![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yes, yes. Surpassing Mark Spitz, Michael Phelps makes history with a tally of eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics, generating a new world record time in seven of the eight. Mark Spitz was not on hand to see it, because nobody invited him to come. For this, and other fun things, have a look at the Olympic medal map, which shows off just how good the countries were doing at any given modern games.
Jumping to the front of the headlines, the “Wait, WHAT?” department has come up with the family or a slain homosexual student suing the school for letting their son express himself in feminine clothes and makeup, instead of rigidly enforcing the dress code. The family is suing because the school did what schools are supposed to do in letting their students express themselves in a supposedly safe environment. They would have preferred unthinking enforcement of a dress code that probably wouldn’t care about the gender identity of the student, just the biological gender. The article says nothing about how the family felt about the student’s homosexuality, but really, it sounds kind of like the family is trying to place blame on as many people as possible, instead of focusing on the person that did the shooting, especially if they think it was motivated by the victim’s clothing and makeup choices.
That sounds familiar. It sounds like... putting a woman in jail because she was raped, at least with a similar “blame-the-victim” mentality. Oh, speaking of something like this, Peter Hitchens does a pretty good rape apologetic, saying that women who drink are at least partially responsible for their own rapes, decrying the decline of "sexual morality", and totally ignoring the fact that rape is not something the victim chooses to have done, and complaining about the compensation decision reported on earlier in the month. For which Shakespeare's sister rightly rips Hitchens several new assholes, because he obviously has far too much shit to spew out just one.
Happier than the preceding, Ellen Degeneres is reported to have wed Portia de Rossi in California. And the world continued to turn, and the sun came up again, and the rain fell (at least up here) on the just and the unjust... and MI5 is trying harder to recruit more homosexuals and encourage current recruits to be more open about their sexual orientation.
Internationally, Pakistan's president resigns ahead of an impeachment threat.
Another kiddie porn ring broken up after a central node for images is arrested. That they’re making an analogy to a librarian is not helpful to my profession, nor does it seems particularly accurate. Thus, “central node”, or if really necessary to tie it to a profession, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “archivist”? Most likely because of arrests like these, or telling the populace that they should want to generate more arrests like these, the United Kingdom Government is proposing even more data snooping and mining. And if they should turn up that your child is obese, then they might take your kid into state care.
On a much more positive note, using SMS, an air traffic controller was able to talk a pilot down for an emergency landing after all the plane's electronics failed. Cool. Coverage everywhere. Hopefully, no citations for “flying while distracted”, if there are laws about the use of mobile devices in planes and such.
An Australian mayor is refusing to apologize for asking that less beautiful women move to his town. He's asking because there are about five men to one woman in the area. In microcosm, what will probably be happening in China through the one-child policy. Still, for those that don’t feel the prettiest, or would like to have a lot of eligible bachelors around, the mining town might be a good destination.
Domestically, one of the basic parts of personal economics - using debt to pay debt generates more debt in interest and fees. Not that some of these loans should have been done in the first place, considering how many of the mortgage loans were done because everyone thought housing prices were only going up.
And then, the deportation of children along with their parents, but also the children left behind when the parents are deported. And they may be the lucky ones. Allegations of children as young as nine are being held in United States-run Iraqi prisons, ostensibly because the children are all IED makers.
A quick candidate note - Senator McCain came out unequivocally against women's rights to choose, saying that life begins at conception.
In our opinion realms, why games and gamers will have to shed trolls if they want to continue - the wave of casual gamers to the on-line play realms is changing the demographic, and now there are enough people on-line that if someone calls you a fag or starts making harassing comments, you can kickban, exclude, and find plenty of other people to play with somewhere else. It’s becoming more civilized - adapt or log off. And if the “hardcore” gamer segment still thinks that trolling and insulting is par for the course, and an acceptable way of talking to everyone, well, then they’ll die out. We are kind of hoping that the convention circuit for genre material would pick up on this, too, but right now, it looks like some reminders and official policies that harassing behavior is not going to be tolerated are needed to get the ball rolling on this.
