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More stuff for you - 16 June 2008
Jun. 17th, 2008 12:10 amSo, yep, monitor’s toast. I think I’m just unlucky, or something. That’s the second one this year that’s zorched on me, and there’s no real computer parts marketer within walking distance of me, so I went out and bought one from one of the local big-box types. It’s nice, it’s “widescreen”, which is apparently all the rage, and it will hopefully last me a very long time before gracefully going onto its next place. If it doesn’t, I’m going to be mighty pissed.
I also witnessed something rather sad today - as I was on my way to buy said monitor, I watched a cat start across the road while my car was pretty far off. He got across my lane okay, but in the other lane, well, he met a truck and the truck won. I pulled off to the side of the road to see what had happened, as the truck that had hit him rolled right on, but the cat was definitely dead. I’d seen the flash of a collar on him, so I thought that I would at least be able to ring the owner of the cat and inform them that their pet was dead by vehicle, but while I was right about the collar, there were no tags on the cat, no ownership information. A couple of girls were nearby and knocked on some neighbor doors, but nobody claimed the cat. Eventually, someone stopped and dragged the cat by his tail over to the curbside, getting him out of the road. (Sorry to say, but with the bleeding going on, we didn’t necessarily want to move the cat. We knew he or she was dead, but none of us had gloves on hand that we could use, just to be sure.) So, when bob Barker reminds us all to help control the pet population, I want to add one more thing on to that - please, please, please tag your animals. Microchips are good, but not everyone has a chip reader on hand. If the poor dear had tags, at least someone would know, rather than having to figure it out when the cat didn’t come home... or by discovering the body by the side of the road. If the animal goes out, or wears a collar at times, please make it possible for someone to identify him or her in case she/he gets lost or struck by a vehicle.
Following on previous matters from before, Metallica says, "We love reviews! We would never, ever, try to suppress them!" and blame it on their marketers for not “getting it”.
A mere 225+ years after her beheading, Swiss authorities are planning to clear the name of the last executed witch in Europe. (That’s last by chronology, no knowledge about whether last by number) Good gesture, plus a play, now, if America could be okay about the more modern witches. Unfortunately, we still have fathers who beat their children to death to "get the demons out of" them. And there are still plenty of people who choose to misuse Islam for their own purposes, prolonging both the pain and the time it takes for all Muslims to get through the time where church and state power are intertwined, to the detriment of both.
Our Unabashed Feminism department and anyone interested in the development of the “parallel economy” that tightly insulates fundamentalists from the rest of the world will be interested in the opening of "pro-life pharmacies" that will not carry any contraceptives, planned or emergency, or birth control pills, period. What’s more worrisome is those cases where a “pro-life” pharmacy is the only one around, or cases where the pharmacist actively refuses to fill the prescription and won’t help someone find somewhere that will. It still sounds like a dereliction of duty to me.
Further material of interest to Unabashed Feminism is the Girl with a One-Track Mind shredding an "advice" column that reinforces sexist thinking about relations between men and women, rather than giving actual advice for the nervous. And there’s the highest-ranking female of a train corporation in Japan.
More bloggers are being arrested for their views than previous years. Now, that may be a function of there being more bloggers for the authorities to arrest, rather than improved surveillance sweeps or other such things. Either way, no person should be subject to arrest because of their political views... fact-correction, certainly, but not arrest.
And now, the rest of the news. al-Sadr will have candidates stand in upcoming elections, hoping to break what he and his followers consider government campaigns against them. This is potentially in addition to the construction of a fighting force against the U.S.-Iraqi permanent bases deal, information which is just now appearing, despite there having been large surges in base construction since Americans arrived in Iraq. There were some deaths and bombings today, including. a woman who blew herself up as Iraqis were celebrating a football victory. could have been worse, but her armaments were spotted and the crowd was getting away from her by police order. So things in Iraq aren’t perfect. (Holding them to that standard would be unrealistic, I suppose, but it’s a good goal to shoot for - zero bombings or terror-type attacks.) If Ann Marlowe is to be believed, successes may hinge more on competent commanders than good doctrine, which would mean we’d get to see what really happens and what gains have been made if we started withdrawing troops. Or cycling them out.
