Getting back into the habot - 6 January 2009

Having apparently missed the whole thing while I was away, LiveJournal laid off a few people, about a dozen, which prompted panic. And Twitter apparently got a hacking, which was apparently cause for lulz. So, again, we wonder - if this disappears completely, well, it was a good run while it lasted, I guess.

Up top, our great and powerful friends of the Religious Right have a new message for all of us, brought through the excellent medium gornzilla (who is so totally not safe for work in general): sleeping alone aids the terrorists. Instead, adopt dogs from those who used them in fighting rings. Or purchase bricks to inscribe with the names of soldiers for a museum walk.

Above the fold and the regular news run, a curiosity. A mother says she heard a Mattel doll say "Islam is the light". Here’s my context: Said dolls have also aparently said “Satan is king.” before. This does not stop the creation of a group such as Mothers Ask Mattel for Accountability (a name chosen for its acronym possibilities, no doubt), who are campaigning against this attempt to convert very young girls to Islam and want Mattel to put on the packaging that the doll says “Islam is the light”. Cue the ellipsis. The high probabilities that this is either something out of nothing, or, at very worst, someone’s idea of a prank (recall Tickle Me Elmo that apparently spoke a homosexul slur... or was it a Teletubbies doll?) rather than an arm of The Insidious Jihad makes me favor Occam. Second, if you really think that a doll repeating a phrase over and over again will somehow brainwash young girls, there would be a lot more Barbies in the world. This goes back to (and I forget where and whom it was I linked to on the matter) the thought that a lot of parallel Christian economy-enthusiasts have - given one chance to slip out and be tempted, the kids will always be tempted and fall and become worldly. Give kids credit. They navigate a sea of media messages to be themselves, right from the get-go. And there are non-Christians, too, so messages from birth can’t be totally effective. Mountain out of a molehill, really. The General provides the proper ridiculous degree.

Also, most interesting, and I’m betting the teachers on the list can confirm - homosexuality is still the insult of choice among the under-18 crowd, despite the under-18 crowd stridently saying that “gay” has nothing to do with homosexuality, but has instead become the new “lame”. *eyebrow pop* Right. Did the Bishop of Rome suddenly become an Anglican lately?

Finally, Unabashed Feminism is going to have a field day with the situation that resulted in this decision. A waitress for the Hooters chain was awarded benefits after she found out she'd been fired from her job... because she came into work sporting bruises inflicted by her abusive boyfriend. This is in conflict with The Hooters Employee Guide, which stipulates that all waitstaff have to have a glamorous appearance (they also have to acknowledge that they'll be on the receiving end of innuendos and comments, and that they're not offended by it... right after they read that the company tolerates no harrassment in the workplace. Okay from the customers, not okay from the co-workers.). The company had argued she abandoned her job after she and her manager came to an agreement that she couldn’t do the duties of being a Hooters waitress and should take some time off.

Internationally, it’s still raining shells in Gaza. Some of them landing way too close to things they shouldn't. Brian Eno finds that Israel has flipped from oppressed to oppressors. Considering the state of Israel has expanded significantly over the course of the last few decades, the idea that Israel is fibbing about a lot of the latest incident gathers weight. But there are equally as many people who are firmly convinced Hamas is the instigator, always has been, and that it is the liberal media that is doing their best to exorcise the truth and paint Israel as responding excessively to the litany of terror attacks they suffer daily. Because the Palestinians abuse their own people as refugees, or as human shields, or as faces to stick on teh camera so that the rest of the world tells Israel to back off. Regrettably, Cease fire demands still blocked in the United Nations. That’s not the way out for Bret Stephens, ho says the only way out for Israel is to do what they're doing, and then start a retaliation campaign - one rocket equals one missile.

The WSJ thinks that this hit will help President Obama, and that he needs to show Israel support in return for their decision, because Israel will show Iran that their proxy wars have big costs, or something like that.

