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Hey, all. We have more data on the winners of the Newberry and Caldecott medals for 2009, as well as a short NPR piece talking to Gaiman. I agree that Gaima's selection re-energizes the Newberry Medal into an award that indicates good, readable books, instead of some of the selections that the children have not been as interested in reading from past years. Plus, hey, it’s Neil. If he didn’t get one, it would probably have been because he didn’t write enough of them.
As one writer is lauded, another apsses on. John Updike, 76 years.
Also up top, before all else, lesons that Spider-Man can teach President Obama, after the President, who considers himself a fan, made an appearance in Amazing Spider-Man. Good, solid, sound advice from a comic book? Oh, yeah.
And there’s 100 Open CourseWare-type classes that might interest you, including “Street-fighting Mathematics”.
Around the world, Iran has called on the United States to end its support of Israel, as well as withdraw troop presences from several other areas around the world. The pairing is, of course, that people are becoming increasingly nervous about the potential for Iranian nuclear weapons, based on the amount of enriched uranium Iran could have. and, in a country where the officials and participants were fined and suspended for participating in a men versus women football game because the law of the ruler says that men and women who are unrelated cannot be in each other’s presence.
Troops originally destined for Iraq are now setting up shop in Afghanistan, where the new administration wants to shift attention and the majority of troop effort to.
The Tamil Tiger rebellion looks to increasingly be melting back into the shadows, as the Sri Lankan government captured another key town. I doubt it will disappear, but it will likely become asymmetric from this point onward.
When going to eat blowfish in Japan, make sure that the place you’re going to has all their licenses in order. Seven men were taken to hospital after ingesting blowfish toxins from a restauant that did not have a license to prepare the posionous fish. Because this is one of those thrills that can kill you if it’s done wrong.
Following on a story from yesterday, the Brazillian government rejected the claim that Josef Mengele is somehow responsible for a town's high twin birth rate, citing that they think Mengele woudn’t have the knowledge to do the genetic tuning needed.
Canada does the stimulus thing, too, but not to nearly the degree that the United States is planning - a more modest thirty billion or so, with a shrinking defecit over time.
In the land where cash is king, some banks kept themselves afloat by oaning money that originated in the drug trade, because it was often the biggest pile of liquid cash available.
On the domestic front, here's a kick to get you to swear off High Fructose Corn Syrup - for three-four years now, the FDA has known taht it could be potentially contaminated with mercury. As part of the process, one of the chemicals used to extract the starch can be contaminated with mercury, a contamination that it then passes on to the syrup. Huh. Worse, half the samples tested by the study came back positive.
Much happier, a profile of nine companies that haven't had to lay off a single worker through the entire economic crisis up to the point of the article, proving that it could be done, but many of them required foresight, planning, and a willingness to retain and improve upon their human workforce, rather than seeing them as expendable line-items that can be cut to meet budgetary requirements.
President Obama may be willing to sacrifice a provision that would icnrease funding for birth control under the Medicare program, as an attempt to appease Republicans and bring them on board with the omnibus stimulus bill. Doing so, of course, puts the President in a bad position with regard to many of his supporters. The long view suggests that perhaps the issue will be revisited later, when having or not having a provision can be a live-or-die question in a stimulus bill. Aaaand, proof of that - President Obama supports the measure, but believes the stimulus billl is the wrong place for it. The provision to make our hospitals and medicine practices digital looks pretty good, though. Must say, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a President make an overt gesture toward making sure legislation arrives in the proper places with the proepr pieces. Of course, true to form of the Loyal (or otherwise) Opposition, the Republicans will vote against the stimulus bill. And they’ll have the support of some economists, who adovocate doing nothing, at least for now, as the best approach.
All said and done, though, President Obama has arrived. How do we know this? He's got his first MAD cover. And people speculating on whether he might be the most famous person in the world... or of all time.
Remember that new scandal with Ted Haggard involving another boy in the church? Turns out, there was some hush money paid, too, so that the second scandal would bury. Of course, had they taken The General's advice on how to spin it, there wouldn’t be this problem.
If you think school is a highly difficult thing, try it by arriving in the high school years with no grasp of any language, native or imported, knowing there's only a few short years to get it all before they send you out into the world. There’s not much of an apparatus for adult learning in our country, and there are probably a lot of people who are dommed to low wage, potentially undocumented work simply because there’s no opportunity for them to go through formal schooling, even if only for a few years, so they can pick up the skills they’d need for holding down work while continuing studies.
