What a weekend - 15 September 2008

What a weekend. In addition to all your eloquent material, the weekend has some great news and some terrible news.

Internationally and domestically, more banks, including Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual, tumble, teeter, die, go bankrupt, and are bought up by competitors for pittances. Economy’s still growing, though, so we’re still good, apparently. And our real incomes have jumped up over time, so we’re still doing fine. Assuming cost of living increases haven’t eaten us alive, that is, and our house didn’t turn worthless, and other such things.

The Saudi clerics have quite the interesting pairing today - one says it's okay to kill the owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral" content, another says that anyone doing horoscopes is a "sorceror" and should be killed. If that went through, I’m pretty sure we’d find out how few people would be left in the country. Unfortunately, they’re matched by a football riot in Congo that killed 13 after one of the players was accused of practicing witchcraft. And there’s the footnote that apparently, the great Stonehenege was not intended to be seen by the peons. All of this reflects a worldview that probably isn't the kind most people want to see or be a part of, and the more thy proclaim their worldview, the farther to the right of the spectrum you can guess it is.

The current administration gave approval for U.S. forces to raid into Pakistan after their targets, for which Pakistan counter-orders that any invading U.S. troops are to be killed.

Muslim militants have claimed responsibility for a series of explosions in New Delhi. 18 dead and many wounded so far in a coordinated strike.

The Iraqi police force is training women to combat a tendency to utilize females for carrying and using explosives. Many men scoff at the idea of women on the police force, of course, but they’re also just as unwilling to violate the taboos about seeing the female body, so something had to give somewhere.

If nothing else, Australian politicians are fairly honest - the New South Wales police minister denied that he had said that he was tit-f**king a female MP's mother, but did not deny that he was dancing in his underwear and performing a simulated sex act on the MP. The minister has since tendered his resignation.

The candidate matters have plenty to discuss. Senator McCain is accused of using his political influence to stop the Drug Enforcement Agency from investigating his wife's stealing of prescription drugs from her charity organization. A form sent out by the McCain campaigh in Ohio to request absentee ballots has a checbox for the voter to mark their eligibility. No box checked, not eligible, bad application, says the Democratic SoS. Let the disenfranchisement games begin.

This sounds familiar. Have we seen it before... groups selling "Obama waffles" that paint the candidate in a negative and stereotypical light, apparently being sold at a “Values Voter” summit sponsored by the Family Research Council. Did this happen in the last election with Seantor Kerry?

In opinions of the candidates, the professor at Musings & Migraines details a good speech for Senator Obama that would get his point across - the Republicans are not the party of change, they’ve been actively trying to screw you over for the last eight years, and that if you want the hurting to stop, elect the Democrat. Austin Cline concurs, saying that the Republican Party requries having enough scandals involving graft and favorable treatment that the corporations stay happy (until discovered, anyway), but not so many that the small-government wing of the party can't claim that less government is needed to fix the problem. Thomas Friedman finds the Republican focus on oil to be backward and supporting of oil dependency, rather than trying to overcome it. John Farrell notes that the things that made John McCain an appealing candidate are the things he's been abandoning to get back into conservative orthodoxy.

More about our esteemed Governor from Alaska and the sudden resurgence of religious conservatism to Republican politics - A Baptist minister in a town near Governor Palin's Wasilla says we should be afraid of her ascension, should it come to pass, based on the way she treated one of his books, and the general climate of the Palin-folk taking over all the local offices and making them in the praise-Jeezis mold. She's certainly willing to point out her belief in the Godly mission of the troops. Suzanne Fields feels the Governor will get new populations to vote for her (is that “even if the guy who will be President is a lout, so we hope he dies quickly?”), as does Matt Tower, while Cathy Young offers yet another possible reason why feminists hate Sarah Palin's successful life. Pat Buchanan is concerned about the Roe decision, and sees electing the pro-life candidate as a necessity so that he can appoint judges to overturn it. And speaking of the conservative religious crowd, while they heartily endorse Palin, they probably wouldn't support any woman in any position of authority in their church structure, because woman are supposed to be subservient to men. Hey... maybe that’s why they can support Palin - she’s only going to be Vice-President, and thus properly has an old man who knows what’s best for her over her in terms of authority?