Despite the worry that the Iraq conflict will stretch on into perpetuity, at least one member of the Individual Ready Reserve is protesting his remobilization orders. As a member of the IRR, he was honorably discharged from service, but the IRR list keeps him around just in case the military is stretched thin so they can pull him back. He protests the Iraq conflict as an occupation and refuses to go, which now may result in his arrest.
Robert Mugabe has threatened civil war if his ruling ZANU-PF party does not win the runoff elections, which probably shreds his credibility and increases the likelihood that government troops will interfere in the runoff. When push came to shove, Mugabe doesn’t seem to be as willing to abide by the rules as he indicated at first.
Irish voters rejected a treaty to give the EU greater control over their affairs on Thursday. While the rejection may have made EU and Irish leaders wonder what went wrong, some of the members of already-incorporated EU states wish they would have had a referendum themselves.
Conoleezza Rice criticized Israel's continual building of settlements on disputed land, saying that it was harmful to the peace process and calling Israel’s motives into question. For as much as they’re trying for peace, it certainly doesn’t look like Israel wants peace with their neighbors.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pledged to increase oil production and requested that consumers reduce their tariffs and their speculation so as to ease oil prices back down to reasonable levels.
Plans dor a fairly sophisticated nuclear weapon were found available through a ring broken up in 2004. Being electronic copies of plans, authorities have no clue how many copies are circulating through the world, and thus have no idea who has copies. Begin your terror scare stopwatches...
Domestically, the consumer of political information is getting savvier, turning to the Internet to try and capture unfiltered and complete speeches, campaign rhetoric, and debate, eschewing or augmenting the nightly sound bites with Internet information. So they probably already know that Al Gore will be endorsing Barack Obama tonight and will wait to see the transcript of the speech.
More financial scandals, with politicians getting preferential loans from Countrywide's CEO, although it’s not completely clear what the return favors were supposed to be. This deserves full investigation, considering that the fallout from these kinds of scandals result in renters being forced to leave after the owner of their house gets foreclosed on, no matter how good of tenants they were.
Getting into the opinion columns, Austin Cline thinks the American Right's move toward supporting authoritartian, dictatorial rule is a result of losing confidence in the government system. Apparently, because we don’t think of Muslims and people in the Middle East as unredeemable enemies who want to pillage and conquer, the government isn’t going to be able to combat them successfully when they strike. So, instead, they need a fanatic that believes the way they do to wield the executive’s power and bully the legislative and jusiciary into going along with it. They would likely hold up the case of entanglement and inappropriate promotion of religion between a public charter school and a nearby mosque as an example of how the government is losing the battle against Muslims, because the school opened when a Christian-themed one would not. And, of course, the SCOTUS decision to grant habeas rights to detainees, because there’s a war going on, can’t you see, and we have to fight it by any way that we can.
Tom Borelli notices that corporations can wield lots of influence over politics - once that influence is being pointed in a direction he doesn’t approve of (“bigger government”), it becomes very noticeable. I wonder how much corporate push toward deregulation and “smaller government” he’s approved of and not necessarily noticed. At the same time, Mary Anastasia O'Grady suggests that we only raise hell about environmental standards and such when private companies are trying to exploit resources, and that the global environmental movement is silent on government-owned companies. Might be true. Might be easier to access the records of private companies. Might also be easier to effect actual change on privately-owned companies, too.
Ken Connor would like to see less shameless vote-pandering and re-election grubbing and more debate and voting based on the ideological foundations of the political movements. Despite believing that freedom and equality are not strictly conservative ideas, I think we can agree on this one, that more philosophy is in order, as well as more practicality.
Paul Jacobs reacts as most would to find out their city has had martial law declared on it, but also proclaiming that Washington D.C. is the way it is because the government keeps trying to intervene to make things better, spends its monies on the wrong priorities, and prevents citizens from having guns. In any case, the cordoning off of citizens from each other is not a tradition we want to encourage. Crime problems could be solved in better ways than that.
