Back from the weekend - 9 February 2009

Now this is a cool idea to start the day off with - have dinner with a stranger, get a donation to your favorite charity - the idea could be tweaked nicely to increase/decrease any creepy factor involved, and it could extend outward to include famous people as the strangers, if they were willing to do it.

The Courage Campaign wants people to sign on to a letter delivered to the Supreme Court attempting to dissuade them from ruling against the 18,000 homosexual marriages conducted in California legally between the overturning of the previous statute and the passage of Proposition Eight.

Neatorama (the web presence of the guys who do mental_floss) has a good list - 10 things science fiction gets wrong, for which the top is “sound in space”.

Here’s an object lesson on why social engineering will almost always work even when technology would prevent virus installation - hackers can convince people they have parking tickets and need specialized software to view the pictures taken of their violations.

And after that brain bit, here’s news.

Internationally, it's pretty hot in Australia. Like, record heat. Which means fires, which means deaths, and I heard on a BBC headline this morning, some of those fires are thought to have been deliberately set. Yikes.

The Catholic Church has ben pushing indulgences a bit harder these days, after John Paul II reintroduced them in 2000. For most Catholics nowadays, they’re curiosities, not necessities.

Terrorism seems to be the watchword for today’s news releases, with Yemen releasing 170 men suspected of being part of al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia releasing a new list of 85 most-wanted men, the folk hero who threw shoes at the former administrator still going to trial (although for assault and not terror), Afghanistan terror arrests still messy, with corruption in the police system, and (in better news) a previous reformist president of Iran declaring he will seek the presidency again.

The Ukraine has said it wants Russian ships out of Crimea in a decade. Considering Russia’s attitude towards things right now, I don’t think that one’s going to go over well.

It’s a bad economic world out there, and it’s getting worse. As it does, more people are driven to suicide, armed robbery, or other crimes to meet their rent or stave off eviction and/or foreclosure.The national psyche is disturbed at losing jobs, houses, finances, and the means to provide for themselves, and is depressed to suicidal points. They have good reason, it seems - the ex-husband of a woman slain last December has the landlord of the woman coming after him for rent and penalties, because she broke her lease with “insufficient notification to vacate” by being murdered. Hell, even the golf resorts are losing money.

In other domestic-esque news, the pundits all seem to agree that foreign governments are taking the measure of Mr. Obama. What they think about it, whether it's Pakistan thumbing their nose at the OBama administration, or Mr. Stokes' fears that the new administration has gone soft on terrorists, based on an unwillingness to use rhetoric like “war on terror” or “war on Islamism”, or The WSJ is afraid that Mr. Obama will be soft on getting European missile defense going, opening the door for satellite-launching Iran to nuke out the place, they all agree that tests are on. Mr. Leeden would probably laugh at that last suggestion, though, considering that while Iran may be hoping to reach religious goals, if they tried to trigger Armageddon, they'd fall over flat.

It appeared on one of my regular website lists, and so now I can more conclusively point out that even those who feel that religion is an important part of their relationship can still produce a relationship tht carries all the elements of what would be "deviancy" without the religious context. Why yes, it looks like good, solidly Abrahamic BDSM practice.

Not following that line at all, a porn star is ready to challenge Mr. Vitter, of D.C. Madam fame, for his Senate seat. Could be quite interesting.

Getting to the opinions, bradhicks is still convinced the stimulus bill is not going to be helpful, and is even less confident that the measues that he thinks will be helpful - naming, deciding price, and selling/buying the toxic bank assets - aren’t going to happen in any sort of timely manner, and we may have to pay the price of a highly-porked “must-pass” bill in the process. Details of differences between the House and Senate versions show up, including material to increase defense spending as the stuff that might actually be helpful is sliced out. The slacktivist explains succinctly why cutting state funds budgets is a bad idea - it means that teachers, judges, police, emergency response, parks and recreation divisions, librarians, bus drivers, and others find themselves out of a job as well as city services in general being cut. I’d say that’s not a good scenario.

According to Austin Cline, though, if you look at the Republican opposition to stimulus as a way of generating more fear for our corporate overlords to exploit, then their opposition on several issues, including stimulus, falls neatly into place.

Mr. Curl believes that the President should always be an optimist, and that telling it like it is to the populace is a bad thing. The President is not the national cheerleader. And if he were to stay optimistic without reason, I think most people would hear it as “Let them eat cake”. Besides, Mr. McCullough is convinced the stimulus plan is not what the people want, nor will it be effective (because it’s not tax cuts), and that if we instead gave the populace the amount of money that each person would have gotten on average from the spending, they’d do a much better job with it than the government can. Mr. Hill most likely agrees, based on the Reagan ideal that government is always bad, and that power in government hands is always corrupting. So, how many state workers do you want out of a job?

And thus, a call to make the Republicans actually make good on their filibuster threats, rather than having the Democrats cave to them every time they mention it. Didn’t we have this problem in the last Congressional session? Have they learned nothing?

