More and more material - 12 March 2009

Up top, there are a lot of bad things about this - having to tell someone that their five year-old daughter has gonhorrea because of sexual abuse, being said five year-old daughter being abused, and being the mother finding out that your boyfriend abused your daughter and gave her the infection. All in all, I'd say that was bad. The boyfriend is probably going to get a Bad Ending for this particular chapter. Similarly both creepy and wrong, taking the purity ball concept one step beyond, where daughter dearest is supposed to think of daddy as her husband until she gets her own, including doing such intimate acts as shaving him, tying his tie, and the like. Because creating an Electra complex, on top of all the other wonderful "women should be pregnant and in the kitchen constantly" views, is something to strive for. And then, when pregnant and scared, she can be referred to a "crisis pregnancy center" which will under no circumstances tell her anything about birth control or abortion, but feed her more religious material until she decides not to abort, and then drop her like a sack of potatoes for all the further care they give to her. She may have one advantage, though - she doesn't live in South Africa, where men can go around raping and/or killing lesbians thinking it will turn them straight and the justice system turns a blind eye. (At least, so far.) Here in this country, we at least make an attempt to prosecute.

Out in the world, if you're going to the toilet in a Japanese ski resort, enjoy the view.

An Iraqi official defended the readiness of the forces, citing the difficulty of stopping suicide bombers as explanation for why there has been a rash of them in the country lately. Like a lot of crime - can't protect everyone everywhere, but can certainly try to stop as many as possible and keep the big ones down.

Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, received a 15 year prison sentence for his assistance in a 1992 execution of merchants. On a much smaller and more recent scale, the journalist who threw shoes at Mr. Bush received three years in jail.

Domestically, here's a reason why you keep your kid out of politics, unless they step into it and want to do it themselves (Kudos to Meghan McCain for espousing moderate Republicanism and for calling out the wingnuts in the party). Remember the highly-publicized Palin daughter pregnancy with marriage thing? It's off. Bristol Palin is now a single mother having a child out of wedlock. I wonder how this will be contorted as to be a good thing for conservative values. Perhaps by having Joe the Plumber marry the available Bristol?

Also, if you're the Westboro Baptist Church (aka. Fred Phelps), you might want to not plant your university protest next to a fraternity house. Because you will be relentlessly mocked by the residents there, who will put on as pro-LGBT an extravaganza as they can, just because you're there.

Wireless taser-like darts...that can be shot through a shotgun. Just what that whole "non-lethal force" idea needed. Really. Not that they have so many options to test it on - Border arrests and attempts are down toward 1970 levels, considering that our economy doesn't look all that much better.

Citing pro-Israel lobbying groups, the candidate for a major intelligence post has withdrawn his name. AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups deny actually taking a position on the candidate. Is it me, or is the appointment season a really rough ride this time around, compared to others? Seems like there's a lot of pent-up irritation, aggravation, and mean-spiritedness that's spilling out in waves over the Obama administration's picks for posts. Maybe it's because there's a Democrat in the White House for the second time in a few decades. People looking for ways of setting up Mr. Obama's policies as a repudiation of Mr. Bush's will find there's still a defense team in place to try and show off how similar the two are or how much Mr. Bush wasn't actually an evil man.

Economically, economists give the President a failing grade...only seven weeks into his presidency. Most of the complaints centered around delays on promises instead of actual gripes with the policy involved. So, Wall Street is complaining that they aren't getting everything they want NOWNOWNOW, throwing a bit of a stock-market tantrum while people in Washington do their best to think through consequences and find a way that will result in good solid economics in the long term (unless they're part of the Party of NO, but they believe the problem gets fixed by letting the current system self-correct and hope they can also handicap or kneecap the government by reducing its receipts through inherently superior tax cuts, which they think people will then run and spend on the economy in the also inherently superior private sector). Well, which would you rather have? A well-thought plan that works and keeps us happy over the long term with good growth, or a rushed-through no-oversight or accountability program that spends billions trying to keep all the plates spinning and only cares about what happened to the money after things are all spent out and may not have actually been put toward the purpose of recovering the economy?

At least someone's making money. The creators of Obama Fingers seem to think so. And claiming that they had no idea that fried chicken and African Americans was a touchy subject, but were inending to cash in on the Obama-mania. I can believe that. Anyone claiming that they didn't know about the DNC roadside ad making fun of Rush Limbaugh in his home town, however, is lying. Especially when there's better material, like RNC Chairman Michael Steele saying the only thing controlling violent impulses toward his critics is talking to God. That may not save him from the other things he's said that put him out of favor with the religious nuts currently comprising the bulk of the Party's prominent facet, but he can pray that it does.

Getting into opinions, then. The opinion of the populace is increasingly skeptical of the claims of climate change, with 41 percent believing those claims are "exaggerated", indicating that lacking a serious catastrophic event, the populace will change from fear to skepticism to dismissal. With additional matters like "It's a cover for socialism and taxation" and "You can't prove that humans are responsible for this", that skepticism will probably rise. After all, Florida and California haven't flooded. Yet.

Mr. Wartzman suggests that newspapers could go online-only with a smaller staff and a more local focus and become profitable. With the way that the Internet works, too, they could still use wire services like the AP and or Google's aggregation services to provide important news around the world and from Washington D.C. It would be an interesting thought to see whether or not by devoting the majority of their focus to local issues, whether online and possibly print newspapers could return themselves to profitability.

Sudan is a concern to the country, because its a country that welcomes terrorists, commits genocide on its own people, and allies itself with interests opposed to the United States, says the Center for Security Policy. They're one of those places with the extreme form of Islam. And can probably be safely knocked over and/or out if someone decides they want to go do it. Mr. Phares praises the idea of getting elements not closely associated with the Taliban to break off and join with the U.S. and Afghan governments, but says "Yer frazin' it rong".

