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We have returned! - 13 October 2008
Oct. 14th, 2008 12:01 amAhh... the weekend. Time spent recovering from illness (almost completely gone now) and enjoying oneself. Mixed in with doing a little bit of work, because it needed to be done.
This means... newsdump. Like Oooh, award winner for economics in memory fo Nobel. And bloggers finding themselves increasingly as defendants in lawsuits. And faked Youtube pages to create drive-by downloads of malicious software.
Internationally, PAkistanis are raising armeis to defend themselves, which makes army commanders happy, as does the authorization to hit drug cartels that are deemed to be helping the insurgency. Russia shoots an ICBM, vowing to commission new weapons for the future, as well. Merchants stage a strike in Iran over a now-delayed tax increase, North Korea goes off the blacklist after it agrees to inspectors, and desperation in the Somali pirate standoff.
Oh, and avian flu vaccines are banned by law from going to embargoes countries or state-sponsored terror states, for concern about being used to make bioweapons. Unless there is a waiver sought, that is. This certainly seems like a place where law and common sense meet head-on. Just generally, places such as Ethiopia need a lot more emergency aid, so why should vaccines and the like be stopped?
In Iraq, the prime minister has said the presence of UK troops is no longer necessary. When he says that about the US troops, we’ll pay attention.
Abortion is now legal in the province of Victoria, Australia, after thirty-five years of campaigning. In opposition, the Catholic archbishop worries about Catholic hospitals, the ability to practice their faith and conscientiously object to abortion in those hospitals, and the requirements to provide referrals to someone who will abort if the first doctor will not. After the measure passed, anti-choice advocates heckled from the gallery, prompting the upper house president to call for security: “Where is the security? Remove her any way. For God’s sake do your job. Jesus. F---ing bananas. Amateur hour up here.”
Doemstically, Gas prices are on the decline, most likely because the rest of the economy has been falling, too.
Nonjudicial punishment, rather than court-martial, for a soldier convicted of beating a Jewish trainee, because while there were several references to the religion of the trainee and the sacerd garments, the Army found no religious motivation for the beatings. This way, most of the details get kept secret, and it basically gets swept under the rug. The MRFF already has the trainee’s information.
Connecticut flips the bird to atavistic definitions of marriage, permits homosexual couples to marry, not just have civil unions, based on the idea that those civil unions weren’t equal to the heterosexual marriages. Even though the governor has opposed the ruling, and said attempts to overturn will likely met with failure, anyone willing to bet against the prospect of a constitutional amendment at the next available opportunity?
A grandfather is going to jail for failing to sod his lawn, despite his attemtps to make a case to his homeowner’s cabal that he didn’t have the money to afford it. And in Ohio, not mowing the lawn could result in jail time. This most definitely sounds way wrong, and makes me wonder just how much power these homeowner’s associations have to dictate the lives of their residents.
Candidate-wise, Whoops. Ballot mistake prints hundreds of "Barack Osama" as the Democratic candidate. What a typo, right?
Results of investigation say: Sarah Palin abused her authority as Governor, shock and surprise. She’s still uncooperative with the investigators. Which makes for an interesting footnote - for the first time in recorded election history of the country, both the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates on a party ticket have been cited for ethics violations before the election. Topping it off, the Progressive Curmudgeon says all we need to know about Sarah Palin is that she's mean and vindictive, the Peter Principle personified, and has the same ideas as to be Dick Cheney in drag.
Governor Palin has also been a fan of faith-based initiatives, using taxpayer dollars to fund her speaking to missionaries about her want to do God's will, among other things. And then there’s that part where despite their moniker as fiscal conservatives, according to Scott McCloud, the Republicans have been anything but.
The crowds are getting really ugly at McCain rallies, even booing Senator McCain when he tries to stop them from seeing Senator Obama as an enemy to be destroyed, an “Arab” in the words of one supporter, a “traitor” in another’s. McCain is walking a fine line between keeping them heated enough to go vote, but not so heated that they start acting on their beliefs. Supporters equating Obama to a monkey? That’s comical, cheeky, and may even be creative, if insulting. But saying where the microphones can hear you that the opponent should be killed or is a traitor? So not cool. Obama bin Lyin'? Ambiguous, but I’m betting it’s another of the “Obama is a terrorist” type of things. Question is whether McCain will give a heel order to his supporters about the character hits, and whether they’ll listen at all. Things may have grown too much, stoked by McCain and Palin, for it to do anything but explode.
