![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Way late and a dollar short - 16 May 2009
May. 18th, 2009 11:16 amOkee-dokee, here we go! Dollhouse picked up a second season, which means that Joss gets more time to do his work. If the execs at Fox have figured anything out, hopefully, it's that you give Joss Whedon two or three seasons to prove to you that he's got a winner. Buffy took two to get going, after all, and Firely probably would have been sizzling by the end of S2.
Hugh Van Es, who took an iconic photo of the Vietnam War, or people boarding a helicopter on the roog of the American embassy in Saigon, has died at 67 years of age.
On the domestic front, it's time to do some ridiculing. First up, the Dell computer corporatio, for their "Della" site that attempts to market laptops to women as if those women were clueless blondes, tee-hee, tee-hee. That's got about the same mentality as Awuful Library Books, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ldragoon savages Dell for their boneheadedness. Seriously. It's trying to cash in on Mr. T bad. And people should remember what happens when you talk down to women buying computer parts.
Also potentially deserving of ridicule is Pfizer's headline offer to give men free Viagra for a year, if they've been on it for three months before they lost their jobs, and thus can't afford the erection...but if you dig into things, it's actually not just for Viagra, and that makes things a lot better than the snark I had lined up for them. I'll pass.
The rules regarding the requirements to buy domestically with stimulus money are going to get a hammering, especially if they start forcing the cancellation of contracts with foreign partners, which could spark a trade war. Combined with businesspeople worried that they elected someone who will go through with his promises regarding businesses, and the economic climate is still pretty unstable.
Beyond that, here lies something that's quite likely to be scary. We knew that the Boy Scouts of America were teaching kids nationalism, machismo, and never, ever to be anything like teh gay under the guise of wilderness experience, camping, and young male bonding. Now, however, the Explorer Scout program for older men (and women) is training their charges with simulations of border patrol and terror-fighting, under the tutelage of actual border patrol and DH(i)S agents. The General is concerned this simulated training isn't enough for the next crop of waterboarders, while Mind Set Central is concerned this is reminiscent of another Youth-focused nationalistic group from our past.
Wired gives us an article on what they allege is a different torture method, currently employed by the police and incarceration system - solitary confinement.
Speaking of torture, Speaker Pelosi admits to briefings, but declares the CIA misled the Congress as to just what the hell was going on. Not letting that accusation get anywhere near lying down, The current CIA chief fought back, declaring that the Speaker knew everything and there was no misleading going on. Either way, we're still working out that there's been stuff going on that we don't like, and that people need to be held accountable for it, whether required to not speak about it on secrecy or no. The WSJ believes the Speaker is talking out her arse, because of procedures normally in place and the lack of leaking things that would have proven them to be lies. Who knows - perhaps the CIA had good internal discipline, or the right threat against those who challenged the orthodoxy.
According to a recent Gallup poll, more people use the label "pro-life" than "pro-choice" when asked to choose between the two. Which could be reaction to the President's stated policies on the matter.
Something more encouraging for medicine - following on an earlier story, the thirteen year-old who refused chemotherapy and radiation treatment for Hodgkin's has been ordered by a judge to undergo the treatment anyway, considering the state's interest overrides his parents' intent to keep using alternative medicine on him, and that he doesn't understand things well enough to make an informed medical decision.
Mr. Sullurn opens the opinions with a "Don't get your hopes up" when it comes to actual reform on the War on Some Drugs.
Of more traditional fare crossing my desk, Mr. Utley declares that the current Administration's energy policies are in the hands of radicals, completely to our detriment, because we should be drilling more oil and mining more coal to keep energy cheap, instead of investing in newfangled inefficient renewables. Mr. Lee brings in matters from the Obamas' private life to prove, in his opinion, that Mr. Obama has no idea how to avoid being indebted and believes that debt can save the country, which, on the first part, makes the Obamas much like everyone else in the country. That this somehow translates into the running of the economy makes me eyebrow-pop. Mr. Juday combines the two strains into one opinion column telling us bigger debt is bad, as are renewable energy conceerns, and so we should scrap both stimulus and sunshine in favor of keeping the system that's already working.
The WSJ advocates against any sort of federal assistance for newspapers, declaring it would compromise their integrity. Well, more than their advertisers already do.
Mr. Greenhut rumbles that California might spike its Republicans (and perhaps others) if they vote for proposals that would raise taxes, expressing the same kind of anger that led to people declaring themselves Tea Party Protesters.
The WSJ also praises Mr. Obama's continuation of Bush-era institutions like military commissions, believing that the President has decided to face reality and now acknowledges that the promises he made about transparency and utilizing normal structures are unsuited to the reality of dealing with terrorists. (And there's a dig, of course, at those who put their trust in Mr. Obama to bring out the truth.)
