Back from the big weekend - 1 December 2008

It’s been four days and a lot of time spent in idleness. Which means lots of time being spent catching up. Enjoy.

Up top, the mainstream media would like you to recall what state of mind you should be in. If a firm beleiver in the idea that Satan is calling witches to attack Sarah Palin or other excellent Christians, then make sure you have enough hex breaking herbs with you, obvious potentials for irony and hilarity notwithstanding.

Public Service Announcement: Twenty-four horus without a break is too long to play WoW. Don’t they highly encourage you to take a break after a while and rest?

Internationally, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, and hiring someone to kill is not honorable in any sort of way, pirates, again, Muslims and Christians killing each other in Nigeria, if you can't afford a funeral in China, expect to be arrested if you dispose of the body in some other way, and a terror attack in Mumbai that killed almost 200 officially, which has resulted in reisgnations and a serious souring of relations between India and Pakistan. For some, this means terrorism is migrating, and will be fought in countries with weak defenses, where appeasement has been the technique of failure,

Oh, and murmurs that HIV/AIDS research is taking money away from more pressing health issues, like preventable childhood diseases such as pneumonia. Did we mention it's World AIDS Day today?

Iraq is a done deal again, complete with more columnists confidently declaring victory* (*so long as things continue apace), as Afghanistan continues to ask for actual effort in their theater.

Domestically, The Pentagon is still planning to use military forces for domestic security operations. We have the National Guard and the police forces for such things - if one wants more of domestic security, then perhaps those organizations should receive more recruits. Instead, we have 20,000 troops stationed and ready just in case.

the quest for limited quantity bargains killed a worker at a Wal-Mart, because he was the one opening the doors to let the stampede in. And in a down economy, the stampede would be worse than usual, because people were seeking bargains? How about a shooting following the usual madness? Killed 2. And generates columns about the bankruptcy of America's morals. Although, apparently, the president-elect's face is enough to sell anything. Or even the mention that he likes a particular cookie. Did we mention restaurants around the D.C. area are hoping he'll stop by?

Now that the President-elect is slated for office, he has asked hsi volunteers to continue their efforts by assisting progressive state races, causes, and training others to be organizers, thus neatly not wasting the energy and momentum built up by the President-elect. He may need it - perhaps as backlash, the amount of hate-crime classed incidents is up and the KKK is becoming more vocal. And in other places, like CNS, attempts are being made to downplay the President-elect's appeal to youth and ability to get large cash in small amounts. Faux News, however, continues to be shut out of the President-elect's news conferences

Confirmed, Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, which will make for the continued reputation that the President-elect is burying hatchets and wanting to hit the ground running from day one.

The Cincinati Zoo and the nearby Creation Museum are selling combo tickets - which might appear to be a rather shrewd marketing move for one of them, but draws scorn and derision from PZ Meyers that an institution devoted to science would align itself with one devoted to undermining that science.

Keeping in the theme of stupid, stupid rat creatures, an artist's belly was apparently too ugly to be used on her own promotional video. The artist has sought a different label, and the fans are giving hell and showing off their own midriffs in protest. There’s also a complaint, now an eviction threat, about the smell of a miniature pony used as therapy for a young boy suffering from cerebral palsy, which is all the more odd considering the cattle farm nearby.

What may take the cake in this segment, though, is the fact that UK health officials are worried about a measles outbreak because so many people choose to believe vaccinations cause autism spectrum disorders.

Students cheat more, but feel okay about it ethically, and blame the increased pressure on their lives as a cause - too much desire to be perfect at all things means finding ways to balance it all, ethically or not. The adult corps is too interested in results to be concerned about methods, and I’ll bet such nice institutions like NCLB and standardized test results are contributing to this, because of the consequences they have for failure.

In opinions, The Slacktivist suggests that newspapers are on hard times because their investors expect them to do something they can't - return giant returns and profit, which makes the quality of their news suffer because they have nobody to run stories by for fact checks or experts to consult, and thus people stop trusting the news because they don’t get anything right in the areas where people are experts, and so people start thinking newspapers don’t get anything right at all. Dennis Prager has a simpler solution - media is biased toward liberal conceptions of "social justice" that they learned in university and that liberal judges jeep pushing on people. All of which, of course, means the liberal media serve to exault Democrats and demonize Republicans.