Mr. Esmail warns us of the horrors of Canadian-style health-care, picking cases where immediate treatment was needed and there was bureaucratcic wait or denial, and not mentioning all the other cases where the system might work as planned. Perhaps as the counterpoint to this, Mr. Connor talks about how corporate greed shorts nursing homes of needed staff and the patients of needed care.

Mr. Taylor fingers the government and the Fed for the economic crash, saying that monetary policy and interest rates were too low for solid and sound practice. Mr. Kennedy takes it a step further, earning him a coveted Worst Person for today's entry by declaring that the nation has become a bunch of pussies who aren’t owning up to their own mistakes, taking responsibility, and doing better next time, but instead expect government to help bail them out and are willingly letting liberals (who apparently believe they know more than you do and that they can manage your life better than you) take control of their lives. We’re aparently all a bunch of whiners with no spine expecting others to solve our problems and shamelessly begging, instead of manning up and fixing things. His example, of the shame and embarrassment of his father for accepting and using food stamps, is a classic “we should be embarrassed to ask for or receive help in this socirty. If you fell on hard times, tough, it’s your fault, so either buck up or die so that all the resources your worthless self would have consumed will go to someone more fit.” Ed Corcoran goes more abstract and says that the United States economy relies on an underclass that is rapidly disappearing, with those underclass unable to work themselves up into the middle class, and the exploitative salaries of those at the top making the situation at the bottom that much worse. The economy needs to be restructured so that even those at the bottom have a living wage, and shift over toward sustaining rather than trying to be perpetually in growth. Of course, that would remove a lot of the fear impulse that sustains capitalism, as well, in a sense, anyway, that one wouldn’t have to fear about losing a job and not being able to find one that paid livable wages and benefits.

Ms. Garment notes that while accusations, rumors, and manufactured scandals make for great rage and indignation, people and Congresscritters should be considering qualifications for the job over minor bits that are unrelated, while Ms. Lopez says the President should stop demonizing his opponents for doing what thy're supposed to do, which a quick shot in at Obama supporters that they’re not listening to the messages presented, preferring soundbites instead. (Although, even in the long form, the message that is seized upon still comes through pretty clear, in my opinon). Apparently, the Democrats need to recognize, appreciate, and possibly even listen to the party that didn’t do a whole lot of listening to them even when they were in the majority. It would stop vicious cycles, sure, but then it’s a question of whether the populace’s vote for their electors means anything about the direction they want the country to take.

Last out, and winning a Worst of his own, Mr. Hawkins blames it all on the Internet - the culture has gotten ruder, cruder, and more paranoid, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet. Partisanship in politics - it’s the Internet, because it compartmentalizes us and lets us have our own echo chambers. The Internet allows “misfits, sexual deviants, and sociopaths” to find people who share their feelings and give them positive interaction, instead of “being a weirdo or loner that society may be able to cajole back towards normalcy through negative social reinforcement”. Thus, “everyone from pedophiles and conspiracy theorists to hackers and...trolls can meet up with hundreds of like-minded souls on the net who tell them what they’re doing isn’t abnormal; to the contrary, it’s great!” Furthermore, it’s making our politics all sound bites and bumper stickers, plus we’re pulling all of that Internet rage and polarizing viewpoints into our real lives, so we’re less moral and more likely to view others as enemies. All this could be reversed, of course, if they took away the ability of someone to be anonymous on the Web. At the very end, he’s also “I have to admit the Internet has done good things, too, (and it’s been mostly good, really), but remember, freaks, misfits, pedophiles, and liberals all use the Internet.”

In the science and tech realms, recent experiment shows no difference between real and faked acupuncture in relieving migraines, although it may not have been a proper placebo test, robots are getting better, including using human tricks to avoid obstacles, green energy growth prospects are quite good, even as they need to get even more green and stop relying on non-renewable resources for their manufacture, mutant worms that can survive at very low oxygen levels as a possible example on how to treat or survive strokes, the possibility that experience and training can be passed from mother to offspring, Ritalin as a possibly addictive drug, the "gut feeling" continuing to be a possibly sound decision-making mechanism, wireless methods of monitoring and dispensing medication in the body, making chips that reduce power consumption by having tolerance for some error, cubes containing discrete pieces of information than can be freely rearranged and that will change their interaction with other cubes based on that new arrangement, and

Going for art, though, The Pre-Raph Pack, a collection of pre-Raphaelite painters and their works, Save the Words, which asks people to adopt words falling out of usage and bring them back into the fold, a cake that is a faithful reproduction of the LOTR movie city of Minas Tirith,

Last for tonight, want your own "There's no God"-style sign? This proves the remix capability of the Internet is unlimited in all sorts of ways. Additionally, I would hate to work for this newspaper. The micromanagement just in what sort of e-mails the reporters are supposed to send to five or more editors would mean it’s time to look into a new job.

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