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And after this, to bed - 11 March 2009
Mar. 12th, 2009 01:07 amGot something important in gaming done today - Finished the 100-level post-game dungeon in .hack//G.U., obtaining several powerful items and accessories. All that’s left now is to clear out the various event campaigns and another series can be safely retired, to be used later on to get someone else all interested in them. Assuming anyone will be. And more memory space on my PS2 resides, with the whole clear data and all that thing. Should be able to reclaim some space. Of course, this means that I may have to start finding some sequence-manner to continue watching television on one hand and gaming on the other. More on this eventually.
Aaaaand, here we go again into the news forest! An announcement in Nebraska about the purchase and use of gaming equipment in a library resulted in an audit, declaring that the purchase of the equipment was a questionable use of public funds, and even better, that workers spending time on social websites or networks or using the gaming equipment while at work is a totally inappropriate use of public equipment and time. [Worms]Stu-pid[/Worms], especialyl considering those purchase were for work programs and training, and libraries should be embracing the whole social networking thing, which means spending time on them to learn how they work and to keep up with your coworkers and such.
It’s Comparison Time! On one hand, we have an appliance store ad in 1974 using Jesus Christ as their spokesperson, and on the other, we get Billy Graham talking about how cults' insistence on the infallibility of their doctrine means they reject Christianity and the Bible, which is the only true and infallible doctrine. Hrm. Let it soak in for a bit. Add in a person claiming to be a Muslim preacher mocking returning soldiers and condemning them for their actions, and perhaps it’s no real wonder at all, then, that religious groups are losing ground and followers, with Christianity taking the most losses (naturally) and “no religion” ranking third behind the Catholics and Baptists. Althoguh it’s not necessarily all bad - being in the national spolight and scrutiny might have helped Rick Warren be a better pastor, including for those members of Saddleback that are definitely LGBT and still accepted anyway.
In the international stage, a 17 year-old went on a gun rampage at his former secondary school, killing 15 across two different towns before killing himself. Why do these things tend to come in clumps? Now that it’s been primed, we’ll probably see some other school violence in the news for a bit.
More ammunition for conservatives to say Guantanamo shouldn't be closed - a released prisoner, then released by the Afghan government, is apparently now the leader of operation in the south for the Afghan Taliban. It took two releases to do it, though, and the Afghan government should probably foot some blame for this one.
Persons detained for planning the 11 September attacks at Guantanamo Bay expressed pride at their work, which in a lot of ways, makes me think they’re grandstanding and may or may not have actually been involved in the attacks at all. If you’re going to go down, you may as well get everyone to think you did it, so the real people can get away.
And, of course, more bombings in Iraq, just in case you hought it was time for some troop withdrawals. If you like, be cheered by a report claiming the Iranian president got a shoe tossed at him recently.
A scholarship fund is in the works to get Palestinians aid to attend university. The majority of comments say “Why are we giving money to those terrorists again? It’s not like it will make a difference in their hearts. They’ll still hate us.” Kind of depends on whether you firmly believe that one of the ways of breaking a terror cycle is to get a populace on the educated track so that there are fewer uneducated masses to turn into people who will throw their lives away. And then there are the “Why spend money on furrners when kids here at home are sucking it up pretty bad already, and can’t get enough non-loan financial aid for college if they’re middle-class and not scholarship material?”, which has a better weight, but I’d say that if we stop importing good students, we lose out on a lot of what drives our economic engines, whether here or elsewhere. I can even use the WSJ for support on this one, as they don’t like the idea of refusing foreign workers based on a misguided notion of Americans losing their jobs to foreigners and the H1-B visa. Mostly, though, a ball of xenophobia and jingoism.
Also, fuel taxes going up in Sweden. So it’s not just here that environmental taxes are being applied.
Domestically, in certain places near the Mexico border, Driving While Black* can really cost you (*or other minority), based on a suit brought against the law enforcement officials of Tenaha, Texas. The officials are alleged to abuse the asset seizure ability of the law to stop minority drivers or those traveling with them, search their cars, and then offer them the choice between having their assets seized or being charged with money laundering or other felony crimes. Most of the plaintiffs surrendered the cash, one especially when the police allegedly threatened to take the children and put them in the foster care system if they didn’t give up the money. If this suit goes through and can be proven, those officeers need to be charged with criminal theft and put on trial.
a second mysterious boom has shaken the Lower Hudson Valley in New York. Cause yet unknown, and the FAA says it’s against regs for any craft that can be traveling fast enough to sonic boom to do so at an altitude where the people on the ground would feel it.
