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The bag of chips - 30 June 2008
Jul. 1st, 2008 12:27 amAnd we close out another month. Summertime really is the busiest time for public libraries. It’s utterly backwards compared to the school system. So, in some ways, I get six months “off” while I get about six months of lots of people in the library. It’s different, that’s for sure.
Several interesting events in history happened over the weekend. On 28 June 1969, the Stonewall Riots erupted after a raid on the Stonewall Inn for operating without a liquor license also arrested several people, homosexual or not, for “indecency”, which is more akin to Driving While Black than any sort of actual offense. The move gave significant energy to the already working LGBT rights movement. In 1914, also on 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the Great War. Today, on 30 June, 1908 was the Tunguska Event, where there was quite the explosion without really knowing much of a cause for it.
Badly needed food aid arrives in North Korea, U.S. denies that this is a carrot to get North Korea friendlier to disclosing all the nuclear stuff.
After being sworn in as President in an uncontested runoff election, Robert Mugabe and his supporters went to work quickly, seizing land and attacking farmers. What Mugabe has done is pretty bad, and unlike Teodoro Obiang, Mugabe does not have oil investments to shield him from scrutiny.
Mm, Iraq. The U.S. is trying to get the Iraqi government to pick up all the fighters they've trained, not just the Shiites, and if the money runs out and the government doesn’t find work for them, well, those guns might just turn on al-Maliki. And then where will all that vaunted progress be? And with an increased presence of female suicide bombers, it may become an interesting thing to watch to see whether the Iraq-native forces can keep up with the changes in tactics. One thing is for certain. The whole thing was understaffed.
There are also fallout cases from Iraq, like PFC LaVena Johnson, who supposedly committed suicide by M-16, despite having a revolver-sized hole in her brain on the opposite side of her dominant hand, her genitals burned with acid, gloves fused to her hands, teeth loose, a nose broken, abrasions on her body, and an eye caved in. Sounds like an actual suicide with a long rifle to you? And it’s apparently not just PFC Johnson who committed a "suicide" of this sort, with the common thread being sexual violence and rape among those who officially killed themselves.
Keeping near the same vein, but going with children trafficked as prostitutes, Another Me lets them express themselves and what brought them to the places they are now without making them identifiable, through the use of masks and costumes. The costumes are beautiful, and the stories are haunting.
While still stretched thin in their two current land wars in Asia, Mr. Bush, with Congressional approval, has been stepping up covert operations against Iran, attempting to destabilize it as well. For which Iran is building mass gravesites, just in case they're invaded. And former Mossad heads are saying Israel has a year before Iran strikes them. And American Samidzat has one war game scenario that ends badly for everyone involved, because the countries are free in their usage of weapons, planes, and bombs.
An accident in a public hostage-freeing exercise: a soldier participating in the exercise used live ammunition rather than blanks. Always check your guns to make sure you have the right kind of ammo for the situation you’re going into. Odds are good, according to the article, that it was a mistake of some sort. While it’s not great, at least it wasn’t nuclear weapons being flown over the country.
Domestic matters: Texas's Supreme Court threw out a jury award to a teenager who suffered abuse at the hands of her church. Because the matter happened as a result of an exorcism, and because the court bought the story that the teenager was “acting out” because she didn’t want to become a missionary like her father, the Texas court decided that the judgement would be messing in religious affairs too much, trying to invoke the First Amendment. Were this any normal account of abuse, the courts would have no problem upholding the award or adding onto it. But because it’s all Christian exorcism, the court decided that it would be intrusive to stop abuse in the church, because churching apparently lets you ignore the laws with impunity.
Larry Craig and David Vitter are sponsoring a marriage protection amendment, to amend the constitution to say that marriage is only one man, one woman. As Liberal Beagle notes, a man implicated for soliciting gay sex in bathrooms and a man who was on the client list of a prostitution service are sponsoring a protection of marriage amendment. Commence ROFL in three, two, one... oh, and have a look at The General's excellent advertisements for the two sponsors.