Terror charges read against four Yemeni men, the youngest 15, the oldest 24, as they are alleged to be part of al-Qaeda and plotted to kill tourists and government officials. Elsewhere, the UN's envoy and torture investigator has said that more nations must take Guantanamo Bay prisoners once the facility closes.

Either much cuter or much more weird than the news above (not sure which, really), Two German citizens tried to go to Africa to get married. They were five and six years old.. And intended on bringing a seven year-old along as a witness.

More provinces cede to Iraqi control, as the United States opens up an embassy in the country, and talk of 2009 being a key year begins.

Pakistan claims it needs more support, not more troops, to beat back the insurgency in Afghanistan and solidify the border.

On the domestic news desk, something light to start - The Mac man apparently in a movie he wrote smoking weed and talking on his Apple product.

Al Franken is certified as the winner of a Minnesota Senate race, after a state-ordered recount. Let the legal challenges commence. And the columns about how it was totally not a fair recount to the losing side.

Significantly more honest, Arrested for speeding, Mr. Charles Barkley explained why he was rushing to where he was - to get oral sex.

In realms where opinion matters more than fact (err, wait, that didn’t come out right), The WSJ compiles a rogue's gallery of persons who would have to testify that they heard about and sanctioned the torture policies and techniques, should a President Obama decide to go headhunting for people to blame. The WSJ points out that if the Congresscritters really were against torture and enhanced interrogation, they were briefed on it and had their chance to make an objection. They’d just, y’know, be jeapordizing national security, and so, by implication, aiding the terrorists, but if they felt that strongly about it, they should have done it, right?

Problem is, considering how top secret and classified most of those situations were, we probably have no access to the record that tells us about what was said, who was briefed, and on what. If we really want answers, declassify as much as humanly possible so that the people and the media can examine the documents and decide if the assertion that Congress knew about the torture is true.

The Slacktivist goes after phrasing made by the prime minister of India, where "military precision" in an attack that targeted civilians is a pretext for war, not an accurate description of the situation. If it were a military offensive, civilians wouldn’t be targeted, and it would be a lot more efficient than it actually was.

Jeff Taylor thinks the incoming President-elect will be crucified this year by high expectations, governments collapsing from no revenues and lots of entitlements, and the housing correction making the bailout an expensive mistake. A Republican senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Judd Gregg, offers advice on how to do stimulus right, with short projects, focusing on the right kinds of infrastructure, and choosing good places to invest taxpayer money.

Liberal Russia, while nowhere near the Kremlin, is survivng anyway, despite the Kremlin. Beforehand, it used to be that prosperity was how you killed authoritarian regimes. In these times, will it be political protests and riots that do the trick? Robert Spencer thinks so, although his focus is on speaking out against the ever-encroaching "global Islamic jihad" and the Organization of the Islamic Conference bloc in the United Nations. Because they’re gettign stronger precisely at the point we’re not caring, and soon, we’ll all be praying toward Mecca, whether we want to or not, because the jihad will successfully silence our ability to speak out against it, under the guise of religious tolerance of Islam or classifying it hate speech. Azadeh Moaveni is worried that Iran's future hinges on teh presidential election, to see whether the fundamentalists take hold again and go really repressive, or whether a saner leader is elected to find ways of improving lives and opening up the country without stepping to far out. Hugo Restall thinks we should be more concerned about China's ambition to field aircraft carriers, as it would make the powr balance in the area shift hard in their favor, or galvanize an opposition that relies on the United States.

Steve Chapman says the Senate must seat the replacement Senator from Illinois, or expose their disregard for the rule of law. If they really feel like being completely evil about it, they can seat him and then try to expel him, but they have to seat him.

William Ayers speaks on his picks for Education secretary and the state of schools and education in the country. Which provokes the expected reaction - give one convicted terrorist column space, give them all column space, and the HuffPo is now just another set of terrorists and sympathizers easily dismissable.

