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You know, the opening line to Countdown, “Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?” One of these days, I’d like to have a group somewhere, probably at work, where we find out which of those stories people were talking about the next day. Just to see if there are any of them that make it through the dreamscape into tomorrow.
Also, over the weekend, I watched “One More, With Feeling”, the BtVS musical episode. I can see where that’s the favorite of a lot of people. I can also see why a lot of people have sworn their devotions to Joss Whedon, after Buffy and Firefly come from his writing and direction. When I have a free moment and/or weekend, perhaps I will dive into Dollhouse. Probably after I get all caught up on the various other shows I’ve been keeping track of.
While you wait for room for this braindump, enjoy Maps of War, which play out conflicts, both military and not, so you can see the troops and ideas spread around. Speaking of ideas, Copyblogger thinks we can weather the recession just fine, and even thrive in it, because we're Humes, who are adaptable, creative, and self-reliant. Which is good, unless you happen to be Dubai, a city that tried to build itself on the fickle and shallow and the excess income everyone had. Perhaps too good of an example of 2009 being a Year of Nothing, as declared by the Germain Cabal of Germans.
Internationally, Mosul appears to still be a sticky point in the "We dun good" part of Iraq, and the new timetables make the troops there worry that the locals can’t handle it.
A chinese flotilla surrounded a United States naval mapping vessel and taunted it, including stopping in front of the vessel, strewing debris in its path, and sailors stripping to their skivvies when hit with fire hoses turned on them in self-defense by the United States ship. Which, while immature and dangerous, is not cutting diplomatic phone lines and putting your troops on high alert because there are war exercises being conducted in the sea near the country to your south. Nor is it planting police in every street to make sure nobody in Tibet decides to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an aborted rebellion.
Saudi Arabia is still backwards when it comes to women, sentencing a 75 year-old woman to lashes for associating with men not her close relatives. There is some apparent sympathy for some of their ideals, though - one in seven supposedly said that a man can strike his girlfriend/wife if she dresses sexy in public. I thought some part of that was to show off to the other people how sexy your partner is. Said CEKSMs also believe it perfectly okay for a man to hit his wife/girlfriend if she’s a nag, and that sexy dressing should make a rape victim partially responsible for her own assault.
And, in the “Wow.” department, fighting off a kangaroo, and surviving being at the center of a flatbed truck-train collision.
Domestically, Consider that Best Buy is offering to recycle your electronics for free* ($10, but with $10 gift card).
The current administrator has directed the government to consult with the Attorney General before carrying out any of the dictates in signing statements of his predecessor, setting the stage to challenge those or rescind them, although one might hope that it actually results in the signing statement returning to just that - a statement instead of an attempt to end-around a law. The President shall veto it and send it back to Congress with his objections. He does not have the authoriy to ignore the parts he doesn’t like or thinks are unconstitutional, even if they’re part of something he does like.
The President also made a call or two to some news outlets to make sure his point was clear - he's not a socialist, and anyone who says that is so has no idea what the word means.
The NY Times has a piece on quants, the people who bring formulas to bear on trying to predict the classically unpredicatble markets, where 50% accuracy is impressive, and all the math that comes out has an attached caveat: Do not use stupidly. Do not assume it will work in all cases at all times. The quants themselves are also trying to point this out, but a lot of people were more interested in whether it could make them money, instead of whether it actually would work as intended.
A shooting spree in Alabama has many dead, including the shooter, and several who might have been, excepting for their armor.
In the opinions, The General thinks the non-excommunicated child rapist in Brazil would make an excellent poster boy for Catholicism. I think he’d get a lot of people agreeing with him, even for the stated reasons. They just might not see it as quite so positive as the Catholic Church obviously does.
Mr. Hassett starts the Presidential opinions by declaring Mr. Obama to be a Manchurian Candidate dedicated to the destruction of the economy. At whose bidding, I am yet unsure. But apparently he’s against people giving to private charities, because he wants all their money to go the State charity, a radical who encourages taxpayer-funded baby-killing without giving the taxpayers any voice on whether they want that, based on his decision to reverse the ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines, unlikely to have spine when it comes to vetoing Congressional pork, because they don’t have enough spine for vetoing it as they add in their own pet projects, and dithers on the economy while trying to distract the people with health care reform, clearing having his priorities screwed up, as everyone has to fix the economy to stability and prosperity before introducing reforms to that economy (it gives the opposition an easier time of telling you not to mess with what is obviously working).