The EPA may institute a rule requiring factories to report their emissions, which will hopefully help figure out how to reduce them... or at least give an idea of how much carbon to put up at auction for cap-and-trade.
Just in case we weren't clear - the CIA destroyed tapes that had "harsh interrogations" on them, which gives credence to the idea that there was definitely torture involved. Aren't you glad the UN is investigating torture and rendition in the United States?
Speaking financially, the prescience of the past suddenly comes into play - a 1994 GAO report warning about the dangers of derivatives has come to pass. And then it was buried by a concerted effort to continue dismantling regulations and making money on risky business. Not a collusive effort, just that all the people who should have been paying attention, including the regulators, were seduced by the lady wearing nothing but dollar bills and thus didn’t give the report the weight it needed. Elsewhere, Mr. Jenkins wants the mdia to play all of Mr. Buffet's remarks, including the one where he suggests that mark-to-market be abolished for the purposes of regulatory capital, so as to avoid forcing institutions into raising capital at bad times or expensive times and to oversell or sell too cheaply their stocks and bonds to keep the additional capital on hand. And, as a bonus, it stops the government from taking over. Mr. Greenspan says it's not Fed policy that caused the problem, but the mortgage rates offered by companies that decoupled from the Fed's rate. Still some digging and finger-pointing in trying to get to the bottom of the pile.
Even before this additional strain happened, one in fifty children in the United States experienced being homeless at some point in 2005-2006. We can only guess how bad it is now, and how much there’s no real safety net for someone if they get to that point. If you take a look at that side of life, suddenly “socialism” doesn’t sound all that bad.
Unless you happen to be some of the denizens of our opinion columns. Then, of course, hardworking, law-abiding, good decision-making taxpayers are being forced to bail out their irresponsible comrades, so that nobody learns their lesson about saving and living within their means. Plus, our saviors and masters, businesses, are being told to keep quiet and not lobby on issues that affect them because they're receiving government money to run their business with, and those that refuse and continue lobbying should be praised becasue they’re protecting us from an overnight takeover by unions through the Employee Free Choice Act. Which, by the way, does not eliminate the secret ballot process. We should also hammer on the President about his continued two-facedness about "responsibility" while spending freely, even more so than the Republicans did. Bad Republicans for abandoning your principles, worse Democrats for embracing yours. Funny how some people can do no right in the opinion columns. Newsweek thinks the President might be surfing into a riptide, once everyone loses patience with him and his plans because nothing seems to be moving forward or getting better in the short attention-span amount of time that the populace is alloting before they complain it hasn’t worked. I almost feel like there should be something about a “surge” thrown back in their faces on that. If most people think that it worked, and that we needed to have patience for it to work, then why are they not extending that same courtesy to the new guy?
But it’s beyond merely economics. That’s even before we complain that education is failing because students feel entitled to good grades based on good effort (or less) and the idea of measurable empirical standards of perfomance is being destroyed, again by those pesky unions and liberals that want thought control over everyone. Or decrying climate change throuh Al Gors's apparent unwillingness to engage his detractors.
The opinion columns are starting to dismiss the entire Presidency up to this point as blunder and error-filled, going after the wrong things, like Rush Limbaugh (which, if you’ll note, has been more like a snowball that others picked up on than a concerted attack from the Administration), and not properly greeting and feteing a visiting head of state, all of which galvanizes his opposition and gives them strength. So, it’ll be the “Anybody But Obama” party for a while? Yeah. Ask the Democrats how well that really did as a tactic. Furthermore, The President is obviously showing the signs of stress related to taking on too much and doing everything incompetently, a fact that his opposition should capitalize on, pointing out what they consider the 10 biggest "amateur" mistakes by the administration so far, many of which are mistakes only if you assume that the staff selection by the President was wrong, and believe that the only success metric of the economic crisis is the Dow Jones Industrial Index goign back up to 10,000 overnight. So, we should always elect old, white, safely-established and long-term politicians to the office of President, so we can be sure that they are “professional” about it, whatever the hell that means. Throw a crisis at anybody and they’re going to make mistakes. If you give them several, well, they might drop one or two while juggling. But because he’s young and “inexperienced”, that makes him an “amateur” at the job. If that’s the case, then blame the people who elected him. See how they like it when you call them a bunch of know-nothing idiots who couldn’t elect a good leader. Count how many times the response is “What, like we elected George W. Bush twice?” All of this is good enough for a third-place quiche.