A quick candidate shot from David Limbaugh, who finds Senator Obama's reputation as a uniter to be at odds with his rhetoric, believing that a true uniter would vote against his party more often and be conciliatory and spineless in his speechwriting and speechmaking. Uniting both sides of the aisle can be done while saying that one’s opponent is not the kind of person to bring about needed change.
Because it was Father’s Day on Sunday, an opinion about how fathers are needed to combat social ills, because poverty and feelings of worthlessness follow children without fathers. A single mother just isn’t enough, it seems to imply.
John Taylo Gatto suggests that the education system should be changed as to actually educate, rather than create automatons, with possibilities like shortening the school year, making vocational training available for all professions, and getting teachers with practical experiences in their fields, among several other things. He’ll find allies in OpinionJournal, which proclaimed that Teach for America's teachers are doing better than more traditionally credentialed teachers, sometimes due to subject expertise.
Two bits about the need to separate poor health from being heavy, and it's okay to decide not to play the diet-and-self-hate game, if one is heavier than waifs who blow away in a stiff breeze.
Last from the opinion matters, speculation that Mr. Olbermann is becoming the Bill'O of the liberal viewpoint, based to some degree on his non-support and criticism of Senator Clinton’s campaign. A longer-form essay in the New Yorker tracks Mr. Olbermann's career from beginning to his current great success at Countdown, much of which has been built dueling Bill’O.
The Science department has spotted some planets that are a bit bigger than Terra, and speculating just how many planets there are, and how common Earthlikes might be.
Last from this, Pharyngula says we need to support more science research, because with it, we’re beating cancer, and if funding trends continue, we soon won’t have enough research going on to keep that progress going.
In technology, though, we’re celebrating the first gravity-based roller coaster built specifically for amusement, hoping a petaflop supercomputer array will be able to study the human visual cortex in realtime, breaking quantum encryption through eavesdropping, thanks to the ability to imperfectly copy quantum states without destroying the original, extremely low-power processors, good for sensors and implantable chips, creating electrical conductivity from nonmetal materials that's potentially better than metals, facials derived from sterilized nightingale poop, and transforming monorail transit into surveillance rails.
At the last for tonight, the power of The Princess Bride, and an apartment that has mysteries and secrets built into it.
For those who want to participate, Tomorrow is the official Download Day for Firefox 3.
Anyway, got to go to bed. School visit across the bridge tomorrow, so I have to leave earlier.
I also witnessed something rather sad today - as I was on my way to buy said monitor, I watched a cat start across the road while my car was pretty far off. He got across my lane okay, but in the other lane, well, he met a truck and the truck won. I pulled off to the side of the road to see what had happened, as the truck that had hit him rolled right on, but the cat was definitely dead. I’d seen the flash of a collar on him, so I thought that I would at least be able to ring the owner of the cat and inform them that their pet was dead by vehicle, but while I was right about the collar, there were no tags on the cat, no ownership information. A couple of girls were nearby and knocked on some neighbor doors, but nobody claimed the cat. Eventually, someone stopped and dragged the cat by his tail over to the curbside, getting him out of the road. (Sorry to say, but with the bleeding going on, we didn’t necessarily want to move the cat. We knew he or she was dead, but none of us had gloves on hand that we could use, just to be sure.) So, when bob Barker reminds us all to help control the pet population, I want to add one more thing on to that - please, please, please tag your animals. Microchips are good, but not everyone has a chip reader on hand. If the poor dear had tags, at least someone would know, rather than having to figure it out when the cat didn’t come home... or by discovering the body by the side of the road. If the animal goes out, or wears a collar at times, please make it possible for someone to identify him or her in case she/he gets lost or struck by a vehicle.
Following on previous matters from before, Metallica says, "We love reviews! We would never, ever, try to suppress them!" and blame it on their marketers for not “getting it”.
A mere 225+ years after her beheading, Swiss authorities are planning to clear the name of the last executed witch in Europe. (That’s last by chronology, no knowledge about whether last by number) Good gesture, plus a play, now, if America could be okay about the more modern witches. Unfortunately, we still have fathers who beat their children to death to "get the demons out of" them. And there are still plenty of people who choose to misuse Islam for their own purposes, prolonging both the pain and the time it takes for all Muslims to get through the time where church and state power are intertwined, to the detriment of both.
