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And a Sunday treat - 03 May 2009
May. 4th, 2009 01:28 amUp top, pretty pictures of people playing with Tesla coils, and people making interesting crop circle designs. And, just for kicks, anti-atheism bingo, for use when your favorite friendly (and likely clueless) proselytizer starts in with the stock statements.
Well, another reason people may be jumping ship to other LJ-like services - when a NOM ad against homosexual marraige appears as part of the LJ ad rotation, it’s going to aggravate a lot of people. LJ is currently in the process of finding and potentially nuking the ad from their rotation.
Internationally, tensions rising in Pakistan's northwest, threatening to undero the government-taliban peace deal. I don’t think this deal is going to last, even with the Sharia court set up in the ceded region. Cue speculation that the Taliban elements will grab Pakistani nuclear weapons and use them, with blame to naturally go to Mr. Obama for not stopping it.
Australia as a Pacific power in the absence of America? Because everyone’s afraid of China, and worried that America won’t actually do something about it if China gets big and belligerent.
the United States is looking to have better ties with Latin American nations, even as conservative columnists say that there will be no good of it other than making the U.S. look weak.
Domestically, stupid, stupid Florida legislature. Nixing library support is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it’s shooting everyone in the foot - where do you think people go in an economic downturn? Tell the legislature to get bent here.
Since being put into the national spotlight, Gov. Palin has been subjected to a lot of ethics complaints. That would be the vetting process that should have been going on in the first place, Governor. Especially if you’re thinking about a presidential run in the next sequence. The Governor is spinning them as nuisances and partisanship trying to make her thinking into ethics violations.
Jack Kemp has died at 76.
Wall Street's role in the new economy will be reduced, says the President, as new regulations will make it harder-to-impossible for them to manipulate numbers into a global crash. At least, that’s the plan.
Don't panic if your TSA screeners are wearing masks - they can, according to a DHS directive intended at combating the H1N1 outbreak.
Last out, Elements of the Republican Party are embarking on a nationwide tour to try and build a GOP that leaves Reagan in the past, where he will be revered, but otherwise new strategies will be employed to work in the present. Mr. DeMint says the GOP has to go back to being a big-tent party, with the emphasis on freedom and limited government.
In the opinions, a philosophical point - if we can make it so that everyone is happy, we should, especially if one is interested in alleviating the suffering of all life. Failing that, the author remarks, we should abstain from meat-eating, but he understands there will be differences about that.
Mr. Cline wonders why we're still coddling the spoiled brats of the rich, that insist that they get everything they want, instead of telling them they can comrpomise like sane and rational people, doing something for the greater good, or they can lose everything they have because of their greed and unwillingness to do the right thing.
Philip Shropshire at AmSam intends on electing na actual liberal to the Democratic Party, instead of letting Arlen Specter continue to pretend to be one, and hopes those of you in PA will help, too.
Mr. Scarborough believes a liberal wingnut just got into the Pentagon, based on Rosa Brooks' appointment as a principal advisor to the undersecretary of defense, and based on her columns penned for the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Epstein beleives that once a cancer drug has passed the toxicity tests, it should be available to be used by patients, instead of having to go through the rest of the clinical trials needed for FDA approval. Yes, it’s slow, but it’s there for a reason - to make sure it does what it says it does, consistently, and without evil adverse effects.
Ms. Malkin takes issue with Mrs. Obama's footwear, believing the media should do as much expose work on her and the Obama wealth as they did on John McCain's expensive shoes, beleiving a hypocrisy in a government that espouses big government bailouts and spending while railing against the excesses of the private sector that brought on the economic crisis. Mr. Lambro laments the beating capitalism is taking at Barack Obama's hands, but is confident it will outlast him, Mr. Murphy is sure that cap and trade legislation will be expensive for everyone, and wants the people to be honest about what that cost is, and Mr. Knight is worried that the government is attempting to convince the populave to volunteer with it, instead of with faith-based charities, by offering secular arms government funding for their good works, and basically shutting out the faith-based charities by requiring them to be nondiscriminatory in who they take for volunteers, leading into Mr. Horowitz's copmlaints about institution of a national service period for Americans, and both declaring that the government is mucking with something that works just fine, and will only get worse with their involvement.
