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Plenty yet to go - 25 June 2008
Jun. 25th, 2008 11:34 pmHave done some today - got rid of my “racing stripes”, made the beard a bit less bushy, took care of some dishes, a lot of the little things. It was a good thing, and I felt accomplished by doing it. Probably just need to get into more of a habit of taking care of all those things. But places are cleaner now, and soon, there will be sleepies.
Starting tonight’s datadump off with some art, it’s a Kaiju collection, with all sorts of monsters looking stylishly bad (or good, as the case may be). They may concentrate around the Door to Hell, a cavern of poisonous gas that was lit on fire thirty-five years ago and is still merrily burning. Most likely, though, they’re just hungry.
Internationally, and significantly scary after having seen New Who 4x11, “Left Turn”, Italy's Prime Minister shows how Constitutional violations really should be done, with the Prime Minister granting himself the ability to use soldiers to clear unrest, suspending all “non-serious” trials for a year to get through criminal and Mafia prosecutions, (including one that potentially involves said Prime Minister), and criminalizing renting housing to illegal immigrants, as well as illegal immigration itself. DNA test will be required for those who claim relatives in Italy. All this assumes it passes the lower house of the parliament, but the ruling party has enough of a majority to put it through if party discipline doesn’t revolt. This is one of those situations that will turn out poorly, even if it accomplishes the stated and intended goals.
Iran is campaigning for one of the rotating Security Council seats coming up for election, and CNS News seems to think that they have a shot at getting a seat. This is the part where I wonder if there is a procedure rule that blocks any nation currently under sanctions from the UNSC from having a seat on it.
Afghanistan may have a surge of its own, if Admiral Mullen’s request for three more brigades manages to get fulfilled. Mullen hopes that progress in Iraq will let him draw the troops he needs into Afghanistan out of Iraq. He’ll have a time of it, though, if the Pentagon keeps awarding hundreds of millions of dollars out to someone whose record on delivery sucks and has been flagged as a potential illegal arms dealer by the State Department, which will certainly leave less money for him to entice soldiers back into the fray.
Domestically, the Untied States Justice Department illegally and improperly discriminated against candidates who appeared to be liberal or were critical of Bush policies when hiring, looking for liberal “buzzwords” in applications and passing over more qualified and higher-ranked candidates to ensure ideological unity in the Justice Department. Of course, by now, all those people who were involved in the program and the politics-based appointments have been sacked or moved on to private practice, so it’s unlikely there will be further headhunting, unless one wanted to go up the chain and add more onto the litany of things that Mr. Bush should be investigated and impeached for.
The measure to name a wastewater treatment plan for George W. Bush continues undeterred, and has apparently incurred a synchronized flush on the new inauguration day, regardless of whether the name change goes through. Sounds cathartic to me.
And last on the Bush agenda’s greatest hits, several states are walking away from federal funding because federal requirements say that only abstinence can be taught in a class that has federal funding. Some are also walking away because the funding structure has been too inconsistent for them to use it. That said, still more than half of the states use the federal grants and accept the abstinence requirements that go along with it. While exaggerating to the point of absurdity for many, I wonder whether the real plan for the Bush administration resembles something like the list of 10 things every girl should know about boy parts from Iron Hymen and the 10 things every other boy id doing instead of being lame and queer and having sex from Sex is for Fags. Again, exaggeration to me, potential gospel document for others. And people wonder why it’s so hard to have a good satirical routine these days.
The environment is enough of a concern that even the casinos are trying to meet LEED certification. The dens of vice are aiming for a few virtues themselves.
If confirmed by the Senate, Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody will become the first female four-star general, out of three three-star generals currently in the service. Because of the exclusion on combat roles for women, it’s taken quite a while for any of them to progress up the ranks to this point.
The RIAA has decided, in addition to suing Internet personages, to demand that AM-FM radio broadcasters pay royalties to them for radio play. A couple of bills currently working their way through the legislature would do just that, despite the radio broadcasters’ insistence that their play and service generates more than enough income for the recording industries to avoid royalty payments.
The SAG may be going on strike at the end of June, for many of the same reasons that the Writer’s Guild did. So perhaps there will not only be few new shows, there may not be any appearances at conventions either. Which would suck if tickets are nonrefundable.