Victor Davis Hanson one-ups all those above with ten politically incorrrect paragraphs, including the insistence that HIV/AIDS is more a homosexual disease than a heterosexual one, that Latin education would be far superior to any sort of cultural studies, and that men now sounds just like women, instead of men...and that the media has become totally biased and not newsworthy at all.

Neal Gabler speculates that the McCarthyite wing of the Republican Party will be the dominant force, which means we can expect more fearmongering, more playing to anxiety, and more attempting to brand an Other to fight and destroy. Rather depressing. Some of them even claim to feel slighted that the Democrats actually helped each other out on the last election, which is definitely an Other-painting exercise.

Rumblings of the need for viable third parties, based on, of all people, Joe Lieberman's running style, but for truly pogressive and leftist candidates.

If Kevin McCullough is to be believed, the reality of conflict has set in and the President-elect is going to abandon his promise of Troops Out Now in favor of the outgoing administrator’s style of fighting. Which is apparently a great thing for Mr. McCullough and a necessary repudiation of the far left, who believe America is weak or some such nonsense. The WSJ thinks the President-elect can send a sign that he's serious on issues by nominating favorites of the outgoing administration to high bench positions, as they also agree with the idea of keeping on people from the outgoing administration so as to shield him from the “worst excesses” of the liberal base.

L. Gordon Crovitz says that intelligence laws need to be updated to modern times, rather than being hamstrung by FISA’s inability to have seen new technology for surveillance and intelligence-gathering. He’s not for the panopticon, but he definitely thinks there should be more leeway in peeking before warrants.

The WSJ complains about the manhandling at Singaporean courts and contempt charges that stuck against it for reporting on the effectiveness and reviews of those courts. A reminder that while we complain about media bias, that we’re not sending the courts after them to silence any political commentary they may have.

The dumping ground of economic issues begins with The WSJ saying that it's okay for Detroit to collapse, because there's no rule that says American cars have to be made in Detroit, and the other automakers are turning profits just fine, so it’s probably best to help Detroit sell to the profitable places, and progresses into Amity Shlaes saying spending doesn't fix recessions, for which George Will agrees, and says a new New Deal would make things worse, like it did in the 1930s, as Charles Karuthammer figures the markets are afraid of the Treasury Secretary and will be volatile until he is removed from the equation. Fredrik Erixon and Razeen Sally peg protectionism as the growing problem, with Walter E. Williams in agreement, as Fay Vincent feels we should be looking to politicians if we want to complain about perks used, and Paul Weyrich will berate the government for requiring more ethanol in gasoline. All of this requires, of course, that you blieve the economy is doing poorly, which Thomas Sowell does not, and thinks the economy will be a cover for government control of business, using CEO pay and other things as distractions from the real purpose.

On the last economic part, Bill'sO waxes poetic about his father's saving habits and what the world would be like if we all saves like his dad.

Mm. Been a while since we had one of these - Doug Giles denies and hates on the green movement as a brainwashing cash-fueled operation trying to get the youth before they know any better, just like any religion that relies more on blind faith than actual thought.

Last out of general opinions, Jackie Cushman on Good Samaritans and the need to stop and help the people we see in need, focusing on people and value rather than money. Perhaps in contrast, Melanie Kirkpatrick on how the immigrants understand Thanksgiving better than the natives, which, according to Mona Charen, were not genocided by settlers, but defeated by superior civilization and infected through normal contact with diseases they had no remedies for, one of the big lie about the country that people keep believing. Finally, the requisite passage from history. Part two.

Science and tech starts with progress on stem cells as a way of restoring vision and hearing in animals and progresses into the economy apparently messing with the sex lives of New Yorkers, cooking robots, data centers that could withstand a nuclear blast and look like they’re a Bond villain hideout, a scientific accident where a young child has a fetus inside her, although I’m a bit skeptical on the source - is this even anatomically possible? - predictions of the future, fast food and Alzheimer's, finer-tuned control of implants that release drugs, improving wind power efficiency, and making the brain younger again with treatments and not Brain Age, Facebook aiming to provide technology so that all across the web, you can see what your friends are doing... did we mention that the idea of collective intelligence will tell researchers, advertisers, and the government more about you than you intended?

Hrm, last for tonight, I suggest someone find a game that would use religion cards like these. If that’s not your thing, perhaps some one minute languages? It would probably be a great escape. If not that, try cardboard art.