Andrew Moylan suggests that domestic drilling will generate lower taxes for us, as more revenue from lease sales and royalties will then permit others to avoid the Alternative Minimum Tax. Because, y’know, we can think about tax decreases or alternatives while we’re still deficit-spending as much as possible to finance the land wars in Asia. When we have surpluses of revenue and can basically pay for the expenses of the government for a few years, too, then we can talk about relieving tax burdens for the people. Maybe when we’ve got the debt paid down or off... maybe. Of course, if![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks has his analysis right, our frantic oil investments will come on-line... just as oil prices drop lots, bankrupting all the oil investment companies and the country. Maybe we should invest in more stable resources.
Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, takes al-Jazeera to task for their positive coverage of the release of Samir Kuntar. Kuntar was convicted of several counts of murder, with a sentence of 542 years, and was apparently unremorseful for his actions and praised events such as the assassination of Anwar Sedat.
Scitech offers an automated method for replacing faces with others, designed ideally so that people photographed by Google Street View cameras or others can retain their anonymity by having their faces replaced with stock photo faces. Beyond that, persistent air pollution may contribute to lung problems and lung cancer. So, like, cleaning up the air and the planet is worthwhile, right? For those concerned with law enforcement or military applications of science, it looks like the brain is the new battleground, for hopping up one's own soldiers and incapacitating and drawing information from others. Assuming it isn’t the Internet, where the United States government is still unprepared for cyberattacks and cracking.
Chevy says they're planning on getting the all-electric Volt finalized by September, and producing plenty of prototypes by the end of the year. This could potentially bring prices down, if the car is affordable and does as promised.
Additional material with a religious theme, includes a group claiming that their prayer has resulted in the reduction of gasoline prices, visiting perhaps the only scholarly demonologist in America. I wonder what his opinion is about the English Catholic pastor who claims promiscuity of any sort can lead to demonic possession, through “a contagious demonic factor”. There are also the more standard claims that reproductive science and religions and spiritual practices not-monotheistic are also pathways for possession and becoming the agent of evil. So would he consider the pastor who sent inappropriate texts and pictures of himself to a 14 year-old girl and kissed a 13 year-old girl to be demonically possessed? Especially when he denies what he did, after apparently admitting it, and saying the media is out to get him?
Last for tonight, happier things, like cats leading blind and deaf dogs, The Vader Project, a method by which the iconic helmet of Darth Vader gets a remix by several artists, leading to several Star Wars vehicles around and about San Francisco, Prince of All Cosmos infant headwear, and an Alien movie-themed pair of chess boards. And at the very tail end, Sandman from the Schulz perspective.
Jumping to the front of the headlines, the “Wait, WHAT?” department has come up with the family or a slain homosexual student suing the school for letting their son express himself in feminine clothes and makeup, instead of rigidly enforcing the dress code. The family is suing because the school did what schools are supposed to do in letting their students express themselves in a supposedly safe environment. They would have preferred unthinking enforcement of a dress code that probably wouldn’t care about the gender identity of the student, just the biological gender. The article says nothing about how the family felt about the student’s homosexuality, but really, it sounds kind of like the family is trying to place blame on as many people as possible, instead of focusing on the person that did the shooting, especially if they think it was motivated by the victim’s clothing and makeup choices.
That sounds familiar. It sounds like... putting a woman in jail because she was raped, at least with a similar “blame-the-victim” mentality. Oh, speaking of something like this, Peter Hitchens does a pretty good rape apologetic, saying that women who drink are at least partially responsible for their own rapes, decrying the decline of "sexual morality", and totally ignoring the fact that rape is not something the victim chooses to have done, and complaining about the compensation decision reported on earlier in the month. For which Shakespeare's sister rightly rips Hitchens several new assholes, because he obviously has far too much shit to spew out just one.
Happier than the preceding, Ellen Degeneres is reported to have wed Portia de Rossi in California. And the world continued to turn, and the sun came up again, and the rain fell (at least up here) on the just and the unjust... and MI5 is trying harder to recruit more homosexuals and encourage current recruits to be more open about their sexual orientation.
Internationally, Pakistan's president resigns ahead of an impeachment threat.
Another kiddie porn ring broken up after a central node for images is arrested. That they’re making an analogy to a librarian is not helpful to my profession, nor does it seems particularly accurate. Thus, “central node”, or if really necessary to tie it to a profession, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “archivist”? Most likely because of arrests like these, or telling the populace that they should want to generate more arrests like these, the United Kingdom Government is proposing even more data snooping and mining. And if they should turn up that your child is obese, then they might take your kid into state care.