I was going to write something in relation to why we’re hearing more truly angry rhetoric at Republican rallies these days, how the game of politics has been replaced with the deadly serious conflict, and then Liberal Eagle beat me to it, describing the good versus evil mentality that a lot of Republican followers now have, and why that transforms politics from a disagreement into a Win At All Costs battleground. Only the polka band seemed to try and find happiness at the rally. Austin Cline takes up this tack as well, noting that the Republican Party is crystallizing into precisely the kinds of people who see things in racial, religious, and good v. evil terms.
Ken Blackwell wants the last presidential debate to focus on issues that he thinks the people want to hear about, that are supposedly of no interest to the mainstream media or “East Coast elites”, including abortion and this nebulous “character” issue that conservatives always want to hammer Senator Obama with, because of supposed negative campaigning, his inherent untrustworthiness as a lawyer and a politician, his great willingness to suppress free speech that doesn't praise him, apparently following the lead of universities that smother any conservative viewpoint that attempts to appear, and his continued hypocrisy between talking as a moderate and acting as a fringe liberal. Oh, and the Senator's position on Iraq, when to the conservative world, it's been won several times over.
All of this leads to the foregone conclusion by Strassel that Senator Obama is just trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat and pass it off as a serious plan. On climate change, there might be some agreement that the talk and plans aren't enough.
In other opinions, Stuck in legal no-man's land, several detainees at Guantanamo Bay may be released into the United Sates, after a federal judge ordered them set free based on the Boumediene decision. To the writers, of course, this means “zomg! Terrrists in teh country!” While there should be sensible guidelines in place to govern how those released will be repatriated or otherwise taken care of, to jump to the spectre of terror is asking for non-sensible guidelines to be hurried into place.
American woman tells British people they drink too much, which conjures an older photograph I think The Weirdo posted, older women with the caption, “Men whose lips touch alcohol shan’t touch ours” or something like it.
A movie purporting to be an interview with an ex-vampire, and not the sanguinary type, but the “real thing”, along with dark occult powers and werecreatures and no, doubt, demons... and doesn’t this sound a little too familiar, like someone’s rehashing the Satanic Panic from twenty years ago, and the big Witch Hunts that have been going on periodically for a while now? And with all the other stuff that it covers in the nine hours it runs, it definitely sounds like something Jack T. Chick would be proud of.
Speaking of Chick and his ilk,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jesus_h_biscuit says of himself what all homosexual people should be saying: "I am an American, goddamnit. A big gay one. I need no one’s approval or permission to be who I am, and that includes loving intensely, fucking passionately, or saying whatever the bloody fuck I feel like saying.". Or being. the greatness of the country is in the way that it permits everyone, and we mean everyone, to have their opinion, voice it, debate it, and live it out in their lives, so long as it’s consensual and it doesn’t hurt anyone in ways they don’t want. In a possibly related, through pretty weak strands, story, the last laugh of Cardinal Newman - his express will was to be buried next to Ambrose St. John. In the preparations for his potential beatification (and later canonization), his remains were going to be exhumed and moved, but when the moment in time came... there were no organic remains. A wooden coffin, some cloth, and such, but the body itself had already decomposed. Not even the Vatican can move him from his resting place now. I hope that he can be canonized anyway, even if for no other reason to give the young and religious some hope that their church isn’t completely looking backward... or more concerned about potential sexuality than actual miracles.
Our science-types are working on micro power grids powered by renewables in case of EMP taking down the standard grid, cheap genome sequencing, the possibility of more than mammals being an extinction risk from climate change, using trees to power sensors that can detect forest fires faster, studying a new ecosystem that has only one lifeform in it, keeping elephants inside their preserves thanks to Google Earth and SMS. When the elephants get too close to the boundaries, the rangers get an SMS and then deploy the lights to keep the elephants inside. More science: building the Forbidden City as an on-line realm, and optimism about the future, if we can get through the next two centuries unscathed.
Ah, art! Beautiful photographs of people and their life, expansive backgrounds of reality and fantasy to put them in, and pictures of the faces of robots from Japan.
Perhaps most importantly, gureilla artist Banksy has opened a pet shop.
