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Red today for everyone - 14 February 2009
Feb. 14th, 2009 05:00 pmAt the top here, a useful website - Listen to Youtube, which will extract the audio content of a Youtube file and generate an MP3 file. Perfect for those audio-only posts that have no associated video content. Or if you want to strip down some sound files from your favorite files and play them in your player. Once again, the remixability of digital data. Of course, if the police will arrest you for taking pictures of a subway train in accordance with the law on taking pictures in public places, the sources of digital data may dry up fast.
Because it's Red Day, we get cute releases like scientific studies that say kising eases stress, and that being a good kisser may be one way of making men stay bonded to you. We also get a prayer to the gods and godesses of love and sensuality (not very safe for work - although it is "just" text).
We also, however, get Red Day cards inspire by the foul-mouthed series Deadwood or by the griping nature of the person receiving, so everything balances.
At our worldwide zone, another female suicide bomber in Iraq targeting pilgrims. Well, considering many Christians kill fellow Christians for religious reasons, I suppose this isn't completely out of the blue, but it does produce a disturbing picture of how much the factions aren't fond of each other.
The pirates in Somalia released a ship, have had several others of their numbers arrested. The dance continues.
On our domestic desk, Stimulus bill passes House, Stimulus bill passes Senate, President signs, welcome to the future. Let the complaints begin. Like some complaints that while the bill itself holds no earmarks, there's nothing stopping states and organizations from spending on pet projects once they have the money. More on those complaints in our opinion section.
A federal court rejected compensation claims by those attempting to link MMR vaccinations with autism, declaring the science used for their claims "is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive". Kudos to the court for insisting on sound science. The WSJ agrees on the ruling.
And now, for a reminder that not everything you read or hear, even in news organizations is necessarily true. Witness exhibit A, an opinion piece in Bloomberg claiming that the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will receive the power to decide whether you receive treatment or not, despite whatever your doctor recommends, and then goes into the "and to cut costs, he'll ration care and make sure the elderly are screwed over the most." Scary, right? Except for a couple of facts. One, the NCHIT already exists, being an office created by the current administrator's predecessor. Second, the claims in the article aren't true, there's a spot in the bill that says nothing there will stop people from being able to get their own health care, and furthermore, it's someone who works as a lobbyist for Big Pharma that's making these claims.
Depending on which way you want to read it, either The President was mistaken when he said that Caterpillar would be able to rehire laid-off workers after the stimulus bill passed, or the Caterpillar CEO waited until after the President left before speaking his true mind on the matter, namely "Thanks for the money, chump, but I'm laying more people off, not hiring them back". With or without the implied "This will be great for my bonus.", if you like.
a network originally conceived to promote understanding of Muslims has had the founder arrested for... beheading his wife. You can't make this stuff up, unfortunately.
Because there's so many more fraud investigations and crises at home, the FBI is considering shifting agents away from counterterrorism operations to handle the increased amount of financial investigations going on. And, possibly, to handle matters of export control, where tech bought from Canada was shipped to the U.S. and then given to someone in China for usage.
With a census on the way next year, a fight is brewing on how and who will conduct the once-a-decade enumeration. Even with the withdrawing of Mr. Gregg, I still see more combat on the horizon.
A commercial plane crashed into a house in Buffalo, NY, with all the passengers and crew on board killed. A suspected cause of the plane's crash is the formation of ice on the wings, which disrupts the ability of the plane to fly.
A Massachusetts town has flown the bird to Homeland Security, choosing to take down the cameras that DHS installed on the streets, due to privacy concerns raised by the citizens of the town.
Last out, perhaps as a desperate bid to try and save themselves from inquiries, a former speechwriter for the last administrator tells us that if we run investigations into how it ran with regard to interrogations and wiretaps, we'll be giving terrorists all they need on how to evade and resist those techniques. As if Congress couldn't close the doors on the session and only let controlled amounts of heavily-redacted but useful information out in the results. The people support these investigations, whether because they're signing for blood or they want to stop wrongs before they happen again, but the last administration's officials have quite an interest in not letting those investigations start. Now might be a time to use an infamous line "Well, if you have nothing to hide, then why are you so against this?"