Our Quiche runner up tonight - Chuck Norris, indicating that he might run for president of Texas after it secedes from the United States in protest over the direction the country is going in. He also gives props to Glenn Beck (which reminds me, need to get going on that bit, too.)
But our winner of the coveted Quiche for both WTF and Muslim scaremongering is Mr. Gaffney, Jr, for his column on the distance the Obama administration showed to Britain, who are ostensibly in the same mission as him - kowtow to Muslims, institute Shariah everywhere, fund terrorists. It started out as a “The United States and Britatin should be solid allies in defense, economics, and politics, and the cold shoulder Mr. Obama gave to Mr. Borwn is unacceptable on these terms” and morphed into “Besides, Mr. Brown and Mr. Obama should be seriously buddy-buddy - after all, Mr. Brown wants Britain to be a Muslim state and Mr. Obama wants to be more European.” by way of Shariah-compliant finance, which Mr. Obama obviously supports because the government has taken over AIG and Citigroup, both who do Shariah-compliant financing, the support for Gaza rebuilding, and the continuing row over what is considered hate speech and what is considered protected speech, the method by which the “Stealth Jihad” operates. So, in the end, I guess it’s a backhanded compliment (heavy on the bacckhand) that distance between Britain and the U.S. is exactly what’s needed, since Britain intends on becoming the Islamic Republic of the United Kingdom.
In technology, a more in-depth look at how computers will soon whomp us at Go, the water levels are rising faster than we originally thought, regrowing dinosaurs from chicken eggs instead of fossilized amber, recreating the Flight 1549 incident to show just how quick-reaction the pilot had to be, generating a "fingerprint" of any given sheet of paper, although I admit to not knowing how this information will be useful in the future,
Lockheed's prototype military-use exoskeleton, and how autonomus hovercopter robots can create an ad-hoc wireless communications network in a disaster area.
Last for tonight 100 cocks caught in a big bust. Totally safe for work.
Aaaaand, here we go again into the news forest! An announcement in Nebraska about the purchase and use of gaming equipment in a library resulted in an audit, declaring that the purchase of the equipment was a questionable use of public funds, and even better, that workers spending time on social websites or networks or using the gaming equipment while at work is a totally inappropriate use of public equipment and time. [Worms]Stu-pid[/Worms], especialyl considering those purchase were for work programs and training, and libraries should be embracing the whole social networking thing, which means spending time on them to learn how they work and to keep up with your coworkers and such.
It’s Comparison Time! On one hand, we have an appliance store ad in 1974 using Jesus Christ as their spokesperson, and on the other, we get Billy Graham talking about how cults' insistence on the infallibility of their doctrine means they reject Christianity and the Bible, which is the only true and infallible doctrine. Hrm. Let it soak in for a bit. Add in a person claiming to be a Muslim preacher mocking returning soldiers and condemning them for their actions, and perhaps it’s no real wonder at all, then, that religious groups are losing ground and followers, with Christianity taking the most losses (naturally) and “no religion” ranking third behind the Catholics and Baptists. Althoguh it’s not necessarily all bad - being in the national spolight and scrutiny might have helped Rick Warren be a better pastor, including for those members of Saddleback that are definitely LGBT and still accepted anyway.
In the international stage, a 17 year-old went on a gun rampage at his former secondary school, killing 15 across two different towns before killing himself. Why do these things tend to come in clumps? Now that it’s been primed, we’ll probably see some other school violence in the news for a bit.
More ammunition for conservatives to say Guantanamo shouldn't be closed - a released prisoner, then released by the Afghan government, is apparently now the leader of operation in the south for the Afghan Taliban. It took two releases to do it, though, and the Afghan government should probably foot some blame for this one.