Getting into opinionated matters, Thomas Sowell thinks moving in the direction of Europe on minimum wage laws and pharmaceutical price controls will only lead to more unemployment and less innovation, respectively. When noting that young and black workers tend to get hit hardest by minimum wage increases, because such increases drive out the low-skilled, is that a failure of employers to not hire those who are underskilled for their work, society to insist that employers have the right to pay substandard or lower than subsistence wages for that work, or is that a failure of the education system to turn out persons who are properly skilled, or at least able to learn the skills, of their future careers? And who knows? Maybe if we mechanized a significant majority of our low-skill work, tha would make it possible for everyone to have higher-skill work, or to be trained in supervising and repairing and working with the machines. The comment about pharmaceutical price controls makes me wonder just how much of a medicine patent’s profit gets re-sunk into research costs for other medicines, and how much goes to the stock shareholders.
Michael Hudson proclaims that the United States economy is not going to recover quickly from this downturn, considering there really isn’t anything there to pay for all the bad loans, excepting perhaps government cash, and the government bankrupting itself to bail out private business is really wrong, especially in a nominally capitalist economy. The solution is for an incoming President to restructure taxes so that the rich pay in more, including capital gains taxed as normal income, make companies and oligarchs take their losses instead of bailing them out, and manage to get strong material through without having lobbyists and wealthy special interests water down and weaken the necessary changes.
Ed Feulner could stand some reform of the United Nations, starting with finances and not having what he perceives to be a speck-plank problem with the Human Rights Council, investigating the United States for potential human-rights abuses while leaving the actual abuses of other countries alone.
Fred Thompson harps on the Boumedine court decision, taking the premise that the United States is actually in a declared war, and that “the most generous rights given to enemy combatants” or such was obviously more than enough and beyond the Geneva Conventions, and now the Supreme Court has let federal courts decide matters of national security and policy, letting the true enemies burrow their way deeper in the court system, and encouraged terrorists to continue not abiding by Geneva conventions themselves. Cal Thomas repeats the old party line that the media isn't covering Iraq because the great progress screws with their already-determined narrative of defeat, where it might just be that everyone is still wondering whether any progress made will be lasting, or whether once the troops start leaving, the whole place will collapse in a rather house-of-cards manner. William Rusher declares the best policy for the Democrats is to endorse the current course of action and keep it going, because the Democrats are so obviously wrong about Iraq being a nightmare. Will all of that together, Lee Culpepper ties it all up and accuses Democrats of nuturing Islamic terrorists as victims against evil Republicans, falling all over themselves to make sure terrorists are accorded every right, and never missing an opportunity to slander and shortchange the military people working in Iraq and bringing in the terrorists to Guantanamo Bay. Have I mentioned how much I love watching ideological devotees rain insults and derision on each other?
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, suggests that the days of scientific models and theories is dwindling with the rapid rise of computational power and raw data. The grand unified theory may not be necessary, because correlations and statistical analysis of things may be what works best and all that we need. Plus, it takes gigantic amounts of computing power to manage the data now - imagine how much more it would take to draw it all together into a self-consistent model.
Anotehr tribute to the passing of George Carlin, trying to get the human creatures to stop investing so much power in their cusswords, and to not adhere to a world where the mentality of scared Bible-thumpers governs the words we do or don’t use.
Mark Pesce sees a new social order coming into being - one where every person is able to share what they see and where the mob, with its tools of social connectivity, will rule, whether in small or large bands fighting against each other. It didn’t sound like it was completely apocalyptic. It did sound like there would be adjustments and the mob would have to learn to control its worst excesses. Perhaps the Anonymous v. Scientology thing is the precursor to mob actions like this?
Scitech has Cool Things again, like using facial expressions to make a lecture pace slow down or speed up, or stop altogether while the person receiving the lecture puzzles stuff out, and Bill Gates complaining and critiquing Microsoft product, services, and their website.
Last for tonight, apparently not only did he subjugate millions, try to kill off other nationalities, and bring a world war down on his head, Hitler had a lousy sense of humor. Just one more reason not to like him, I guess.