Walking into opinions, first, the commentary on the stimulus. To start, Mr. Schiller says that the fears of Depression, Great have been overblown and that we're nowhere near what it was back then, despite fear-mongering rhetoric to the contrary. Ms. Hollis thinks that we've been fear-mongered into enslaving ourselves to the government, when what we needed to do was have faith that the American economy would fix itself (eventually), thus keeping us out of the tyranny of government. The WSJ complains that there was no transparency in the bill or its compromise version. Bill'O, uncharacteristically mild, believes that we should be skeptical of claims that stimulus will work, because nobody knows if they will work, much like nobody really knows if the TARP program worked. Mr. Barone believes the New Deal has been a bad thing to emulate, based on the belief that World War II was really the thing that brought us out of recession then. Mr. Hewitt claims any thought of "bipartisanship" and coalition-building vanished when President Obama let Ms. Pelosi write the stimulus bill of which I note, the President is not permitted by law to introduce a bill into the legislature - he must find someone to do it for him, so even if he had written it all himself, it might still have been seen as "letting Ms. Pelosi write it" if she were the person to introduce it, a move that would make sense, considering it's supposed to be written as a strong Democratic bill, with a message to the backbenchers that they don't get a free vote on it, and an additional note that this continues in the "Blame Pelosi" attack vector, and Ms. Strassel provides the other blame side, for the three GOP senators that permitted things to move forward, even though she's praising the GOP for not blaming them officially.
There, that's all the commentary on the stimulus that doesn't really talk all that much about, well, the stimulus. Which means I'm left with Ann Coulter, of all people, complaining that the spending is too much, in the wrong places, repeals all that excellent welfare reform of the last decade, repeating the lie about the NCHIT, declaring the death of the private sector, and trying to make us believe that only bureaucrats will get more jobs now that the bill's passed. She has to work hard to make up for everyone else's off-topicness.
Then, more generally on the economy, The WSJ complains that hauling bank CEOs before Congress is political theater, especially form a committee that's trying to punish them as much as possible while demanding they do more, apparently ignoring evidence and the majority of the credit market not being in consumer lending. A second complaint is against groups sending letters to banks and senators demanding they stop using federal bailout funds to lobby against the Employee Free Choice Act, thinking it an intimidation tactic, and that if we're going to ban banks from using TARP to fight unionization, we should ban unions from using their dues and government funds that are used to pay their workers to promote it. Mr. McKinnon says China and the United States both have a vested interest in not monkeying with exchange rates, because they won't get to the underlying problem of the Chinese saving like crazy and the United States spending like crazy. Finally, Mr. Laar points out that countries following the tax-cuts, lowered-spending, slash social-programs crisis response in Eastern Europe are doing quite well economically, unlike everyone else.
Cenk Uygur has a novel solution for solving the bank problem, though - reclaim the money spent in executive bonuses, arrest those who refuse to pay it back, and properly curbstomp them this time by firing the lot of them and nationalizing the banks. Then, we set how much they make, at least until it's proper to spin them back off into being private enterprises again, with the regulations encumbered that say "Don't do it again."
After that, Jeb Bush talks a bit about his current lack of political ambition, the direction Republicans will need to go in, and a reform to the education system that he thinks will work.
Ms. Marsden muses on Vice-President Biden and his ability with words, which reminds me of some other President somewhere with a gift for getting his words twisted. I don't remember who it was, though, or whether it was a Simpsons episode somewhere.
The WSJ is definitely looking smug by claiming that the new Administration is becoming much more "next verse, same as the first" on antiterrorism and the skeletons of the Bush administration. Their proof is the continued usage of state secrets to dismiss a lawsuit brought against Boeing for helping arrange the rendition of suspected terrorists. Which follows a sort-of-similar path from the wiretap debate, where people assumed to be acting in good faith were protected from getting hammered, while leaving the option open to investigate or decide whether the people ordering them were acting within the confines of the law. Still, there is a vested conservative interest in trying to paint Mr. Obama as just like his predecessor, so as to divide the liberal wing of politics into infighting long enough so that the conservative wing can get their own sorted out.
If that fails, though, they can point out that Mr. Obama seems to be having trouble getting Cabinet appointments through because groups with and against him throw fits. If it's not Republicans harping on taxes and who paid and who isn't, then it's Democrats worried that the Census will not be run impartially. Except for one problem. the President only nominates. It's the legislators that have to approve that nomination. And if people are withdrawing their names, it's probably because they realized they have zero chance of making it through the minefield to get enough Senators to approve them to the post. And while it would be interesting to force the hand of said Senators and make them vote them down, it would be seen as a further embarrassment to the President. Which is kind of stupid.