William McGurn takes issue with the recent headlines about the ineffectiveness of purity pledges, by compmlaining that the study only matched those teens with similarly religious teens and found no effect. Had it been a more general comparison between them and teenagers at large, he says, we’d find out that the group as a whole, pledgers or no, have less sex, wait longer, and have some that do stay chaste to marriage, proving that solid conservative and religious values really do work in keeping kids away from premarital sex. So, comparing a small group to a really big group is totally okay, despite all the extra variables that come with the big group that may influence the numbers in different directions. One of the small group staying chaste has a higher impact than one of the bigger group. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mr. Clemens said.

That said, and next to last for the opinions, there are some highlights in what felt like a bad year.

At the very tail end, though, Rachel Alexander will willingly trade your freedom for her security, thinking that we should let laws get passsed, and then work to correct the kinks, letting the government sweep in and arrest, spy on, and otherwise impede “terrorists” and their supporters, instead of seeing the ways that club can be used to turn innocent Americans into terrorists if the government wishes them to be. Terrorists have no “rights”, according to her, and preventing another terror attack is paramount to any sort of quaint ideas about privacy or innocence until proven guilty or even probable cause.

In technology, the turning of the new year made apparent a bug in older Zune programming, with quite the interesting results, the knowledge that you can get out of your phone contract, if you arrange for someone else to take it over for you, light to push and trap tiny molecules, gunning hard for the “lab on a chip” crowd, along with technology to fuse an dstudy cells, an artificial eye that can see 360 degrees with no obstructions, refining fuel cells to take less pure fuels, adding authentication to the DNS protocol, after a serious cache-poisoning scare, tooth regrowth through stem cells, of which your wisdom teeth are apparently great sources of, more pictures of the Milky Way galaxy core, Richard Dawkins on how discovering or generating a human-chimp hybrid would change the world, and JAXA, the Japanese space agency, thinking and designing a wearable toilet for astronauts.

Last for tonight, old posters of civil defense, for those years when people actively worried they would get nuked... and didn’t realize that being caught near the blast site and in the fallout zone meant more than just some radiation dusting the ground. If that’s not your thing, maybe giant ice scultpures will do the trick?

And some parting words of wisdom from the outgoing administrator.

The Randomness of the day's events - 07 January 2009

Up top, test your logical sense. Recall that logically valid arguments may have no truth value when taking the test. And, for those literarily inclined, the Tale of Genji endures, despite more than a thousand years after its creation.

In the International frame, Israel continues to hold attention. A new accusation that Israel is using white phosphorus shells, which sounds like it goes against the laws of war. Additional pressure comes from the mounting desire for a cease-fire and an increasing series of violent acts against Jews in other countries. International consequences. There’s now a really big push, and I guess it has something to do with Hamas, from what I’m reading, to link the conflict in Gaza with Iran in some way, if not attempting to say directly that it's a war between Israel and Iran's proxy. The Prime Minister of Israel makes his case on how Hamas has broken their good faith and cease-fire, justifying the current offensive and dismissing the idea that it is excessive. It's also a bad idea to be working for any media in the area - release the breaking news too early and the censors will have your head and wonder whether you’re an agent trying to help their opponents.

Elsewhere on Iran, Turkey held up a shipment it considered suspicious from Iran to Venezuela because it contained equipment which could be used to manufacture explosives. The official markings on the crate: tractor parts. How do we get there from here?

The dispute between Russia and Ukraine over gas prices, supplies, and outstanding debts has hurt European nations, despite promises from both sides that said supplies would not be affected.

A nice HumInt about how life is now that the new security arrangements have taken hold, which seems to be alternating between “See? They work well together.” and “This oppressive security agreement is hindering us from doing what we need to do.” Stories of the police finding potential suicide bombers seems to suggest more the former, and that we’ve trained a competent force, drive-by killings notwithstanding.