Our Unabashed Feminism department and anyone interested in the development of the “parallel economy” that tightly insulates fundamentalists from the rest of the world will be interested in the opening of "pro-life pharmacies" that will not carry any contraceptives, planned or emergency, or birth control pills, period. What’s more worrisome is those cases where a “pro-life” pharmacy is the only one around, or cases where the pharmacist actively refuses to fill the prescription and won’t help someone find somewhere that will. It still sounds like a dereliction of duty to me.
Further material of interest to Unabashed Feminism is the Girl with a One-Track Mind shredding an "advice" column that reinforces sexist thinking about relations between men and women, rather than giving actual advice for the nervous. And there’s the highest-ranking female of a train corporation in Japan.
More bloggers are being arrested for their views than previous years. Now, that may be a function of there being more bloggers for the authorities to arrest, rather than improved surveillance sweeps or other such things. Either way, no person should be subject to arrest because of their political views... fact-correction, certainly, but not arrest.
And now, the rest of the news. al-Sadr will have candidates stand in upcoming elections, hoping to break what he and his followers consider government campaigns against them. This is potentially in addition to the construction of a fighting force against the U.S.-Iraqi permanent bases deal, information which is just now appearing, despite there having been large surges in base construction since Americans arrived in Iraq. There were some deaths and bombings today, including. a woman who blew herself up as Iraqis were celebrating a football victory. could have been worse, but her armaments were spotted and the crowd was getting away from her by police order. So things in Iraq aren’t perfect. (Holding them to that standard would be unrealistic, I suppose, but it’s a good goal to shoot for - zero bombings or terror-type attacks.) If Ann Marlowe is to be believed, successes may hinge more on competent commanders than good doctrine, which would mean we’d get to see what really happens and what gains have been made if we started withdrawing troops. Or cycling them out.
Despite the worry that the Iraq conflict will stretch on into perpetuity, at least one member of the Individual Ready Reserve is protesting his remobilization orders. As a member of the IRR, he was honorably discharged from service, but the IRR list keeps him around just in case the military is stretched thin so they can pull him back. He protests the Iraq conflict as an occupation and refuses to go, which now may result in his arrest.
Robert Mugabe has threatened civil war if his ruling ZANU-PF party does not win the runoff elections, which probably shreds his credibility and increases the likelihood that government troops will interfere in the runoff. When push came to shove, Mugabe doesn’t seem to be as willing to abide by the rules as he indicated at first.
Irish voters rejected a treaty to give the EU greater control over their affairs on Thursday. While the rejection may have made EU and Irish leaders wonder what went wrong, some of the members of already-incorporated EU states wish they would have had a referendum themselves.
Conoleezza Rice criticized Israel's continual building of settlements on disputed land, saying that it was harmful to the peace process and calling Israel’s motives into question. For as much as they’re trying for peace, it certainly doesn’t look like Israel wants peace with their neighbors.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pledged to increase oil production and requested that consumers reduce their tariffs and their speculation so as to ease oil prices back down to reasonable levels.
Plans dor a fairly sophisticated nuclear weapon were found available through a ring broken up in 2004. Being electronic copies of plans, authorities have no clue how many copies are circulating through the world, and thus have no idea who has copies. Begin your terror scare stopwatches...
Domestically, the consumer of political information is getting savvier, turning to the Internet to try and capture unfiltered and complete speeches, campaign rhetoric, and debate, eschewing or augmenting the nightly sound bites with Internet information. So they probably already know that Al Gore will be endorsing Barack Obama tonight and will wait to see the transcript of the speech.
More financial scandals, with politicians getting preferential loans from Countrywide's CEO, although it’s not completely clear what the return favors were supposed to be. This deserves full investigation, considering that the fallout from these kinds of scandals result in renters being forced to leave after the owner of their house gets foreclosed on, no matter how good of tenants they were.
