Charging onward - 19 February 2009

On the big desk of the world, Pakistan's deal to institute Taliban-style law in one of their regions has eyebrows popping up all over the alliance that intends on knocking the Taliban down. I wouldn’t be surprised to see mission creep, now. Further hindering the mission, Kyrgyzstan's parliament has voted to close the United States air base in their country.

Lest you wonder whether anyone is really committed to any sort of peace process, Israel is demanding the return of one of their soldiers before they release the blockade on the borders.

And, just so that you can keep keeping tabs on them, Blackwater worldwide is changing its name to Xe. And possibly hoping the furor around them will die down as the name disappears.

Domestic-like, a federal appeals court has ruled 17 men cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay must remain at the prison there, based on its ruling that they do not have the right to automatically enter the United States, and should go through the regular immigration process.

The new Attorney General has some fire on how the United States has taken the coward's road on matters of race, and although the workplace is farily well integrated, that our personal lives are still self-segregating as much as possible.

Poltiico notes that there is a trend of mainstream media journalists becoming part of the new administration, and wobbles between strongly conservative people like Malkin and Bozell considering it the administration giving jobs to the sycophants that helped get them elected, and others on a more moderate strain saying that government jobs are rather stable at the moment, and thus a journalist offered the choice between a job in government and unemployment will probably take the government job.

Nuclear power facilities will have to be built to withstand large plane attacks, which is good, but also seems very one step behind, trying to fix something that’s not likely to happen again.

Considering that vampirism is a thing in the country at the moment, some vampires are behaving like, well, fandomites, namely wondering who the hell these sparkly bastards are and why they call themselves vampires, when they’re in love with characters and not all that fond of drinking blood themselves.

Realizing that optimism isn’t going to fly, the Fed has made its economic predictions run more in accord with reality. Did we mention that the people are increasingly more panicked about the state of the economy? Which could result in those things that would call down the military on our own heads, impose martial law, and the like. Blargh. If you happen to be one of the unfortunate, maybe some sites to visit will help some?

And now, we get into opinions, where Mr. Henninger acknowledges that people save when they get their taxes cut, and thus the tax cut portions of the stimulus plan have to be engineered in such a way as to make people spend them instead of saving them, so that the full effect of their being spent can be felt. So, what was that about how tax cuts are just the perfect thing to stimulate the economy? You’re sure the populace won’t do their very best to save every penny they get waiting for the other shoe to drop? Wouldn’t it be easier to just, say, spend the money? After all, we can see what people are doing now in the recession, and a lot of them are in the "Save and scrounge" mode.

The WSJ pans Mr. Obama's homeowner rescue plan, saying that it rewards those who bought more house than they could afford, and will not stop defaults, nor will it give loan companies incentives to keep rates down past the point they’re required to. Mr. Reynolds says that letting judges direct renegotiation of mortgages will harm the mortgage-backed securities market, which will unravel companies and make banks insolvent. Wait, weren’t those mortgage-backed securities part of the problem?

Mr. Ingrassia declares the taxpayers shouldn't have to pay the UAW's retirement plan, with the whole 30-and-out plan needing scrapping, along with decades worth of other bad decisions that the taxpayers shouldn’t have to stand for. In other words, time for bankruptcy proceedings for the car companies, says he. The WSJ agrees that bankruptcy is the only way that Detroit will change.

Mr. Jeffery believes that Mr. Obama is building a database of all our health records, and will then use a research council to dictate what kind of care everyone receives. Except that it doesn’t, and Mr. Jeffery lets anyone examine the words to confirm this. That it has data and can be shared with other providers in support of good health doesn’t suddenly void things like HIPAA and other laws that require medical records be kept private. It probably requires a certain amount of compatibility between all types of electronic health records, sure, but that doesn’t mean one giant database, just that the DBs have to be able to talk to each other. If and when they actually need to do so. But that doesn’t jibe with the “socialism!” attack vector.