On the domestic desk, publishers are gambling on the successes of big blockbusters to make up for more modest returns on the rest of their catalog, giving out lots of cash to a certain few and hoping to make lots, rather than more modest fees for titles that will turn profits regularly, if not spectacularly. According to the article, it works, so people keep trying it, and not only that, if a publishing house doesn’t bid big, the agents won’t send them what they consider their best work.

The House of Representatives has adopted rule changes that make their rule languages gender-neutral, owing to the significant presence and chairships of female Members of Congress. For those whom language is still the enemy and a subtle reminder of the the idea “no penis, no power”, this counts as a step forward. For others, this is nonsense and unimportant.

New laws coming soon into effect requiring product testing on all items for sale, including handcrafted items, are sparking worries that most of the market for hand made objects will drop out, because most people making those objects can’t pay for the testing, and fear they will be assumed guilty of breaking the law if they sell, resulting in fines they can't pay.

The General points us to a member of a church who feels all of Santa's reindeer, except Rudolph, are homosexuals - based on the Rankin-Basss special, and thus the “reindeer games” that Rudolph can’t participate in are all homosexual in nature. Which is fairly harmless. Depending on which way you look at it, the Bishop of Rome's proclamation that hormone contraceptives are polluting the planet is also harmless wingnuttery or further proof that he is quite out of touch with science.

Potentially dangerous, however, is a ricin threat delivered against several Seattle bars known for their homosexual clientele.

The happy part out of this, though, is the Buddhist temple that takes care of birds deemed to dangerous or unsuitable to be pets.

In opinions, Uncle $cam feels that blog services are doing far too much to profile and monitor their users, as well as aiding the government's ability to shape and control Internet traffic and censor it. Also linked are the Committee to Protect Bloggers, which may understandably be focused elsewhere, like China, and The Open Net Initiative, tracking filtering and censorship practices around the world.

Returning to domestic opinions, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann return to a campaign promise of the Obama team - tax cuts for Americans, but these aren’t tax cuts, because they’re refundable credits. This makes them unmistakably welfare for the poorest, which makes the rich, who already pay so very much, have to pay more to balance things out, while the lowerst-income (those lazy and indolent slackers who don’t pay any taxes, or won’t after the credits) get money and will be able to impose their will on the government so they can suck more money away any time they please. Mixing in with Cal Thomas's insistence that spending plans make people dependent on government, and thus socialism appears, the Democrats spend us into the ground, and everybody fails because nobody was willing to sensibly listen to ideas about not spending more than you have when economic times are good and nobody is willing to tighten their budgets and cut programs to essentials. They’d probably team up with Tom Price, who says that the Republican Party must oppose the "health-care rationing" that the Obama administration is set on, because health-care rationing is the only outcome he can envision from the plan, after all the private insurance providers have been driven away. His alternative is to reform taxes so that it makes sense to own insurance and make it so that each person purchases and controls their own insurance care. Add on Hal Varian, who proclaims that boosting private investment and investing in good projects or the states, instead of federal government spending, is how we get out of a recession, and Thomas Sowell, who feels that the bailout cash was a gift to Democrats to spend how they like and avoid taking flak for it, along with the inevitable delays spending money on building and repairing infrastructure has, and the critics are ready before the President has even taken office. Not that Dan Gainor, or anyone, expects the mainstream media to hold the incoming President accountable on his economic promises, leaving it to the columnists to do so.

Richard Olivastro expresses his distate for the matter surrounding the appointed junior Senator from Illinois, considering all the possible options for Mr. Reid and the Rules Committee to use as charlatanism and defiance of law. Instead, he suggests, Mr. Reid move over to Minnesota and tell Al Franken that he can’t have a Senate seat that he stole. Funny how recounts work like that - whomever’s on the losing side will accuse the other of stealing the seat through some chicanery. In both cases, though, Mr. Reid probably doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on about keeping someone out, should the matters in their states resolve in favor of the petitioners.