A person named in the anthrax attacks in 2001 has been awarded nearly $6 million in damages, successfully proving his case that he had his privacy rights invaded by the government when persons investigating spoke his name as a “person of interest” and the reporting began from there. Mr. Hatfill was found innocent of the anthrax charges. From there to the other end of the spectrum, a town in Missouri found out that their new drug agent was not working for the government. At the same time, things appeared to do better, with busts and things happening to try and clean up the particular town. It didn’t take long for the matter to unravel, once someone actually looked, but the con was good enough to fool the elected leader and the police. Huh. Guess that culture of unconditional obedience of arbitrary federal rules does have consequences, after all.
In candidate matters, huh. When the candidate electd for his liberal leanings starts becoming more centrist, people feel a bit betrayed. To win the general election, appearing centrist enough to grab conservatives rather than relying on one’s liberal base seems to be the prevailing thought. Which is weird, because the country probably wants someone who is willing to stay on the liberal side enough to be consistently a liberal.
In attempts to combat politics that focus on race and racial benefits instead of whether the policy itself is good for the country, commentary that's geared toward painting minorities in as negative as light as possible, whether actually justified or not, and I am Hussein aims to make it so that Senator Obama's middle name is not rendered into a swear or used in connection with the discredited "secret Muslim" theory
A Portland, OR shop that prominently featured the Confederate flags had them covered up with images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hrm. MJS at The General's gives his take - that the flag is heritage not racism, but much like the swastika, because the “Stars and Bars” have been associated with a darker chapter in the history of the world, there’s going to be significant resistance to its return to innocuous status. We’ve had a longer time to work this out with the flag, but it isn’t helping that there are some groups that want to revive or continue the policies of the darker era that adopt the flag as one of their symbols, too.
I’m inclined to think the following headline is just a bad decision rather than an instance of bias, but Clark Questions McCain's qualifications makes it sound worse, like General Clark is saying that Senator McCain doesn’t have the stuff to lead as President, than it actually is, which is that General Clark is saying that Senator McCain’s war experience won’t help him that much when making decisions as President, The Senator would need more command experience to make his claim sound.
Senator Obama's support of equal pay for equal work is apparently not borne out in his own practice as a state Senator. I wonder, however, how much control the Senator has over setting the pay of the people working for his office. Senator McCain’s office appears to have been more female-friendly and paid closer to even keel, but that might be demographic, for all I know. All I get are numbers. What I want to see are reasons why things are the way they are.
Working into opinion matters,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks doesn't really care about the recent SCOTUS decision overturning the D.C. gun ban, and thinks you shouldn't either. The populace will be armed, if it were illegal, we’d find ways to get guns, and so really, the issue itself is a non-starter, as nothing that anyone really does will change anything significantly. At all.
Continuing with The Infamous Brad, he wants the same thing that global warming people do - because the planet is developing a middle class and will soon have to decide what kind of energy they want to power it, not because humanity has wrecked the planet. So, in that sense, getting people away from inefficient coal and reliance on nations that haven’t made it out of the Dark Ages because of their oil is important, because renewable and efficient energy, like solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear power will be able to power this up-and-coming middle class with the least amount of political BS and the least amount of big investments needed at any given time. The money-saving motive, toward more efficient appliances, vehicles, and lighting, will probably do more to get the people off of coal and oil dependence than the idea of “save the planet!”. As a followup, for those who either want to save the planet or a lot of money, some old-tech ideas that don't happen any more, but would save lots of money if they did. On the other side, Paul Driessen says we should drill now and worry about consequences later, even if it takes 5-10 years to actually see the results of drilling.
For a more traditional anti-anthropogenic climate change piece, James Kerian claims that man-made climate change is only being researched because of "yellow science", causing sensationalism instead of research. (bradhicks also doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, but even if he’s going to laugh at someone who thinks that men did this, he’s still going to work with them to bring about the same kinds of goals in technology.)