With fairly tortured logic, but Dr. B.B. Robinson manages to blame high-income black people for making income inequalities between blacks, and between blacks and whites, worse, saying that the black community should focus on reducing the inequality between themselves so they can present a unified front for reducing inequality between themselves and whites. Cannibalize yourselves, he says, and then you can go to work on everyone else.

However, he manages to lose to Turd Blossom, who claims that the Obama crowd is making it up as they go along, and this making things up is damaging their credibility, after having run such a well-planned campaign. Battle plan, meet the enemy. Elsewhere, however, if you think that the President doesn’t have a plan on anything, I think you’re not paying attention. That it doesn’t go as planned is expected, thus, scrambling was going to happen no matter who was in office.

However, the big losers tonight are the New York Post, which defended a cartoon as being about a poorly written stimulus bill when it had some pretty racist subtexts, if you wanted to interpret it that way. So, after having all of that pointed out, they said, “Hey, a cartoon is a cartoon. You’re all reading whatever you wanted into it. So if we offended you, sorry. But if you were looking to make us look bad, fuck you.” (As it turns out, at least according to Mr. Olbermann, one of the editors said “Oh, hell no. I didn’t comission that or see it until it ran. If I had, I would have nixed it.”)

Into technology, where body scanners have replaced the metal detectors at a Tulsa airport, new fossils unearthed in the tar pits, liquid water possibly discovered on Mars, using magnets to assemble nanostructures, using mobile phones as a "doctor in your pocket" platform, with connection and consultation available through mobile services like SMS, supercharging Wi-Fi until higher-bandwidth standards can take over, peering into short-term memory with fMRI, more encouraging signs of having found a genetic mutation that will kill HIV, and a device that takes sunlight and CO2 and generates natural gas.

At the end, vintage Japanese posters describing what to do to survive a chemical attack. That, and the human vending machine, which might somehow sound like something that would be done in a WPA if things get that bad here.

There’s also Thomas Doyle's art, which is very good at capturing scenes in detail.

And now we're going to the weekend - 20 February 2009

Before the news - Adobe Acrobat Reader has an exploitable bug that could lead to backdoors and other nasties. They think they’ll get it patched out soemwhere in March.

Leading off tonight, because, well, you can’t make this up - It appears that we have our winners for the Whore of Babylon contest: Madonna and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. *shrug* I’m waiting for the revelation that they have bulletproof hair before I start thinking too hard about it.

And we’ve got a mittful of the Phelps clan, just for that extra crazy sauce. Westboro will be making a stop in Buffalo to spread their message of damnation for the victims of the plane crash there, as well as staging an event to tell us all how God's wrath is being visited on Victoria in the form of brushfires. They were planning on visiting the United Kingdom, but the UK government has told them to get lost and not come back. That may not stop members of the WBC from doing their thing, they just must do it without the benfit of their leader.

Compared to this, Catholicism's organized campaign against an abortion bill that doesn't exist seems rather tame. Although North Dakota's state house just passed a bill that would give fertilized eggs human status and rights, which would essentially be an abortion ban, by making someone who aborts a murderess and those that perform the procedure acessories. Nothing in the article on how they plan on handling miscarriages, but knowing The Law, those will probably also result in muder or manslaughter investigations.

Domestic before international because domestic has one thing - Barnard MAdoff never bought any stock at all.

Going to the International Desk, Princess Bride fans, get ready. The R.O.U.S.? I don't beleive they exist. Maybe we should send down some Level 1 heroes to take care of them, so they can get that crucial amount of tiny XP that propels them on their way.

POTUS visited Canada, and assured them that he had no grand protectionist plans. China asks the rest of the world not to get protectionist, either.

Human bomb in Pakistan at funearl of Shiite leader, rioting after explosion. It’s definitely looking like a campaign in Afghanistan will have spill over to Pakistan. Although, The Telegraph reports that the United States secretly backed the recent peace-for-Sharia deal in Pakistan, as part of a divisive strategy. Might also be a good way of trying to buy time to build things up to the point where when someone comes to the door with a pea-shooter, they find themselves staring down a howitzer.