Kicking back at the other side, Mona Charen accuses the Obama health care plan of wanting to destroy private insurance, so that we find ourselves in a situation like other single-payer countries have, with long waits and poor services. Charles Krauthammer feels the Obama star is fading, and that he will lose because he couldn't be the celebrity candidate all the way to the end, and Burt Prelutsky pulls off the kid gloves in his mockery of Senator Obama.

In non-candidate opinions, Miek Gallagher drums the beat of 9/11, saying we’ve already forgotten it and its impact. L. Gordon Crovitz thinks intelligence services still need to improve vastly to combat still-unknown and un-executed plots.

The WSJ believes that it's found poster-states on why increases in taxes don't balance budgets by themsleves, John fund comments on someone who wants to build lots of solar power stations without the environmental impact studies that precede building stuff as a way of quickly reducing oil dependence. Forserious, though, if we were going to forego the regs, most people would be building coal and oil plants and refineries, not solar.

Debra J. Saunders revisits one of the conundrums of the American society - old enough to vote, to sign up to get killed in a foreign land, to smoke, but not old enough to drink. Might be time to reverse Reagan’s machinations and bring the drinking age back down to 18. Or, at the very least, if we must have it so that high school seniors aren’t permitted to legally drink and/or buy, 19. Another set of opinions about the young, on the Freakonomics Blog, several people weigh in about what sex was like 30 years ago, will be like in 30 years, and what the ideal view of sex should be. Very interesting to see.

Last out of the opinions department, The children is not learning their history and civics... possibly because they’re not being tested on them for NCLB, and possibly because civic literacy is not any sort of priority for any political party looking to get elected or any elected candidate looking to do stuff he shouldn’t be able to.

In science and technology, a photograph of what could be a planet orbiting a Sol-like star. Unconfirmed whether it actualy is a planet in orbit - and it’ll be a while before we can confirm or deny. Tack onto that an unidentified object appearing in Hubble's view, something that wasn’t there before, and that they’re not completely sure what it is, either.

And then, spammer's conviction overturned, with ruling that the law used to convict is overbroad - the conviction based on using a false name was considered stifling of free and anonymous speech. So I guess we’ll have to try again and make sure that commercial unsolicited e-mail is outlawed or something.

Additionally, hackers infiltrating the LHC's computer systems, draft proposals to track every Internet communication back to its source, in a uniquely-identifiable manner, which would basically kill any form of anonymity on the ‘Net, unless one were willingly or able to use someone else’s IP to do the transmitting with. Like, say, if one had botnets. 3M's pocket projector, moving from texting to video snippets to keep in touch, broadcasting from the cell phone, a musing as to why anyone would put a biodefense lab in the middle of a populated area with potentially volitaile weather, and proposals for gigabit WiFi, yo.

Ah, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. For here, at the end, we can say, that today, September 15, 2008 George Takei and Brad Altman are married, and that probably makes them both the Happiest Men in the world today. That’s the light part. If you want to not read the shadow, stop here. The shadow to that is a Denver policeman who declined to take a report of the incident or arrest the attacker when a homosexual was assaulted in the city and subdued his attacker. That it can’t necessarily be prosecuted as a hate crime doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be prosecuted.

And very last - origami burgers.

Dashing away - 17 September 2008

Internationally, The Bishop of Rome urged his followers to accept death "at the hour chosen by God", speaking out against euthanasia and acknowledging, if only indirectly, that those who die young, in pain, of easily preventable diseases, etc. are doing so because it is the hour appointed them by God. In a lot of ways, that would say God is quite a dick. With the explanation that everyone is a sinner and thus doomed to suffer through life, though, it probably makes a lot of people feel better about why the world hasn't put their foot down and helped everyone get to a point where they have the basic necessities.

Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, has died at 65. The cycle of time goes on, and all those who we used to listen to aren't around or available anymore...

The United States is selling bunker-buster bombs to Israel, possibly helping them arm themselves before fulfilling a promise to knock over Iranian nuclear facilities before they produced a weapon.

