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Salutations from the news desk. Language is in the news, with popular new words and phrases from Japan for this year, the town of Forks, Washignton, cashing in on the Twilight fad (good for them, recognizing the capitalist drive to exploit a fandom), and the somewhat aphathetic entry of "Meh" into the dictionary. As is gaming, where all the Clix lines, excepting perhaps HeroClix, are vanishing into the ether. Have no idea why, but it might have something to do with the problem with a lot of miniatures games - the investment cost in money, time, and space is high.
Literature also has a laugh with us by showing websites that turn into print material, and there’s no Onion in sight, apaprently because the Onion was doing its thing in the print era before the web.
Internationally: Aiming for the peaceful talking route, the president of Afghanistan has said he will guarantee the security of the Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, if he's willing to come to the negotiation table.
Status of forces pact approved, troops in Iraq past UN mandate. Also, because of the violence in Iraq over the last few years, local markets appear to be the norm from now on, as the populace still doesn’t want to risk being hit in a high-traffic area away from their houses. Plus, it’s faster to shop local.
Iran's vice-president is taking serious heat for allegedly insulting the Koran. Right, so we’ve established that letting religious zealots of any strip control a country is a bad idea. And, apparently, when it comes to missile defense, anyone commenting but the U.S. and the country it plans on dropping missiles in is apparently out of line.
In domestic matters: Forget Socialist, Terrorist, or Muslim - The President-Elect is a nerd! And still really popular with Europe, which may mean that the American image improves some with Obama as well.
Okay, elsewhere, doom, doom, doom, al-Qaeda doom... but no specifics, really. It sounds like the bigger danger to Mr. Obama will be an inability to correspond directly through e-mail to those who send him messages. Although it sounds like some are trying to make the possibility of Hillary clinton as a Secretary of State into an albatross...actually, scratch that. They will be trying to make her into an albatross.
Anniversary marked of Jim Jones and his particular cult brand.
A message that we approve of for the President-elect: Investigate all the things that your predecessor did that look like they might have been illegal, secret or not. Bring out all the hidden things into the light and examine them for their legality and their desirability. It may also be worth examining whether using students as assistants to university police departments, unless, say, enrolled in a law enforcement program, is really a good idea. Additional advice that we like: some statements on getting America back to the forefront of technology,
And one we scratch our heads at: Be afraid of atheists and the non-religious, because they’re a huge voting block. Except, for this writer, the non-religious includes atheists, pagans, and those who don’t attend church often enough for his tastes. With such a large sample, it’s no wonder he’s afraid of the “non-religious” voting block, and is worried that they, and the Democratic Party that the nonreligious always serve, are growing stronger. I think he’d have good company from the Catholic bishop that blames university education for why the Catholic Church is having trouble bringing people into services. Because the people are mass educated in a system that doesn’t do religious education (or at least tries not to), and people in power that claim to be Catholic aren’t being the most pious of people, the church is experiencing mass desertions. Perhaps we need a Vatican III, then, so that Catholicism can figure out how to retool itself to appeal to the populace again?
Further head-scratchers are the idea of getting practical people into the Obama administration so that the President-elect will not be seen as a risky ideologue, looking at cutting social programs, or not bringing new ones into existence, to balance the budget, although it lacked that much of an implication that cutting bailouts or military spending would also help, calls to return to a commodity standard, like the gold standard, as a way of crushing bubbles before they happen, the apparent McCarthyite sentiment in the President-elect's questionnaire - nowhere have I heard it said that the “wrong” answers on the test will disqualify you from a position - it makes more sense to know where the media and one’s opponents might go to try and generate controversy or scandal.
this continuing rumor that the President-elect will reinstitute a "Fairness Doctrine" on the airwaves, and panic and screeching at the socialist Democrats and the Republicans who will follow them into putting corporate profits into the hands of redistributionists. I guess it just happens to be that these redistributionists will take from the rich and give to the poor, rather than taking from the poor and giving bonuses and stock options and bailouts to the rich.