Leaving off the President for today, Mr. Elder has a list of seven questions he believes should be asked of the President in his news room conference, starting with "Stimulus spending doesn't work, so why aren't you doing what Reagan did, which will have more immediate effect than your plan, by the way.", going into "Aren't you having it both ways by saying we don't torture but investigating which methods of interrogation we can use?", "Why ban lobbyists if you're going to issue waivers?", "Isn't it odd that all your people have trouble with taxes?", and "You can't blame both greedy corporations and stupid people. One of them has to be at fault. Choose!" Those seven questions look to be about three questions and four statements. Of those three, two of them have been covered, in intricate detail, and the matter of the waivers can probably be explained as something that should be used rarely.
Elsewhere, Messrs. Driessen and Soon feel that the UN should be focusing on concrete problems, like poverty, in Sub-Saharan Africa, instead of climate change. I think he's got a point - fix the obvious problems before the other ones, but keeping other problems in mind isn't necessarily a bad thing while trying to fix the immediate crises.
The WSJ raises eyebrows about Geert Wilders, author of "Fitna", being detained at Heathrow Airport and not allowed into the country because of concerns his presence would upset Muslim communities. This is where my "freedom of speech, even the kind I think is stupid" antennae go up.
Ms. Marlowe suggests no amount of increased troops alone will be able to make Afghanistan stable and safe. In addition, measures to reform government, improve literacy, and put power back into the hands of the people are necessary if improvement is to appear. Nearby, Mr. Kamiski says that now is as good a time as ever to pop Russia's bubble about what kind of power it thinks it has.
In technology, Micrsoft thinks to emulate apple and open retail stores. Assuming there are enough Microsoft products to fill them... and that people will want to buy them. Also, GPS receivable chips that are smaller than a matchstick head, finding that the brain is wired to enjoy other people's misfortunes and suffer at their successes, making both jealousy and schadenfreude part of our mental chemistry, twisting radio waves so as to add another way of freeing up spectrum, delaying the quantum entanglement response, generating a small qbit buffer, targeting cancerous growth cells at the nanoscale level with smart drug delivery systems, new worries of superbugs in the ocean water, although it's still safe to take a swim, assuming you shower well before and after, unveiling the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, and reconstructing the soft tissues of dinosaur heads to guess at what their brains (and brain cases) were doing.
The AP runs a story on fibromyalgia drugs intending it as a hit piece about drug companies promoting a disease that may or may not exist to pump up their profits and sell untested drugs. The National Fibromyalgia Association responds, declaring the article regurgitation of old stuff and giving credence to two people over the scientific consensus, resulting in an article that prints lies.
At the end for today, urban camouflage - making people and things integrate well into the background, so as to remove eyesores from the landscape or to make people disappear into their surroundings.
Because it's Red Day, we get cute releases like scientific studies that say kising eases stress, and that being a good kisser may be one way of making men stay bonded to you. We also get a prayer to the gods and godesses of love and sensuality (not very safe for work - although it is "just" text).
We also, however, get Red Day cards inspire by the foul-mouthed series Deadwood or by the griping nature of the person receiving, so everything balances.
At our worldwide zone, another female suicide bomber in Iraq targeting pilgrims. Well, considering many Christians kill fellow Christians for religious reasons, I suppose this isn't completely out of the blue, but it does produce a disturbing picture of how much the factions aren't fond of each other.
The pirates in Somalia released a ship, have had several others of their numbers arrested. The dance continues.
On our domestic desk, Stimulus bill passes House, Stimulus bill passes Senate, President signs, welcome to the future. Let the complaints begin. Like some complaints that while the bill itself holds no earmarks, there's nothing stopping states and organizations from spending on pet projects once they have the money. More on those complaints in our opinion section.
A federal court rejected compensation claims by those attempting to link MMR vaccinations with autism, declaring the science used for their claims "is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive". Kudos to the court for insisting on sound science. The WSJ agrees on the ruling.
And now, for a reminder that not everything you read or hear, even in news organizations is necessarily true. Witness exhibit A, an opinion piece in Bloomberg claiming that the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will receive the power to decide whether you receive treatment or not, despite whatever your doctor recommends, and then goes into the "and to cut costs, he'll ration care and make sure the elderly are screwed over the most." Scary, right? Except for a couple of facts. One, the NCHIT already exists, being an office created by the current administrator's predecessor. Second, the claims in the article aren't true, there's a spot in the bill that says nothing there will stop people from being able to get their own health care, and furthermore, it's someone who works as a lobbyist for Big Pharma that's making these claims.