Madagascar's security forces regained control of government buildings after demonstrators backing the opposition occupied them. Peacefully, for both occupation and dispersement, it looks like.

Having denied a visa to the woman Israeli tennis player, the United Arab Emirates allowed the male Israeli tennis player to entry the country and participate in his tournament. The woman denial was not rescinded, and I suspect they’re only letting him in because they were threatened with being pulled from the tour and fined to hell and back. They still may be fined for the first ban. Soemthing here tells me, though, they may have accomplished what they really wanted to do, and are now trying to look good and possibly bury that they’re still not letting the female tennis player in. (Mr. Krieger says, despite this, we should be hoping the UAE does reasonably well in the financial crunch, because they’re one of the strongest reform countries in the Arabian Peninsula.)

On a different note, the royal family of Saudi Arabia is adjusting to a world where they're not immediately deferred to, where some look to be progressives, and where one gets retorted at on a footie call-on show after he berates the commentary for not knowing what it’s talking about. The wheels of change? Maaybe.

So, let’s think in opinionated manners. The WSJ is concerned that the United States is lending legitimacy to another conference that will turn out to be anti-Israel. State has announced they’re sending in people to try and change the direction of the conference, with reservations that they will pull out if it’s not to their liking. This is apparently a dumb move, according to the WSJ, who suspects the attendees will not be interested in U.S. reforms.

Mr. Morris provides your daily dosage of fearfear, believing that the Obama administration is caving in completely to terrorists who will strike the country again. Because he’s sending humanitarian aid to Gaza, where even the UN isn’t going, he’s shutting down the apparatuses that were allegedly used extralegally, and not immediately and forcefully denouncing Yemen for releasing suspected al-Qaeda operatives and Pakistan for making the deal with the Taliban in their own country. So, for not being a carbon copy of his predecessor, Mr. Obama is apaprently weak on terrorism. And if you want to try twisting the knife in further, Mr. London tells us that the AP released a story proving there was yellowcake uranium in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, proving he had the WMD and vindicating everyone who said that we should invade. Here's the article in question. So, for those who have nuke knowledge, what kind of stuff does it take to turn yellowcake into something to be a-feared of, about how long does it take, and would it have been reasonable in any way to suspect that Iraq had the facilities and knowledge for doing so?

To cap off all this apparent weakness, Mr. Gaffney wants to know why the United States isn't modernizing and expanding its nuclear forces, in the light that everyone else seems to be doing so. We’d reduce to... 500 warheads, which should be enough to destroy the world many times over, and this is a sign of weakness? (Although, making sure that the warheads themselves aren’t doing things like leaking hard rads does deserve funding and testing.)

Mr. Devine thinks that Flight 1549's evacuation was completely successful because it had no government entities anywhere near it, so that first responders could respond, staff could do their jobs unfettered, and so forth. The alternative that Mr. Devine envisions is where emergency responders have to show identification to a government authority before being cleared to enter - the modern version of fiddling while Rome burns, no doubt. He’s certain this will happen thanks to a program that intends to have emergency responders be pre-certified and receive identification that lets them in... so they don’t have to dither with anyone. It took a while to get to that conclusion, though, and he thinks that because the rule acknowledges that you can’t use it inflexibly, the rule shouldn’t exist in the first place.

The WSJ brings new material to light in the Ted Stevens case, alleging prosecutorial misconduct that casts doubt on the validity of the verdict, with Justice not sharing everything on time, redacting passages, and not disclosing potential relationships between witnesses and prosecuters. So the Stevens saga may not be over.