Getting into the opinion columns, Austin Cline thinks the American Right's move toward supporting authoritartian, dictatorial rule is a result of losing confidence in the government system. Apparently, because we don’t think of Muslims and people in the Middle East as unredeemable enemies who want to pillage and conquer, the government isn’t going to be able to combat them successfully when they strike. So, instead, they need a fanatic that believes the way they do to wield the executive’s power and bully the legislative and jusiciary into going along with it. They would likely hold up the case of entanglement and inappropriate promotion of religion between a public charter school and a nearby mosque as an example of how the government is losing the battle against Muslims, because the school opened when a Christian-themed one would not. And, of course, the SCOTUS decision to grant habeas rights to detainees, because there’s a war going on, can’t you see, and we have to fight it by any way that we can.
Tom Borelli notices that corporations can wield lots of influence over politics - once that influence is being pointed in a direction he doesn’t approve of (“bigger government”), it becomes very noticeable. I wonder how much corporate push toward deregulation and “smaller government” he’s approved of and not necessarily noticed. At the same time, Mary Anastasia O'Grady suggests that we only raise hell about environmental standards and such when private companies are trying to exploit resources, and that the global environmental movement is silent on government-owned companies. Might be true. Might be easier to access the records of private companies. Might also be easier to effect actual change on privately-owned companies, too.
Ken Connor would like to see less shameless vote-pandering and re-election grubbing and more debate and voting based on the ideological foundations of the political movements. Despite believing that freedom and equality are not strictly conservative ideas, I think we can agree on this one, that more philosophy is in order, as well as more practicality.
Paul Jacobs reacts as most would to find out their city has had martial law declared on it, but also proclaiming that Washington D.C. is the way it is because the government keeps trying to intervene to make things better, spends its monies on the wrong priorities, and prevents citizens from having guns. In any case, the cordoning off of citizens from each other is not a tradition we want to encourage. Crime problems could be solved in better ways than that.
A quick candidate shot from David Limbaugh, who finds Senator Obama's reputation as a uniter to be at odds with his rhetoric, believing that a true uniter would vote against his party more often and be conciliatory and spineless in his speechwriting and speechmaking. Uniting both sides of the aisle can be done while saying that one’s opponent is not the kind of person to bring about needed change.
Because it was Father’s Day on Sunday, an opinion about how fathers are needed to combat social ills, because poverty and feelings of worthlessness follow children without fathers. A single mother just isn’t enough, it seems to imply.
John Taylo Gatto suggests that the education system should be changed as to actually educate, rather than create automatons, with possibilities like shortening the school year, making vocational training available for all professions, and getting teachers with practical experiences in their fields, among several other things. He’ll find allies in OpinionJournal, which proclaimed that Teach for America's teachers are doing better than more traditionally credentialed teachers, sometimes due to subject expertise.
Two bits about the need to separate poor health from being heavy, and it's okay to decide not to play the diet-and-self-hate game, if one is heavier than waifs who blow away in a stiff breeze.
Last from the opinion matters, speculation that Mr. Olbermann is becoming the Bill'O of the liberal viewpoint, based to some degree on his non-support and criticism of Senator Clinton’s campaign. A longer-form essay in the New Yorker tracks Mr. Olbermann's career from beginning to his current great success at Countdown, much of which has been built dueling Bill’O.
The Science department has spotted some planets that are a bit bigger than Terra, and speculating just how many planets there are, and how common Earthlikes might be.
Last from this, Pharyngula says we need to support more science research, because with it, we’re beating cancer, and if funding trends continue, we soon won’t have enough research going on to keep that progress going.
In technology, though, we’re celebrating the first gravity-based roller coaster built specifically for amusement, hoping a petaflop supercomputer array will be able to study the human visual cortex in realtime, breaking quantum encryption through eavesdropping, thanks to the ability to imperfectly copy quantum states without destroying the original, extremely low-power processors, good for sensors and implantable chips, creating electrical conductivity from nonmetal materials that's potentially better than metals, facials derived from sterilized nightingale poop, and transforming monorail transit into surveillance rails.
At the last for tonight, the power of The Princess Bride, and an apartment that has mysteries and secrets built into it.
For those who want to participate, Tomorrow is the official Download Day for Firefox 3.
Anyway, got to go to bed. School visit across the bridge tomorrow, so I have to leave earlier.
