The loop begins again, starting with Vita, and possibly ending with pictures of potential effects of global warming. Although, while it's fun to talk about the end of the world, it would actually be rather boring for a very long time, plus, it would probably mean the churches manage to take over, like they want to, because they’re the organized force.
It being 17 March, some people are celebrating the Irish Saint driving out snakes from a land that didn’t necessarily have them, while others understand it as the Christians proclaiming their victory over the locals. Today also happens to have the play-in game for the NCAA tournament. For your “lies, damned lies, and statistics” department, if the average pay of graduates in the selected schools were the determination on whether they advanced, Duke wins.
Also in the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” department, but someone trying to be serious, derision and mockery coming forth for Maggie Gallagher, who blames the increase in non-married births to... Teh Gay. That’s right, since gay marriage became the important issue, it caused all the striaghts to start having kids without being married (because of that whole “all sorts of families” becoming more important than “always heteronormative two-parent households, no exceptions”). The Dispatches From the Culture Wars point out how ridiculous it is to correlate these two, and The General describes the plot by Teh Gay to impregnante women.
Elsewhere, and probably more importantly, the United States claims to have shot down an unmanned Iranian aricraft well inside Iraqi airspace, continuing to maintain the high tensions, Soldiers have seized the presidential capital of Madagascar, even though the president himself was not there, a leftist took power in El Salvador, promting much worry that another Central/South American country will become hostile, a United Nations human rights investigator alleged that North Korea tortures extensively, both in and out of prison, and Egypt will be opening up and exploring more of a pyramid with a bent shape.
A family of four in the United Kingdom that is obese and receiving unemployment benefits says the amount of their benefit isn't enough to pay all their bills. That’s 22,000 pounds of benefit per year, that is. There are a lot of things wrong with the picture, but the one where they supposedly don’t know how to lose weight is the worst.
In domestic zones, claims that the number of homeless children is far less than it actually is, because the study trumpeting 1.5 million children used a loose definition of homeless, instead of the federal standard, by which only 330,000 children are truly homeless. Still too many, no matter which number you use.
An ex-Pennsylvania state senator was convicted of 137 counts of corruption, with bail set at $2 million. Woof. That’s a lot of hits.
The Associated Press highlights some of the difficulties in working with FOIA and several federal agencies's unwillingness to respond in a timely manner to requests, deny them for reasons that don't make sense, or redact them to the point of uselessness. Transparency in government and all that, Mr. President. Get cracking. And enforce hard the rule that requires records be given to the Archivist after 25 years. After that time, I suspect most of the things that were national security secrets can be declassified, as well.
So, here’s something that could have clued us into the impending doom. Or did, and nobody paid attention to it - the derivatives market was worth quadrillions of dollars, supposedly. This with trillions being the number we normally think of as excessive amounts. That’s more than the GDP of several nations put together.
AIG opens up and shows where a tiny amount of its bailout cash went - to pay off creditors, with another chunk slated to pay bonuses to incompetent executives. The WSJ believes you should be mad at the government for its inability to make AIG a solvent company, not regulating it before it failed, and/or for not letting it fail and die in the first place, instgead of being totally outraged by bonuses and not noticing there’s still a lot of bailout cash unaccounted for. They also want you to believe that creating regulators to decide on who's a systemic risk is a bad idea, because it will imply government backing and or “too big to fail” status. On that, they’re right - that implication is a way bad thing. Additionally, I think we already have those kinds of regulators in place - wouldn’t be too hard to trustbust someone who had gotten to the point of being too big to fail, methinks. Especially if it gets this way by grafting arms onto itself that have many fingers in many pots.
And, just for contrariness, a company having to close down a call center because it could find enough people to work for them, and the possibility of having a nationalized retirement plan, that follows you from job to job. It’s pitched as “Unions want to take over your 401(k)”, because those unions are evul.
In the opinions, questions as to why the current administration hasn't begun investigations toward the end of prosecuting the previous administration for war crimes and treason.
Justice Thomas tells the American populace they're all a bunch of spoiled brats, with no concept or willingness to sacrifice, and without leadership that asks them to make those sacrifices.
The new narrative is in full genesis. We’ve gone from “He’s a socialist with a radical agenda!”, which was always hard to stick and didn’t really resonate well with the populace, to “He’s been hiding his true agenda in pleasant-sounding language” (Exhibit A on this), to “He’s an incompetent who will destroy the economy trying to fix it and get his agenda through!” Exhibit A, and Exhibit B, take a bow. And to some degree, Exhibit C.
