Moving forward into the world - 9 July 2008

I’ve got a few things. Now that I’ve spent a couple days away from it, I can still firmly conclude that Russel T. Davies made a lots of fans angry with the way he ended this particular Doctor Who season, by ( Spoilers, yo )

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My professional self cheers for ten years in prison for the man stealing and then selling library materials. And the person who actually told the police about what had happeend. I wondered about everyone else who may have bought things and didn’t make any mention about them. Speaking of librarians, who people should know are not usually a quiet bunch, especially when their civil liberties are being trod upon, a 61 yead-old librarian, Carol Kreck, was removed and cited for trespassing at an "open to the public" McCain event for holding a sign that said "McCain = Bush". Smart librarian that she is, she reasoned correctly that most Republicans should be thrilled at the comparison, considering how well that Mr. Bush has been doing while in office. Think Progress, among other places, has the video of Carol's removal and citation. She’s contesting the ticket and I suspect there will be people filing suits on her behalf. It should be a fairly easy case to make that free speech at an open to the public event is a First Amendment guarantee, especially since it was nonviolent.

The “Hell in a Handbasket” squad, also known as our international department, starts with violence breaking a cease-fire in Lebanon, Russia threatening military consequences if the Czech Republic installs a radar for a U.S. missile shield scheduled for Poland, and Iran testing medium range missiles, some of which could potentially strike Israel, and threatening retaliation if attacked.

Our Iraq bureau is either impressed with the confidence the Iraqi security forces have in themselves or the inflated opinion the Iraqi security forces have in themselves. In either case, the Iraqi government is still making a smart decision by insisting that any status of forces agreement after the UN mandate runs out include a timetable for withdrawal.

Domestically, a soldier who turned atheist in the firefights is suing, alleging discrimination and threats against his life based on his change of heart from other soldiers. The soldier alleges he was passed over for promotions because his lack of faith in God and refusal to just put his beliefs aside and pray with troops somehow made him less of a leader. The Pentagon still claims that there is no official religion and that members and officers of the armed forces do not try to convert others. At least, officially. But this is a country where pastors regularly consider 150-foot high crosses as a way fo marking the city for the god of Abraham. Said pastor would ring the city with crosses at every entrance if he could. It’s also a country where an attempt to take a consecrated wafer out of a church erupts into death threats and armed guards surrounding the church during services. And the local Catholics consider it a hate crime, compare it to a kidnapping and call it a mortal sin. Of those three options, only the third is one they have any authority over. PZ Meyers, in his desire to break the fanatical hold that a symbol like that has on the people, is asking for some consecrated wafers so that he can desecrate them properly, with forethought and malice, and documentation of every step of the way.

Adding potential insult to injury on the rule of law, the Senate approved a FISA bill with retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies involved in spying on Americans in violation of the law. That chapter on the country’s history has now effectively closed without knowing the full extent of what was going on. Glen Greenwald speaks his mind on the matter, and calls for a large amount of donations to be made to start fighting the new FISA.

Dennis Kucinich will bring a single article of impeachment to the floor on Thursday, continuing his attempts to stir some sort of desire in his colleagues to at least have a look into what’s been going on for the last seven years and to decide whether even this single item is an impeachable offense.

The Happiness Project offers sme tips for choosing the "commandments" of one' own project, but would be good for selecting any sort of set of aphorisms to keep handy as a reference.

The Girl With a One-Track Mind offers up an insight into a cultural bias - because she writes freely about sex, sexual experience, and her ability to have orgasms easily and frequently, many people believe she's a man. She then goes further on to explain how it is that she is able to have orgasms - surprise, surprise, she played with toys and masturbated and found out what brought her to climax. Armed with that knowledge, she can then guide a lover or position herself so that she gets orgasms, almost regardless of what he’s doing or not doing to her. Mind you, good chemistry and humor and technique can make some experiences better than others, but it should be possible, barring the worst of circumstances or being forced, for a woman to enjoy orgasms regardless of partner... and that she shouldn’t feel ashamed at wanting them or in being assertive enough to tell her partner what works for her. Crushing stereotypes of both genders will make it easier for all of us to have better sex lives.