Leading the pack of quiche-winners tonight is Mr. Stokes, who thinks that Mr. Obama complicated the simple issue and simplified the complex issue, but giving a nuanced answer to abortion and a straight one to torture. Half-credit, but not in the way you write about. These are both simple issues - no, we should not torture, ever, and no, we should not restrict access to family planning measures such as abortions. Even in the ideal situation where every would-be aborted baby will have a loving home ready for them if the biological mother doesn’t want the child, there are still scars like rape that would be highly traumatic to have to live over for the gestation period. And evn if “valuable intelligence” was extracted from a tortured person, that still doesn’t excuse the immorality and illegality of the act. Ms. Fields still thinks it's about revenge and punishing people who were acting in good faith, scared of more terrorists. “I was only following orders” is not a defense. Nor should “That all happened in the past” be.
Runner-up honors is Comedian Limbaugh the Younger, turning the Miss America kerfuffle into a chance for him to declare how much the majority doesn’t want gay marriage, Perez Hilton asked a loaded question, and how liberals and gay marriage activists are actively trying to stomp out opposition to their eicked, deviant, sinful, unchristian lifestyle. Wait, Dave, isn’t the Miss USA pageant a private organization? And thus entitled to do all the viewpoint dsicrimination they want in selecting their judges and their winners? Kind of like a church has the same option? If you think that she lost the crown because she affirmed her beliefs, go ahead and make her as much of a martyr as you like. You don’t get to complain, though, if in the process, she also becomes a pariah. Oh, and lose the “gay marriage will make churches lose their ability to evangelize” bullshit. There haven’t been any churches that I know of that have been shut down by the government or restricted in their speech because the state is now doing marriages for everyone. Those honors get shared with Mr. Bandes, who says the new hate crimes act could/will be used against churches to suppress their anti-homosexual messages and Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, who declare the federal government is ushering in new ages of censorship against "traditional" morality and conservative thought, using abortion, Miss America, and Garafolo to insist that soon, nobody who disagrees with the prevailing liberal viewpoint will be allowed to speak for fear of being labeled a hate criminal.
Sharing top honors tonight is Mr. Farris, declaring that the United States government must reject the United States treaty on the Rights of the Child because it lets the government, and a foreign one at that, instead of parents, decide what's best for their children. So the Geneva bureaucrats can ban spanking of children in the United States as child abuse, and the U.S. then has to start arresting and prosecuting parents for it. Spending may have to be re-ordered so that children receive an appropriate share. Judges might even try to ban smoking around children, because smoke harms them. So, Mr. Farris, you say we shouldn’t think of the children in this matter, because we’d be restricting the freedoms of others in the name of protecting our kids? Can’t be that, can it? Oh, I know what it is. It’s because it’s an entity outside the United States making rules we have to follow, isn’t it? You can’t stand the idea that someone else can declare, based on good science, that the cherished (and often religious) traditions of child rearing in the country are doing more harm than good and should be stopped. Won’t you think of the children, though, Mr. Farris?
The other big loser is Mr. Krauthammer, who instead of devoting half a column to why torture is a grey area, devotes his entire column to what he feels are two exceptions to the no torture ever rule - the Jack Bauer “ticking time bomb” scenario, where someone has to give up their information to prevent another disaster from happening soon, and the scenario where you’re aiming for high-value information from a high-value suspect in your capture, but don’t have the urgency of the imminent attack to worry about. In both cases, he says, you do what you have to do, including torture, and then you take the responsibility for it afterward. If, at the time, the ends would justify the means, he says, then torture is excused, regardless of how it actually turns out, but you can make a better case if the information you got was high-value stuff that could be said to have prevented more attacks. And, under no circumstances do you look back and then prosecute - if you didn’t complain about it then, you forfeited any right to complain or do soemthing about it later. Yet another Apologist For Illegal Torture, Mr. Charles Krauthammer, co-winner of a Worst Person in the World quiche. And perhaps we wouldn’t have these problems if we put someone who was more like a conscientious objector in charge instead of someone who’s all too willing to go with it and then try to justify it later.