In technology, Google releases a beta of Picasa for Intel-based Apple computers, 60 minutes on how fMRIs lets brainthinkies come out, and some of the police, government, and marketing applications for that kind of technology, The FBI's increasing unease about cyberwarfare, which makes me think that “Pluto’s Kiss” might be an eventuality instead of a fiction, even if it isn’t named that, people wanting to rush headlong into cyberwarfare by deploying robotic soldiers, walking nanobots only a molecule or two in size, and how city grids and the urban jungle dull our minds, but that dull can be counteracted with some nature popping up here and there.

At the end of tonight’s dispatches, a look inside the White House at all the staff that make Presidential transitions, visits, and life smooth and undisturbed. That, and the industry that makes it's money selling adult films... would like a bailout. Well, Hustler and Girls Gone Wild are, anyway.

Things Learned, version 12

Time passes, knowledge is gained, and weird situations abound. Here’s what I’ve learned in this stretch of time.

1) Our patrons are of all types of people. We serve all types of people. Thus, as a professional, I will not go whomping on the person who insists that America is a Christian nation, that we’ve been on a downslide since the adoption of separation of Church and State, on Masonic conspiracies, that we’re trying to displace God from the country and bring back everything that the Greeks were doing, including professional sport, homosexuality, and watching football over going to church. The really interesting part was the skillful weaving of that which is fact and that which is opinion. As a professional, I will continue with my work as I listen to what is being said. This part of the discipline that we have. I reserve the right to be quietly amused by the matter, however.

1b) I have the requisite professionalism to take someone seriously when they ask about information on a One World Government or a North American Union, cite Ron Paul as the person who is talking about it, but nobody is paying attention to, and to advise them that they will likely find a dearth of scholarly information on the matter, while still finding them a book about the currently-applying Constitution so they can study it, because they are trying to inform themselves about the shadowy cabal, whomever they are, planning on writing a new one for the OWG/NAU. I am That. Damn. Good. I still reserve the right to go, “Huh. Met a Ron Paul supporter today.”

1c) Similarly, I do not miss more than a beat processing and reconfiguring my approach when someone tells me that they do not go on the Internet at all, because they are afraid of it and are certain it is full of violence just waiting to spring upon them as soon as they log on. And can manage to guide them to a successful interaction despite the most likely avenue of getting the information they want is through said ciolent Internet.

2) Teenagers can be ladies and gentlemen when they want to. They can also be little snots when they want to.

3) I apparently have a bit of a black thumb on maintenance calls. The one I made, that was supposedly fixed? Broke again the same day. And continued to break even after having been fixed twice.

4) There’s nothing better than seeing someone’s face light up when they ask you a question like “I might be grasping at straws here, but do you have any books about parents going to work?” and a catalog search later, the response is, “Actually, yes we do.” As it turns out, two or three in the system, in fact. These are the moments librarians live for, where all the mofoery that the profession puts up with melts away through the joy of finding exactly what someone needs.

5) There are few things more cool, professionally, that listening to a parent do awesome parenting and encouragement. I hope that all parents can be like that.

6) Gamers are the wave of the future. Libraries need to be able to talk to them on their own terms and to provide places for them to hang out and to create. More generally, libraries ened to keep up with technology and move siwftly to adopt the new ways of communication that the young are using. If we don’t, we lose them and they may or may not come back when they have kids.

7) There’s no large print version of out library card application. But they are working on making it more accessible for those with poorer eyesight.

8) I’m not sure anymore which will come first - the new library completing, or my five year service award.

9) Human voices carry through the walls of our meeting room decently, but muffled. A basketball being dribbled, however, comes through loud and clear.

10) I have sufficient authority on grade school math to be used as a bludgeon against a child’s currently-incorrect answer.

11) Calvin talked about dinosaurs in rocketships, and I had thought that was just a fantastic thought. And then, there was Captain Raptor.

12) Trig tables are apparently an essential reference thing to have around. Fortunately, we have Google Calculator. (And a hat tip to the older gentleman who recognized the fact that enterprising students can, indeed, check out all our books and leave us without valuable resources to other students. It was, to say the least, a most interesting conversation.)