The WSJ declares that if the American populace want to drive cars with no fuel efficiency, then we should let them, and manufacture such cars without interference from Washington. This in response to the problem that vehicle manufacturers can’t seem to sell their smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, the proposed “Washington” solution being a high tax on gasoline to induce the consumer to buy the gas sipper instead of the Hummer. Or, perhaps the fuel-efficient car could be less expensive than the big gas-guzzler. But that would wreck how profit works in American automotive matters - bigger are more profitable, so push the big ones, of course.
Mr. Stephens tells us that the liberal wing of America has decided its time for Afghanistan to be the unwinnable war, a quagmire that will eat up soldiers and become another... you know, invoking that is probably like invoking Godwin. Because liberals are all defeatists with no spine to see an action through, even when we thought this war was a just one.
Mr. McGurn does not like the tone of the narrative that praises Mrs. Obama for being an active and issue-supporting First Lady while sweeping the achievements of Mrs. Bush under the rug. Considering that Mrs. Bush never ahd much of fanfare made for the things she did to support this, with the media focusing a lot on the things her husband was doing wrong/right, this is a fair criticism. Historically speaking, though, do we remember a whole lot of what the First Ladies have done to help their Presidents? Not to say that it’s right to do so, but they do tend to get lost in the narrative.
Looking into technology, looking at the ways at which networks grow and then suddenly all click into place and become connected, machines that speed up bacterial evolution, magnetic fields generated by power lines affect the direction cows and deer line up to feed, a Web protocol that is completely voice-driven, a robot that can play follow-the-leader, a way of severely compressing image information without quality loss, meaning far less space is needed to hold images, single-molecule magnets, transforming high-frequency sounds into light, nanoscopic probes with cancer-killing missions, testing and developing better cyber-warfare defenses, image processing, rather than raw power, taking the forefront in digital picture taking, trying to pinpoint brain activity that indicates the presence of consciousness, wireless brain stimulation that works on light, attemtping to replicate a brain on a chip, and Hadoop, a program that can out-Google Google when it comes to crunching the vast sea of data here on the Web?
All the greatness of the basketball brackets. Coming soon to your country, if you’re the United States. Whoo.
It being 17 March, some people are celebrating the Irish Saint driving out snakes from a land that didn’t necessarily have them, while others understand it as the Christians proclaiming their victory over the locals. Today also happens to have the play-in game for the NCAA tournament. For your “lies, damned lies, and statistics” department, if the average pay of graduates in the selected schools were the determination on whether they advanced, Duke wins.
Also in the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” department, but someone trying to be serious, derision and mockery coming forth for Maggie Gallagher, who blames the increase in non-married births to... Teh Gay. That’s right, since gay marriage became the important issue, it caused all the striaghts to start having kids without being married (because of that whole “all sorts of families” becoming more important than “always heteronormative two-parent households, no exceptions”). The Dispatches From the Culture Wars point out how ridiculous it is to correlate these two, and The General describes the plot by Teh Gay to impregnante women.
Elsewhere, and probably more importantly, the United States claims to have shot down an unmanned Iranian aricraft well inside Iraqi airspace, continuing to maintain the high tensions, Soldiers have seized the presidential capital of Madagascar, even though the president himself was not there, a leftist took power in El Salvador, promting much worry that another Central/South American country will become hostile, a United Nations human rights investigator alleged that North Korea tortures extensively, both in and out of prison, and Egypt will be opening up and exploring more of a pyramid with a bent shape.
A family of four in the United Kingdom that is obese and receiving unemployment benefits says the amount of their benefit isn't enough to pay all their bills. That’s 22,000 pounds of benefit per year, that is. There are a lot of things wrong with the picture, but the one where they supposedly don’t know how to lose weight is the worst.
In domestic zones, claims that the number of homeless children is far less than it actually is, because the study trumpeting 1.5 million children used a loose definition of homeless, instead of the federal standard, by which only 330,000 children are truly homeless. Still too many, no matter which number you use.
An ex-Pennsylvania state senator was convicted of 137 counts of corruption, with bail set at $2 million. Woof. That’s a lot of hits.