In technology, work needed on a South Carolina nuclear plant to bring it up to safety code, age hurts women more than men, with more older women living with painful conditions, a pretty big cave dscovered in Vietnam,
Last for today - Wow. That's pretty far off - we’ve spotted the furthest-known object in the universe. Bett go grab something good to drink.
Well, another reason people may be jumping ship to other LJ-like services - when a NOM ad against homosexual marraige appears as part of the LJ ad rotation, it’s going to aggravate a lot of people. LJ is currently in the process of finding and potentially nuking the ad from their rotation.
Internationally, tensions rising in Pakistan's northwest, threatening to undero the government-taliban peace deal. I don’t think this deal is going to last, even with the Sharia court set up in the ceded region. Cue speculation that the Taliban elements will grab Pakistani nuclear weapons and use them, with blame to naturally go to Mr. Obama for not stopping it.
Australia as a Pacific power in the absence of America? Because everyone’s afraid of China, and worried that America won’t actually do something about it if China gets big and belligerent.
the United States is looking to have better ties with Latin American nations, even as conservative columnists say that there will be no good of it other than making the U.S. look weak.
Domestically, stupid, stupid Florida legislature. Nixing library support is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it’s shooting everyone in the foot - where do you think people go in an economic downturn? Tell the legislature to get bent here.
Since being put into the national spotlight, Gov. Palin has been subjected to a lot of ethics complaints. That would be the vetting process that should have been going on in the first place, Governor. Especially if you’re thinking about a presidential run in the next sequence. The Governor is spinning them as nuisances and partisanship trying to make her thinking into ethics violations.
Jack Kemp has died at 76.
Wall Street's role in the new economy will be reduced, says the President, as new regulations will make it harder-to-impossible for them to manipulate numbers into a global crash. At least, that’s the plan.
Don't panic if your TSA screeners are wearing masks - they can, according to a DHS directive intended at combating the H1N1 outbreak.
Last out, Elements of the Republican Party are embarking on a nationwide tour to try and build a GOP that leaves Reagan in the past, where he will be revered, but otherwise new strategies will be employed to work in the present. Mr. DeMint says the GOP has to go back to being a big-tent party, with the emphasis on freedom and limited government.
In the opinions, a philosophical point - if we can make it so that everyone is happy, we should, especially if one is interested in alleviating the suffering of all life. Failing that, the author remarks, we should abstain from meat-eating, but he understands there will be differences about that.
Mr. Cline wonders why we're still coddling the spoiled brats of the rich, that insist that they get everything they want, instead of telling them they can comrpomise like sane and rational people, doing something for the greater good, or they can lose everything they have because of their greed and unwillingness to do the right thing.
Philip Shropshire at AmSam intends on electing na actual liberal to the Democratic Party, instead of letting Arlen Specter continue to pretend to be one, and hopes those of you in PA will help, too.
Mr. Scarborough believes a liberal wingnut just got into the Pentagon, based on Rosa Brooks' appointment as a principal advisor to the undersecretary of defense, and based on her columns penned for the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Epstein beleives that once a cancer drug has passed the toxicity tests, it should be available to be used by patients, instead of having to go through the rest of the clinical trials needed for FDA approval. Yes, it’s slow, but it’s there for a reason - to make sure it does what it says it does, consistently, and without evil adverse effects.
Ms. Malkin takes issue with Mrs. Obama's footwear, believing the media should do as much expose work on her and the Obama wealth as they did on John McCain's expensive shoes, beleiving a hypocrisy in a government that espouses big government bailouts and spending while railing against the excesses of the private sector that brought on the economic crisis. Mr. Lambro laments the beating capitalism is taking at Barack Obama's hands, but is confident it will outlast him, Mr. Murphy is sure that cap and trade legislation will be expensive for everyone, and wants the people to be honest about what that cost is, and Mr. Knight is worried that the government is attempting to convince the populave to volunteer with it, instead of with faith-based charities, by offering secular arms government funding for their good works, and basically shutting out the faith-based charities by requiring them to be nondiscriminatory in who they take for volunteers, leading into Mr. Horowitz's copmlaints about institution of a national service period for Americans, and both declaring that the government is mucking with something that works just fine, and will only get worse with their involvement.