Mr. Greenberg believes there are people out to destroy the Electoral College, which needs stalwart defenders of the idea that the people are idiots and need learned men with the power to tell them so and elect the president they want.
Mr. Stephens joins the chorus objecting to the National Intelligence Director, Mr. Freeman, based on his positive attitutde toward Saudi Arabia and Mao Zedong, and dismissing the opposition as crackpots because they assume that anyone against Mr. Freeman is part of the Israel Lobby.
Burt Prelutsky thinks we're still afraid of Muslims, using the point that we haven’t plastered the beheading story all over the news or charged the man with murder and we didn’t let the creator of “Fitna” into the UK as his justification. Apparently, we’re so afraid of offending Muslims and used to kowtowing to them that we have no spine to talk about the heinous things they do. I’m sure Mr. Prelutsky envisions all dancing happily as we’re subjected to Wahabist Islam, the unbelievers tax, restrictive coverings, and the like.
Returning to sanity for a moment, as our last item, Ms. Whitney sees a sudden contraction of revolving debt (credit cards) as promulgating another credit crisis on top of the current one.
In technology, Yubi-nya, a wireless remote control that is the size of a ring and operates by pressing fingers together. That would be “Ring-Meow” for the literalists, or “Meow Ring” for those looking for sense. Potentially, though, one could control things such as MP3 players just by pressing the right digits together, even while holding on to things like tram handles or poles.
Additionally, why gas still reigns supreme as the fuel of choice, even though it will eventually be unseated by whatever breakthrough technology gets appropriate mass marketing.
And then, tiny structures doing even tinier chemical work, mobile phone viruses taking advantage of mobile phones with data plans (surprisingly, the affected are not running a Windows product), the theory of mind being used to explain the presence of religion, because once you can imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, then you can jump to The Gods Are Watching, another cry to put firm guidance and regulation on the use of robots in place before they're completely unleashed, attempting to build a proof of concept on a shape-shifting smartphone,
At the tail end tonight, Introducing: Smunk, a portmanteau of smelly and funk. Often used to describe the smell of ill-ventilated break rooms, locker rooms, and other locales where odiferousness stays longer than it should.
That, and effective ways for your peaceful law-abiding group to be declared terrorists by the government.
Also, over the weekend, I watched “One More, With Feeling”, the BtVS musical episode. I can see where that’s the favorite of a lot of people. I can also see why a lot of people have sworn their devotions to Joss Whedon, after Buffy and Firefly come from his writing and direction. When I have a free moment and/or weekend, perhaps I will dive into Dollhouse. Probably after I get all caught up on the various other shows I’ve been keeping track of.
While you wait for room for this braindump, enjoy Maps of War, which play out conflicts, both military and not, so you can see the troops and ideas spread around. Speaking of ideas, Copyblogger thinks we can weather the recession just fine, and even thrive in it, because we're Humes, who are adaptable, creative, and self-reliant. Which is good, unless you happen to be Dubai, a city that tried to build itself on the fickle and shallow and the excess income everyone had. Perhaps too good of an example of 2009 being a Year of Nothing, as declared by the Germain Cabal of Germans.
Internationally, Mosul appears to still be a sticky point in the "We dun good" part of Iraq, and the new timetables make the troops there worry that the locals can’t handle it.
A chinese flotilla surrounded a United States naval mapping vessel and taunted it, including stopping in front of the vessel, strewing debris in its path, and sailors stripping to their skivvies when hit with fire hoses turned on them in self-defense by the United States ship. Which, while immature and dangerous, is not cutting diplomatic phone lines and putting your troops on high alert because there are war exercises being conducted in the sea near the country to your south. Nor is it planting police in every street to make sure nobody in Tibet decides to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an aborted rebellion.
Saudi Arabia is still backwards when it comes to women, sentencing a 75 year-old woman to lashes for associating with men not her close relatives. There is some apparent sympathy for some of their ideals, though - one in seven supposedly said that a man can strike his girlfriend/wife if she dresses sexy in public. I thought some part of that was to show off to the other people how sexy your partner is. Said CEKSMs also believe it perfectly okay for a man to hit his wife/girlfriend if she’s a nag, and that sexy dressing should make a rape victim partially responsible for her own assault.
And, in the “Wow.” department, fighting off a kangaroo, and surviving being at the center of a flatbed truck-train collision.