Depending on which way you want to read it, either The President was mistaken when he said that Caterpillar would be able to rehire laid-off workers after the stimulus bill passed, or the Caterpillar CEO waited until after the President left before speaking his true mind on the matter, namely "Thanks for the money, chump, but I'm laying more people off, not hiring them back". With or without the implied "This will be great for my bonus.", if you like.
a network originally conceived to promote understanding of Muslims has had the founder arrested for... beheading his wife. You can't make this stuff up, unfortunately.
Because there's so many more fraud investigations and crises at home, the FBI is considering shifting agents away from counterterrorism operations to handle the increased amount of financial investigations going on. And, possibly, to handle matters of export control, where tech bought from Canada was shipped to the U.S. and then given to someone in China for usage.
With a census on the way next year, a fight is brewing on how and who will conduct the once-a-decade enumeration. Even with the withdrawing of Mr. Gregg, I still see more combat on the horizon.
A commercial plane crashed into a house in Buffalo, NY, with all the passengers and crew on board killed. A suspected cause of the plane's crash is the formation of ice on the wings, which disrupts the ability of the plane to fly.
A Massachusetts town has flown the bird to Homeland Security, choosing to take down the cameras that DHS installed on the streets, due to privacy concerns raised by the citizens of the town.
Last out, perhaps as a desperate bid to try and save themselves from inquiries, a former speechwriter for the last administrator tells us that if we run investigations into how it ran with regard to interrogations and wiretaps, we'll be giving terrorists all they need on how to evade and resist those techniques. As if Congress couldn't close the doors on the session and only let controlled amounts of heavily-redacted but useful information out in the results. The people support these investigations, whether because they're signing for blood or they want to stop wrongs before they happen again, but the last administration's officials have quite an interest in not letting those investigations start. Now might be a time to use an infamous line "Well, if you have nothing to hide, then why are you so against this?"
Walking into opinions, first, the commentary on the stimulus. To start, Mr. Schiller says that the fears of Depression, Great have been overblown and that we're nowhere near what it was back then, despite fear-mongering rhetoric to the contrary. Ms. Hollis thinks that we've been fear-mongered into enslaving ourselves to the government, when what we needed to do was have faith that the American economy would fix itself (eventually), thus keeping us out of the tyranny of government. The WSJ complains that there was no transparency in the bill or its compromise version. Bill'O, uncharacteristically mild, believes that we should be skeptical of claims that stimulus will work, because nobody knows if they will work, much like nobody really knows if the TARP program worked. Mr. Barone believes the New Deal has been a bad thing to emulate, based on the belief that World War II was really the thing that brought us out of recession then. Mr. Hewitt claims any thought of "bipartisanship" and coalition-building vanished when President Obama let Ms. Pelosi write the stimulus bill of which I note, the President is not permitted by law to introduce a bill into the legislature - he must find someone to do it for him, so even if he had written it all himself, it might still have been seen as "letting Ms. Pelosi write it" if she were the person to introduce it, a move that would make sense, considering it's supposed to be written as a strong Democratic bill, with a message to the backbenchers that they don't get a free vote on it, and an additional note that this continues in the "Blame Pelosi" attack vector, and Ms. Strassel provides the other blame side, for the three GOP senators that permitted things to move forward, even though she's praising the GOP for not blaming them officially.
There, that's all the commentary on the stimulus that doesn't really talk all that much about, well, the stimulus. Which means I'm left with Ann Coulter, of all people, complaining that the spending is too much, in the wrong places, repeals all that excellent welfare reform of the last decade, repeating the lie about the NCHIT, declaring the death of the private sector, and trying to make us believe that only bureaucrats will get more jobs now that the bill's passed. She has to work hard to make up for everyone else's off-topicness.
Then, more generally on the economy, The WSJ complains that hauling bank CEOs before Congress is political theater, especially form a committee that's trying to punish them as much as possible while demanding they do more, apparently ignoring evidence and the majority of the credit market not being in consumer lending. A second complaint is against groups sending letters to banks and senators demanding they stop using federal bailout funds to lobby against the Employee Free Choice Act, thinking it an intimidation tactic, and that if we're going to ban banks from using TARP to fight unionization, we should ban unions from using their dues and government funds that are used to pay their workers to promote it. Mr. McKinnon says China and the United States both have a vested interest in not monkeying with exchange rates, because they won't get to the underlying problem of the Chinese saving like crazy and the United States spending like crazy. Finally, Mr. Laar points out that countries following the tax-cuts, lowered-spending, slash social-programs crisis response in Eastern Europe are doing quite well economically, unlike everyone else.