Mr. Gramm is showing us who he blames for the economic meltdown, as a way of indicating that he thinks the current reforms are ineffective. Tighter monetary policy and a depoliticization of the lending process are his twin solutions to reverse the bad decisions of earlier. Oh, and we’re apparenly exaggerating how much “deregulation” was done in the past, so we can’t blame that, either. Mr. Schulz says not to believe any promises of green jobs coming from building renewables, because green power is simply too expensive to be attractive and buildable in great quantities, and so jobs in efficient (but polluting) industries will be nixed in favor of the new, inefficient green jobs, which will then require government subsidy for the rest of their existence. Because any new technology should be instantly cheap, I guess.

A good thing from the stimulus package, though, is that it makes COBRA coverage a lot more palatable, by subsidizing costs and extendeding how long peopel can stay on COBRA, so long as they don’t render themselves ineligible by not having coverage for two months or so.

More warmly, Ms. Noonan asks up to not let out optimistic flame go out, mentioning Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post yesterday asking his readers how they were coping with the stress and the wide variety of responses that it received, and believing that the good stuff will start local and get bigger. As it turns out, stimulus spending, and the refusal to accept it, could be parlayed into a bigger question of where the GOP is going, with the “we failed our core” Republicans opposing it, including to the point of refusing it at the governorship level, and a more centrist-leaning that likes and wants the bailout cash and will champion it to others. We’ll have to see whose cuisine reigns supreme.

Mr. Bozell III complains about the media as sycophants, not actually daring to stand up or voice concerns with things like the stimulus bill, instead distracting us with pictures of cookies being served to the opposition. Yeah, I’m not sure why anyone would want to show that as any sort of serious news. Ms. Charen berates the NYT for not using the word communist in decribing the Khmer Rouge regime in a recent article, because the world needs to remember that it was those damn communists who did all the slaughtering in the last century or two, so that nobody ever thinks about becoming a communists, and that we can safely say all communists, and those anywhere close to them on the spectrum, are all going to be genocidal murderers. Capitalism forever, nevermind all the people that it has killed over time.

On the tail end of things, Comedian Rush Limbaugh still thinks there's a plot afoot to kill conservative talk radio, this time not under a Fairness Doctrine, but under regulations regarding local content, diversity of ownership, and public interest that will be used to enforce something like said Fairness Doctrine. I’m inclined to believe that the comedian is seeing spooks again, but I don’t know where they’re coming from. Anyone with more knowledge than I who can comment one way or another on the matter? And, to be fair, it’s not like the comedian is going as far out as Ms. Coulter, who dismisses the ranking of the previous president as seventh-worst as mostly the bleating of liberals and academics, who don’t really know anything about history, which will surely vindicate this Republican president much like how it has vindicated all the other ones, like Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoo...errr, George Washington. Because liberals are all Bill Ayers, don’t know seven Presidents, and elect and promote people wiht Islamic names, shock and horror.

In scientific and technological realms, smoking blunts your caffeine high, which oddly explains why smokers can be real coffee junkies - it takes more to make the hit. This also works with certain antipsychotics, so kicking the habit there might mean a reduction in dosage, too.

Also, laid out in detail, why the United States vaccinates, and why people should continue with this idea, now that objections regarding autism are being buried because of bad science.

Elsewhere, A reusable rocket/jet hybrid... coming to you in 10 years, a gigantic gamma-ray blast noticed some 12.2 billion light-years away, yet more ways of making solar power more concentrated for cheaper, assuming you’re working with solar on Terra. There are companies looking into ways of making solar cheap by putting the colectors in space, and then throwing a highly concentrated beam down to Terra for us to use. Plus, Norway has decided they've had enough with IE6 and are ready to leave it in the dust, with their greatest find service asking users to upgrade to IE7/IE8, Firefox, or other browsers. Last out, Snapter, a service that attempts to convert digital photographs of pages into PDFs that could have been scanned on a flatbed.

Last for tonight, a beautiful picture of a white cat on a snow background. And for those who can’t get enough of baby animals, Zooborns. (Oh, and we bid farewell to Socks the cat.)