Interpretation and context often also has an effect on whether something comes across as innocuous or insulting. An ambiguous comment about whether a bar is "your kind of place" requires thought to decide whether the bouncer was being a bouncer, being gruff for effect, was offering a friendly warning about the insides of the bar, or was trying to be discriminatory about whether someone dressed to give off a homosexual vibe was welcome in the bar. And it’s no easier for the manager, either, and resolves inconclusively.

In a world where one can overlay one reality onto another, how much of reality will stay shared between people? Will the overlays creates a different place for two people, so much so that they won’t be able to interact?

In science and technology, Oooh, pretty. Translucent creatures. Also, poker computer beats human players, more cables for Internet being laid down, Google chatting goes three-dimensional, with a beta project called Lively, data mining news and reports to build a map of health problems and disease outbreaks, and checking to see if octopi have a preferred tentacle. Duck, this one’s for you...

Saving opinions for the bottom tonight, Dennis Prager laments the decline of the country, calling Rene Marie's substitution of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" for "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Denver a perfect triumph of liberal values, because liberals want to replace a national culture with multiculturalism, elevate feelings above morals and “right and wrong”, make artists into “do-no-wrong” moral beacons, and prefer people to think of themselves as victims tryign to make things right. Even though several liberals condemned the subsitution, the culture of liberalism apparently made it possible to lie to someone about a performance and then try to justify it. It’s certainly not just liberals who have been fibbing and trying to justify it, so I would not lay the blame for all of this at liberal feet. Blame Plato, if you like, or his Socrates, who admitted full-out that tellling the people a useful myth would make for good governance - or the Buddha’s skillful means, which used deception to get people out of a burning building, thinking there were shinies outside. Those are normally considered lies for the greater good. Ms. Marie’s may not have been one of those, but the culture she’s in, liberal and conservative, has always said that if there’s a bigger point to be made or demonstrated, lying isn’t always wrong. Pam Meister weaves the Denver incident into a larger narrative of Liberals Hate America and her True Patriots, and trying to score irony points with “Only in America do our soldiers fight to make sure you can say how much you hate them.” America is a very fragile country indeed if you believe that if not for the standing army fighting in conflicts everywhere, all the time, the country would collapse into a totalitarian regime or be overrun by terrorists and would-be conquerors. A mindset like that often tries to create the totalitarian regime it is trying to avoid, in the name of freedom and security.

Joson Matera and Young America's Foundation are up in arms about the prevalence of liberal speakers at commencements. I’d be willing to bet the data supports that universities and colleges do have more professed liberals than conservatives at their commencements. Some of that may be due to ideological vogue, in wanting to have nothing to do with the side of the spectrum that spawned the current administration, or the university’s tradition of helping young and newly-minted adults be exposed to different viewpoints than the ones they grew up with. Or, for all I know, many of the prominent conservatives are lousy public speakers, or would be booed off stage and not accorded respect by the student body. There’s also the usual part that commencement speakers receive honorary degrees, and some universities may not be comfortable doing that to conservative speakers. I’m sure there have to be other considerations in addition to any sort of ideological leanings. Would be nice to know what goes into the selection of a speaker, though.

Spanish-speakers, help, please. Michelle Malkin is going after a group called "La Raza" and painting them as racists against whtie people and friends of illegal immigrants. She translates “La Raza” as “The Race” and implies that it means the superiority of ethnicity for those who belong to the group. I need more information, one about whether there is another possible interpretation for the phrasing, and whether or not La Raza is in accord with the people on the immigration issue. That both presumptive candidates are meeting with them indicates to me that they’re probably less wingnut than Malkin wants to paint them as, and probably more reasonable about their wants.