The point ofbradhicks‘s speaking turns out to be that global warming wouldn't be a bad target for boomers and millenials to wage war against, with profits for the generation in between them. Better energy, less pollution, and profits for all? For a crusade, one could certainly do worse. And the technology developed out of such a crusade would be easily marketable to the rest of the world.
Knowing that atheists are despised by much of the populace, I find it sad, cheering, and an interesting social commentary that an atheist coming out party is in the works. Sad, that atheists are in a climate that encourages them to hide, like other groups felt, cheering, that atheists aren’t the kinds of people who won’t try to organize and attend these events, and an interesting commentar that the language here is the same as coming out to one’s peers as an LGBTQ person. Although I doubt it would have the same sort of bad reactions that coming out has had for some LGBTQ people.
Although, as a bit of a funny, it turns out that the AFA's autocorrection policy has come back to bite it in the ass, changing the track sprinter Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual. I find it less than savory that anyone is changing the words in an article, whether “Democratic” to “Democrat” or “Gay” to “Homosexual” - context is very important, and it’s theoretically supposed to be true that writers have taken context into account in composing their articles. Still, I point and laugh that the AFA has managed to take an AP article and turn it into “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials”. Of course, it has since been re-edited, because humans realize when they’re being laughed at and when their machines have failed.
Peter Schmidt revisits an issue that I haven't heard from in a while - the idea that collegiate affirmative action policies engage in discrimination against white and Asian American applicants in order to meet "diversity" requirements. The point I find most telling in Schmidt’s argument is not anything he says about race relations, but that universities have been rapidly catering to those that can pay full price and those that can increase university endowments. Catering to the rich is going to be more of a problem than diversity requirements. Odds are good that those coming from poorer schools have a harder time of getting into university and affording it. That also probably disproportionately affects minorities. And, if I recall rightly, most systems of affirmative action have been reviewed or struck down these days.
Further in this theme, Dinesh D'Souza takes a swing at Michelle Obama, painting her as a woman with a massive inferiority complex, apparently because she got into Princeton on affirmative action (she obviously wasn’t good enough), got honors (despite having no command of the English language), and a good-paying job, yet sees fit to remark that the whole way up to her current place, there were always people telling her what she could and couldn’t do. In D’Souza’s mind, the benevolent generosity extended to Michelle Obama, characterized as “You’re not good enough, but we’ll take you anyway” should be enough for her to enjoy her comforts and not make waves. Y’know, despite being patronizing, trying to attach the idea of her not being good enough so that everyone else around her will view her not as a product of her own skill and intellect, but as someone who couldn’t hack it on their own and had to be helped every step of the way. D’Souza wants you to believe that Michelle Obama only got where she did because of university welfare, not her own work and willingness to fly the bird at anyone who told her “You’re not good enough.” She made it through the program and graduated with honors. Obviously, Mr. D’Souza, she was good enough, unless you want to discredit the entirety of the graduating classes of Princeton University from the beginning of desegregation.
Because you can’t finish the opinions without someone invoking children somewhere, Ken Connor feels that now is a good time to crusade against Planned Parenthood, expounding upon the origins of the clinic, their efforts to “green” their clinics, make them more welcoming, and to provide kiosk services in other areas so as to permit easier access to testing and birth control. For him, of course, this is all subordinated to the fact that Planned Parenthood does do abortions as part of their services, and that we should all be outraged at their baby killing ways. Would someone who has volunteered or can pull up the figures quickly tell me how much of PP’s total services, percentage-wise, is actual abortion procedures?
The Wall Street Journal praises the SCOTUS for a policy-like decision on compensatory damages, simply because there was no established law to deal with the situation. Had there been, there probably would have been much screaming about “activist judges”, unless it was in favor of the corporations. Then they would probably be silent. A more standard WSJ opinion is
remarking again that not all oil fields leased are productive, and so any estimates that assume them are overinflated, or that "the economy" as a whole is a fiction, because the economies at the top and bottom are so wildly variant as to make he average useless., or even raising a glass to Hong Kong because their tax cuts on wine are apparently responsible for economic growth in the country. I doubt they’d be as happy about a 100 pound fine assessed to a person who had a "for sale" sign displayed in his vehicle. Especially because the person that was hit by the fine didn’t realize the law had changed.