Okay, the really last thing will hopefully make you laugh - priests of the Christian and Sith orders. And God accused of selling cocaine in Tampa. When did Skee-ball stop being fun for Him?
And now, sleepytime.
Starting tonight’s datadump off with some art, it’s a Kaiju collection, with all sorts of monsters looking stylishly bad (or good, as the case may be). They may concentrate around the Door to Hell, a cavern of poisonous gas that was lit on fire thirty-five years ago and is still merrily burning. Most likely, though, they’re just hungry.
Internationally, and significantly scary after having seen New Who 4x11, “Left Turn”, Italy's Prime Minister shows how Constitutional violations really should be done, with the Prime Minister granting himself the ability to use soldiers to clear unrest, suspending all “non-serious” trials for a year to get through criminal and Mafia prosecutions, (including one that potentially involves said Prime Minister), and criminalizing renting housing to illegal immigrants, as well as illegal immigration itself. DNA test will be required for those who claim relatives in Italy. All this assumes it passes the lower house of the parliament, but the ruling party has enough of a majority to put it through if party discipline doesn’t revolt. This is one of those situations that will turn out poorly, even if it accomplishes the stated and intended goals.
Iran is campaigning for one of the rotating Security Council seats coming up for election, and CNS News seems to think that they have a shot at getting a seat. This is the part where I wonder if there is a procedure rule that blocks any nation currently under sanctions from the UNSC from having a seat on it.
Afghanistan may have a surge of its own, if Admiral Mullen’s request for three more brigades manages to get fulfilled. Mullen hopes that progress in Iraq will let him draw the troops he needs into Afghanistan out of Iraq. He’ll have a time of it, though, if the Pentagon keeps awarding hundreds of millions of dollars out to someone whose record on delivery sucks and has been flagged as a potential illegal arms dealer by the State Department, which will certainly leave less money for him to entice soldiers back into the fray.
Domestically, the Untied States Justice Department illegally and improperly discriminated against candidates who appeared to be liberal or were critical of Bush policies when hiring, looking for liberal “buzzwords” in applications and passing over more qualified and higher-ranked candidates to ensure ideological unity in the Justice Department. Of course, by now, all those people who were involved in the program and the politics-based appointments have been sacked or moved on to private practice, so it’s unlikely there will be further headhunting, unless one wanted to go up the chain and add more onto the litany of things that Mr. Bush should be investigated and impeached for.
The measure to name a wastewater treatment plan for George W. Bush continues undeterred, and has apparently incurred a synchronized flush on the new inauguration day, regardless of whether the name change goes through. Sounds cathartic to me.
And last on the Bush agenda’s greatest hits, several states are walking away from federal funding because federal requirements say that only abstinence can be taught in a class that has federal funding. Some are also walking away because the funding structure has been too inconsistent for them to use it. That said, still more than half of the states use the federal grants and accept the abstinence requirements that go along with it. While exaggerating to the point of absurdity for many, I wonder whether the real plan for the Bush administration resembles something like the list of 10 things every girl should know about boy parts from Iron Hymen and the 10 things every other boy id doing instead of being lame and queer and having sex from Sex is for Fags. Again, exaggeration to me, potential gospel document for others. And people wonder why it’s so hard to have a good satirical routine these days.
The environment is enough of a concern that even the casinos are trying to meet LEED certification. The dens of vice are aiming for a few virtues themselves.
If confirmed by the Senate, Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody will become the first female four-star general, out of three three-star generals currently in the service. Because of the exclusion on combat roles for women, it’s taken quite a while for any of them to progress up the ranks to this point.
The RIAA has decided, in addition to suing Internet personages, to demand that AM-FM radio broadcasters pay royalties to them for radio play. A couple of bills currently working their way through the legislature would do just that, despite the radio broadcasters’ insistence that their play and service generates more than enough income for the recording industries to avoid royalty payments.
The SAG may be going on strike at the end of June, for many of the same reasons that the Writer’s Guild did. So perhaps there will not only be few new shows, there may not be any appearances at conventions either. Which would suck if tickets are nonrefundable.