In a weird sort of counterpoint to Malkin’s “Americans (and possibly Whites) First” screed, Mona Charen decries "diversity" policies that stop hard-working Asian-Americans from taking all the spots they've earned in private academies and colleges. The idea, I’m sure, is to point out that because Asian-American parents push their students to stay in line and complete their homework more than other ethnicities do, their children naturally achieve better scores, so if people want to put more of their ethnicity into prep schools and selective universities, they should get their kids to study and do homework more. A sound principle, and that will work for a while. At that point, then, where we have an equal amount of people who are all equally able to achieve, then how does the selection committee make their decisions? That’s where all the fighting about diversity has been - it’s not supposed to be about less-qualified candidates getting in because they’re minorities, it’s supposed to be about ensuring that universities and schools don’t choose all one race and not expose their young adults to different cultures and experiences. Ashley Herzog might agree with Mona, but for different reasons - she thinks that political correctness bans an anti-slavery book from schools because one of the characters refers to another as a nigger, robbing the class of the great literature that Huckleberry Finn is.

William McGurn says there's more to the current administration than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighting several global commitments to fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS undertaken by the administration, and a change in G8 policy toward accounting for what member countries have done to actually fight the things they have identified as threats.

In candidate opinions, more of similar rhetoric from before. The Chronwatch Senator Obama is a socialist who hangs out with terrorists and will bring about the end of the country through surrender to jihad, and liberals are attempting to smeartheir opponents and hide the fact that their candidate is bad for America opinion certainly has vigor, but the “Obama’s background makes him a socialist-terrist and his liberal voting record proves it” argument still doesn’t make sense to me. Unless the Demcoratic party decided they were going to be real leftists, there’s no way they would let an actual socialist, or someone friendly and approving of terrorists capture their nomination.

Brett Stephens wants to know some specifics of Senator Obama's Iraq plans, suggesting that a document created by one of his advisers as a potential plan is the one the Seantor may take, leaving some 60-80,000 forces in Iraq at the end of the presidential term. The Senator’s position, relative to “surge” doctrine, still wants troops out, but has now come from what was painted as “troops out at any cost” to “troops out after assessing conditions”, which was probably the Senator’s actual position before, but wasn’t picked up as such by the media narrative that is now accusing him of a flip-flop on Iraq and polishing the apples they’re giving to Mr. Bush as they praise his “surge”.

Last for tonight, 100 tanka, with more modern verse, and commentary. It flows almost like a renga, with the way one seems to move into the next, even though the 100 are all separate poems from different places and times. Time for bed, now.

Things I have learned, version 10: May/June 2008

May Flowers in bloom and wisdom with it. Theoretically. And June was actually kind of quiet for Things Learned. Perhaps because of all the Summer Reading stuff. Well, hopefully. Anyway, this is what I learned these two months:

1) Left Behind: The Kids has at least 38 volumes. How long can the end of the world take?

2) My brain works in odd ways - hearing someone describe the idea of having slept through terrors by carrying a practice sword in one hand, and a teddy bear in the other, made me think of how appropriate that imagery would be for the tarot card The Magician. Perhaps someone with better Tarot knowledge will tell me it suits The Fool better, or The Emperor, or The Hermit, but The Magician is what came to mind first.

3) The fashion style of wearing pants that permit obvious view of boxer shorts or other underclothes is not limited to men.

3b) Although I will give credit that the people I observed this trend on choose flannel boxer shorts to show off, rather than, say, a g-string or other, more revealing attire.

3c) I still, however, find this style of dress to be odd - the purpose of wearing underclothes is for them to be under clothes, not visible. Thus, wearing or pants or shorts on top of already-visible underclothes seems to defeat the purpose.

3d) The reverse of this style has the same difficulty as the original - wearing one's athletic shorts so low as to permit the full view of one's jeans underneath tends to defeat the purpose of the athletic shorts in the first place.

4) It's a good day when your credentials are called into question by an irate customer. It's a better day when you have enough good relations to ask a favor of the person that's annoying the customer and he's cool with toning it down for a bit.

5) Some things I have learned the library is not, according to my users:
a) A playground
b) A hanging-out space
c) A place where people can check out any books they want to
d) A place to play games on the computer
e) A place where noise of any kind is permitted
f) A place to talk

6) Not everyone feels that their fellow beings are deserving of common courtesy, nor is everyone considerate of the possible effects their actions have on others.