Chester E. Finn, Jr. thinks that Ohio needs a revival that doesn't involve taxation and that finally shifts Ohio from manufacturing to knowledge work. Which would work in Michigan, too, considering the brain drain there as well (of which I am a part, I freely admit). I don’t know if dropping taxes is the right idea as much as managing to attract and hold a company that works in the new economy, rather than ones that depend on automobile manufacturing and other 1900s-era production. Not that those places couldn’t be retooled for newer, more efficient vehicle production, but the Big Three basically denying that they can do it has hurt them hard.
Candidate opinions begin here. Philip Klein finds Senator Obam&apo;s lack of talking terror to be an excellent example of why he won&apo;t be effective fighting it. The Wall Street Journal believes the Senator's tax plans will bring about citizens fleeing the country to avoid them, putting us on par with the French for tax rate, Austin Hill feels that Obama will enforce a quashing of conservative opinion in the name of "media reform", because it is apparently unacceptable to those liberals in power that Americans choose conservative viewpoints over liberal ones. I’d hope that the populace would choose factual information over hearsay, and know when they are listening to an opinion program rather than one that purports itself as facts. I find it interesting that both parts of the spectrum are complaining about bias against them. The more I read about things, the more I’m beginning to find that “the media” will create its own narrative, and both sides will find bias in it, and rail about it from within the media-defined system.
In science and technology, existing drug may be repurposed to fight disease of the brain. Nice to know when the solution may already have been developed, isn’t it? And, much like before, accidents in the lab create new possible illness-fighters. There’s also new ways of making water boil much faster. And Buzz Aldrin says that there needs to be more NASA research, or the Russians and Chinese will beat us to Mars.
Last for tonight, though - Lego cathedrals, form which billions of bricks are stored and retrieved... automatically. It’s all robots and computers there, which is really, really, cool.
Several interesting events in history happened over the weekend. On 28 June 1969, the Stonewall Riots erupted after a raid on the Stonewall Inn for operating without a liquor license also arrested several people, homosexual or not, for “indecency”, which is more akin to Driving While Black than any sort of actual offense. The move gave significant energy to the already working LGBT rights movement. In 1914, also on 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the Great War. Today, on 30 June, 1908 was the Tunguska Event, where there was quite the explosion without really knowing much of a cause for it.
Badly needed food aid arrives in North Korea, U.S. denies that this is a carrot to get North Korea friendlier to disclosing all the nuclear stuff.
After being sworn in as President in an uncontested runoff election, Robert Mugabe and his supporters went to work quickly, seizing land and attacking farmers. What Mugabe has done is pretty bad, and unlike Teodoro Obiang, Mugabe does not have oil investments to shield him from scrutiny.
Mm, Iraq. The U.S. is trying to get the Iraqi government to pick up all the fighters they've trained, not just the Shiites, and if the money runs out and the government doesn’t find work for them, well, those guns might just turn on al-Maliki. And then where will all that vaunted progress be? And with an increased presence of female suicide bombers, it may become an interesting thing to watch to see whether the Iraq-native forces can keep up with the changes in tactics. One thing is for certain. The whole thing was understaffed.
There are also fallout cases from Iraq, like PFC LaVena Johnson, who supposedly committed suicide by M-16, despite having a revolver-sized hole in her brain on the opposite side of her dominant hand, her genitals burned with acid, gloves fused to her hands, teeth loose, a nose broken, abrasions on her body, and an eye caved in. Sounds like an actual suicide with a long rifle to you? And it’s apparently not just PFC Johnson who committed a "suicide" of this sort, with the common thread being sexual violence and rape among those who officially killed themselves.