Elsewhere in the opinions: Guy Benson telling conservatives to put country first by not speaking negatively against the President-elect, but neither to back down any in their opposition to him on key matters, while managing not to be cast as the contrarian party. Tough job, d00d. Considering those key opposition points are going to probably make you into the party of “No!” And, if George Will is right about how much the Republican Party has been doing the very "socialist" think they made hue and cry about, it will be tough for the Republicans to mount coherent opposition on soem of the economic issues. On social matters, they’re still just fine. Going back to the basics seems to be the conservative call, especially in depressed-economy states like Michigan, but even so, looks like the new Republicans will still be trying for new communication ways.
Let GM go bankrupt, because it's cheaper than a bailout, says Michael Levine, responding to the possibility of an automaker bailout from the federal government. Michael Barone agrees with Mr. Levine, even though he knows that it will probably crash Michigan’s economy. Robert Hahn and Peter Passel suggest perhaps rebates for car-buying instead of company bailouts as the solution.
Some discussion on whether the Employee Free Choice Act actually does what it intends to, namely making it easier to unionize and to protect workers from employers' unfair labor practices.
Apparently, though, because the G-20 conference is the final solidifcation of the One World Economy, administered by Big Brother, we can all just relax as our overlords steer us the way they want to go.
In technology: retouching a video so as to remove offending things, or to make them vanish entirely. Reality will soon be only what one experiences with the eye, and even then, maybe not. Beyond that, closer still to organs that won't generate immune rejection responses, looking at wobbles to find potentially habitatble moons of giant exoplanets, a system on a chip that will do blood workups in ten minutes, the triumph of Phoenix in the midst of all the other gloom,
And last out of this pile, A smug grin saying "Information is not free" because of the Google Book Search settlement, even as more and more people join in on digital ventures. I’m guessing that the future is not as much about information (which is good, but really, you can probably find all sorts of information through free, if illegal, channels) as it will be about organization, finding, indexing, and attention to that information. Eyeballs are cheap, actually getting someone to the thing they want to find the first time is priceless.
On the tail end, perhaps some hope - the possibility that war will become a relic of the past.
And at the very last, 16 years old and playing professional baseball for Japan. Oh, did we mention she’s a chick?
Literature also has a laugh with us by showing websites that turn into print material, and there’s no Onion in sight, apaprently because the Onion was doing its thing in the print era before the web.
Internationally: Aiming for the peaceful talking route, the president of Afghanistan has said he will guarantee the security of the Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, if he's willing to come to the negotiation table.
Status of forces pact approved, troops in Iraq past UN mandate. Also, because of the violence in Iraq over the last few years, local markets appear to be the norm from now on, as the populace still doesn’t want to risk being hit in a high-traffic area away from their houses. Plus, it’s faster to shop local.
Iran's vice-president is taking serious heat for allegedly insulting the Koran. Right, so we’ve established that letting religious zealots of any strip control a country is a bad idea. And, apparently, when it comes to missile defense, anyone commenting but the U.S. and the country it plans on dropping missiles in is apparently out of line.
In domestic matters: Forget Socialist, Terrorist, or Muslim - The President-Elect is a nerd! And still really popular with Europe, which may mean that the American image improves some with Obama as well.
Okay, elsewhere, doom, doom, doom, al-Qaeda doom... but no specifics, really. It sounds like the bigger danger to Mr. Obama will be an inability to correspond directly through e-mail to those who send him messages. Although it sounds like some are trying to make the possibility of Hillary clinton as a Secretary of State into an albatross...actually, scratch that. They will be trying to make her into an albatross.
Anniversary marked of Jim Jones and his particular cult brand.