13) Camo comes in pink. This is awesome. And thus keeps the kidlets looking like kidlets, rather than miniature copies of the military men.

Stuff for library users to learn, v. 3

Remember, most of you are good people who do not annoy the library staff. Here are some helpful tips on keeping that status... although I’ve noticed that it’s the people who aren’t aware that what they’re doing is royally pissing off the library staff that tend to do it best.

1a) The library is changing. We are doing our best to ensure that all of our populaces have a niche that they can be happy in, but a side effect of being a public building is that all members of the public are welcome to join in. In high-traffic areas like computers, this means you may be forced to encounter age groups you personally find detestable, possibly making more noise than you are comfortable with, and maybe even doing harmless things to each other or around that annoy you. There are two proper responses to this:

i) Suck it up and deal with it.

ii) Politely ask a staffer to see what they can do about the situation.

1b) Telling a staff member that they are incompetent and shouldn’t be employed because they don’t read your mind and stop someone from doing something harmless that doesn’t appear to be directly affecting anyone is a sure way to make a staff member’s day. Most of us will shrug it off. The rest of us will blog about it. In either case, on what authority do you tell a staff member how to do their job?

1c) Talking to the offenders directly can work, too. But don’t expect them to be any more of mind readers about some sort of “quiet” need than I am. If you want success, do it in a rational manner. If you blow up at them, they might respect you, or they might see it as a challenge to annoy you further. If you decide to take matters into your own hands, don’t be surprised if the librarian tells you you’re out of line while also telling them to tone it down.

1d) For said offenders: If a librarian gets involved, you’re being too loud. If you ask the librarian to move somewhere where you can be a little louder, we still expect you to behave civilly. Don’t make me come in there. And especially don’t make me come back because you exceeded the bounds of good taste. It makes me less likely to grant you the request to move in the first place.

2) Saying “You’re a big girl/boy, we don’t read baby books anymore” is totally missing the point. To encourage reading, read what they want to read. Imposing arbitrary age and gradedness on someone’s pleasurable reading just doesn’t work. Even if he wants to hear “Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie” for the five hundredth time, read it to him (or let him read it). Don’t stifle the reading love, please!

2b) The persons responsible for Accelerated Reader and other ways of packaging someone’s reading skills into numerical and quantifiable “levels” or “points” will be hung by their toes, attached to an unnecessarily slow-moving mechanism, and subjected to the closest thing we humans have to carbonite freezing.

2c) The library is not just a place to look at books. I’m not even sure that’s our primary function any more, with as often as the Internet terminals are in use.

3) Honk and die. Come into the library to retrieve your children.

4) We are not an answering machine service, nor do we have to keep track of anyone. If you are that concerned about the whereabouts of your child, tether him or her with a cell phone or other sort of leash, please.

4b) On that point, we do not act in loco parentis. So, if you want your child not to check certain materials out, or not to attend programs, or to only make it so they can watch Barney forever and ever until the end of time, you’ll have to accompany your child to the library every single time.

5) When making a complaint to me, don’t hedge. If you say, “The depictions of X in this book are Y, but I’m not really an anti-Y person” or “but I have these other progressive ideas over here”, you’re not helping me figure out what you think is wrong with the book.

6) Teenagers are occasionally rowdy and coarse. Comes with the territory. We’re really doing our best to make sure that we’re not totally stifling them and riding their asses to the point where they can’t sneeze without a handkerchief and a shush appearing (which is what some of you users want), and not letting them run amok and turn the place into their persona living rooms (which is what they would like).

7) Once is a warning. Twice is a command. Don’t make me say it a third time.

8) I am not a bludgeon to be used indiscriminately! I will answer your questions nicely, politely, and to the best of my ability, but I assure you, that does not mean that I have somehow sided with you against your child in any sort of way.