And in our opinion matters: Lorie Byrd insists that the Loyal Opposition stick to their guns and principles, while adding on that they will have to take on the responsibility for criticizing the President, pointing out where he fails and missteps, and promoting the good things that the former administrator did, because the media won’t criticze and the current President, despite his unity calls, can’t bring himself to admit that there was anything that the former administrator did well. William Rusher is kinder to the incoming President, noting that the new information gathered through conversation and briefings makes campaign promises become inadvisable or otherwise un-implementable, and Mr. Rusher uses Iraq as an example, where the President must commit to withdrawal, but probably realizes that it’s a litle harder than originally anticipated. Fouad Ajami is convinced that the election of Barack Obama sounded an all-clear to dictators and tyrants of the Middle East, telling them that America wasn't coming to topple them if they continued in their wanton ways. Comedian David Limbaugh has a list of what he considers to be good questions for the White House Press Secretary, regarding the presence of complications around Guantanamo, and whether President Obama is willing to reverse himself on the matter if no solutions acceptable to him or conservatives are found, including the spectre of “would you give terrorists Constitutional protections” and “you’re making terrorism into a law-enforcement issue again, instead of a military one”, a red herring on how torture techniques are supposedly good for extracting live-saving information (been watching a little to much 24 lately?), and how promoting funding for abortions is sticking to the promise of bringing America together. That last one might almost be a legitimate question, but some part of it’s legitimacy arises from the unbending stand of religious conservatives that zygotes should be brought to term, no matter how they came into being, whether it’s economically viable for the family to do so, and that after those zygotes become live humans, the families they’re attached to must now sink or swim without any guarantee of sufficient assistance from any source that they will be able to make it.
Bruce Bialosky is utterly nonplussed with the first week of the Obama presidency so far, registering, to his count, one attack on the First Amendment (lobbyist exclusions as somehow infringing on the right of the people to ask the government for a redress of grievances), dangerous terrorists get moved to American soil and “show trials to protect their rights” (Guantanamo Bay EO), and “restricted methods used to gain useful information to be used to help win the war on terror” (Torture EO).The Guantanamo bit has been played and replayed and replayed, considering it started with the former administrator. It does look to be the current Talking Point of how much President Obama is a terrorist-loving cheesemonkey, though. the bit about lobbyists representing the populace, well, that’s sort of true - they really represent organizations and often conglomerations of corporations, who while seen as persons currently under the law, are not really representing people... and at what point, might I add, did asking the government to grant you favors and special treatment before laws are passed count as asking for redress? Unless every lobbyist has in mind a particular law that they want fixed, repealed, or redressed when they go to lobby. Still, I imagine that kind of power being more like Mr. Smith goes to Washington than the well-oiled machines that lobby and interest groups are. I’m probably naive in thinking this.
Dennis Prager feels college-age students don't know about the true terror of Communism, and the millions that it killed, so they can equate the largely impotent bogeyman that Communism turned out to be with the likely largely impotent bogeyman that radical Islam will be, laying both at the blame of right-wing agitators. Oh, and just to make sure he shreds her credibility, he makes sure to note that she believes the government attacked the people on 11 September 2001. Absent from either person’s expressed point of view is that we really haven’t had a pure communist experiment, and thus are unlikely to be able to gauge its success. Truthfully, it will probably take a world or two by itself to arrange it and see if it works. Frank Gaffney declares that we're (still) not taking radical Islam seriously enough, so he and Prager probably would get along.
The WSJ argues that the stimulus package is actualy only about 12% real stimulus spending, with a delayed return, and that the rest is either special-interest pork, entitlements, or spending on things that don't return on their investment, like public transit schemes, and thus, we should see it as a Democratic wish list rather than real stimulus. Mr, Sowell sees spending as a way for the feds to create new institutions and buy the power to dictate how corporations will be run, where if we were really interested in stimulus, we’d just cut takes pretty hard and be done with it.
With a post that required a disclaimer post before it, which you should read, where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks asks to think of his post in the same way one would scrutinize a big policy proposal (which it is, basically), he lays out what he thinks would be the right stimulus spending - version 2 of the Works Progress Administration, where anyone who needed a job would get one that fit with what they “do” - not necessarily for great wages, but a job that makes money that can then be used to avoid having one’s house pulled out from under oenself, or that can be used, in conjunction with boarders or others working together, to keep a roof over one’s head. Because the stuff built, supposedly as a waste of government dollars, was built solidly and strong, and most of it is still here with us today, although not necessarily for its intended purpose any more. This revamp would likely also be seen as a “waste” of government dollars, but it would be better than trying to push through something seen as “welfare” and it would likely get all those infrastructure jobs done for cheap - and get everything upgraded for the society that will return when the economy does. It’s a good suggestion. It needs holes poked in it, if you can find some.
