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Ants. Again. - 14 April 2009
Apr. 15th, 2009 01:07 amGreetings, everyone. Did you know that you can find art anywhere? And that if you know where to look, even books can have some fairly racy pictures embedded in them. The Dead Pool claims Marilyn Chambers, soap model and pornography star, an actress in a seminal work that probably helped launch what we now think of as the adult film industry, as opposed to earler stag films. And yes, a Zombie Bible, so that we can cover the whole segment from birth to death to undeath. And a PSA - crucifixion is bad for your health.
A concise summary as to why Amazon should not chalk their recent experience up to "a glitch" and not examine the underlying structure, the one where, really, only LGBTQ authors could get caught in something like this, because they’re an “other”. For a reason why thinking of people as “other” is bad, heres's a page teh Unabashed Feminism department would want to burn.
Following on an earlier story, Salon released the other parts of the Sgt. X affair, where despite having a copy of the tape sent to them, the Army and the Senate both concluded there was no such pressure to not diagnose PTSD in soldiers returning from Iraq, after an internal investigation. Here's their conclusions. And here's the story of someone similar, but who managed to get VA help and correctly diagnosed.
International news to start - Iraq is still divided on sectarian lines, with government officials accusing media persons of stoking tensions between the two with their reporting.
Somalia continues to be a problem zone, with mortar shells fired at a plane carrying a United States Congressperson as it took off. The AP praised the Presidential decision to leave the piracy affair to subordinates rather than interjecting himself into the matter, earning them a quicknews “I hate the press” award, no doubt for praising the President for doing nothing. The Chinese appear not to be having trouble with the matter, though, as according to something that's probably not very credible, dolphins protect Chiense ships from pirates.
A Russian father was charged with putting a hit out on his daughter, apparently over a mini-skirt that the girl was wearing. Worse, the hit was sucessful. Better, the men doing it have been charged. I’m glad we don’t have disputes over clothing that escalate into violence, possibly motivated by religious belief (at least, I’m assuming that’s what the throwaway line about the area being mostly Muslim is supposed to imply) here in this country, right?
Domestically, the crop of bad economic news, and the people looking for it, has become a phenomenon (doot do, de do do) - pessimissm porn.
Mr. McGurn heralds the announcement of GOProud, an organization dedicated to proving homosexual conservatives exist and to getting their interests working with the Republican Party at large. Apparently, homosexual conservatives aren’t that worried about employment discrimination or hate-crimes legislation, but instead want private health care options instead of government-run ones. These GOProud are against he Log Cabin Republicans, who have become indistinguishable from leftists, and want the party to return to... Reaganite roots? How did we get there from here?
Which leads into the opinions pretty nicely, because Ms. Parker thinks that Christian social conservatism isn't dying, but will thrive in the Age of Obama, because Republicans and Christian conservatives line up so well on social issue, and the evul secularists have been enjoying undue influence so far. (Like, from the beginning of the country, yo.)
Mr. Larner deconstructs a pillar of the anti-socialism movement, pointing out that excepting where he critiqued perfectable utopianism (and some of its facets, like the planned economy), Mr. Hayek’s ideas have not been borne out by the time passing since he wrote them, and the man himself was not an extreme right-winger, like he is wielded to be.
Mr. Adams has the solution to Somali piracy - every ship going out is armed, and anyone who doesn't let armed boats dock in their ports should just kiss goodbye to their foreign aid coming from our “generous Christian nation”. Praise Jesus and pass the ammunition. (His boating story is interesting, too - three guys going out fishing carry three guns that can all carry a high amount of rounds. Gun nuts much?) Mr. Zimmerman has a more sensible solution - travel in convoys.
On a similar note, but different country, the WSJ thinks that North Korea will only do what they're supposed to do if the U.S. walks away from aid and China cuts off their energy suppiles, so the country falls and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that the Kim regime and the nuclear threat are both gone. Ms. Glick takes the backroads to get to her poitn about how the U.S. and Europe are ignoring Iran to their detriment, starting with Egypt taking action against Hezbollah, the implications it has on Arab politics, a digression on Iran’s growing influence and succesful renogiations of peace plans, and then finally getting to the point of ”If Iran’s neighbors are all warning us about them almost daily, why hasn’t anyone from the United States, Europe, or Israel made a glass desert out of Iran?“ But we won’t, and then we’ll be surprised when suddenly we all become Shiite Islamic states under Iran and terrorists.