Keeping near the same vein, but going with children trafficked as prostitutes, Another Me lets them express themselves and what brought them to the places they are now without making them identifiable, through the use of masks and costumes. The costumes are beautiful, and the stories are haunting.
While still stretched thin in their two current land wars in Asia, Mr. Bush, with Congressional approval, has been stepping up covert operations against Iran, attempting to destabilize it as well. For which Iran is building mass gravesites, just in case they're invaded. And former Mossad heads are saying Israel has a year before Iran strikes them. And American Samidzat has one war game scenario that ends badly for everyone involved, because the countries are free in their usage of weapons, planes, and bombs.
An accident in a public hostage-freeing exercise: a soldier participating in the exercise used live ammunition rather than blanks. Always check your guns to make sure you have the right kind of ammo for the situation you’re going into. Odds are good, according to the article, that it was a mistake of some sort. While it’s not great, at least it wasn’t nuclear weapons being flown over the country.
Domestic matters: Texas's Supreme Court threw out a jury award to a teenager who suffered abuse at the hands of her church. Because the matter happened as a result of an exorcism, and because the court bought the story that the teenager was “acting out” because she didn’t want to become a missionary like her father, the Texas court decided that the judgement would be messing in religious affairs too much, trying to invoke the First Amendment. Were this any normal account of abuse, the courts would have no problem upholding the award or adding onto it. But because it’s all Christian exorcism, the court decided that it would be intrusive to stop abuse in the church, because churching apparently lets you ignore the laws with impunity.
Larry Craig and David Vitter are sponsoring a marriage protection amendment, to amend the constitution to say that marriage is only one man, one woman. As Liberal Beagle notes, a man implicated for soliciting gay sex in bathrooms and a man who was on the client list of a prostitution service are sponsoring a protection of marriage amendment. Commence ROFL in three, two, one... oh, and have a look at The General's excellent advertisements for the two sponsors.
A person named in the anthrax attacks in 2001 has been awarded nearly $6 million in damages, successfully proving his case that he had his privacy rights invaded by the government when persons investigating spoke his name as a “person of interest” and the reporting began from there. Mr. Hatfill was found innocent of the anthrax charges. From there to the other end of the spectrum, a town in Missouri found out that their new drug agent was not working for the government. At the same time, things appeared to do better, with busts and things happening to try and clean up the particular town. It didn’t take long for the matter to unravel, once someone actually looked, but the con was good enough to fool the elected leader and the police. Huh. Guess that culture of unconditional obedience of arbitrary federal rules does have consequences, after all.
In candidate matters, huh. When the candidate electd for his liberal leanings starts becoming more centrist, people feel a bit betrayed. To win the general election, appearing centrist enough to grab conservatives rather than relying on one’s liberal base seems to be the prevailing thought. Which is weird, because the country probably wants someone who is willing to stay on the liberal side enough to be consistently a liberal.
In attempts to combat politics that focus on race and racial benefits instead of whether the policy itself is good for the country, commentary that's geared toward painting minorities in as negative as light as possible, whether actually justified or not, and I am Hussein aims to make it so that Senator Obama's middle name is not rendered into a swear or used in connection with the discredited "secret Muslim" theory
A Portland, OR shop that prominently featured the Confederate flags had them covered up with images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hrm. MJS at The General's gives his take - that the flag is heritage not racism, but much like the swastika, because the “Stars and Bars” have been associated with a darker chapter in the history of the world, there’s going to be significant resistance to its return to innocuous status. We’ve had a longer time to work this out with the flag, but it isn’t helping that there are some groups that want to revive or continue the policies of the darker era that adopt the flag as one of their symbols, too.
I’m inclined to think the following headline is just a bad decision rather than an instance of bias, but Clark Questions McCain's qualifications makes it sound worse, like General Clark is saying that Senator McCain doesn’t have the stuff to lead as President, than it actually is, which is that General Clark is saying that Senator McCain’s war experience won’t help him that much when making decisions as President, The Senator would need more command experience to make his claim sound.