Last for tonight, XKCD notes that most of us who want portable, transferable collections of media that we've purchased will have to pirate them. After all, all the DRM stops working if you move to another computer.
And then, there’s The Game.
This means... newsdump. Like Oooh, award winner for economics in memory fo Nobel. And bloggers finding themselves increasingly as defendants in lawsuits. And faked Youtube pages to create drive-by downloads of malicious software.
Internationally, PAkistanis are raising armeis to defend themselves, which makes army commanders happy, as does the authorization to hit drug cartels that are deemed to be helping the insurgency. Russia shoots an ICBM, vowing to commission new weapons for the future, as well. Merchants stage a strike in Iran over a now-delayed tax increase, North Korea goes off the blacklist after it agrees to inspectors, and desperation in the Somali pirate standoff.
Oh, and avian flu vaccines are banned by law from going to embargoes countries or state-sponsored terror states, for concern about being used to make bioweapons. Unless there is a waiver sought, that is. This certainly seems like a place where law and common sense meet head-on. Just generally, places such as Ethiopia need a lot more emergency aid, so why should vaccines and the like be stopped?
In Iraq, the prime minister has said the presence of UK troops is no longer necessary. When he says that about the US troops, we’ll pay attention.
Abortion is now legal in the province of Victoria, Australia, after thirty-five years of campaigning. In opposition, the Catholic archbishop worries about Catholic hospitals, the ability to practice their faith and conscientiously object to abortion in those hospitals, and the requirements to provide referrals to someone who will abort if the first doctor will not. After the measure passed, anti-choice advocates heckled from the gallery, prompting the upper house president to call for security: “Where is the security? Remove her any way. For God’s sake do your job. Jesus. F---ing bananas. Amateur hour up here.”
Doemstically, Gas prices are on the decline, most likely because the rest of the economy has been falling, too.
Nonjudicial punishment, rather than court-martial, for a soldier convicted of beating a Jewish trainee, because while there were several references to the religion of the trainee and the sacerd garments, the Army found no religious motivation for the beatings. This way, most of the details get kept secret, and it basically gets swept under the rug. The MRFF already has the trainee’s information.
Connecticut flips the bird to atavistic definitions of marriage, permits homosexual couples to marry, not just have civil unions, based on the idea that those civil unions weren’t equal to the heterosexual marriages. Even though the governor has opposed the ruling, and said attempts to overturn will likely met with failure, anyone willing to bet against the prospect of a constitutional amendment at the next available opportunity?
A grandfather is going to jail for failing to sod his lawn, despite his attemtps to make a case to his homeowner’s cabal that he didn’t have the money to afford it. And in Ohio, not mowing the lawn could result in jail time. This most definitely sounds way wrong, and makes me wonder just how much power these homeowner’s associations have to dictate the lives of their residents.
Candidate-wise, Whoops. Ballot mistake prints hundreds of "Barack Osama" as the Democratic candidate. What a typo, right?
Results of investigation say: Sarah Palin abused her authority as Governor, shock and surprise. She’s still uncooperative with the investigators. Which makes for an interesting footnote - for the first time in recorded election history of the country, both the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates on a party ticket have been cited for ethics violations before the election. Topping it off, the Progressive Curmudgeon says all we need to know about Sarah Palin is that she's mean and vindictive, the Peter Principle personified, and has the same ideas as to be Dick Cheney in drag.
Governor Palin has also been a fan of faith-based initiatives, using taxpayer dollars to fund her speaking to missionaries about her want to do God's will, among other things. And then there’s that part where despite their moniker as fiscal conservatives, according to Scott McCloud, the Republicans have been anything but.
The crowds are getting really ugly at McCain rallies, even booing Senator McCain when he tries to stop them from seeing Senator Obama as an enemy to be destroyed, an “Arab” in the words of one supporter, a “traitor” in another’s. McCain is walking a fine line between keeping them heated enough to go vote, but not so heated that they start acting on their beliefs. Supporters equating Obama to a monkey? That’s comical, cheeky, and may even be creative, if insulting. But saying where the microphones can hear you that the opponent should be killed or is a traitor? So not cool. Obama bin Lyin'? Ambiguous, but I’m betting it’s another of the “Obama is a terrorist” type of things. Question is whether McCain will give a heel order to his supporters about the character hits, and whether they’ll listen at all. Things may have grown too much, stoked by McCain and Palin, for it to do anything but explode.