Charge! (And Owe!) - 10 July 2008

Work today was quite the interesting sequence - I did not spend one minute at the desk of my regularly assigned branch for the entirety of my paid time today. I think that’s the first time that’s happened on a day when I didn’t have a full-day meeting (I had a half-day meeting, instead...).

Anyway, let’s go for the throat right from the start - we know that Mr. W. Bush has trouble with appearing to be an intelligent and educated man, one worthy of respect. He did not help to dispel that image at the G8 summit today, using some Spanish to attempt to flag down the Italian prime minister, after having apologized for publishing a completely factual but unflattering biography of him as a politician. Mr. Bush then took his leave of the summit by saying "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter" and adding a "we're #1"-style fist-pump on the end.

Iran didn’t fare much better today. After missile launch pictures came under suspicion of a bad Photoshop job, which was later confirmed to be a bad Photoshop job, even though the fact that missiles and potentially more missiles were launched isn’t in doubt. The United States Secretary of Defense seized the opportunity to argue for the relevancy and need for the polish/Czech missile shield. The Wall Street Journal's opinion page also wants you to believe Iran is a big threat now, and that the United States needs interception sites all over the world.

Images of China's anti-terror drills and police parades in anticipation of the Olympic Games. In other words, there’s a lot of police presence there, and they’re probably not going to be shy about using it.

In Iraq, serious civil works projects are underway in Sadr City to keep the friendliness of the residents high, displaying what might be competence in the “hearts and minds” part of unifying the country under the central government.

I have to highlight the following opinion in the Wall Street Journal, because I see it as the vanguard of the new conservative position. The Wall Street Journal encourages a status of forces agreement, but suggests now that withdrawal of troops from Iraq is a positive thing, assuming that some troops stay and the timetable is agreed to by both sides. See the spin? Where it used to be “Troops in, possibly forever”, became “Watch the surge, it’s going to work” to “Surge successful, see? We need to stay to make sure, of course.” Now that the Iraqi government and people have said “You’re leaving, either by a timetable that we set or all at once.”, the rhetoric has changed to “We have confidence that the Iraqi people can maintain security, now that our successful surge has quelled the violence. We’ll have to leave behind some amount of forces, of course, just to be sure, but we can start withdrawing troops soon.” A nifty undercut of the opposition’s long-held position that American troops have needed to come out of Iraq, instead of pouring more in. It will soon be a popular conservative position to establish timetables for withdrawal and bring the troops home, under the rhetoric of “victory”, despite “Mission Accomplished” having happened more than five years ago. Iraq will have become a sign of America’s greatness and ability to both conquer and rebuild, while swiftly and violently burying the shifting justifications, half-truths and “intelligence failures” that brought about the conflict in the first place. Poisonous fruit of that vine.

If the withdrawal happens and things don’t fall apart, conservatives will claim it a victory of the current administration’s policies and the surge strategy. If it fails, liberals will be blamed for forcing a timetable and an early exit, especially if the wheels come off during a President Obama’s term. It’s a no-lose situation for the spin machine. But I’m marking this as the point where, out of necessity and the Iraqi people not budging, the idea of drawing down troops on a fixed schedule becomes an acceptable idea for conservatives to talk about.

In domestic matters, this is why you get your vaccines, godsdammit: A measles outbreak has struck 127 people over 15 states, most of whom were not vaccinated, and were thus susceptible to the disease when travelers who were infected overseas returned. While nobody has died yet on this outbreak, we wouldn’t have to worry about it if everyone were immunized against the disease.