Senator Obama's support of equal pay for equal work is apparently not borne out in his own practice as a state Senator. I wonder, however, how much control the Senator has over setting the pay of the people working for his office. Senator McCain’s office appears to have been more female-friendly and paid closer to even keel, but that might be demographic, for all I know. All I get are numbers. What I want to see are reasons why things are the way they are.
Working into opinion matters,
bradhicks doesn't really care about the recent SCOTUS decision overturning the D.C. gun ban, and thinks you shouldn't either. The populace will be armed, if it were illegal, we’d find ways to get guns, and so really, the issue itself is a non-starter, as nothing that anyone really does will change anything significantly. At all. Continuing with The Infamous Brad, he wants the same thing that global warming people do - because the planet is developing a middle class and will soon have to decide what kind of energy they want to power it, not because humanity has wrecked the planet. So, in that sense, getting people away from inefficient coal and reliance on nations that haven’t made it out of the Dark Ages because of their oil is important, because renewable and efficient energy, like solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear power will be able to power this up-and-coming middle class with the least amount of political BS and the least amount of big investments needed at any given time. The money-saving motive, toward more efficient appliances, vehicles, and lighting, will probably do more to get the people off of coal and oil dependence than the idea of “save the planet!”. As a followup, for those who either want to save the planet or a lot of money, some old-tech ideas that don't happen any more, but would save lots of money if they did. On the other side, Paul Driessen says we should drill now and worry about consequences later, even if it takes 5-10 years to actually see the results of drilling.
For a more traditional anti-anthropogenic climate change piece, James Kerian claims that man-made climate change is only being researched because of "yellow science", causing sensationalism instead of research. (
bradhicks also doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, but even if he’s going to laugh at someone who thinks that men did this, he’s still going to work with them to bring about the same kinds of goals in technology.) The point of
bradhicks‘s speaking turns out to be that global warming wouldn't be a bad target for boomers and millenials to wage war against, with profits for the generation in between them. Better energy, less pollution, and profits for all? For a crusade, one could certainly do worse. And the technology developed out of such a crusade would be easily marketable to the rest of the world.Knowing that atheists are despised by much of the populace, I find it sad, cheering, and an interesting social commentary that an atheist coming out party is in the works. Sad, that atheists are in a climate that encourages them to hide, like other groups felt, cheering, that atheists aren’t the kinds of people who won’t try to organize and attend these events, and an interesting commentar that the language here is the same as coming out to one’s peers as an LGBTQ person. Although I doubt it would have the same sort of bad reactions that coming out has had for some LGBTQ people.
Although, as a bit of a funny, it turns out that the AFA's autocorrection policy has come back to bite it in the ass, changing the track sprinter Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual. I find it less than savory that anyone is changing the words in an article, whether “Democratic” to “Democrat” or “Gay” to “Homosexual” - context is very important, and it’s theoretically supposed to be true that writers have taken context into account in composing their articles. Still, I point and laugh that the AFA has managed to take an AP article and turn it into “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials”. Of course, it has since been re-edited, because humans realize when they’re being laughed at and when their machines have failed.
Peter Schmidt revisits an issue that I haven't heard from in a while - the idea that collegiate affirmative action policies engage in discrimination against white and Asian American applicants in order to meet "diversity" requirements. The point I find most telling in Schmidt’s argument is not anything he says about race relations, but that universities have been rapidly catering to those that can pay full price and those that can increase university endowments. Catering to the rich is going to be more of a problem than diversity requirements. Odds are good that those coming from poorer schools have a harder time of getting into university and affording it. That also probably disproportionately affects minorities. And, if I recall rightly, most systems of affirmative action have been reviewed or struck down these days.