Running in competition for pastry, Mr. Gerson makes a strong case for himself by lecturing us all on the need for civility, because our current strain of politics is all rants and swear words. Although he only uses Al Franken as an example of uncivil discourse.
However, it loses out to Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who blames a higher minimum wage as sucking away thousands of potential jobs and causing the end of thousands of actual ones in American Samoa. Apparently because higher minimum wages means that low-skill workers lose their jobs because companies decide to move. (In this case, move from Samoa to Georgia, where the minimum wage is still the same.) If that really were the case, American companies would be deserting the country to outsource all of their...waitasecond. Kernel of truth there, I think - companies do move so they don't have to pay a living wage and/or benefits to the people there. And most of the time, it is work that would be considered low-skills. The true stupidity of the piece is that it advocates for reducing the minimum wage so as to retain the jobs, instead of realizing that costs will continue to rise, so wages need to continue rising. There has to be another solution to the problem, one that doesn't necessarily involve making people work three minimum-wage jobs to make their ends meet.
The biggest loser/winner of the lot, however, is Mr. Krauthammer, continuing with his torture apologetics by declaring that we all would have done (and did do) the same at the time, because we all believed that the information gathered was worth violating our principles over, and so we can't suddenly decide we shouldn't have done it then, because we did do it, we were right to do it, and what we got from it justifies it all. So any Speakers saying they didn't know or were misled are lying, because they had to have given approval when it was presented to them.
Actually, no. He gets trumped. Ms. Toensing says that if you haven't read the actual memos, the documents supporting them, and drafted your own legal dissenting analysis, you should shut up about the torture memos. Even if you had, the people responsible for the memos and the things that resulted from them are just fine under United States law, because they never intended to hurt anyone or torture them while they were interrogating. She, though, does leave open the possibility that the CIA be investigated, since they proposed using the methods, even as she gives Justice a pass, because all they were doing was advising whether those methods were legal.
In technology, the science of making a gadget expire just out of warranty, or the science of why people believe gadgets expire just out of warranty, speculation on whether becoming a truly spacefaring race will change our brain makeup, once we stop being limited by territorial divisions on Terra and can see the world from a different perspective, anticipation of what the Kelper mission to find Terra-likes will produce for us, freaking bedbugs! on a resurgence, tiny implants giving tiny charges to help with chronic pain, brain scanning isolates the regions that help us derive emotional context from spoken conversations, and even more highly-efficient OLEDs.
Last for tonight, a really good idea - uitilizing the spinning of prayer wheels to generate both electricity and karma.W
Hugh Van Es, who took an iconic photo of the Vietnam War, or people boarding a helicopter on the roog of the American embassy in Saigon, has died at 67 years of age.
On the domestic front, it's time to do some ridiculing. First up, the Dell computer corporatio, for their "Della" site that attempts to market laptops to women as if those women were clueless blondes, tee-hee, tee-hee. That's got about the same mentality as Awuful Library Books, and
ldragoon savages Dell for their boneheadedness. Seriously. It's trying to cash in on Mr. T bad. And people should remember what happens when you talk down to women buying computer parts.Also potentially deserving of ridicule is Pfizer's headline offer to give men free Viagra for a year, if they've been on it for three months before they lost their jobs, and thus can't afford the erection...but if you dig into things, it's actually not just for Viagra, and that makes things a lot better than the snark I had lined up for them. I'll pass.
The rules regarding the requirements to buy domestically with stimulus money are going to get a hammering, especially if they start forcing the cancellation of contracts with foreign partners, which could spark a trade war. Combined with businesspeople worried that they elected someone who will go through with his promises regarding businesses, and the economic climate is still pretty unstable.
Beyond that, here lies something that's quite likely to be scary. We knew that the Boy Scouts of America were teaching kids nationalism, machismo, and never, ever to be anything like teh gay under the guise of wilderness experience, camping, and young male bonding. Now, however, the Explorer Scout program for older men (and women) is training their charges with simulations of border patrol and terror-fighting, under the tutelage of actual border patrol and DH(i)S agents. The General is concerned this simulated training isn't enough for the next crop of waterboarders, while Mind Set Central is concerned this is reminiscent of another Youth-focused nationalistic group from our past.
Wired gives us an article on what they allege is a different torture method, currently employed by the police and incarceration system - solitary confinement.
Speaking of torture, Speaker Pelosi admits to briefings, but declares the CIA misled the Congress as to just what the hell was going on. Not letting that accusation get anywhere near lying down, The current CIA chief fought back, declaring that the Speaker knew everything and there was no misleading going on. Either way, we're still working out that there's been stuff going on that we don't like, and that people need to be held accountable for it, whether required to not speak about it on secrecy or no. The WSJ believes the Speaker is talking out her arse, because of procedures normally in place and the lack of leaking things that would have proven them to be lies. Who knows - perhaps the CIA had good internal discipline, or the right threat against those who challenged the orthodoxy.