Senator Obama takes whacks from all sides of the spectrum on his recent interview regarding late-term abortions, with the center position being a very dangerous one, not being pro-choice enough for many liberals, and not anti-choice enough for any religious conservatives he would want to court. Furthermore, on a hot microphone, but off the air, the Reverend Jesse Jackson expresses unflattering opinions of Senator Obama. The minister apologized, almost as soon as he realized what he has done, but that didn’t really stop Fox from parading the matter in front of everyone, including using Bill’O as the first person to air it. They did at least wait three days to air it, but Bill’O also implied that there was much worse stuff hidden away that didn’t get shown because they weren’t out to embarrass the reverend or make him look bad. If that really were the case, the sound bite would be buried as something said off-the-record. But faced with such a promising morsel, they couldn’t turn it down.

On the Republican side, a potential candidate for McCain's veep gets the twice-over by the General, with some possibility that Governor Crist may not be a heterosexual, despite a convenient tape showing him making out with a woman. (“I’m not gay, honest? See? Security cameras caught me making out with my girlfriend!”) In the running for a Republican office, though, all candidates must be heterosexual family-values types, lest they further fracture the already weak coalition. Would be interesting to see it happen, though - an outed homosexual in a Republican vice-president spot, if Governor Crist really is, and was willing to get both nomination and come out of the closet. I can imagine the fun from that.

In the opinion columns, Andrew Bolt makes fun of someone suffering from a serious delusion that his drinking water would kill millions by exhausting the water supply by stating that everyone who believes in anthropogenic climate change, or that small countries such as Australia can make a dent on CO2 emissions, is suffering similar delusions, including government officials.

To get the country off dependence of foreign oil, T. Boone Pickens, CEO of BP Capital, says that we'll start with wind. The wind power will replace the natural gas going into power plants, which will then displace a significant amount of our oil needs, and buy us enough time to get the other alternative energy technologies in place and generating electricity. Ten years maximum, he says. I like the plan. I’d like to see it done. Can we get the investment we need to start generating serious energy from renewable resources? Walter E. Williams calls Congress OPEC's staunchest ally, in calling for more drilling, believing that even if it takes time to extract, oil prices will fall from the threat of domestic supplies.

The Wall Street Journal sees an impending collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially if the taxpayer-backed corporations continue to be used as a place for high-risk and losing mortgage investments to be dumped from other corporations.The crash has to hit rock bottom somewhere, and if it ends up being the taxpayer who gets the short end of the stick, it will be politics as usual. Just be sure that when some company posts a record profit from having unloaded all their bad investments, that the government says, “We’ll take that, thank you for paying us back for the bad loans you unloaded on us. Next time, make better decisions.”

Speaking of spending, Michael Leavitt, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, sees competitive bidding on durable medical equipment as a litmus test for Congress on entitlement spending. Should the Congress be able to put DME services out to bid, he feels they might have the stones to make more difficult decisions about other entitlements.

In candidate opinions, Turd Blossom says Senator Obama has been copying the Bush playbook and using Nixon tactics, although he claims the Senator doesn’t have the machine the GOP does, and we all saw what happened to Nixon, right? Plus, Obama’s just the biggest flip-flopper ever, isn’t he? Ah, Karl, remember that you’re a discredited advisor to what will likely go down in history as one of the sorriest administrations in recent, and possibly long-term, history. The WSJ probably gives you space because Rupert likes you and thinks you’re doing a heckuva job. Plus, your attempt to take credit for Senator Obama’s playbook is misguided. If he’s emulating anybody, really, it’s Ron Paul’s campaign. Senator Obama noticed how well it did in fundraising and thought it would be a good idea.

Science and technology leads with robots thrashing humans at air hockey. Will there be no sport that humans can play better than robots and computers, given enough time and computing power?

A new Microsoft update may bork your Internet completely, but it seems to affect ZoneAlarm users most consistently.

The Continuum of Cute. Look at how other people ranked 100 animal pictures, or make your own ranking.

Last for tonight, Shipping Justice: The Guantanamo Bay cell on tour. Using a scaled replica of the isolation cell that many Guantanamo Bay detainees spend most of their days in, a countrywide tour aims to increase the people’s knowledge of what goes on and to get them to put pressure on the government to shut down overseas dungeons, and to realize just how potentially arbitrary jailing and “justice” really is. Add the torture and abuse on top of that, and it’s a real fun place out there, isn’t it?