Further in this theme, Dinesh D'Souza takes a swing at Michelle Obama, painting her as a woman with a massive inferiority complex, apparently because she got into Princeton on affirmative action (she obviously wasn’t good enough), got honors (despite having no command of the English language), and a good-paying job, yet sees fit to remark that the whole way up to her current place, there were always people telling her what she could and couldn’t do. In D’Souza’s mind, the benevolent generosity extended to Michelle Obama, characterized as “You’re not good enough, but we’ll take you anyway” should be enough for her to enjoy her comforts and not make waves. Y’know, despite being patronizing, trying to attach the idea of her not being good enough so that everyone else around her will view her not as a product of her own skill and intellect, but as someone who couldn’t hack it on their own and had to be helped every step of the way. D’Souza wants you to believe that Michelle Obama only got where she did because of university welfare, not her own work and willingness to fly the bird at anyone who told her “You’re not good enough.” She made it through the program and graduated with honors. Obviously, Mr. D’Souza, she was good enough, unless you want to discredit the entirety of the graduating classes of Princeton University from the beginning of desegregation.
Because you can’t finish the opinions without someone invoking children somewhere, Ken Connor feels that now is a good time to crusade against Planned Parenthood, expounding upon the origins of the clinic, their efforts to “green” their clinics, make them more welcoming, and to provide kiosk services in other areas so as to permit easier access to testing and birth control. For him, of course, this is all subordinated to the fact that Planned Parenthood does do abortions as part of their services, and that we should all be outraged at their baby killing ways. Would someone who has volunteered or can pull up the figures quickly tell me how much of PP’s total services, percentage-wise, is actual abortion procedures?
The Wall Street Journal praises the SCOTUS for a policy-like decision on compensatory damages, simply because there was no established law to deal with the situation. Had there been, there probably would have been much screaming about “activist judges”, unless it was in favor of the corporations. Then they would probably be silent. A more standard WSJ opinion is
remarking again that not all oil fields leased are productive, and so any estimates that assume them are overinflated, or that "the economy" as a whole is a fiction, because the economies at the top and bottom are so wildly variant as to make he average useless., or even raising a glass to Hong Kong because their tax cuts on wine are apparently responsible for economic growth in the country. I doubt they’d be as happy about a 100 pound fine assessed to a person who had a "for sale" sign displayed in his vehicle. Especially because the person that was hit by the fine didn’t realize the law had changed.
Chester E. Finn, Jr. thinks that Ohio needs a revival that doesn't involve taxation and that finally shifts Ohio from manufacturing to knowledge work. Which would work in Michigan, too, considering the brain drain there as well (of which I am a part, I freely admit). I don’t know if dropping taxes is the right idea as much as managing to attract and hold a company that works in the new economy, rather than ones that depend on automobile manufacturing and other 1900s-era production. Not that those places couldn’t be retooled for newer, more efficient vehicle production, but the Big Three basically denying that they can do it has hurt them hard.
Candidate opinions begin here. Philip Klein finds Senator Obam&apo;s lack of talking terror to be an excellent example of why he won&apo;t be effective fighting it. The Wall Street Journal believes the Senator's tax plans will bring about citizens fleeing the country to avoid them, putting us on par with the French for tax rate, Austin Hill feels that Obama will enforce a quashing of conservative opinion in the name of "media reform", because it is apparently unacceptable to those liberals in power that Americans choose conservative viewpoints over liberal ones. I’d hope that the populace would choose factual information over hearsay, and know when they are listening to an opinion program rather than one that purports itself as facts. I find it interesting that both parts of the spectrum are complaining about bias against them. The more I read about things, the more I’m beginning to find that “the media” will create its own narrative, and both sides will find bias in it, and rail about it from within the media-defined system.
In science and technology, existing drug may be repurposed to fight disease of the brain. Nice to know when the solution may already have been developed, isn’t it? And, much like before, accidents in the lab create new possible illness-fighters. There’s also new ways of making water boil much faster. And Buzz Aldrin says that there needs to be more NASA research, or the Russians and Chinese will beat us to Mars.
Last for tonight, though - Lego cathedrals, form which billions of bricks are stored and retrieved... automatically. It’s all robots and computers there, which is really, really, cool.
