Huzzah and survival! - 31 January 2008

That’s right, we made it to the end of another month! Shocking! Surprising! (We hope for many more sequels.)

Kenya is still in violence over a election that the opposition's supporters continue to claim was rigged. Even UN mediators don’t seem to have had as much of an effect so far.

The Bush administration is signaling that it does not want to reduce the number of troops in Iraq any more than what is currently scheduled for this year. Overworked, overstressed, and increasingly in need of rest troops are only hindering their ability to get things done the longer they stay without a break. Supposedly, though, the decision on troop drawdowns will be made by the commanders. I wonder what those commanders will do if their recommendations turn out to be against what the Bush Administration thinks they should be. At least the troops got their pay upped by 3.5 percent. Which was about the amount of my COLA, as I recall. So they might not have a pay raise at all.

Even worse, the plight of veterans is sufficient incentive for con men to enrich their own pockets instead. So be careful which charities you consider contributions to. There are others still exploiting the current servicemembers, attaching a yellow ribbon to a camoflauge-patterned scrotum. There’s supporting the troops for you.

In possibly better military news, a leading general recommends that soldiers be able to blog and post video to YouTube as a way of waging the war of perception.

Mr. Bush wants $6 billion USD to build a system that would supposedly help the Internet stay up during attacks by spying on Internet traffic and reducing access points between the 'Net and government computers.

Shikha Dalmia in the Wall Street Journal finds mandatory-coverage universal health care plans lacking in doing the job of providing affordable health care to all, because if coverage is required and prices are subsidized, premiums spike, and if prices are held down, then coverage goes down with it. Is the reasoning here is predicated on insurance companies upping their premiums because they know they can get more money out of the government because of it? If so, then I can see where this spiral of premiums-versus-coverage would happen. If the government were the single payer for all Americans, then what happens? More premium spikes, or will the matter finally come to a point where the government says “You’ll provide your services at this price, and no more, or you won’t be in practice”?

The Federal Reserve dropped interest rates another .5 percentage points. Those who are already complaining about how this affects them will complain more. Those hoping to pay back as much as possible while rates are low may be happier still. Professor tscheese continues to note that cutting rates is not a way to fix an economy, especially when the prices of houses are still out of reach for many.

With regard to the Attorney General that can’t actually make a judgment on the legality of waterboarding, the Wall Street Journal is proud of Mukasey's dodging of the issue, claiming he is correct in not deciding to engage in hypothetical legal judgments on something that isn’t officially being practiced any more. So we can be sure of the measure of our Attorney General - he won’t say, and at least one paper believes he’s right and lauds him for it.

Perhaps trying to position himself as a pundit in his post-White House days, Karl Rove opines on the "new" rules for the 2008 election and some "old" rules that still apply. All told, Turd Blossom writes better than he did anything in government.

Finally, with regard to the general election in November, Red Rabbit laments the dropping-out of John Edwards, considering him to have been the most electable and most progressive of the candidates, and expressing significant annoyance at the mainstream media’s ignoring of his platform and his serious candidacy.

Late-breaking news - Ann Coulter has declared that in a McCain versus Hillary election campaign, she would endorse and support Senator Clinton, basically giving the Senator a kiss of death to her progressive segment as well as the Republican opposition. It would be the most effective manner of killing Senator Clinton without doing anything other than being Ann Coulter. Impressive.

Yesterday, I believe, was International Delete Your MySpace Profile day. Today, we find out, the Athesists and Agnostics Group on Myspace was deleted earlier in the month, along with a Secular Humanist group (according to a comment made to the original post). Hrm. Pressure from NewsCorp, which also own Fixed Noise, perhaps?

Gruesome put pictureless news - a nurse pled guilty to stealing parts from cadavers and reselling them as transplant candidates. In addition, he forged certificates and records so that the doctors accepting his transplant candidates were unaware of their origins. gruesome news with some pictures, although not gruesome pictures, involve an African-American mother who was apparently shot dead by white police officers who were goign to arrest her husband on drug charges. The story is murky, the details are few, and the ugly spectre of some sort of racially motivated decision rears its head in the situation.