The WSJ looks on at drug corporation mergers and is a bit nervous at how they will interact with the new government, including complaints about FDA approval, the spectres of single-payer-type coverage for more people, and the way the companies are being run that turns them from good research houses into attempted money-makers, with the innovation-stifling that comes with it.
Mr. Jenkins, Jr. feels that upgraded fuel-efficiency standards and emission regulations are ways of appeasing the green constituency while kicking automakers that are down, rather than being any measure that actually improves anything. I’d say that in an economic depression, things that make you have to fill up your fuel tank less often would be welcome improvements. And then, if the economy takes off and we have another gas spike, we’ll still not have to fill up as often. It’s a win-win situation to me, it seems.
Mr. Frank speaks on the push toward privatization of roads, and how that's a bad idea, because roads weren’t built for private use, corporate debt is more expensive, so tolls would rise, and because the right solution, like raising gas taxes, is unpopular because conservatives have staked their livelihoods on being the side of the aisle that hates any tax increase, justified or no.
Here in technology, thinkies about how space can be used as a therapy tool, a jellyfish that can revert to a younger self making the rounds and increasing its own population, some reordering of the tree of evolution, regular sprints as a good health exercise, an implantable device that trains immune cells to attack tumor cells, more attempts at building independent nations on the high seas, Laser weapons in trucks shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles, and a study declaring that the consequences of anthropogenic climate change will not be reversible for a millenium, so if something really bad does go down, we’re going to have to ride it out.
Last for tonight, and of importance, just about everything you would need to commit an identity theft of someone is available for free on the web, so long as you know where to look. In places like government registers, where things such as Social Security numbers are displayed in the clear as part of scanned documents. No redaction, no nothing. There’s legislation in the works about stopping that and making your private numbers truly private. Although, from what the article person went through, if you have a relatively common name, you may be better hid because of the noise surrounding all of you that makes it harder to tell which data point goes to which person.
And one more item that, I have to admit, have potential comedy values, too. The Extreme Mind suite, which is all about tones and subliminal commands to do all sorts of things, like get energized, get healthy, get aggressive, get bigger plumage-related sexual organs, all of this.
The actually funny thing that’s the true end for tonight? Patch log for United States: Democracy server. Version 44 had a lot of work to do to bring things back to a playable standard. Maybe we’ll see more people logging on now.
As one writer is lauded, another apsses on. John Updike, 76 years.
Also up top, before all else, lesons that Spider-Man can teach President Obama, after the President, who considers himself a fan, made an appearance in Amazing Spider-Man. Good, solid, sound advice from a comic book? Oh, yeah.
And there’s 100 Open CourseWare-type classes that might interest you, including “Street-fighting Mathematics”.
Around the world, Iran has called on the United States to end its support of Israel, as well as withdraw troop presences from several other areas around the world. The pairing is, of course, that people are becoming increasingly nervous about the potential for Iranian nuclear weapons, based on the amount of enriched uranium Iran could have. and, in a country where the officials and participants were fined and suspended for participating in a men versus women football game because the law of the ruler says that men and women who are unrelated cannot be in each other’s presence.
Troops originally destined for Iraq are now setting up shop in Afghanistan, where the new administration wants to shift attention and the majority of troop effort to.
The Tamil Tiger rebellion looks to increasingly be melting back into the shadows, as the Sri Lankan government captured another key town. I doubt it will disappear, but it will likely become asymmetric from this point onward.
When going to eat blowfish in Japan, make sure that the place you’re going to has all their licenses in order. Seven men were taken to hospital after ingesting blowfish toxins from a restauant that did not have a license to prepare the posionous fish. Because this is one of those thrills that can kill you if it’s done wrong.
Following on a story from yesterday, the Brazillian government rejected the claim that Josef Mengele is somehow responsible for a town's high twin birth rate, citing that they think Mengele woudn’t have the knowledge to do the genetic tuning needed.
Canada does the stimulus thing, too, but not to nearly the degree that the United States is planning - a more modest thirty billion or so, with a shrinking defecit over time.
In the land where cash is king, some banks kept themselves afloat by oaning money that originated in the drug trade, because it was often the biggest pile of liquid cash available.
On the domestic front, here's a kick to get you to swear off High Fructose Corn Syrup - for three-four years now, the FDA has known taht it could be potentially contaminated with mercury. As part of the process, one of the chemicals used to extract the starch can be contaminated with mercury, a contamination that it then passes on to the syrup. Huh. Worse, half the samples tested by the study came back positive.
