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Back on the work train - 15 July 2008
Jul. 15th, 2008 11:57 pmAh, weekends. Time for getting lots of things done. Also, caught a small amoun of the “overpriced me swing big sticks” exhibition yesterday, and it was quite fun to watch.
Now, for some real news. Did you hear that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to XBox 360? Or that public nuisance Jack Thompson is facing disbarment with no chance of reinstating?
Okay, now for some actual news. Sudan's president is charged with genocide, because of Darfur violence, although an actual trial won’t happen for a while. Another possible hot spot is a disputed region between Thailand and Cambodia, with Combodia claiming Thai troops and civilians crossed into Camboidan territory. And there’s the regular amounts of Middle East weirdness, including a delayed trip because of a specific but unnamed security threat, a United States army deserter slated for deportation from Canada, and a young child being interrogated as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo. Oh, and still millions of names on the terrorist watch list. Is yours?
Praise Jeebus and pass the ammunition, right up to the point that one of the sponsors couldn’t attend, and then no gun giveaway. Right now, the “bitterly clinging to guns and religion” idea seems to be thrown aside in favor or training the army of God with semiautomatics. Which terrorists are we in more danger from, again?
Apparently, in Italy, driving while homosexual is a disease. 100,000 euros later, perhaps the government will rethink its position, after the courts ruled that requiring a man to retake his drivers test and then only relicensing him for one year because he was a homosexual constituted sexual discrimination. It’s a wonder that we haven’t seen this tried in our own country at least once.
Acting on what they've cobbled together, the Daily Mail believes it knows the identity of renowned graffiti artist Banksy. And has published their suspicions. As the Girl With A One-Track Mind notes, whether he is or isn't Banksy, the person named should sue for having his privacy disrupted for something definitely not in the public interest. Having been the recipient of a Mail outing herself, she’s of the opinion that the people don’t need to know whom every popular-but-anonymous person is.
A gent apparently cut his head off with a chainsaw rather than move from his flat. Flat was scheduled for destruction by developers, but rather than pull an Arthur Dent, the person apparently took his own life.
In domestic matters, Some kids go grave-robbin to dig up the dead and have their way with them. The courts find that the dead can’t give consent, for one, and so the grave-digging jaunt is definitely illegal. In other criminal matters, gang members break in, stabstab, then apologize when they realize they've got the wrong man. Whoops. Much more unapologetically, people are dicks on the Internet - and their dickery is getting more sophisticated.
Hey, look! Candidate scheduled to talk at 10:45, so let's have Mr. Bush put on a press conference at 10:20. Whether malice or incompetence, it certainly looks like someone has an axe to grind, don’t they? And if all that he’s going to talk about is his belief that the country's financial system is sound, and that the government will be bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and possibly more institutions as they suffer from their investments losing value, then we can all listen to the “hope and change” message. It would be an excellent sequence for Senator Obama if he could get the optimism just right.
In our opinion columns, the shine on Senator Obama has certainly worn off. Austin Cline puts him in league with many of Mr. Bush's ideas, based on his recent voting on the revised FISA-with-immunity bill, Thomas Sowell finds his ideas old and proven to not work,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks is having his last nerve frayed by the Senator's unwillingness to speak the fact that minorities are being actively screwed by whites, preferring to tell the victims that they have to work harder to succeed.
The big thing regarding the Senator, at least from my news sources, appears to be a New Yorker magazine cover. Eric Zorn wonders whether equal time will be given to anti-McCain covers, buying into the satire argument, for which Eric Milikin writes that the stuff he writes of as "equal-time" smears are actually facts about Senator McCain, and thus would not be satire, but reality. The artist defends his work, believing that the conception is ridiculous enough that it should make people laugh when they see it depicted that way, terrorist fist-bumps and all. Unfortunately for the artist, the joke falls flat, because the attempted satire is what several conservatives have been trying to paint the Senator as in all seriousness, and this gives them fuel to twist in their own special way. Not only that, it plays into media framing that paints figures according to the terms of their enemies, even if all the coverage is about refuting the factless claims. “Obama is an un-American terrorist sympathizer” may very well be the “swift-boat” narrative that conservatives use to try and instill enough doubt in the voting mind to permit either a conservative victory or a result close enough for them to steal.
More generally in election matters, David Lewis Schafer points out how the current electoral system encourages lukewarm candidates of the major parties, while trying to shoot down proposals that all electors in a state should vote for the national popularity winner, regardless of margin. While some part of me says that one-issue candidates could be a breath of fresh air for the country to hear under the NPV system, I’d rather do something like IRV - lets people vote for whom they want to, even though it likely results in major-party candidates winning anyway, because they have the most second or third rank choices. Just possibly, a third-party might end up winning because enough people really feel in line with their politics. Can dream, after all. As Liberal Eagle notes, the center is not where the media thinks it is. For one thing, Joe Liberman is not a centrist. Nor are people who have a single difference to set them apart from Mr. Bush.
