and other competitors to build devices and mobile-OSes that will have comparable features.
Coolest stuff, however, comes from Dave Roman's guide to fledgling artists on how to land themselves freelancing contracts. It’ll still be along, hard slog ahead, and the financial security isn’t going to be great, but if you’re determined, this is a good reason for figuring out how to break into the market.
A new study compares individual states' Math and Science scores with other countries'. They find that most states are still better than many of the countries in the world, but that they lag behind Asia in the maths and the sciences. Which is something we’ve known for a while now, I believe. So it’s supposed to be mixed news - our lowest-performing states still outstrip much of the world, but our highest-performing states still lose out to Asian countries. And that’s disregarding all the minefields possible in trying to compare the various performances across countries. A stray thought in my brain says “Wait, weren’t we refusing to participate in that kind of testing, because it was too expensive?” With a result like that, what would the Bush administration have to fear? They might even manage to spin it into something that would promote their education policy and the bills they’ve passed.
Alas, there is only so much Cool Stuff. Now we turn to the uglier parts of society - Pakistan's opposition leader now is calling for Musharraf to leave his office. Which, according to the article, has the United States quaking in their boots that extremists (and possibly Osama bin Laden, if you believe that he’s in Pakistan) will take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Georgia’s president, who also declared emergency situations earlier, has decided to remove the emergency situation, so one situation seems to be working toward resolution.
One of HarperCollins's publishers, Judith Reagan, has filed suit claiming she was fired preemptively and encouraged not to disclose information regarding Bernard Kerik, in a bid to protect Mayor 9/11 from even more of the dirt that has already been dug up on Kerik. Reagan was also the publisher for the O.J. Simpson book project, and claims that the whole item was a set up to dismiss her and blacken her character. Reagan is seeking $100 million U.S. in damages.
Republicans fracture on just about everything else, but there's one thing they can agree on - they'll die before they let Hillary Clinton into office. If there’s one thing these primary campaigns seem to agree on, it’s that they want to distance themselves from her or slam her at every turn. Almost makes me wonder if the voters will overwhelmingly vote for her, on the prospect that she’s got to be good, because her opponents are spending so much time deconstructing her. Of course, it could be something simpler. I mean, if Fixed Noise's commentators fail to convince anyone that they can describe people accurately, then the Republican Party may not have the highest of abilities when it comes to making sound arguments.
Supposedly breaking ranks with the White House, Mr. Mukasey asked for, and got, security clearances to reopen the warrantless wiretapping investigation. But not likely on the matter as to whether the program was legal, but whether the people involved in it did their jobs correctly. Not that Mr. Mukasey would necessarily get much from the secretive Bush administration, who had to have a court order requiring them to archive their e-mails levied against them, rather than simply doing so because it was required under the Federal Records Act, which says that only the Archivist of the United States has the authority to clear records for disposal and destruction. Wasn’t this the reason why there was a flap about using non-whitehouse.gov e-mails a little while ago, so that they wouldn’t be archived according to the requirements of the law? I can only hope that this turns out to be something like seventeen minutes of dead air for Mr. Bush and his administration.
Kimberly Kagan, at the Weekly Standard, describes in detail how the surge is working - and then slips up and gives away the game. After stomping on Iraq and then having trouble dealing with the fallout, we’re supposed to be cheering that our military managed to buy sufficient time for the Iraqis to reorganize, get a police and government under their belts, and then start kicking out the radical elements of their society themselves, occasionally asking for help from us on particularly thorny spots. So if anyone deserves praise for routing all the militias and al-Qaeds in Iraq, it’s the Iraqi government and police, not the United States Army. Kudos to the Iraqis, then. The warhawks are flapping mad that the mainstream media seems to be moving on to other things just in their moment of triumph, and that even with all their accomplishments displayed, the American people still seem rather set against admitting that their sandbox excursion was a success. Even signing bombs that will be dropped on insurgents doesn’t seem to hold the thrill it did before, eh? More on why the American populace might still be pissed at the war even with such great progress later, in the quiche-tossing competition.
Want good evidence on why torture doesn’t work? Check this out - Saddam Hussein supposedly cried at his last meeting with an FBI interrogator that befriended him. Yep, that’s right, the person questioning him didn’t have to whip him, waterboard him, or anything else, and the dictator broke down in tears after having confessed to his crimes. All without even having to look crosswise at the Geneva convention.
This is tragic - New York police shot a teenager who was walking toward them with a black object in his hand. The object turned out to be a hairbrush. I suspect the police fired because they were worried that the object was a gun. This is one of those places where non-lethal force might be useful, as well. For as much as we complain about how they’re used in situations that don’t need it, a taser might have been just the right thing to use. Most of those nonlethal weapons, though, would require an officer to get within firing range, had the item turned out to actually be a gun, wouldn’t they? *sigh* No winning situation here, I guess.
This is worse - as foreclosure and defaults on home loans continue to rise, the vacant hosues left behind are being appropriated for criminal purposes, which drives down the value and ability to sell houses in the affected neighborhoods, as well as driving up the violent crime rate and introducing a lot of “low-income, inner-city” problems to more suburban areas (even if those suburban areas might have had those same problems naturally). Houses that don’t have people living in them don’t get regular upkeep, and one overgrown house can ruin the effect of a whole neighborhood. This is one of the ripple effects from risky loans collapsing.