A message that we approve of for the President-elect: Investigate all the things that your predecessor did that look like they might have been illegal, secret or not. Bring out all the hidden things into the light and examine them for their legality and their desirability. It may also be worth examining whether using students as assistants to university police departments, unless, say, enrolled in a law enforcement program, is really a good idea. Additional advice that we like: some statements on getting America back to the forefront of technology,
And one we scratch our heads at: Be afraid of atheists and the non-religious, because they’re a huge voting block. Except, for this writer, the non-religious includes atheists, pagans, and those who don’t attend church often enough for his tastes. With such a large sample, it’s no wonder he’s afraid of the “non-religious” voting block, and is worried that they, and the Democratic Party that the nonreligious always serve, are growing stronger. I think he’d have good company from the Catholic bishop that blames university education for why the Catholic Church is having trouble bringing people into services. Because the people are mass educated in a system that doesn’t do religious education (or at least tries not to), and people in power that claim to be Catholic aren’t being the most pious of people, the church is experiencing mass desertions. Perhaps we need a Vatican III, then, so that Catholicism can figure out how to retool itself to appeal to the populace again?
Further head-scratchers are the idea of getting practical people into the Obama administration so that the President-elect will not be seen as a risky ideologue, looking at cutting social programs, or not bringing new ones into existence, to balance the budget, although it lacked that much of an implication that cutting bailouts or military spending would also help, calls to return to a commodity standard, like the gold standard, as a way of crushing bubbles before they happen, the apparent McCarthyite sentiment in the President-elect's questionnaire - nowhere have I heard it said that the “wrong” answers on the test will disqualify you from a position - it makes more sense to know where the media and one’s opponents might go to try and generate controversy or scandal.
this continuing rumor that the President-elect will reinstitute a "Fairness Doctrine" on the airwaves, and panic and screeching at the socialist Democrats and the Republicans who will follow them into putting corporate profits into the hands of redistributionists. I guess it just happens to be that these redistributionists will take from the rich and give to the poor, rather than taking from the poor and giving bonuses and stock options and bailouts to the rich.
Elsewhere in the opinions: Guy Benson telling conservatives to put country first by not speaking negatively against the President-elect, but neither to back down any in their opposition to him on key matters, while managing not to be cast as the contrarian party. Tough job, d00d. Considering those key opposition points are going to probably make you into the party of “No!” And, if George Will is right about how much the Republican Party has been doing the very "socialist" think they made hue and cry about, it will be tough for the Republicans to mount coherent opposition on soem of the economic issues. On social matters, they’re still just fine. Going back to the basics seems to be the conservative call, especially in depressed-economy states like Michigan, but even so, looks like the new Republicans will still be trying for new communication ways.
Let GM go bankrupt, because it's cheaper than a bailout, says Michael Levine, responding to the possibility of an automaker bailout from the federal government. Michael Barone agrees with Mr. Levine, even though he knows that it will probably crash Michigan’s economy. Robert Hahn and Peter Passel suggest perhaps rebates for car-buying instead of company bailouts as the solution.
Some discussion on whether the Employee Free Choice Act actually does what it intends to, namely making it easier to unionize and to protect workers from employers' unfair labor practices.
Apparently, though, because the G-20 conference is the final solidifcation of the One World Economy, administered by Big Brother, we can all just relax as our overlords steer us the way they want to go.
In technology: retouching a video so as to remove offending things, or to make them vanish entirely. Reality will soon be only what one experiences with the eye, and even then, maybe not. Beyond that, closer still to organs that won't generate immune rejection responses, looking at wobbles to find potentially habitatble moons of giant exoplanets, a system on a chip that will do blood workups in ten minutes, the triumph of Phoenix in the midst of all the other gloom,
And last out of this pile, A smug grin saying "Information is not free" because of the Google Book Search settlement, even as more and more people join in on digital ventures. I’m guessing that the future is not as much about information (which is good, but really, you can probably find all sorts of information through free, if illegal, channels) as it will be about organization, finding, indexing, and attention to that information. Eyeballs are cheap, actually getting someone to the thing they want to find the first time is priceless.
On the tail end, perhaps some hope - the possibility that war will become a relic of the past.
And at the very last, 16 years old and playing professional baseball for Japan. Oh, did we mention she’s a chick?