Lawrence Kudlow suggsets that bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might contribute further to the Fed ruling everyone's financial lives, to the point of making the dollar worthless as the Fed tries to juggle all its financial commitments rather than working on keeping the currency stable and strong.
It's getting better in Iraq, because the planes don't can land smoothly, rather than spiral-y, according an AP writer.
Science and technology produces new ways of knocking buildings down to the ground, from the bottom up. The new method is supposedly less messy and polluting. Speaking of clean and less polluting, a Delaware church has coated their roof in solar panels, which will produce about 2/3 of the energy the church consumes annually. RAWK. Whether one believes in saving the planet or a serious reduction in one’s energy bill, public works and institutions where there’s sunny days enough to warrant them (and in some places where it may not be) should be considering things like the solar panels. The Delaware government is paying, through a program, for half of the cost of the solar panels. The Slacktivist likes and encourages this kind of church-state interaction, feeling it will pass the Lemon test. Considering we do like our churches, putting solar panels on all of them could generate quite some power. And then, on top of government buildings and other places... I wonder how much more percentage points of power solar could jump if this were the way things could work out, and it could be afforded by all those interested.
An opinion fostered by Alex Steffen and Cory Doctrow: the Outquisition, whereby people with knowledge and expertise turn back from fleeing into gated communities and insular shells and go back into the cities and out to the rural areas and into the falling-down suburbs to help rebuild them, rework them, and get them ready for the potential disasters that the future will sling at us, in case of events that disrupt our way of life sufficiently to make the way we do things now obsolete. Of course, when conservative think tanks tell us that the reason poor people make poor nutrition choices is because poor people are stupid and deliberately choose to hurt themselves, and not because the difference for many between eating for the week and only getting halfway through is the difference between choosing the absolute cheapest food regardless of nutrition and choosing to eat the healthier but more expensive options, we may not be getting much help from our Corporate Overlords on renewing the land that has already been abandoned.
Last for tonight, What is Sexy, anyway? And, some light reading for everyone. The EU's Internet Literacy Handbook, and Cory Doctrow's Little Brother.
Okay, okay, and the Muppets are going to be on display at the Smithsonian. There’s some happy news.
Now, for some real news. Did you hear that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to XBox 360? Or that public nuisance Jack Thompson is facing disbarment with no chance of reinstating?
Okay, now for some actual news. Sudan's president is charged with genocide, because of Darfur violence, although an actual trial won’t happen for a while. Another possible hot spot is a disputed region between Thailand and Cambodia, with Combodia claiming Thai troops and civilians crossed into Camboidan territory. And there’s the regular amounts of Middle East weirdness, including a delayed trip because of a specific but unnamed security threat, a United States army deserter slated for deportation from Canada, and a young child being interrogated as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo. Oh, and still millions of names on the terrorist watch list. Is yours?
Praise Jeebus and pass the ammunition, right up to the point that one of the sponsors couldn’t attend, and then no gun giveaway. Right now, the “bitterly clinging to guns and religion” idea seems to be thrown aside in favor or training the army of God with semiautomatics. Which terrorists are we in more danger from, again?
Apparently, in Italy, driving while homosexual is a disease. 100,000 euros later, perhaps the government will rethink its position, after the courts ruled that requiring a man to retake his drivers test and then only relicensing him for one year because he was a homosexual constituted sexual discrimination. It’s a wonder that we haven’t seen this tried in our own country at least once.
Acting on what they've cobbled together, the Daily Mail believes it knows the identity of renowned graffiti artist Banksy. And has published their suspicions. As the Girl With A One-Track Mind notes, whether he is or isn't Banksy, the person named should sue for having his privacy disrupted for something definitely not in the public interest. Having been the recipient of a Mail outing herself, she’s of the opinion that the people don’t need to know whom every popular-but-anonymous person is.
A gent apparently cut his head off with a chainsaw rather than move from his flat. Flat was scheduled for destruction by developers, but rather than pull an Arthur Dent, the person apparently took his own life.
In domestic matters, Some kids go grave-robbin to dig up the dead and have their way with them. The courts find that the dead can’t give consent, for one, and so the grave-digging jaunt is definitely illegal. In other criminal matters, gang members break in, stabstab, then apologize when they realize they've got the wrong man. Whoops. Much more unapologetically, people are dicks on the Internet - and their dickery is getting more sophisticated.
