Our stuff is interesting.... isn't it? - 23 July 2008

Before beginning, we note the existence of The Improv Encyclopedia, which is available for free to everyone, and is a repository of improv-style games that help break ice, build trust, and help with theater and drama as well.

And now, n00s.

Internationally, North Korea has demanded that the United States stop being hostile toward it, apparently wanting to move up the timetable of getting taken of the state-sponsored terror list and to get into a happier relation with the United States... by demanding that the U.S. abandon a goal to destroy them, apparently. That’s weird.

Furthermore, welcome to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Part II. Currently anyonmously sourced, it has been suggested that Russia would station nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba if the United States continued to build its missile defense shield in Poland and/or the Czech Republic. We did this sort of thing once before, and we got lucky that nobody decided to launch a strike. If this is true, are we going to be able to pull it off again, or are we going to get frakked?

I’ll bet the following gets spun as “meeting a benchmark” by the current administration, but the Iraqi government okayed October 1 for an election date, causing a significant section of the Kurdish faction to storm out of the building, probably delaying the process until the beginning of next year. Benchmark met, no doubt, but not in any effective fashion.

More in Iraq and Afghanistan, things have gone on long enough that about half of the British troops are ready to leave the military.

One of the world's most wanted war criminals proved that all it took was some facial hair to wander freely. Well, and then he got caught, so it wasn’t quite good enough, but still, he was working as an alternative medicine practitioner right under their noses.

The chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration says "Illegal drugs fund terrorists, mmkay?" Where this could be used as a reason to legalize and regulate drug usage and provide assistance to those who need to get off of truly dangerous drugs, more likely it will be used as a hammer to try and stomp out all drug usage (that isn’t preceded by a prescription, anyway).

Another construction vehicle used as a weapon to attack others. The armament and armor on the vehicle does kind of make it a decebt battlewagon, especially if it can use other vehicles and things as shields while it rampages. Of course, having seen it once before, the citizens and police were much faster at shooting the driver to stop the attack. People do learn from previous situations.

The hurricanes are at it again, with Dolly taking a bite out of Texas and Mexico.

Sliding into the opinion columns, much like Elwood does to parallel park, Thomas Sowell blames government for creating the economic crisis it is claiming it can fix, because lenders were forced by the government to make bad investments in bad neighborhoods to avoid charges of discrimination. The media are, of course, complicit in all of this because they played up the “whites approved more than blacks” angle while neglecting the individual factors, and the “Asian-Americans approved more than whites” angle. Everyone’s to blame, dpeending on who you read. Government, for forcing bad loans, lenders, for writing them in rapacious terms, and individuals, for greedily accepting them based on their desire to keep up with the Hiltons, they’re all to blame. Oh, except for the rich. The rich have their income share grow, considering their taxes went down, which probably caused the conclusion that their share of taxes they paid increased. Tricksy statistics...

Speaking thereof, the Measure Of America released some factoids from their report, many of which are quite sobering by themselves. Ah, and when looking at an ingredient label, theings like "fragrance" could very well be a combination of potentially dangerous chemicals, supposedly in trace, non-toxic amounts, and there’s no disclosure about that at all.

Ed Feulner wants the branches of the government to do some Constitutional reading before the next election, so they can remember what their actual duties are, and not overstep them or expect another branch to do what they should rightly be doing. Which would mean Congress as the sole originator of law, with the President only giving it a yes-or-no vote, and the Supreme Court making narrow decisions about specific cases, and probably only rarely making broader decisions about interpretation of the law. A much more separated government to be sure, but one potentially prone to problems, unless somewhere along the way we’ve decided that it doesn’t requires a court case before the Supreme Court can knock a signed law down for constitutionality. At least, that’s the first problem I’m envisioning - several years through appeals before one bad and obviously bad law can be tanked, because it muscled through the Congress and had a friendly President.

Karin Agness tells us that NOW has become a radically fringe organization that sees sexism around any corner, needing superwomen to fight the patriarchy everywhere, because it exists everywhere, including media and the way that women are told their bodies aren’t good enough, regardless of what their body looks like. I’d be more inclined to believe Agness if there weren’t stories like the ones ranted on before, where it definitely sounds like a “men know best” attitude is imposed on women.

Alan Caruba considers NATO to be an alliance that has long since become obsolete, and is now being used as a way of making American troops protect Europe, instead fo their own troops. Well, no Soviet Union, certainly, but a defense alliance could still be useful, even if where you consider the “threat” coming from has changed.

Comedian David Limbaugh starts the candidates off with a whoomp, calling Senator Obama an appeasing lucky chowder-headed unapologetic surrender monkey, thinking that the Senator should be slinking around in shame at his obvious mistake in opposing the wildly successful Iraq war and it’s equally successful troop surge, rather than getting a sense of what’s on the ground and cordially agreeing with the Iraqi prime minister on the position the Iraqi government has always held. Oh, and he’s also wrong about the need to talk to Iran, rather than blast it technologically to the Middle Ages that many of its clerics have trouble getting out of ideologically. Dennis Prager suspects it will be Israel pulling the trigger, as a pre-emptive strike against Iranian capaciity to hit them with nuclear weapons. Cal Thomas piles on, calling the Senator naive on national security issues without actually saying so, and trying to convicne people that they can’t “gamble” on the Senator’s record in the current time, because of great unspoken consequences that will result. Guy Benson says the Senator has a thin skin when personally attacked, but lacks rage and anger for when people attack America, a dangerous quality in Benson’s eyes, because it means the Senator wouldn’t dash headlong into retaliation and land wars in Asia.