Much happier, a profile of nine companies that haven't had to lay off a single worker through the entire economic crisis up to the point of the article, proving that it could be done, but many of them required foresight, planning, and a willingness to retain and improve upon their human workforce, rather than seeing them as expendable line-items that can be cut to meet budgetary requirements.
President Obama may be willing to sacrifice a provision that would icnrease funding for birth control under the Medicare program, as an attempt to appease Republicans and bring them on board with the omnibus stimulus bill. Doing so, of course, puts the President in a bad position with regard to many of his supporters. The long view suggests that perhaps the issue will be revisited later, when having or not having a provision can be a live-or-die question in a stimulus bill. Aaaand, proof of that - President Obama supports the measure, but believes the stimulus billl is the wrong place for it. The provision to make our hospitals and medicine practices digital looks pretty good, though. Must say, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a President make an overt gesture toward making sure legislation arrives in the proper places with the proepr pieces. Of course, true to form of the Loyal (or otherwise) Opposition, the Republicans will vote against the stimulus bill. And they’ll have the support of some economists, who adovocate doing nothing, at least for now, as the best approach.
All said and done, though, President Obama has arrived. How do we know this? He's got his first MAD cover. And people speculating on whether he might be the most famous person in the world... or of all time.
Remember that new scandal with Ted Haggard involving another boy in the church? Turns out, there was some hush money paid, too, so that the second scandal would bury. Of course, had they taken The General's advice on how to spin it, there wouldn’t be this problem.
If you think school is a highly difficult thing, try it by arriving in the high school years with no grasp of any language, native or imported, knowing there's only a few short years to get it all before they send you out into the world. There’s not much of an apparatus for adult learning in our country, and there are probably a lot of people who are dommed to low wage, potentially undocumented work simply because there’s no opportunity for them to go through formal schooling, even if only for a few years, so they can pick up the skills they’d need for holding down work while continuing studies.
And in our opinion matters: Lorie Byrd insists that the Loyal Opposition stick to their guns and principles, while adding on that they will have to take on the responsibility for criticizing the President, pointing out where he fails and missteps, and promoting the good things that the former administrator did, because the media won’t criticze and the current President, despite his unity calls, can’t bring himself to admit that there was anything that the former administrator did well. William Rusher is kinder to the incoming President, noting that the new information gathered through conversation and briefings makes campaign promises become inadvisable or otherwise un-implementable, and Mr. Rusher uses Iraq as an example, where the President must commit to withdrawal, but probably realizes that it’s a litle harder than originally anticipated. Fouad Ajami is convinced that the election of Barack Obama sounded an all-clear to dictators and tyrants of the Middle East, telling them that America wasn't coming to topple them if they continued in their wanton ways. Comedian David Limbaugh has a list of what he considers to be good questions for the White House Press Secretary, regarding the presence of complications around Guantanamo, and whether President Obama is willing to reverse himself on the matter if no solutions acceptable to him or conservatives are found, including the spectre of “would you give terrorists Constitutional protections” and “you’re making terrorism into a law-enforcement issue again, instead of a military one”, a red herring on how torture techniques are supposedly good for extracting live-saving information (been watching a little to much 24 lately?), and how promoting funding for abortions is sticking to the promise of bringing America together. That last one might almost be a legitimate question, but some part of it’s legitimacy arises from the unbending stand of religious conservatives that zygotes should be brought to term, no matter how they came into being, whether it’s economically viable for the family to do so, and that after those zygotes become live humans, the families they’re attached to must now sink or swim without any guarantee of sufficient assistance from any source that they will be able to make it.
Bruce Bialosky is utterly nonplussed with the first week of the Obama presidency so far, registering, to his count, one attack on the First Amendment (lobbyist exclusions as somehow infringing on the right of the people to ask the government for a redress of grievances), dangerous terrorists get moved to American soil and “show trials to protect their rights” (Guantanamo Bay EO), and “restricted methods used to gain useful information to be used to help win the war on terror” (Torture EO).The Guantanamo bit has been played and replayed and replayed, considering it started with the former administrator. It does look to be the current Talking Point of how much President Obama is a terrorist-loving cheesemonkey, though. the bit about lobbyists representing the populace, well, that’s sort of true - they really represent organizations and often conglomerations of corporations, who while seen as persons currently under the law, are not really representing people... and at what point, might I add, did asking the government to grant you favors and special treatment before laws are passed count as asking for redress? Unless every lobbyist has in mind a particular law that they want fixed, repealed, or redressed when they go to lobby. Still, I imagine that kind of power being more like Mr. Smith goes to Washington than the well-oiled machines that lobby and interest groups are. I’m probably naive in thinking this.