In politics, Cynicism is now one of the greatest threats to democracy, according to a new study by the London School of Economics. No mention made of the things that cause the cynicism, lke nepotism, cronyism, corruption, graft, trying to present the same thing as two different things, fraud, hypocrisy, scandal, and all of that. Of course cynicism is the real threat. It's not anything like PMCs that feed on the national budget, making more money and doing more services for war efforts than the soldiers and generals do.

In other domestic matters, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike is proving to be worse than the actual storm, as power is still out, food is spoiling, and people are stuck where they are, waiting for assistance and for services to be restored.

The Fed is bailing out AIG to the tune of several billions of dollars, so some will die and some will live, and hopefully, things don't collapse too poorly.

Candidate matters - After hearing about it on NPR and now seeing Liberal Seagull promote it, it may be time to link to The Living Room Candidate, a project from the Museum of the Moving Image that chronicles, catalogs, and archives television advertisements and their contexts for Presidential campaigns. After this current election cycle is over, it will join the project as well. They may have quite a few interesting things to add in, too, as during the debates, screened (for broadcast suitability) comments and Twitter messages will be available on the Current TV feed, which basically merges in real-time commentary on the debates as they unfold, rather than waiting for the end for the pundits to have a hack at them. It's an interesting and likable concept.

McCain freely admits that all the hubbub about the pig thing last week? Manufactured, even though he's trying to claim that Senator Obama really was up to something when he made the remark about lipstick on a pig.

The opinions come at us yet again - Austin Hill sswipes at Senator Obama, feeling that nobody has asked him whether he has the experience to be President, as Governor Palin gets grilled on the matter. (Um, where has he been the last few months? One of the main Republican lines of attack has been about the Senator's lack of experience in what they deem to be important matters.) The WSJ makes comparisons between Governor Palin and President Truman as a way of saying that experience doesn't really matter, (man, this is going to be a very DID-style line of attack, isn't it?), and a radio jockey got suspended for a week for giving out the actual numbers of women protesting Sarah Palin on the air. Just a week? That's really a long suspension-to-dismissal offense.

Serious (or at least, those who take themselves seriously) opinions include Theroux on Thoreau and politics, including a couple comments on moose-hunting. Additionally, fixing the housing panic through calm decision-making and letting the market do most of the heavy lifting and loss-taking, and hopefully taking the lesson that overextending on high-risk investments is nto sound strategy, claiming victory in Iraq because media outlets no longer use the term "civil war" to describe the conflict, perhaps because, well, the things that looked like a civil war, with members of one religious faction fighting another, have stopped (or are at least not being reported on).

In much more light-hearted matters, The General pokes fun at how many people fall all over themselves to say "It's not because he's black..." but have no good followup by providing them with a handy excuse wheel to secretly spin, so they don't sound like parrots quite as often.

Non-candidate opinions include Peter Watts thinking about whether we can truly be culpable for our actions, if we can change ourselves into someone completely different through the introduction of chemicals. If it's all biology and free will is an illusion, then we can trace it all back to some root in our systems somewhere. Perhaps if we unravel all the complexities of the human condition to their basics, we can take a stab at answering that question.

Web of Debt suggests the grand power brokers behind all things are toying with the markets to try and put the freefall of the markets into a controlled fall, where the worst of it can be hidden, and the rest can be swept under the rug through conflicts and surprises elswehere, at least until the next wave of credit crashes, at which point more drastic measures will need to be taken.

In science and technology - Darwin gets an apology from the Chruch of England over the whole evolution thing, a conviction in India obtained based on scanning the brain to see if someone has knowledge of the crime and is lying about it, a new, untested, unproven technology at work in a live situation, utilizing peers to review patents for obviousness and possible prior art/patents already granted by putting new patent applications on the Web for all to see, as an attempt to crowd out the people looking to litigate or to get patents on things that are, well, patently obvious, attempting to get electronics to play on the same rights manageent fields, under the idea of "buy once, play anywhere", assuming the device in question talks the right rights languages, the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, aiming to keep our tubes free and clear of corporate or political censorship and control, whether through blocking, banning, "shaping traffic", or bandiwdth caps. Last out of this section - Things That Look Like Flying Saucers.