Persons detained for planning the 11 September attacks at Guantanamo Bay expressed pride at their work, which in a lot of ways, makes me think they’re grandstanding and may or may not have actually been involved in the attacks at all. If you’re going to go down, you may as well get everyone to think you did it, so the real people can get away.
And, of course, more bombings in Iraq, just in case you hought it was time for some troop withdrawals. If you like, be cheered by a report claiming the Iranian president got a shoe tossed at him recently.
A scholarship fund is in the works to get Palestinians aid to attend university. The majority of comments say “Why are we giving money to those terrorists again? It’s not like it will make a difference in their hearts. They’ll still hate us.” Kind of depends on whether you firmly believe that one of the ways of breaking a terror cycle is to get a populace on the educated track so that there are fewer uneducated masses to turn into people who will throw their lives away. And then there are the “Why spend money on furrners when kids here at home are sucking it up pretty bad already, and can’t get enough non-loan financial aid for college if they’re middle-class and not scholarship material?”, which has a better weight, but I’d say that if we stop importing good students, we lose out on a lot of what drives our economic engines, whether here or elsewhere. I can even use the WSJ for support on this one, as they don’t like the idea of refusing foreign workers based on a misguided notion of Americans losing their jobs to foreigners and the H1-B visa. Mostly, though, a ball of xenophobia and jingoism.
Also, fuel taxes going up in Sweden. So it’s not just here that environmental taxes are being applied.
Domestically, in certain places near the Mexico border, Driving While Black* can really cost you (*or other minority), based on a suit brought against the law enforcement officials of Tenaha, Texas. The officials are alleged to abuse the asset seizure ability of the law to stop minority drivers or those traveling with them, search their cars, and then offer them the choice between having their assets seized or being charged with money laundering or other felony crimes. Most of the plaintiffs surrendered the cash, one especially when the police allegedly threatened to take the children and put them in the foster care system if they didn’t give up the money. If this suit goes through and can be proven, those officeers need to be charged with criminal theft and put on trial.
a second mysterious boom has shaken the Lower Hudson Valley in New York. Cause yet unknown, and the FAA says it’s against regs for any craft that can be traveling fast enough to sonic boom to do so at an altitude where the people on the ground would feel it.
The EPA may institute a rule requiring factories to report their emissions, which will hopefully help figure out how to reduce them... or at least give an idea of how much carbon to put up at auction for cap-and-trade.
Just in case we weren't clear - the CIA destroyed tapes that had "harsh interrogations" on them, which gives credence to the idea that there was definitely torture involved. Aren't you glad the UN is investigating torture and rendition in the United States?
Speaking financially, the prescience of the past suddenly comes into play - a 1994 GAO report warning about the dangers of derivatives has come to pass. And then it was buried by a concerted effort to continue dismantling regulations and making money on risky business. Not a collusive effort, just that all the people who should have been paying attention, including the regulators, were seduced by the lady wearing nothing but dollar bills and thus didn’t give the report the weight it needed. Elsewhere, Mr. Jenkins wants the mdia to play all of Mr. Buffet's remarks, including the one where he suggests that mark-to-market be abolished for the purposes of regulatory capital, so as to avoid forcing institutions into raising capital at bad times or expensive times and to oversell or sell too cheaply their stocks and bonds to keep the additional capital on hand. And, as a bonus, it stops the government from taking over. Mr. Greenspan says it's not Fed policy that caused the problem, but the mortgage rates offered by companies that decoupled from the Fed's rate. Still some digging and finger-pointing in trying to get to the bottom of the pile.
Even before this additional strain happened, one in fifty children in the United States experienced being homeless at some point in 2005-2006. We can only guess how bad it is now, and how much there’s no real safety net for someone if they get to that point. If you take a look at that side of life, suddenly “socialism” doesn’t sound all that bad.