Leading the pack of quiche-winners tonight is Mr. Stokes, who thinks that Mr. Obama complicated the simple issue and simplified the complex issue, but giving a nuanced answer to abortion and a straight one to torture. Half-credit, but not in the way you write about. These are both simple issues - no, we should not torture, ever, and no, we should not restrict access to family planning measures such as abortions. Even in the ideal situation where every would-be aborted baby will have a loving home ready for them if the biological mother doesn’t want the child, there are still scars like rape that would be highly traumatic to have to live over for the gestation period. And evn if “valuable intelligence” was extracted from a tortured person, that still doesn’t excuse the immorality and illegality of the act. Ms. Fields still thinks it's about revenge and punishing people who were acting in good faith, scared of more terrorists. “I was only following orders” is not a defense. Nor should “That all happened in the past” be.
Runner-up honors is Comedian Limbaugh the Younger, turning the Miss America kerfuffle into a chance for him to declare how much the majority doesn’t want gay marriage, Perez Hilton asked a loaded question, and how liberals and gay marriage activists are actively trying to stomp out opposition to their eicked, deviant, sinful, unchristian lifestyle. Wait, Dave, isn’t the Miss USA pageant a private organization? And thus entitled to do all the viewpoint dsicrimination they want in selecting their judges and their winners? Kind of like a church has the same option? If you think that she lost the crown because she affirmed her beliefs, go ahead and make her as much of a martyr as you like. You don’t get to complain, though, if in the process, she also becomes a pariah. Oh, and lose the “gay marriage will make churches lose their ability to evangelize” bullshit. There haven’t been any churches that I know of that have been shut down by the government or restricted in their speech because the state is now doing marriages for everyone. Those honors get shared with Mr. Bandes, who says the new hate crimes act could/will be used against churches to suppress their anti-homosexual messages and Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, who declare the federal government is ushering in new ages of censorship against "traditional" morality and conservative thought, using abortion, Miss America, and Garafolo to insist that soon, nobody who disagrees with the prevailing liberal viewpoint will be allowed to speak for fear of being labeled a hate criminal.
Sharing top honors tonight is Mr. Farris, declaring that the United States government must reject the United States treaty on the Rights of the Child because it lets the government, and a foreign one at that, instead of parents, decide what's best for their children. So the Geneva bureaucrats can ban spanking of children in the United States as child abuse, and the U.S. then has to start arresting and prosecuting parents for it. Spending may have to be re-ordered so that children receive an appropriate share. Judges might even try to ban smoking around children, because smoke harms them. So, Mr. Farris, you say we shouldn’t think of the children in this matter, because we’d be restricting the freedoms of others in the name of protecting our kids? Can’t be that, can it? Oh, I know what it is. It’s because it’s an entity outside the United States making rules we have to follow, isn’t it? You can’t stand the idea that someone else can declare, based on good science, that the cherished (and often religious) traditions of child rearing in the country are doing more harm than good and should be stopped. Won’t you think of the children, though, Mr. Farris?
The other big loser is Mr. Krauthammer, who instead of devoting half a column to why torture is a grey area, devotes his entire column to what he feels are two exceptions to the no torture ever rule - the Jack Bauer “ticking time bomb” scenario, where someone has to give up their information to prevent another disaster from happening soon, and the scenario where you’re aiming for high-value information from a high-value suspect in your capture, but don’t have the urgency of the imminent attack to worry about. In both cases, he says, you do what you have to do, including torture, and then you take the responsibility for it afterward. If, at the time, the ends would justify the means, he says, then torture is excused, regardless of how it actually turns out, but you can make a better case if the information you got was high-value stuff that could be said to have prevented more attacks. And, under no circumstances do you look back and then prosecute - if you didn’t complain about it then, you forfeited any right to complain or do soemthing about it later. Yet another Apologist For Illegal Torture, Mr. Charles Krauthammer, co-winner of a Worst Person in the World quiche. And perhaps we wouldn’t have these problems if we put someone who was more like a conscientious objector in charge instead of someone who’s all too willing to go with it and then try to justify it later.
In technology, work needed on a South Carolina nuclear plant to bring it up to safety code, age hurts women more than men, with more older women living with painful conditions, a pretty big cave dscovered in Vietnam,
Last for today - Wow. That's pretty far off - we’ve spotted the furthest-known object in the universe. Bett go grab something good to drink.