According to a recent Gallup poll, more people use the label "pro-life" than "pro-choice" when asked to choose between the two. Which could be reaction to the President's stated policies on the matter.
Something more encouraging for medicine - following on an earlier story, the thirteen year-old who refused chemotherapy and radiation treatment for Hodgkin's has been ordered by a judge to undergo the treatment anyway, considering the state's interest overrides his parents' intent to keep using alternative medicine on him, and that he doesn't understand things well enough to make an informed medical decision.
Mr. Sullurn opens the opinions with a "Don't get your hopes up" when it comes to actual reform on the War on Some Drugs.
Of more traditional fare crossing my desk, Mr. Utley declares that the current Administration's energy policies are in the hands of radicals, completely to our detriment, because we should be drilling more oil and mining more coal to keep energy cheap, instead of investing in newfangled inefficient renewables. Mr. Lee brings in matters from the Obamas' private life to prove, in his opinion, that Mr. Obama has no idea how to avoid being indebted and believes that debt can save the country, which, on the first part, makes the Obamas much like everyone else in the country. That this somehow translates into the running of the economy makes me eyebrow-pop. Mr. Juday combines the two strains into one opinion column telling us bigger debt is bad, as are renewable energy conceerns, and so we should scrap both stimulus and sunshine in favor of keeping the system that's already working.
The WSJ advocates against any sort of federal assistance for newspapers, declaring it would compromise their integrity. Well, more than their advertisers already do.
Mr. Greenhut rumbles that California might spike its Republicans (and perhaps others) if they vote for proposals that would raise taxes, expressing the same kind of anger that led to people declaring themselves Tea Party Protesters.
The WSJ also praises Mr. Obama's continuation of Bush-era institutions like military commissions, believing that the President has decided to face reality and now acknowledges that the promises he made about transparency and utilizing normal structures are unsuited to the reality of dealing with terrorists. (And there's a dig, of course, at those who put their trust in Mr. Obama to bring out the truth.)
Running in competition for pastry, Mr. Gerson makes a strong case for himself by lecturing us all on the need for civility, because our current strain of politics is all rants and swear words. Although he only uses Al Franken as an example of uncivil discourse.
However, it loses out to Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who blames a higher minimum wage as sucking away thousands of potential jobs and causing the end of thousands of actual ones in American Samoa. Apparently because higher minimum wages means that low-skill workers lose their jobs because companies decide to move. (In this case, move from Samoa to Georgia, where the minimum wage is still the same.) If that really were the case, American companies would be deserting the country to outsource all of their...waitasecond. Kernel of truth there, I think - companies do move so they don't have to pay a living wage and/or benefits to the people there. And most of the time, it is work that would be considered low-skills. The true stupidity of the piece is that it advocates for reducing the minimum wage so as to retain the jobs, instead of realizing that costs will continue to rise, so wages need to continue rising. There has to be another solution to the problem, one that doesn't necessarily involve making people work three minimum-wage jobs to make their ends meet.
The biggest loser/winner of the lot, however, is Mr. Krauthammer, continuing with his torture apologetics by declaring that we all would have done (and did do) the same at the time, because we all believed that the information gathered was worth violating our principles over, and so we can't suddenly decide we shouldn't have done it then, because we did do it, we were right to do it, and what we got from it justifies it all. So any Speakers saying they didn't know or were misled are lying, because they had to have given approval when it was presented to them.
Actually, no. He gets trumped. Ms. Toensing says that if you haven't read the actual memos, the documents supporting them, and drafted your own legal dissenting analysis, you should shut up about the torture memos. Even if you had, the people responsible for the memos and the things that resulted from them are just fine under United States law, because they never intended to hurt anyone or torture them while they were interrogating. She, though, does leave open the possibility that the CIA be investigated, since they proposed using the methods, even as she gives Justice a pass, because all they were doing was advising whether those methods were legal.
In technology, the science of making a gadget expire just out of warranty, or the science of why people believe gadgets expire just out of warranty, speculation on whether becoming a truly spacefaring race will change our brain makeup, once we stop being limited by territorial divisions on Terra and can see the world from a different perspective, anticipation of what the Kelper mission to find Terra-likes will produce for us, freaking bedbugs! on a resurgence, tiny implants giving tiny charges to help with chronic pain, brain scanning isolates the regions that help us derive emotional context from spoken conversations, and even more highly-efficient OLEDs.
Last for tonight, a really good idea - uitilizing the spinning of prayer wheels to generate both electricity and karma.W