Unless you happen to be some of the denizens of our opinion columns. Then, of course, hardworking, law-abiding, good decision-making taxpayers are being forced to bail out their irresponsible comrades, so that nobody learns their lesson about saving and living within their means. Plus, our saviors and masters, businesses, are being told to keep quiet and not lobby on issues that affect them because they're receiving government money to run their business with, and those that refuse and continue lobbying should be praised becasue they’re protecting us from an overnight takeover by unions through the Employee Free Choice Act. Which, by the way, does not eliminate the secret ballot process. We should also hammer on the President about his continued two-facedness about "responsibility" while spending freely, even more so than the Republicans did. Bad Republicans for abandoning your principles, worse Democrats for embracing yours. Funny how some people can do no right in the opinion columns. Newsweek thinks the President might be surfing into a riptide, once everyone loses patience with him and his plans because nothing seems to be moving forward or getting better in the short attention-span amount of time that the populace is alloting before they complain it hasn’t worked. I almost feel like there should be something about a “surge” thrown back in their faces on that. If most people think that it worked, and that we needed to have patience for it to work, then why are they not extending that same courtesy to the new guy?
But it’s beyond merely economics. That’s even before we complain that education is failing because students feel entitled to good grades based on good effort (or less) and the idea of measurable empirical standards of perfomance is being destroyed, again by those pesky unions and liberals that want thought control over everyone. Or decrying climate change throuh Al Gors's apparent unwillingness to engage his detractors.
The opinion columns are starting to dismiss the entire Presidency up to this point as blunder and error-filled, going after the wrong things, like Rush Limbaugh (which, if you’ll note, has been more like a snowball that others picked up on than a concerted attack from the Administration), and not properly greeting and feteing a visiting head of state, all of which galvanizes his opposition and gives them strength. So, it’ll be the “Anybody But Obama” party for a while? Yeah. Ask the Democrats how well that really did as a tactic. Furthermore, The President is obviously showing the signs of stress related to taking on too much and doing everything incompetently, a fact that his opposition should capitalize on, pointing out what they consider the 10 biggest "amateur" mistakes by the administration so far, many of which are mistakes only if you assume that the staff selection by the President was wrong, and believe that the only success metric of the economic crisis is the Dow Jones Industrial Index goign back up to 10,000 overnight. So, we should always elect old, white, safely-established and long-term politicians to the office of President, so we can be sure that they are “professional” about it, whatever the hell that means. Throw a crisis at anybody and they’re going to make mistakes. If you give them several, well, they might drop one or two while juggling. But because he’s young and “inexperienced”, that makes him an “amateur” at the job. If that’s the case, then blame the people who elected him. See how they like it when you call them a bunch of know-nothing idiots who couldn’t elect a good leader. Count how many times the response is “What, like we elected George W. Bush twice?” All of this is good enough for a third-place quiche.
Our Quiche runner up tonight - Chuck Norris, indicating that he might run for president of Texas after it secedes from the United States in protest over the direction the country is going in. He also gives props to Glenn Beck (which reminds me, need to get going on that bit, too.)
But our winner of the coveted Quiche for both WTF and Muslim scaremongering is Mr. Gaffney, Jr, for his column on the distance the Obama administration showed to Britain, who are ostensibly in the same mission as him - kowtow to Muslims, institute Shariah everywhere, fund terrorists. It started out as a “The United States and Britatin should be solid allies in defense, economics, and politics, and the cold shoulder Mr. Obama gave to Mr. Borwn is unacceptable on these terms” and morphed into “Besides, Mr. Brown and Mr. Obama should be seriously buddy-buddy - after all, Mr. Brown wants Britain to be a Muslim state and Mr. Obama wants to be more European.” by way of Shariah-compliant finance, which Mr. Obama obviously supports because the government has taken over AIG and Citigroup, both who do Shariah-compliant financing, the support for Gaza rebuilding, and the continuing row over what is considered hate speech and what is considered protected speech, the method by which the “Stealth Jihad” operates. So, in the end, I guess it’s a backhanded compliment (heavy on the bacckhand) that distance between Britain and the U.S. is exactly what’s needed, since Britain intends on becoming the Islamic Republic of the United Kingdom.
In technology, a more in-depth look at how computers will soon whomp us at Go, the water levels are rising faster than we originally thought, regrowing dinosaurs from chicken eggs instead of fossilized amber, recreating the Flight 1549 incident to show just how quick-reaction the pilot had to be, generating a "fingerprint" of any given sheet of paper, although I admit to not knowing how this information will be useful in the future,
Lockheed's prototype military-use exoskeleton, and how autonomus hovercopter robots can create an ad-hoc wireless communications network in a disaster area.
Last for tonight 100 cocks caught in a big bust. Totally safe for work.