Ms. Salvato says we need to be stalwart against the socialist menance, who are throwing money at a problem that can't be solved by money, while they also strive to keep most of the populace ignorant and disconnected from their political reality, so they become dependent and ignorant and easy to control. the WSJ thinks that since Europe doesn't care for massive debt spending, it should be a sign that America shouldn't, either. (Wait, since when has the WSJ been in favor of America becoming more European?) Mr. Henninger says the goal has been punitive wealth redistribution aimed at bleeding the top one percent dry and giving their wealth to the bottom, and it's all spelled out in the President's economic playbook, with the figures right there that show how the top one percent have been holding increasing amounts of all the wealth in the country. Mr. Hawkins sees the Obama administration as gutting the millitary and rendering it unable to fight China or any other world power if they should decide to give us a go, because our technology is old and needs replacing, and the money to do it just isn't there.

Mr. Scalia believes that passing Employee Free Choice means the end of the secret ballot, not because of a mistaken belief that it will go away, but because he beleives that unions will intimidate people into signing on to an authorization card that they wouldn't support in a secret ballot election. So, businesses are claiming "card check" means union intimidation, while unions believe that before the ballot arrives, the business pulls out all the stops to intimidate workers into not joining the union, including firing the people who look like they would support such a thing, thanks to the "at will" nature of employment where you could be fired for sneezing. I'm betting that they're both right, and will both continue those practices even in the new realm. After all, if a business wants the idea to tank, they just find enough convenient excuses to fire everyone who signed on with a union card, and make it look that way so that they can't be traced back to signing the card, which would be a clear violation of labor law and a sign of inepititude in employer intimidation.

Doctors Groopman and Hartzband say that the savings claims on electronic medical records are mostly exaggerated. While electronic medical records have their advantages, they say, they follow the maxim "To err is human, to really foul things up, you need a computer". Thus, better error-checking and diagnostic procedures on the front end before data entry would need to be in place, as well as making sure error-checking or alerts happen after data entered to make sure it all meshes properly. Based on their experience at Harvard, which already uses electronic records, they say the savings aren't that great, and the study that may have produced the figure did some not-scientific things and made assumptions it shouldn't have. What's refreshing about this? Absolutely nowhere does it say that the federal government will be leaning over your doctor's shoulder and telling them what to do. Glad that misconception has finally died.

Last for tonight, because he often aims for the place of dishonor, Mr. Turd Blossom thinks that the White House made a mistake in mentioning Limbaugh by name and continuing to make him out to be the head of the Republican Party, and he makes it sound like they said it, and nothing happened, and they kept egging Rush on, as if it were a schoolyard taunt. Or that it was merely a distraction away from the dissatisfaction people have with his policy (um, still good approval ratings, and according to the figures Ms. Maddow had last night, Congressional approval ratings have doubled up). And Rush rising to the bait, deciding he liked the mantle, and then the Republican Party behaving as if Rush really were in charge means nothing at all? The whole "Boss Limbaugh" thing wouldn't be getting nearly as much play if it didn't keep turning out to be true, and Rush didn't keep exploiting it to try and making his ratings and revenues go up. Oh, and how much has the White House mentioned him lately? Not as much as the talking heads, I'd say, freeing the administration to work on their real priorities. Wasn't the whole "Listening to Rush" supposed to be a one-off, anyway? That it's gotten bigger means someone else had to have been feeding it. So how is it a mistake for the White House to have tossed off an off-the-cuff remark and then moved on to other things, while the echo chambers on both sides bounce it around and make it into something other than what it was?

In technology, The BBC may have violated the law on computer misuse by buying a botnet so it could gather footage and demonstrate how easy it is to get one for a programme. Even though they were supposedly only spamming their own servers and accounts, the fact that they used the botnet at all may have violated the act. Oops. The end result may have been positive, after all - it warned the people that they had compromised computers and then shut down the botnet.

a prediction that Google will roll out Android netbooks with cloud and Microsoft stuff compatibility and make an absolute killing as people trust the Google name and the platform behind it, which means that Linux could become a high-use platform in a hurry. People might need to start working on their anti-spyware / antivirus solutions now, just in anticipation.

Google is starting to track your visiting habits with persistent cookies, so they can serve you more ads based on what you supposedly like. Disinformation campaigns, here we go! It's not made out to be as bad as some other programs that are seen to be much more intrusive and potentially hackable, but there's already a privacy complaint campaign, aiming for them to at least make such cookieness opt-in instead of opt-out.

Additionally, quick-charge lithium batteries, which, if scaled-up well, could become hot-swappable bits for electric vehicles or possibly the way that one can add electric infrastructure to the system of petrol stations across the country. Hooray for fast-rechargable batteries.

Speaking of Google, they're stepping into the voice realm with Google Voice service, probably a result of having Android phones out on the market. More information from Forbes, where Google Voice appears to be message box and ring-through service rolled into one.

Further on down the road, some parts of intelligence, such as the speed of data transmission down the lines and the amount of processor cells, may be genetic, more on self-assembling tissues, which could mean we're getting close to actually being able to generate living biological organisms. So we could potentially create things like fish with bone teeth.

Out of this segment, NASA's ten greatest missions. No doubt about number one - it's still the only successful one where the humans tagged along in person.

Last for tonight - some things you may not have known about our world in 2008. Additionally, sketches on the iPhone, and the AT-AT as a pet, and why you should never use a saw as your power tool attachment for a sex toy.