The Associated Press highlights some of the difficulties in working with FOIA and several federal agencies's unwillingness to respond in a timely manner to requests, deny them for reasons that don't make sense, or redact them to the point of uselessness. Transparency in government and all that, Mr. President. Get cracking. And enforce hard the rule that requires records be given to the Archivist after 25 years. After that time, I suspect most of the things that were national security secrets can be declassified, as well.
So, here’s something that could have clued us into the impending doom. Or did, and nobody paid attention to it - the derivatives market was worth quadrillions of dollars, supposedly. This with trillions being the number we normally think of as excessive amounts. That’s more than the GDP of several nations put together.
AIG opens up and shows where a tiny amount of its bailout cash went - to pay off creditors, with another chunk slated to pay bonuses to incompetent executives. The WSJ believes you should be mad at the government for its inability to make AIG a solvent company, not regulating it before it failed, and/or for not letting it fail and die in the first place, instgead of being totally outraged by bonuses and not noticing there’s still a lot of bailout cash unaccounted for. They also want you to believe that creating regulators to decide on who's a systemic risk is a bad idea, because it will imply government backing and or “too big to fail” status. On that, they’re right - that implication is a way bad thing. Additionally, I think we already have those kinds of regulators in place - wouldn’t be too hard to trustbust someone who had gotten to the point of being too big to fail, methinks. Especially if it gets this way by grafting arms onto itself that have many fingers in many pots.
And, just for contrariness, a company having to close down a call center because it could find enough people to work for them, and the possibility of having a nationalized retirement plan, that follows you from job to job. It’s pitched as “Unions want to take over your 401(k)”, because those unions are evul.
In the opinions, questions as to why the current administration hasn't begun investigations toward the end of prosecuting the previous administration for war crimes and treason.
Justice Thomas tells the American populace they're all a bunch of spoiled brats, with no concept or willingness to sacrifice, and without leadership that asks them to make those sacrifices.
The new narrative is in full genesis. We’ve gone from “He’s a socialist with a radical agenda!”, which was always hard to stick and didn’t really resonate well with the populace, to “He’s been hiding his true agenda in pleasant-sounding language” (Exhibit A on this), to “He’s an incompetent who will destroy the economy trying to fix it and get his agenda through!” Exhibit A, and Exhibit B, take a bow. And to some degree, Exhibit C.
The WSJ declares that if the American populace want to drive cars with no fuel efficiency, then we should let them, and manufacture such cars without interference from Washington. This in response to the problem that vehicle manufacturers can’t seem to sell their smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, the proposed “Washington” solution being a high tax on gasoline to induce the consumer to buy the gas sipper instead of the Hummer. Or, perhaps the fuel-efficient car could be less expensive than the big gas-guzzler. But that would wreck how profit works in American automotive matters - bigger are more profitable, so push the big ones, of course.
Mr. Stephens tells us that the liberal wing of America has decided its time for Afghanistan to be the unwinnable war, a quagmire that will eat up soldiers and become another... you know, invoking that is probably like invoking Godwin. Because liberals are all defeatists with no spine to see an action through, even when we thought this war was a just one.
Mr. McGurn does not like the tone of the narrative that praises Mrs. Obama for being an active and issue-supporting First Lady while sweeping the achievements of Mrs. Bush under the rug. Considering that Mrs. Bush never ahd much of fanfare made for the things she did to support this, with the media focusing a lot on the things her husband was doing wrong/right, this is a fair criticism. Historically speaking, though, do we remember a whole lot of what the First Ladies have done to help their Presidents? Not to say that it’s right to do so, but they do tend to get lost in the narrative.
Looking into technology, looking at the ways at which networks grow and then suddenly all click into place and become connected, machines that speed up bacterial evolution, magnetic fields generated by power lines affect the direction cows and deer line up to feed, a Web protocol that is completely voice-driven, a robot that can play follow-the-leader, a way of severely compressing image information without quality loss, meaning far less space is needed to hold images, single-molecule magnets, transforming high-frequency sounds into light, nanoscopic probes with cancer-killing missions, testing and developing better cyber-warfare defenses, image processing, rather than raw power, taking the forefront in digital picture taking, trying to pinpoint brain activity that indicates the presence of consciousness, wireless brain stimulation that works on light, attemtping to replicate a brain on a chip, and Hadoop, a program that can out-Google Google when it comes to crunching the vast sea of data here on the Web?
All the greatness of the basketball brackets. Coming soon to your country, if you’re the United States. Whoo.