Domestically, Consider that Best Buy is offering to recycle your electronics for free* ($10, but with $10 gift card).
The current administrator has directed the government to consult with the Attorney General before carrying out any of the dictates in signing statements of his predecessor, setting the stage to challenge those or rescind them, although one might hope that it actually results in the signing statement returning to just that - a statement instead of an attempt to end-around a law. The President shall veto it and send it back to Congress with his objections. He does not have the authoriy to ignore the parts he doesn’t like or thinks are unconstitutional, even if they’re part of something he does like.
The President also made a call or two to some news outlets to make sure his point was clear - he's not a socialist, and anyone who says that is so has no idea what the word means.
The NY Times has a piece on quants, the people who bring formulas to bear on trying to predict the classically unpredicatble markets, where 50% accuracy is impressive, and all the math that comes out has an attached caveat: Do not use stupidly. Do not assume it will work in all cases at all times. The quants themselves are also trying to point this out, but a lot of people were more interested in whether it could make them money, instead of whether it actually would work as intended.
A shooting spree in Alabama has many dead, including the shooter, and several who might have been, excepting for their armor.
In the opinions, The General thinks the non-excommunicated child rapist in Brazil would make an excellent poster boy for Catholicism. I think he’d get a lot of people agreeing with him, even for the stated reasons. They just might not see it as quite so positive as the Catholic Church obviously does.
Mr. Hassett starts the Presidential opinions by declaring Mr. Obama to be a Manchurian Candidate dedicated to the destruction of the economy. At whose bidding, I am yet unsure. But apparently he’s against people giving to private charities, because he wants all their money to go the State charity, a radical who encourages taxpayer-funded baby-killing without giving the taxpayers any voice on whether they want that, based on his decision to reverse the ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines, unlikely to have spine when it comes to vetoing Congressional pork, because they don’t have enough spine for vetoing it as they add in their own pet projects, and dithers on the economy while trying to distract the people with health care reform, clearing having his priorities screwed up, as everyone has to fix the economy to stability and prosperity before introducing reforms to that economy (it gives the opposition an easier time of telling you not to mess with what is obviously working).
Mr. Greenberg believes there are people out to destroy the Electoral College, which needs stalwart defenders of the idea that the people are idiots and need learned men with the power to tell them so and elect the president they want.
Mr. Stephens joins the chorus objecting to the National Intelligence Director, Mr. Freeman, based on his positive attitutde toward Saudi Arabia and Mao Zedong, and dismissing the opposition as crackpots because they assume that anyone against Mr. Freeman is part of the Israel Lobby.
Burt Prelutsky thinks we're still afraid of Muslims, using the point that we haven’t plastered the beheading story all over the news or charged the man with murder and we didn’t let the creator of “Fitna” into the UK as his justification. Apparently, we’re so afraid of offending Muslims and used to kowtowing to them that we have no spine to talk about the heinous things they do. I’m sure Mr. Prelutsky envisions all dancing happily as we’re subjected to Wahabist Islam, the unbelievers tax, restrictive coverings, and the like.
Returning to sanity for a moment, as our last item, Ms. Whitney sees a sudden contraction of revolving debt (credit cards) as promulgating another credit crisis on top of the current one.
In technology, Yubi-nya, a wireless remote control that is the size of a ring and operates by pressing fingers together. That would be “Ring-Meow” for the literalists, or “Meow Ring” for those looking for sense. Potentially, though, one could control things such as MP3 players just by pressing the right digits together, even while holding on to things like tram handles or poles.
Additionally, why gas still reigns supreme as the fuel of choice, even though it will eventually be unseated by whatever breakthrough technology gets appropriate mass marketing.
And then, tiny structures doing even tinier chemical work, mobile phone viruses taking advantage of mobile phones with data plans (surprisingly, the affected are not running a Windows product), the theory of mind being used to explain the presence of religion, because once you can imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, then you can jump to The Gods Are Watching, another cry to put firm guidance and regulation on the use of robots in place before they're completely unleashed, attempting to build a proof of concept on a shape-shifting smartphone,
At the tail end tonight, Introducing: Smunk, a portmanteau of smelly and funk. Often used to describe the smell of ill-ventilated break rooms, locker rooms, and other locales where odiferousness stays longer than it should.
That, and effective ways for your peaceful law-abiding group to be declared terrorists by the government.