On a much more positive note, using SMS, an air traffic controller was able to talk a pilot down for an emergency landing after all the plane's electronics failed. Cool. Coverage everywhere. Hopefully, no citations for “flying while distracted”, if there are laws about the use of mobile devices in planes and such.
An Australian mayor is refusing to apologize for asking that less beautiful women move to his town. He's asking because there are about five men to one woman in the area. In microcosm, what will probably be happening in China through the one-child policy. Still, for those that don’t feel the prettiest, or would like to have a lot of eligible bachelors around, the mining town might be a good destination.
Domestically, one of the basic parts of personal economics - using debt to pay debt generates more debt in interest and fees. Not that some of these loans should have been done in the first place, considering how many of the mortgage loans were done because everyone thought housing prices were only going up.
And then, the deportation of children along with their parents, but also the children left behind when the parents are deported. And they may be the lucky ones. Allegations of children as young as nine are being held in United States-run Iraqi prisons, ostensibly because the children are all IED makers.
A quick candidate note - Senator McCain came out unequivocally against women's rights to choose, saying that life begins at conception.
In our opinion realms, why games and gamers will have to shed trolls if they want to continue - the wave of casual gamers to the on-line play realms is changing the demographic, and now there are enough people on-line that if someone calls you a fag or starts making harassing comments, you can kickban, exclude, and find plenty of other people to play with somewhere else. It’s becoming more civilized - adapt or log off. And if the “hardcore” gamer segment still thinks that trolling and insulting is par for the course, and an acceptable way of talking to everyone, well, then they’ll die out. We are kind of hoping that the convention circuit for genre material would pick up on this, too, but right now, it looks like some reminders and official policies that harassing behavior is not going to be tolerated are needed to get the ball rolling on this.
Andrew Moylan suggests that domestic drilling will generate lower taxes for us, as more revenue from lease sales and royalties will then permit others to avoid the Alternative Minimum Tax. Because, y’know, we can think about tax decreases or alternatives while we’re still deficit-spending as much as possible to finance the land wars in Asia. When we have surpluses of revenue and can basically pay for the expenses of the government for a few years, too, then we can talk about relieving tax burdens for the people. Maybe when we’ve got the debt paid down or off... maybe. Of course, if
bradhicks has his analysis right, our frantic oil investments will come on-line... just as oil prices drop lots, bankrupting all the oil investment companies and the country. Maybe we should invest in more stable resources.Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, takes al-Jazeera to task for their positive coverage of the release of Samir Kuntar. Kuntar was convicted of several counts of murder, with a sentence of 542 years, and was apparently unremorseful for his actions and praised events such as the assassination of Anwar Sedat.
Scitech offers an automated method for replacing faces with others, designed ideally so that people photographed by Google Street View cameras or others can retain their anonymity by having their faces replaced with stock photo faces. Beyond that, persistent air pollution may contribute to lung problems and lung cancer. So, like, cleaning up the air and the planet is worthwhile, right? For those concerned with law enforcement or military applications of science, it looks like the brain is the new battleground, for hopping up one's own soldiers and incapacitating and drawing information from others. Assuming it isn’t the Internet, where the United States government is still unprepared for cyberattacks and cracking.
Chevy says they're planning on getting the all-electric Volt finalized by September, and producing plenty of prototypes by the end of the year. This could potentially bring prices down, if the car is affordable and does as promised.
Additional material with a religious theme, includes a group claiming that their prayer has resulted in the reduction of gasoline prices, visiting perhaps the only scholarly demonologist in America. I wonder what his opinion is about the English Catholic pastor who claims promiscuity of any sort can lead to demonic possession, through “a contagious demonic factor”. There are also the more standard claims that reproductive science and religions and spiritual practices not-monotheistic are also pathways for possession and becoming the agent of evil. So would he consider the pastor who sent inappropriate texts and pictures of himself to a 14 year-old girl and kissed a 13 year-old girl to be demonically possessed? Especially when he denies what he did, after apparently admitting it, and saying the media is out to get him?
Last for tonight, happier things, like cats leading blind and deaf dogs, The Vader Project, a method by which the iconic helmet of Darth Vader gets a remix by several artists, leading to several Star Wars vehicles around and about San Francisco, Prince of All Cosmos infant headwear, and an Alien movie-themed pair of chess boards. And at the very tail end, Sandman from the Schulz perspective.