Hey, look! Candidate scheduled to talk at 10:45, so let's have Mr. Bush put on a press conference at 10:20. Whether malice or incompetence, it certainly looks like someone has an axe to grind, don’t they? And if all that he’s going to talk about is his belief that the country's financial system is sound, and that the government will be bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and possibly more institutions as they suffer from their investments losing value, then we can all listen to the “hope and change” message. It would be an excellent sequence for Senator Obama if he could get the optimism just right.
In our opinion columns, the shine on Senator Obama has certainly worn off. Austin Cline puts him in league with many of Mr. Bush's ideas, based on his recent voting on the revised FISA-with-immunity bill, Thomas Sowell finds his ideas old and proven to not work,
bradhicks is having his last nerve frayed by the Senator's unwillingness to speak the fact that minorities are being actively screwed by whites, preferring to tell the victims that they have to work harder to succeed.The big thing regarding the Senator, at least from my news sources, appears to be a New Yorker magazine cover. Eric Zorn wonders whether equal time will be given to anti-McCain covers, buying into the satire argument, for which Eric Milikin writes that the stuff he writes of as "equal-time" smears are actually facts about Senator McCain, and thus would not be satire, but reality. The artist defends his work, believing that the conception is ridiculous enough that it should make people laugh when they see it depicted that way, terrorist fist-bumps and all. Unfortunately for the artist, the joke falls flat, because the attempted satire is what several conservatives have been trying to paint the Senator as in all seriousness, and this gives them fuel to twist in their own special way. Not only that, it plays into media framing that paints figures according to the terms of their enemies, even if all the coverage is about refuting the factless claims. “Obama is an un-American terrorist sympathizer” may very well be the “swift-boat” narrative that conservatives use to try and instill enough doubt in the voting mind to permit either a conservative victory or a result close enough for them to steal.
More generally in election matters, David Lewis Schafer points out how the current electoral system encourages lukewarm candidates of the major parties, while trying to shoot down proposals that all electors in a state should vote for the national popularity winner, regardless of margin. While some part of me says that one-issue candidates could be a breath of fresh air for the country to hear under the NPV system, I’d rather do something like IRV - lets people vote for whom they want to, even though it likely results in major-party candidates winning anyway, because they have the most second or third rank choices. Just possibly, a third-party might end up winning because enough people really feel in line with their politics. Can dream, after all. As Liberal Eagle notes, the center is not where the media thinks it is. For one thing, Joe Liberman is not a centrist. Nor are people who have a single difference to set them apart from Mr. Bush.
Lawrence Kudlow suggsets that bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might contribute further to the Fed ruling everyone's financial lives, to the point of making the dollar worthless as the Fed tries to juggle all its financial commitments rather than working on keeping the currency stable and strong.
It's getting better in Iraq, because the planes don't can land smoothly, rather than spiral-y, according an AP writer.
Science and technology produces new ways of knocking buildings down to the ground, from the bottom up. The new method is supposedly less messy and polluting. Speaking of clean and less polluting, a Delaware church has coated their roof in solar panels, which will produce about 2/3 of the energy the church consumes annually. RAWK. Whether one believes in saving the planet or a serious reduction in one’s energy bill, public works and institutions where there’s sunny days enough to warrant them (and in some places where it may not be) should be considering things like the solar panels. The Delaware government is paying, through a program, for half of the cost of the solar panels. The Slacktivist likes and encourages this kind of church-state interaction, feeling it will pass the Lemon test. Considering we do like our churches, putting solar panels on all of them could generate quite some power. And then, on top of government buildings and other places... I wonder how much more percentage points of power solar could jump if this were the way things could work out, and it could be afforded by all those interested.
An opinion fostered by Alex Steffen and Cory Doctrow: the Outquisition, whereby people with knowledge and expertise turn back from fleeing into gated communities and insular shells and go back into the cities and out to the rural areas and into the falling-down suburbs to help rebuild them, rework them, and get them ready for the potential disasters that the future will sling at us, in case of events that disrupt our way of life sufficiently to make the way we do things now obsolete. Of course, when conservative think tanks tell us that the reason poor people make poor nutrition choices is because poor people are stupid and deliberately choose to hurt themselves, and not because the difference for many between eating for the week and only getting halfway through is the difference between choosing the absolute cheapest food regardless of nutrition and choosing to eat the healthier but more expensive options, we may not be getting much help from our Corporate Overlords on renewing the land that has already been abandoned.
Last for tonight, What is Sexy, anyway? And, some light reading for everyone. The EU's Internet Literacy Handbook, and Cory Doctrow's Little Brother.
Okay, okay, and the Muppets are going to be on display at the Smithsonian. There’s some happy news.