More domestically, Mr. Bialosky believes the current Administration's tax proposals will discourage the Creators from making more jobs for the rest of us, so we should lower their taxes to honor their ability to keep the rest of us employed rather than making them reliant on the government. This is the appearance of a new facet to the “lazy people on welfare” tactic - more taxes means less jobs and less innovation for fear of those taxes. Never mind the fact that a non-profitable company (unless incorporated as a nonprofit) will not survive very long anyway, and those jobs get lost. Mr. Macey says that the government only needs to control the financial sector to control us all, and is hard at work doing just that, with the unintended consequence of entrenching bad executives instead of letting them be bought out with exorbitant severance packages and getting someone good in.
Mr. DeYoung is against government caps on how much a payday loan shark can charge customers, claiming that banking practices to rack up overdraft fees are more expensive and manipulated to happen more often, and thus payday loans are positively transparent by comparison. Plus, people who engage in that are rational and informed customers who need just that little bit of short-term credit. Repeatedly. And, in his bow to The Almighty Market, he says that places that have lots of payday loan places and no caps have better prices. If one can consider usury of that sort to have any sort of acceptable price.
Messrs. Weems and Sasse believe comparing government programs to private insurers is a false comparison, and give their reasons why public plan care would be more expensive than private plan care, including the quality requirements of private plans, the costs of marketing, and the lack of antifraud measures the government takes.
The Slacktivist gives a logical opinion on why nobody should even care about Tax Freedom Day - it’s playing with your statistical heads, and the premise that it advocates, no taxes, and thus, no government, is not the result people want, especially with the added delusion that $15 now will have the same purchasing power in the anarchic state to follow.
Last out, Mr. Stephens suggests that while building our own defenses against cyberattack, we go out and infiltrate the networks of those who are hacking into ours, so that at best, we present a Wargames-optimal solution and generate cyber-MAD.
In technology, DNA/graphene sensors that could detect cancer, DNA as a building block for nanotubes, a claim to the world's first cloned camel, some of the weirder inventions at CHI, including memory matches, a solar farm beaming power back to California is greenlighted, Twitter as a way of tapping the collective mind, or as a way of broadcasting interesting information collected from sensors. Either way, Seldon probably would like Twitter. Also related, receiving a newsstream may mess with your moral mind, by not giving you enough time to stop and think and come to the moral conclusion you want to, or to develop the empathic feelings for other people needed.
Last for tonight, people need to get up away from their chairs and move around. Which would be wonderful, for those people that have jobs that let them not be chainted to their desk. Also, a historical note - herb-infused wine has been used to help treat ailments for millenia. Cheers. Just don’t come to the library stinking of it - as most of you probably already know, being offensively odored will result in you being ordered to leave.
A concise summary as to why Amazon should not chalk their recent experience up to "a glitch" and not examine the underlying structure, the one where, really, only LGBTQ authors could get caught in something like this, because they’re an “other”. For a reason why thinking of people as “other” is bad, heres's a page teh Unabashed Feminism department would want to burn.
Following on an earlier story, Salon released the other parts of the Sgt. X affair, where despite having a copy of the tape sent to them, the Army and the Senate both concluded there was no such pressure to not diagnose PTSD in soldiers returning from Iraq, after an internal investigation. Here's their conclusions. And here's the story of someone similar, but who managed to get VA help and correctly diagnosed.
International news to start - Iraq is still divided on sectarian lines, with government officials accusing media persons of stoking tensions between the two with their reporting.
Somalia continues to be a problem zone, with mortar shells fired at a plane carrying a United States Congressperson as it took off. The AP praised the Presidential decision to leave the piracy affair to subordinates rather than interjecting himself into the matter, earning them a quicknews “I hate the press” award, no doubt for praising the President for doing nothing. The Chinese appear not to be having trouble with the matter, though, as according to something that's probably not very credible, dolphins protect Chiense ships from pirates.
A Russian father was charged with putting a hit out on his daughter, apparently over a mini-skirt that the girl was wearing. Worse, the hit was sucessful. Better, the men doing it have been charged. I’m glad we don’t have disputes over clothing that escalate into violence, possibly motivated by religious belief (at least, I’m assuming that’s what the throwaway line about the area being mostly Muslim is supposed to imply) here in this country, right?
Domestically, the crop of bad economic news, and the people looking for it, has become a phenomenon (doot do, de do do) - pessimissm porn.
Mr. McGurn heralds the announcement of GOProud, an organization dedicated to proving homosexual conservatives exist and to getting their interests working with the Republican Party at large. Apparently, homosexual conservatives aren’t that worried about employment discrimination or hate-crimes legislation, but instead want private health care options instead of government-run ones. These GOProud are against he Log Cabin Republicans, who have become indistinguishable from leftists, and want the party to return to... Reaganite roots? How did we get there from here?