Getting into opinionated matters, Thomas Sowell thinks moving in the direction of Europe on minimum wage laws and pharmaceutical price controls will only lead to more unemployment and less innovation, respectively. When noting that young and black workers tend to get hit hardest by minimum wage increases, because such increases drive out the low-skilled, is that a failure of employers to not hire those who are underskilled for their work, society to insist that employers have the right to pay substandard or lower than subsistence wages for that work, or is that a failure of the education system to turn out persons who are properly skilled, or at least able to learn the skills, of their future careers? And who knows? Maybe if we mechanized a significant majority of our low-skill work, tha would make it possible for everyone to have higher-skill work, or to be trained in supervising and repairing and working with the machines. The comment about pharmaceutical price controls makes me wonder just how much of a medicine patent’s profit gets re-sunk into research costs for other medicines, and how much goes to the stock shareholders.
Michael Hudson proclaims that the United States economy is not going to recover quickly from this downturn, considering there really isn’t anything there to pay for all the bad loans, excepting perhaps government cash, and the government bankrupting itself to bail out private business is really wrong, especially in a nominally capitalist economy. The solution is for an incoming President to restructure taxes so that the rich pay in more, including capital gains taxed as normal income, make companies and oligarchs take their losses instead of bailing them out, and manage to get strong material through without having lobbyists and wealthy special interests water down and weaken the necessary changes.
Ed Feulner could stand some reform of the United Nations, starting with finances and not having what he perceives to be a speck-plank problem with the Human Rights Council, investigating the United States for potential human-rights abuses while leaving the actual abuses of other countries alone.
Fred Thompson harps on the Boumedine court decision, taking the premise that the United States is actually in a declared war, and that “the most generous rights given to enemy combatants” or such was obviously more than enough and beyond the Geneva Conventions, and now the Supreme Court has let federal courts decide matters of national security and policy, letting the true enemies burrow their way deeper in the court system, and encouraged terrorists to continue not abiding by Geneva conventions themselves. Cal Thomas repeats the old party line that the media isn't covering Iraq because the great progress screws with their already-determined narrative of defeat, where it might just be that everyone is still wondering whether any progress made will be lasting, or whether once the troops start leaving, the whole place will collapse in a rather house-of-cards manner. William Rusher declares the best policy for the Democrats is to endorse the current course of action and keep it going, because the Democrats are so obviously wrong about Iraq being a nightmare. Will all of that together, Lee Culpepper ties it all up and accuses Democrats of nuturing Islamic terrorists as victims against evil Republicans, falling all over themselves to make sure terrorists are accorded every right, and never missing an opportunity to slander and shortchange the military people working in Iraq and bringing in the terrorists to Guantanamo Bay. Have I mentioned how much I love watching ideological devotees rain insults and derision on each other?
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, suggests that the days of scientific models and theories is dwindling with the rapid rise of computational power and raw data. The grand unified theory may not be necessary, because correlations and statistical analysis of things may be what works best and all that we need. Plus, it takes gigantic amounts of computing power to manage the data now - imagine how much more it would take to draw it all together into a self-consistent model.
Anotehr tribute to the passing of George Carlin, trying to get the human creatures to stop investing so much power in their cusswords, and to not adhere to a world where the mentality of scared Bible-thumpers governs the words we do or don’t use.
Mark Pesce sees a new social order coming into being - one where every person is able to share what they see and where the mob, with its tools of social connectivity, will rule, whether in small or large bands fighting against each other. It didn’t sound like it was completely apocalyptic. It did sound like there would be adjustments and the mob would have to learn to control its worst excesses. Perhaps the Anonymous v. Scientology thing is the precursor to mob actions like this?
Scitech has Cool Things again, like using facial expressions to make a lecture pace slow down or speed up, or stop altogether while the person receiving the lecture puzzles stuff out, and Bill Gates complaining and critiquing Microsoft product, services, and their website.
Last for tonight, apparently not only did he subjugate millions, try to kill off other nationalities, and bring a world war down on his head, Hitler had a lousy sense of humor. Just one more reason not to like him, I guess.
Okay, the really last thing will hopefully make you laugh - priests of the Christian and Sith orders. And God accused of selling cocaine in Tampa. When did Skee-ball stop being fun for Him?
And now, sleepytime.