Dennis Prager feels college-age students don't know about the true terror of Communism, and the millions that it killed, so they can equate the largely impotent bogeyman that Communism turned out to be with the likely largely impotent bogeyman that radical Islam will be, laying both at the blame of right-wing agitators. Oh, and just to make sure he shreds her credibility, he makes sure to note that she believes the government attacked the people on 11 September 2001. Absent from either person’s expressed point of view is that we really haven’t had a pure communist experiment, and thus are unlikely to be able to gauge its success. Truthfully, it will probably take a world or two by itself to arrange it and see if it works. Frank Gaffney declares that we're (still) not taking radical Islam seriously enough, so he and Prager probably would get along.
The WSJ argues that the stimulus package is actualy only about 12% real stimulus spending, with a delayed return, and that the rest is either special-interest pork, entitlements, or spending on things that don't return on their investment, like public transit schemes, and thus, we should see it as a Democratic wish list rather than real stimulus. Mr, Sowell sees spending as a way for the feds to create new institutions and buy the power to dictate how corporations will be run, where if we were really interested in stimulus, we’d just cut takes pretty hard and be done with it.
With a post that required a disclaimer post before it, which you should read, where
bradhicks asks to think of his post in the same way one would scrutinize a big policy proposal (which it is, basically), he lays out what he thinks would be the right stimulus spending - version 2 of the Works Progress Administration, where anyone who needed a job would get one that fit with what they “do” - not necessarily for great wages, but a job that makes money that can then be used to avoid having one’s house pulled out from under oenself, or that can be used, in conjunction with boarders or others working together, to keep a roof over one’s head. Because the stuff built, supposedly as a waste of government dollars, was built solidly and strong, and most of it is still here with us today, although not necessarily for its intended purpose any more. This revamp would likely also be seen as a “waste” of government dollars, but it would be better than trying to push through something seen as “welfare” and it would likely get all those infrastructure jobs done for cheap - and get everything upgraded for the society that will return when the economy does. It’s a good suggestion. It needs holes poked in it, if you can find some.The WSJ looks on at drug corporation mergers and is a bit nervous at how they will interact with the new government, including complaints about FDA approval, the spectres of single-payer-type coverage for more people, and the way the companies are being run that turns them from good research houses into attempted money-makers, with the innovation-stifling that comes with it.
Mr. Jenkins, Jr. feels that upgraded fuel-efficiency standards and emission regulations are ways of appeasing the green constituency while kicking automakers that are down, rather than being any measure that actually improves anything. I’d say that in an economic depression, things that make you have to fill up your fuel tank less often would be welcome improvements. And then, if the economy takes off and we have another gas spike, we’ll still not have to fill up as often. It’s a win-win situation to me, it seems.
Mr. Frank speaks on the push toward privatization of roads, and how that's a bad idea, because roads weren’t built for private use, corporate debt is more expensive, so tolls would rise, and because the right solution, like raising gas taxes, is unpopular because conservatives have staked their livelihoods on being the side of the aisle that hates any tax increase, justified or no.
Here in technology, thinkies about how space can be used as a therapy tool, a jellyfish that can revert to a younger self making the rounds and increasing its own population, some reordering of the tree of evolution, regular sprints as a good health exercise, an implantable device that trains immune cells to attack tumor cells, more attempts at building independent nations on the high seas, Laser weapons in trucks shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles, and a study declaring that the consequences of anthropogenic climate change will not be reversible for a millenium, so if something really bad does go down, we’re going to have to ride it out.
Last for tonight, and of importance, just about everything you would need to commit an identity theft of someone is available for free on the web, so long as you know where to look. In places like government registers, where things such as Social Security numbers are displayed in the clear as part of scanned documents. No redaction, no nothing. There’s legislation in the works about stopping that and making your private numbers truly private. Although, from what the article person went through, if you have a relatively common name, you may be better hid because of the noise surrounding all of you that makes it harder to tell which data point goes to which person.
And one more item that, I have to admit, have potential comedy values, too. The Extreme Mind suite, which is all about tones and subliminal commands to do all sorts of things, like get energized, get healthy, get aggressive, get bigger plumage-related sexual organs, all of this.
The actually funny thing that’s the true end for tonight? Patch log for United States: Democracy server. Version 44 had a lot of work to do to bring things back to a playable standard. Maybe we’ll see more people logging on now.