And here's another helping - 2 December 2008

Double dose tonight, because I apparently forgot to post last night. Perhaps I should send out the Playmobil Hazmat Crew to make my brain work again.

Fear, fear, terror, terror, biological attack will happen by 2013. So, naturally, the next president will have to devote more time and resources to keeping us safe from the terrists. The funny thing is - the terrorists that get caught are the stupid ones. The ones that are likely to succeed probably aren’t, and won’t be noticed until too late. Occasionally, of course, they do find one that hits on target, but I don’t know if that’s one of the scatter actualy being right or deliberate ignorance of strong evidence. Pat Buchanan provides a voice of reason, asking India not to knee-jerk against Pakistan, possibly setting off a bigger, more major conflict. As he points out, it took one assassination to spark the first Great War. Maybe the third one will be sparked by a terror hit at just the wrong time and place.

South Korea pulls out the last of its troops from Iraq, hopefully a signal that we will be leaving soon as...right. The Agreement that is alternately on or off, depending on what day it is. For the conflict that we've already won and are continuing to win, if only the mainstream media would report on it, says Mr. Norris, action-star turned pundit.

Chillingly, in an attempt to end the tribal warfare that has been going on for 20 years, mothers in Papua New Fuinea's Highland region are committing infanticide. By killing all the sons, the mothers hope to bring an end to the fighting, giving the men the knowledge that there will not be someone else there to take their place. It’s a desperation move, and hopefully it succeeds quickly so that there’s time to repopulate after the hostilities cease.

Starting in the domestic sphere, Well, duh. The United States is in a recession, and has been for the last year, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group that has the power to officially tell us what most of America already knew. It's doubtful anyone will step up to take the blame, says Dogulas MacKinnon, but they’ll all step up to take a bailout. And spending and FDR-like policies will prolong and worsen the agony, says Michael Fumento, because it stops the private sector from working its mojo to bring things back to health in its fast and efficient way.

Wingnuttery in the military is not exclusive to United States shores, but the presenter of this particular instance is a chaplain in the United States Air Force. Apparently, Charles Darwin is Soviet leader, despite predating Lenin and the USSR, and the United States’ sole ideology is Theism and no other, among other wild and specious claims. The General has his own take, lamenting the exclusion of Marvin Gaye on the list of Soviet leaders.

Indictments against Messrs. Cheney and Gonzalez, the GEO Group dimissed... and only now do the details of the prosecutor, the case, and what the indictments were appear. Had we known this beforehand, we’d have given it even less chance than the proverbial snowball.

In art, one of those cultural things - a small sampling of painted, decorated, and very artistic trains in Japan. In a country where rail service covers the whole country and most people use it, the aesthetic is important. Here, where everyone drives, you get art cars on occasion, but the public transit is usually pretty drab, dreary, and graffiti-laced.

As if someone needed more fuel for the “Obama-Messiah” speculation, Alex Grey has done a painting of him as a world leader. Something that will make the President-elect into more of a progressive than he’s been sowing so far, would be to follow Marty Klein's recommendations to stop the government's blanket hostility toward sexuality, by requiring accuracy in sex ed, funding Planned Parenthood and contraceptives, so as to make abortions as much of a nonissue as possible, stop criminalizing teenagers for sex and sexual behavior, including educating federal judges on healthy sexuality and refocusing on stopping child pornography while letting adult entertainment and sexuality go, and removing censorship by the FCC and things like CIPA. Hear, hear, yo. Do all this, and President Obama will be more progressive than most.

In the opinionated areas, that Muslism were involved in the Mumbai attacks means that the Unietd States must do more political warfare to combat extremist Islam, by helping out its opponents in places where the ideology is strong, not just explaining America, but helping them build networks. Islam is the new Communist bloc, which means all the wonderful stuff we did to affix a fear of communism is now repurposed toward Islam. I haven’t heard an explicit domino theory yet, but all that “fight them there, or they’ll bomb us here” certainly sounds a lot like it. The WSJ also says that keeping the freedom and liberty-destroying tools like the Patriot Act around so as to gether intelligence on suspected terrorists is a good thing and something the President-elect should consider.