I was going to write something in relation to why we’re hearing more truly angry rhetoric at Republican rallies these days, how the game of politics has been replaced with the deadly serious conflict, and then Liberal Eagle beat me to it, describing the good versus evil mentality that a lot of Republican followers now have, and why that transforms politics from a disagreement into a Win At All Costs battleground. Only the polka band seemed to try and find happiness at the rally. Austin Cline takes up this tack as well, noting that the Republican Party is crystallizing into precisely the kinds of people who see things in racial, religious, and good v. evil terms.
Ken Blackwell wants the last presidential debate to focus on issues that he thinks the people want to hear about, that are supposedly of no interest to the mainstream media or “East Coast elites”, including abortion and this nebulous “character” issue that conservatives always want to hammer Senator Obama with, because of supposed negative campaigning, his inherent untrustworthiness as a lawyer and a politician, his great willingness to suppress free speech that doesn't praise him, apparently following the lead of universities that smother any conservative viewpoint that attempts to appear, and his continued hypocrisy between talking as a moderate and acting as a fringe liberal. Oh, and the Senator's position on Iraq, when to the conservative world, it's been won several times over.
All of this leads to the foregone conclusion by Strassel that Senator Obama is just trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat and pass it off as a serious plan. On climate change, there might be some agreement that the talk and plans aren't enough.
In other opinions, Stuck in legal no-man's land, several detainees at Guantanamo Bay may be released into the United Sates, after a federal judge ordered them set free based on the Boumediene decision. To the writers, of course, this means “zomg! Terrrists in teh country!” While there should be sensible guidelines in place to govern how those released will be repatriated or otherwise taken care of, to jump to the spectre of terror is asking for non-sensible guidelines to be hurried into place.
American woman tells British people they drink too much, which conjures an older photograph I think The Weirdo posted, older women with the caption, “Men whose lips touch alcohol shan’t touch ours” or something like it.
A movie purporting to be an interview with an ex-vampire, and not the sanguinary type, but the “real thing”, along with dark occult powers and werecreatures and no, doubt, demons... and doesn’t this sound a little too familiar, like someone’s rehashing the Satanic Panic from twenty years ago, and the big Witch Hunts that have been going on periodically for a while now? And with all the other stuff that it covers in the nine hours it runs, it definitely sounds like something Jack T. Chick would be proud of.
Speaking of Chick and his ilk,
jesus_h_biscuit says of himself what all homosexual people should be saying: "I am an American, goddamnit. A big gay one. I need no one’s approval or permission to be who I am, and that includes loving intensely, fucking passionately, or saying whatever the bloody fuck I feel like saying.". Or being. the greatness of the country is in the way that it permits everyone, and we mean everyone, to have their opinion, voice it, debate it, and live it out in their lives, so long as it’s consensual and it doesn’t hurt anyone in ways they don’t want. In a possibly related, through pretty weak strands, story, the last laugh of Cardinal Newman - his express will was to be buried next to Ambrose St. John. In the preparations for his potential beatification (and later canonization), his remains were going to be exhumed and moved, but when the moment in time came... there were no organic remains. A wooden coffin, some cloth, and such, but the body itself had already decomposed. Not even the Vatican can move him from his resting place now. I hope that he can be canonized anyway, even if for no other reason to give the young and religious some hope that their church isn’t completely looking backward... or more concerned about potential sexuality than actual miracles.Our science-types are working on micro power grids powered by renewables in case of EMP taking down the standard grid, cheap genome sequencing, the possibility of more than mammals being an extinction risk from climate change, using trees to power sensors that can detect forest fires faster, studying a new ecosystem that has only one lifeform in it, keeping elephants inside their preserves thanks to Google Earth and SMS. When the elephants get too close to the boundaries, the rangers get an SMS and then deploy the lights to keep the elephants inside. More science: building the Forbidden City as an on-line realm, and optimism about the future, if we can get through the next two centuries unscathed.
Ah, art! Beautiful photographs of people and their life, expansive backgrounds of reality and fantasy to put them in, and pictures of the faces of robots from Japan.
Perhaps most importantly, gureilla artist Banksy has opened a pet shop.
Last for tonight, XKCD notes that most of us who want portable, transferable collections of media that we've purchased will have to pirate them. After all, all the DRM stops working if you move to another computer.
And then, there’s The Game.