Something much better than the previous paragraph is a PepsiCo commercial for the Super Bowl that is entirely soundless, using sign language and captions throughout. Sheri Christianson, an employee of PepsiCo with Deaf parents, explains why this commercial is a great thing for everyone. To watch the commercial ahead of its debut, YouTube has the ticket.

Much better news out of our Science (SCIENCE!) department offers using rare metals to split water and create hydrogen, or using a strain of E. Coli to produce lots of cheap hydrogen from sugars. Additionally, all blue-eyed persons may share a common evolutionary ancestor.

Something of interest to us all is that both sexes think that men are smarter than they are and that women aren't as smart, despite there being little difference in actual intelligence. Probably says a lot about our cultural and historical upbringings, that men appear smarter because they’ve always had more license to make error and discover and do really neat things without scandal or harassment of failure following them. And while men were being pressured to settle down and make children, women were getting it even more.

Next to last for tonight, in our news of the strange, a German travel agency is offering a flight where passengers may disrobe while the flight is in the air. The passengers would have to stay clothed before boarding, and dress before deplaning, and the crew will stay clothed during the flight. Similarly strange, Anton LaVey's Black House now has condominiums where it once stood. There’s also photorealistic drawings done with just blue and black ball-point pens (some images will be NSFW, because bare breasts are still grounds for firing in this country, it appears), and some more modern and polished-looking clockwork and steampunk-style sculpture. Further strangeness involves a successful eBay selling business that could be fined millions for not purchasing an "electronic auctioneer" license in Pennsylvania. Yet another place where brick governments are interacting with virtual storefronts. I wonder how this one will turn out.

Strange Public Service Announcement about statutory rape - epic fail. Putting the child’s head on the adult’s body doesn’t really work - the young who are technically committing statutory don’t care, and the pedos like them when they look young all over, not in some grotesque combination of young and old. The copy associated with the pictures doesn’t really do all that much, either. All in all, pretty big failure.

Memorial strangeness celebrated the aqua Teen Hunger Force LED bomb scare by going about Boston and other locales and putting up more LED art unrelated to ATHF.

Winding down by upping the philosophical content of this entry, smurasaki talks about how stories that involve a Destined or Chosen Hero are generally not as good as stories where the characters have the choice to kick arse and save the world or to ignore it and let it fall. In those kinds of stories, the real beauty is not in the Chosen fulfilling destiny - after all, that’s destined, but in the way by which the author is able to bring about the situation that allows the Chosen to do their destined thing, usually through the far more interesting choices of the secondary non-destined characters. Neat.

The Unabashed Feminism department gives us Kelpie Wilson's new take on the idea of abortion, transforming it from a sin act worthy of guilt into an act that has reverence for the child aborted. Rather than slavishly adhering to some “pro-life” ideology that says everyone who can be born, should, it takes into account whether the child would have a good life, whether the planet could handle that child, and whether the parents are ready for the child to be born. There’s also a reminder that nature causes a lot of abortions by herself, which may be a small signal that it wasn’t time for that child, yet. Wilson also speculates that the rise of agriculture and the settling of people produced the patriarchal society that then started to assert a right to control women’s reproductive abilities, and started fighting more stridently with each other over control of those women. In its very origins, “pro-life” is not about anything other than control of women when it comes to abortions or contraception or other things that give women back their ability to choose when they will have children, and what partners they will have. “Pro-life” is remarkably pro-death when it comes to sons sent to fight in wars over women and resources, and in insisting that women go through pregnancy and birth until it kills them. There’s a reason why everyone should assert that women have an inalienable right to choose how they express their sexuality and whether they want children - it helps to keep those who do want to be mothers alive and able to raise their children properly. I think that’s something that even the most “pro-life” person can endorse.

A little humor before we finish - the 12-step guide to writing lesbian stories, either on the screen or in print. The golden rule is thus - in no way can a lesbian relationship be stable and happy. The rest is building up the scene where the lesbian converts an otherwise straight woman temporarily, but heterosexuality wins in the end, or the new couple rides off into the sunset because they couldn’t find anyone who liked them here.

Last for tonight, Happy Fun Snow Creatures. I wonder if Winter Carnival in Houghton is happening now, because there would be plenty of good snow and ice sculpture there, too. Where it isn’t snowing, enjoy conceptual sculptural art cars. I will enjoy sleep.