Harry R. Jackson, Jr. sees the election of the pragmatic Obama as a way for conservative Christians to escape the wingnut label and be sees as social glue instead, although most of the piece is about the a panel involveing the Congressional Black Caucus and their belief that there’s more to be done in the Obama administration to relieve the tensions and disparities of race, although I think Mr. Jackson believes that the Caucus is seeing too many things in terms of race. Elsewhere in the world, the WSJ is not happy that the supposedly liberal party of Egypt are still anti-Jews, and that regardless of what other progress they may be making, this backwardsness is making it hard to say confidently the Arab world is progressing. At the stakes where lives are involved, the president of Georgia defends his military actions, claiming that Russia invaded his sovereign territory and has engaged in a misinormation campaign to make the world believe Georgia was the aggressor.

Star Parker has the future of Republicans pegged - staying anchored to the socially conservative base and then reminding people of the limited government part, and by doing so, the spendy conservatives will drop out and become Democrats, and the minorities that are socially conservative (apparently because they see the damage “moral relativism” causes) will gravitate to that socially conservative Republicans, fixing the “white” problem they have.

Dank Kennedy sees a war on fast food, in much the same way as the war on tobacco, but is certain the mainstream media will miss all of it, and is thus left in the curious position of defending unhealthy vices and insisting that the media is not smart enough or chooses not to connect all the dots that amount to this war, like they haven’t with the bailouts, and that all of this amounts to government control of our lives and industries. It’s quite the twisted way of getting there, that’s for sure.

Last out of this segment, Thomas Sowell considers the community service requirement propoganda for the left akin to military recruitment and service on the right and hostile to freedom, because it lets teachers and admissions officers, all liberals, dictate what is acceptable community service, and thus they do it on their terms, with their ideas, denying families the opportunity to figure out how to best spend their childrens time, turning what should be an exercise for compassion into one of propaganda, and, naturally, by encouraging work in homeless shelters, implanting the idea that it’s okay to be a “vagrant”, someone “not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play” rather than being too ashamed to use government services set up to help people stay afloat in situations between jobs or such. He assumes everyone who is homeless is there by choice, and thus, there should be no need for any assistance to those who choose to be lazy, because it takes money from all the productive and hard-working people and squanders it on them. If that’s the case, Mr. Sowell, would you be okay with religious organizations stopping their assistance programs as well? Those people must be lazy, too, if they need help. Nevermind the charge on many of them to help the needy when they have the chance, which sometimes manifests as the tithe to the church. Getting back to the point, though, this is a new dimension to the still-tired argument that liberals have taken over the school system and are using it as an indoctrination chamber, K-university. The point of community service is to take a step back and get people to look at a world foreign to many (possibly intimate to some), perhaps putting some names and faces to “the poor” and those “vagrants”, and the people who are “the least of my people”. And rather than being some sort of liberal plot, military service would be excluded because it’s a contract that requires adulthood to be signed on to, I suspect. Anyway, community service might be one way of sneaking actual education back into the school system. Maybe from there, we can retake our classrooms and banish the standardized tests and their control over school purses back to where they came from.

Technology opens up with an interesting design for alpine sheltering - an 8-meter self-sufficient structure that intends to blend in with the nature around it, while providing a transparent view of that nature to those inside. It’s neat - if it could be made in such a way as to be carryable like a tent, I think camping would be that much more awesome. Beyond this point, the bizarre lack of acorns in parts fo the United States is drawing attention, commercial wave farm number one is up and running, harnessing the tides and currents to generate power, using virtual reality to trick people into believing they're someone else - therapy now, MMORPGs later. - A patent application for a method of dispersing hurricanes through the use of sonic booms generated by supersonic jets, and male-male coupled penguins are trying to look after eggs... but they're stealing them from other couples. Not quite the way to go about it - and the other penguins have noticed the theft and are ostracizing the two. Well, so long as nobody rants on about this being some analogue to human homosexual pairings.

And last from these sections, two instances of technology to very different ends - Dec 2, 1942 finds the first controlled atomic chain reaction, Dec 2, 1957 opens up the first commercial nuclear power plant in Shippington, PA, and then on Dec 1, 1952, the first successful sex-change operation presented Christine Jorgensen to the world.

Last for tonight, oh, hey, look, The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar! Plenty of images taken of our universe that are beautiful and wallpaper-deseving all by themselves. Of course, if space doesn’t interest you, here are some television shows someone thinks you might like. If you have time for television, that is. If that’s not your thing, then perhaps consider the impact Anne of Green Gables, and her bosom friend, have had on lesbians for the last 100 years.