Science and Technology presents: Ken Ham and Kent Hovind's newest magazine cover. In actual science and technology, a plastic that shapeshifts depending on light frequencies, allowing it to drive a motor without the need to first convert the light to electricity, GM and state utilities starting to build an infrastructure to support plug-in electric cars (and apparently, getting America off foreign oil dependence is popular, on both sides of the spectrum - this couldn’t have come out of a vaccuum. Apparently, now it’s in vogue to say that oil dependence means funding terrorism on the right, even as they pooh-pooh environmental consequences from the left. Weird.), transistors that work using paper instead of metal for their interstrate layer, more thoughts about high-rises used as farms rather than office buildings, and cadavers donated to science that are being used to test impacts and stresses for the Orion capsule.

Also, the possibility that science needs to evolve to explain UFOs, rather than UFOs needing to fit current science. Posthuman Blues agrees, reminding us that science is interested in correct answers, some of which may not be the simplest answers.

Selling putty as a microscopic keyboard cleaner. Does it work? Will it blend? And really, who would buy this? Would they be sold on this 1960s ad for rice, too?

Last for tonight, our Worst Persons awards, including flaming quiche to the face. Deserving of an honorable mention are the homeowner's association members who forbid clotheslines in their yards, claiming that it makes cookie-cutter subdivisions look lik "lower-class neighborhood". And also, the response to problems with Fat Princess, a rescue-the-damsel game that has a mechanic where in addition to trying to rescue your own captured damsel, you can feed your prisoner, who never says no, and the fatter she gets, the more people there will need to move her to safety. After some concerns about whether this was reinforcing negative stereotypes about fat people, the trolls came out of the woodwork. Suffice it to say, our Unabashed Feminism department is all over it, initial drama, concern trolling, and all.

Almost to the award-winning state is The Roman Catholic Church, who claims that women ordained in a ceremony today are invalid and excommunicate, because they're women trying to be priests, and the bishops that ordained the priests that ordained the first of the women priests are also excommunicate, because everyone knows that women can’t be priests in Catholicism, despite women serving an impressive role in the spread and preservation of the Christian religion when it was not as favored as it is today, despite several prominent women in the Christian Foundational Writings, one of which Catholics venerate as an intercessor with the being named by the Tetragrammaton, and despite that in the childrearing role, women are ussually the people who pass on the teachings of

One of our winners for today is Star Parker, who believes that if you let openly gay persons serve in the military, then the slippery slope slides on down to the point where we're all moral relativists and have no compasses or senses of what's right or wrong, with all our traditional, moral, upstanding values that make this country great eroded away and, bizzarely, the people’s sense of individual responsibility destroyed as well. All because if you let a gay serve in the military, then he’ll ask for some benefits, and then to marry, and then to raise children, and everything good and decent about the country will be steamrolled as the gays indoctrinate everyone into believing their wicked, sinful lifestyle is a-okay. Parker would find an ally in Chuck Colson's complaint that people will be forced to renounce their religious beliefs, because Human Rights Commissions will fine them every time they speak their belief that homosexuality is wrong or that Islam is dangerous.

Speaking of homosexual baiting and bashing, having not learned their lesson from the last time they portrayed men kissing (accidentally) as unacceptably nonmasculine, Mars, Inc. has made Mr. T the arbiter of manliness, exhorting male racewalkers to "get some nuts" and calling them "a disgrace to the man race". If one wishes to remove Mars products from one’s life in protest, Wikipedia has a list of all the Mars, Inc. properties. For those looking to contact the Snickers division, their contact information is here.

And, of course, the list of the ten most challenged books in America for the past year, of which the top book is a book about penguins. And the rest all seem to have trouble with the whole sexuality thing, or promoting a religious viewpoint that’s not conservative Christianity. And your public library has all of them, and continues to maintain its dedication to the idea that all libraries should have something that offends you inside.

But there’s a co-winner of worsts in this nightmare. Michael Savage described autism as a racket, with "99 percent of the cases [are] a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out", apparently fueled by greedy doctors who want to overdiagnose the cause as autism, when in Savage’s opinion, all they need is a male father figure to tell them to not “act like a moron...Stop being a putz...Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.” amenquohi, who actually has an autistic child, notes that it took six months of observation to get the diagnosis, and that once diagnosed and getting proper treatment, her child has improved by leaps and bounds. After getting mounds of correspondence already about the message and remarks, TRN released a statement saying "No, he didn't mean that, really, but because he had to get it down to a small amount of time, the nuances and subtleties of his reamerks were lost.", and so will not be taking disciplinary action against him. Furthermore, they state that they feel some part of the campaign to discipline Savage is a political hatchet job started by Media Matters to take remarks out of context, and suggest www.savageonautism.com to “view a representative sampling of Dr. Savage’s views, as well as the applicable issues, in true context.” For those who want to contact Talk Radio Network and voice their displeasure with Savage’s remarks, here's the network's contact information. Doubtful that they’ll do anything, though, as they seem determined to dismiss everyone as Media Matters flunkies with axes to grind.

And on that note, off to bed we go. They’ll still be there in the morning, I assure you.