This is worst. If I haven’t stated it before, when I say that children are cruel and vicious to each other, I mean it. That our culture seems to find this a natural thing and that while egregious violations of the social code are given swift retribution, that a low-level hostility is allowed to develop and exist between the inmates at schools is very strange. Sure, we can’t be everywhere, but when did picking on someone ever become an acceptable or tolerated activity?
Second, the upcoming article shows off why doing something for the lulz is a Bad, Bad, Idea. And doing something for revenge is even worse. Putting the three together makes a combination of events so horrible that the victim of a ruse where she thought she had found a boyfriend on MySpace and was then subjected to a barrage of insults supposedly from her boyfriend ended up committing suicide. Things were going well for the victim - new school, positive body image improvements, thought she had a boyfriend. As it turns out, the “boyfriend” account was created by the parents of a girl that Megan had decided not to be friends with anymore, and then on a particular date, the boyfriend and the MySpace accounts of several of her friends all started posting derogatory messages about her. En masse. In succession. Calling her everything from fat to a slut. Under such a concerted attack, which had been described as a joke by one of the other parents on the block whose daughter was participating, well, we know the result. The kicker is that there are no charges being filed, because with the Internet being the way it is, and the fake boyfriend’s account disappearing, there’s no real way of concretely connecting the event to the parents and determining that the hate-filled messages were the cause of the suicide. According to the police report, after the incident, the mother who created the profile said she felt that the joke had contributed to the victim’s suicide, but that she didn’t feel “as guilty” about it because the victim had attempted suicide before. And just for icing, there’s the comment section, where the opinions range is as diverse from a strong want to push criminal charges to putting the blame on the victim’s parents because they let their child get on MySpace.
Children are vicious to each other. We strongly suspect they learn it from us. Who else would teach our children about how it’s okay to toy with other people’s emotional states, because that bitch dumped our daughter! Where else can we learn the great values of deceit and spying, so as to find the best way to provide maximum impact when the “joke” (and it’s always a joke) goes off? In what other situations can we learn the value of taking advantage of trust for laughs? Who else would provide such a stirring story of how it’s okay to ignore one’s conscience? And then, add into the mix a fragile teenager, working toward positive results, who thinks luck just might be turning for them.
“I Did It For the Lulz” is no defense in this or any other sort of bullying. I can’t wrap my head around why this started in the first place. I suppose there’s probably some lesson in here about keeping a safe distance away from people whom you don’t know well on-line, but I’m not sure that it would have helped in this situation. We’re very good at believing what we want to believe.
And this is politics. The veto wars continue - Bush knocks down a Democratic domestic spending bill, and in response, the Dems make threatening noises about forcing Republicans to filibuster the latest Iraq withdrawal bill. The veto is well in character for Mr. Bush, as is his laying blame at the feet of his opposition. Admitting to error has never been Mr. Bush's strength, if he ever actually does it. The choicest quote from him, showing just how blissfully unaware of the definition of “hypocrite” he is, is as follows:
“The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it’s acting like a teenager with a new credit card...This year alone, the leadership in Congress has proposed to spend $22 billion more than my budget provides. Now, some of them claim that’s not really much of a difference -- the scary part is, they seem to mean it.”
This, coming from the sod who seems to think that every time he asks for many billions of dollars for funding an unpopular war, his opposition and the American populace should cheer and give him all he wants without asking why or for what the money will be spent on. For those whose memories are long enough to remember how, at a moment of great potential for unity and harmony, Mr. Bush squashed any hopes of elevating ourselves and spent any sort of good will the world might have had toward us. The same guy who rails and sends troops against dictators and people who aren’t free, in his opinion, as he signs legislation that continues to reduce the average American’s freedoms to the amount that the people we’re supposedly liberating have. The one who might not have been elected fairly both times he claimed the presidency. The one who keeps making threatening gestures toward yet another country. The one who’s spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in his attempt to try and outdo his father. Yeah, him. He’s complaining that spending is somehow getting out of control whenever a Democrat proposes something. Say, brother, is that a plank in your eye? Maybe you should work more on removing it than in insisting your eyes are clean and that everyone else has specks in theirs. I’ve heard a quiche-wash is an excellent way of noticing they’re there.
Liberal Eagle suggests that liberals are not patriotic, if patriotic means myopic, chest-beating, knuckle-dragging, we're-always-right, and such. And that not being patriotic is a good thing, in that case, because it provides a way of noticing when things are going wrong, and because it provides the way to wishing greater goods on all people, and expanding all the good things about this country to something that all countries should have.
The Slacktivist provides an excellent complement to this idea in noting journalism and politics these days is less about finding objective fact and truth in favor of what could accurately be describes as truthiness. The debate is no longer about who’s right, it’s about who you trust. The people who are supposed to be able to evaluate matters beyond the layperson’s expertise and produce information on who is telling the truth and who isn’t are saying the equivalent of “Math is hard, tee hee.” The value of an informed citizen is never greater, but the problem is that the pools that would provide information to that citizen are shrinking and drying up.
A good thing climbing up out from under all that morass, however, is the Pretty Bird Woman House getting plenty of donations to rebuild and reopen after arsonists torched their building in 2006.
After all that stuff, there’s one last bit of silliness to help lighten the mood, if it is needed - Paranormal restraining orders. Although, we do wonder whether any paranormal entity will actually respect the law/rules of terrestrial and matter-based beings and stay away. Good novelty, I suppose, but waaaaaay to many problems if attempted seriously.
And now, sleep.