Which leads into the opinions pretty nicely, because Ms. Parker thinks that Christian social conservatism isn't dying, but will thrive in the Age of Obama, because Republicans and Christian conservatives line up so well on social issue, and the evul secularists have been enjoying undue influence so far. (Like, from the beginning of the country, yo.)
Mr. Larner deconstructs a pillar of the anti-socialism movement, pointing out that excepting where he critiqued perfectable utopianism (and some of its facets, like the planned economy), Mr. Hayek’s ideas have not been borne out by the time passing since he wrote them, and the man himself was not an extreme right-winger, like he is wielded to be.
Mr. Adams has the solution to Somali piracy - every ship going out is armed, and anyone who doesn't let armed boats dock in their ports should just kiss goodbye to their foreign aid coming from our “generous Christian nation”. Praise Jesus and pass the ammunition. (His boating story is interesting, too - three guys going out fishing carry three guns that can all carry a high amount of rounds. Gun nuts much?) Mr. Zimmerman has a more sensible solution - travel in convoys.
On a similar note, but different country, the WSJ thinks that North Korea will only do what they're supposed to do if the U.S. walks away from aid and China cuts off their energy suppiles, so the country falls and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that the Kim regime and the nuclear threat are both gone. Ms. Glick takes the backroads to get to her poitn about how the U.S. and Europe are ignoring Iran to their detriment, starting with Egypt taking action against Hezbollah, the implications it has on Arab politics, a digression on Iran’s growing influence and succesful renogiations of peace plans, and then finally getting to the point of ”If Iran’s neighbors are all warning us about them almost daily, why hasn’t anyone from the United States, Europe, or Israel made a glass desert out of Iran?“ But we won’t, and then we’ll be surprised when suddenly we all become Shiite Islamic states under Iran and terrorists.
More domestically, Mr. Bialosky believes the current Administration's tax proposals will discourage the Creators from making more jobs for the rest of us, so we should lower their taxes to honor their ability to keep the rest of us employed rather than making them reliant on the government. This is the appearance of a new facet to the “lazy people on welfare” tactic - more taxes means less jobs and less innovation for fear of those taxes. Never mind the fact that a non-profitable company (unless incorporated as a nonprofit) will not survive very long anyway, and those jobs get lost. Mr. Macey says that the government only needs to control the financial sector to control us all, and is hard at work doing just that, with the unintended consequence of entrenching bad executives instead of letting them be bought out with exorbitant severance packages and getting someone good in.
Mr. DeYoung is against government caps on how much a payday loan shark can charge customers, claiming that banking practices to rack up overdraft fees are more expensive and manipulated to happen more often, and thus payday loans are positively transparent by comparison. Plus, people who engage in that are rational and informed customers who need just that little bit of short-term credit. Repeatedly. And, in his bow to The Almighty Market, he says that places that have lots of payday loan places and no caps have better prices. If one can consider usury of that sort to have any sort of acceptable price.
Messrs. Weems and Sasse believe comparing government programs to private insurers is a false comparison, and give their reasons why public plan care would be more expensive than private plan care, including the quality requirements of private plans, the costs of marketing, and the lack of antifraud measures the government takes.
The Slacktivist gives a logical opinion on why nobody should even care about Tax Freedom Day - it’s playing with your statistical heads, and the premise that it advocates, no taxes, and thus, no government, is not the result people want, especially with the added delusion that $15 now will have the same purchasing power in the anarchic state to follow.
Last out, Mr. Stephens suggests that while building our own defenses against cyberattack, we go out and infiltrate the networks of those who are hacking into ours, so that at best, we present a Wargames-optimal solution and generate cyber-MAD.
In technology, DNA/graphene sensors that could detect cancer, DNA as a building block for nanotubes, a claim to the world's first cloned camel, some of the weirder inventions at CHI, including memory matches, a solar farm beaming power back to California is greenlighted, Twitter as a way of tapping the collective mind, or as a way of broadcasting interesting information collected from sensors. Either way, Seldon probably would like Twitter. Also related, receiving a newsstream may mess with your moral mind, by not giving you enough time to stop and think and come to the moral conclusion you want to, or to develop the empathic feelings for other people needed.
Last for tonight, people need to get up away from their chairs and move around. Which would be wonderful, for those people that have jobs that let them not be chainted to their desk. Also, a historical note - herb-infused wine has been used to help treat ailments for millenia. Cheers. Just don’t come to the library stinking of it - as most of you probably already know, being offensively odored will result in you being ordered to leave.