Cenk Uygur has a novel solution for solving the bank problem, though - reclaim the money spent in executive bonuses, arrest those who refuse to pay it back, and properly curbstomp them this time by firing the lot of them and nationalizing the banks. Then, we set how much they make, at least until it's proper to spin them back off into being private enterprises again, with the regulations encumbered that say "Don't do it again."
After that, Jeb Bush talks a bit about his current lack of political ambition, the direction Republicans will need to go in, and a reform to the education system that he thinks will work.
Ms. Marsden muses on Vice-President Biden and his ability with words, which reminds me of some other President somewhere with a gift for getting his words twisted. I don't remember who it was, though, or whether it was a Simpsons episode somewhere.
The WSJ is definitely looking smug by claiming that the new Administration is becoming much more "next verse, same as the first" on antiterrorism and the skeletons of the Bush administration. Their proof is the continued usage of state secrets to dismiss a lawsuit brought against Boeing for helping arrange the rendition of suspected terrorists. Which follows a sort-of-similar path from the wiretap debate, where people assumed to be acting in good faith were protected from getting hammered, while leaving the option open to investigate or decide whether the people ordering them were acting within the confines of the law. Still, there is a vested conservative interest in trying to paint Mr. Obama as just like his predecessor, so as to divide the liberal wing of politics into infighting long enough so that the conservative wing can get their own sorted out.
If that fails, though, they can point out that Mr. Obama seems to be having trouble getting Cabinet appointments through because groups with and against him throw fits. If it's not Republicans harping on taxes and who paid and who isn't, then it's Democrats worried that the Census will not be run impartially. Except for one problem. the President only nominates. It's the legislators that have to approve that nomination. And if people are withdrawing their names, it's probably because they realized they have zero chance of making it through the minefield to get enough Senators to approve them to the post. And while it would be interesting to force the hand of said Senators and make them vote them down, it would be seen as a further embarrassment to the President. Which is kind of stupid.
Leaving off the President for today, Mr. Elder has a list of seven questions he believes should be asked of the President in his news room conference, starting with "Stimulus spending doesn't work, so why aren't you doing what Reagan did, which will have more immediate effect than your plan, by the way.", going into "Aren't you having it both ways by saying we don't torture but investigating which methods of interrogation we can use?", "Why ban lobbyists if you're going to issue waivers?", "Isn't it odd that all your people have trouble with taxes?", and "You can't blame both greedy corporations and stupid people. One of them has to be at fault. Choose!" Those seven questions look to be about three questions and four statements. Of those three, two of them have been covered, in intricate detail, and the matter of the waivers can probably be explained as something that should be used rarely.
Elsewhere, Messrs. Driessen and Soon feel that the UN should be focusing on concrete problems, like poverty, in Sub-Saharan Africa, instead of climate change. I think he's got a point - fix the obvious problems before the other ones, but keeping other problems in mind isn't necessarily a bad thing while trying to fix the immediate crises.
The WSJ raises eyebrows about Geert Wilders, author of "Fitna", being detained at Heathrow Airport and not allowed into the country because of concerns his presence would upset Muslim communities. This is where my "freedom of speech, even the kind I think is stupid" antennae go up.
Ms. Marlowe suggests no amount of increased troops alone will be able to make Afghanistan stable and safe. In addition, measures to reform government, improve literacy, and put power back into the hands of the people are necessary if improvement is to appear. Nearby, Mr. Kamiski says that now is as good a time as ever to pop Russia's bubble about what kind of power it thinks it has.
In technology, Micrsoft thinks to emulate apple and open retail stores. Assuming there are enough Microsoft products to fill them... and that people will want to buy them. Also, GPS receivable chips that are smaller than a matchstick head, finding that the brain is wired to enjoy other people's misfortunes and suffer at their successes, making both jealousy and schadenfreude part of our mental chemistry, twisting radio waves so as to add another way of freeing up spectrum, delaying the quantum entanglement response, generating a small qbit buffer, targeting cancerous growth cells at the nanoscale level with smart drug delivery systems, new worries of superbugs in the ocean water, although it's still safe to take a swim, assuming you shower well before and after, unveiling the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, and reconstructing the soft tissues of dinosaur heads to guess at what their brains (and brain cases) were doing.
The AP runs a story on fibromyalgia drugs intending it as a hit piece about drug companies promoting a disease that may or may not exist to pump up their profits and sell untested drugs. The National Fibromyalgia Association responds, declaring the article regurgitation of old stuff and giving credence to two people over the scientific consensus, resulting in an article that prints lies.
At the end for today, urban camouflage - making people and things integrate well into the background, so as to remove eyesores from the landscape or to make people disappear into their surroundings.