Getting special mention, because I really want to stick a Worst Person In The World on the end of all of this, there was a confluence of stuff about the right to choose whether or not to have a child. It all started innocuously enough - complaints about a Royal Mail stamp that honors one of the pioneering women of birth control, because the woman herself held currently-unacceptable views on eugenics. We honor lots of people who have vies that we consider inappropriate now - after all, there are a lot of Presidents who owned slaves - one of the founding discoverers of the continent (for Spain) probably had dim views of the natives there, and so forth. Plus, we still have Silly Putty and Tang, both of which were dismal failures at their intended purposes, but have found new life. It would be a short list, indeed, if we were only allowed to honor historical figures who coincided perfectly with modern beliefs.

Besides, considering the history of contraceptives, there have been a lot of attempts that haven't worked, despite many claims of their efficacy. Seriously. So we should be honoring those who have made progress toward effective birth control, even as we say the reasons they were doing so are suspect. So far, so good.

Things do take a turn into the political, where bluesgirly has what she thinks is the perfect solution to the problem of women having an option to choose not to ahve a child. It's a very Modest Proposal and tells us why we should vote for the Palin/McCain ticket, too. We'll just force every wom^H^H uterus to have any child that might get into it, no matter how it got there, and we'll force all the men to be responsible for any uterus they might impregnate, allowing the government to track them down, garnish them, jail them, force them to have vasectomies if the government deems it necessary, and enforce that responsibility. If we're going to legislate that all uteruses have to have any children that are there, no matter what circumstances they arrived there by, we have to legislate that all men will be held accountable, even to the point of having their ability to reproduce taken away, for any children that they impregnate, accidentally or not. If that means there are suddenly a lot of school dropouts, fantastic. Then we can take away all those sub minimum-wage jobs from the immigrants and give them to our new fathers and mothers. It'll solve two problems at once. (That last benefit is one I thought of and isn't in the actual proposal itself.)

And then, some very interesting material from Phil Harris. Phil would probably take the proposal above to be serious and work toward its implementation. His column today about the potential First Ladies of the next election is not really about the candidates (he characterizes Senator Obama as someone who has not actually said anything about his positions, based on his voting record, and proclaims Senator McCain as a "true American War Hero"), or the first ladies, excepting really about their positions on abortions. Potential First Lady McCain, whose "views on abortion are not perfect in my [Harris's] opinion, but at least she limits her tolerance to cases of rape and incest." And on potential First Lady Obama, "Although she has mothered two children, her affection for children ends apparently at the birth canal." Harris's own opinion on the matter? "I hope that she [McCain] and others will see that rape and incest are not crimes that should condemn an innocent child to death." So children conceived in what are, for the grand majority, non-consensual acts (rape by definition, and many cases of incest are rapacious and abusive) should grow to term as reminders to a mother about what happened to her, with the genetic material of the person who violated her, possibly resulting in a child who looks like that person in some way? It would take someone of good fortitude to come through all of that, birth the child and possibly raise it, possibly as a single mother whose life was derailed by such an event, and not have problems. So perhaps he's complimenting women, saying that they're strong enough to go through that and come out on top. If that's the case, thuogh, he should also be thinking they're smart enough to make decisions like that on their own, without interference. So that's already Worst Person-worthy, but there's more.

Using Mrs. Obama as a segue back to the candidate, Harris spends time on Senator Obama's opposition to the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act before a paragraph that cements his dishonor as today's Worst Person In The World by far.

I am not certain why Barack Obama has such a callous view of infant death. Perhaps, it is a genetic holdover from the culture of his father’s Kenyan goat-herding legacy. I suppose defective baby goats were routinely cast onto the rocks and left to die. That way, only the best qualified would grow to become members of the goat-herd community.

This isn't even at the level of "It's because he's black." This stoops so far below that it would make a genocidal dictator proud. The implication that at his core, Barack Obama is a primitive savage who hasn't made it into the civilized era is so low that the sewer rats are wondering what's rumbling under their feet. That kind of allegation would be more suited to the 1800s than our current times. Because there's so much volume around, and he has a right to speak freely, I don't expect Harris to be called on it, or to apologize for it, but the disservice he has done to Senator Obama and his wife is almost slanderous. Congratulations, Phil Harris, Worst Person In The World.