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More material for all - 28 May 2009
May. 29th, 2009 12:34 amMorning. Start your day off right with Zombie Pikachu. Now that you’re in the right frame of reference for braaaains, check out the kid keeping a lending library of books banned by his school - in his locker and the locker next to his. Someone kindly get that kid to pursue a career in libraries or working for the ACLU. And/or use him as some sort of weird sleeper agent to destabilize censorious institutions from the inside. Because there’s clearly work to do. The gent arrested in 2006 for importing manga that the U.S. Postal Service intercepted, inspected, and then declared obscene, notifying the police and then sending the material on to its destination...pled guilty to one count and had three others dismissed, mostly because he and his lawyer probably couldn’t make a case to a jury about the artistic merit of the work. So, now he’s a sex offender, faces jail time, and the authorities are going to feel more confident they can prosecute people for owning drawings that depict minors in adult situations. Or, possibly, depictions of anthropomorphs having sex as well, considering as part of the deal there was apparently an admission of “bestiality” in the plea. Information and opinions available from The Infamous Brad and his comment crew.
To shake you out of this and get you going on some other track, rumors are that Hollywood's creative dearth continues, and Alien is on the track for a remake.
Going international, news continuing to confirm that the Taliban are no friends to women and to education thereof, killing teachers, destroying schools, and attacking students. The Taliban denies they’re responsible, but they’re suffering under the handicap of being an organization that doesn’t treat the mature, obedient women well as well as their past history. A little ways away, the wife of a reform candidate is stirring up some women's rights support for the candidate. And it sounds like the people might be listening.
North Korea renounced the truce of 1953, returning it and South Korea (and the United States, I believe) to an official state of war with each other. That would be your excuse, if you want to go bomb some buildings - if you’re at war, it’s much mroe excusable to destroy the enemy’s ability to make weaponry. So, hawks, make your case now - if things go back to being settled down, it will be that much harder to convince people to strike at North Korea.
Children as decoys and spies are one of the ways drug cartels probe the Mexico-United States borders for weaknesses and shipping routes. *sigh* What happened to the concept of innocent children beign shielded from all of this? (It never was, I know.)
More fun in the domestic sphere. - A gauntlet has been thrown down by the Discovery Institute, declaring no True Christaian can accept evolution. Creationsists-only, or you’re not Christian. Derision, mockery, dismissal as a fringe element within a fringe element, and acceptance and promotion by the Republican Party to follow.
A federal appeal has been filed on Proposition 8, that will likely make it to the high court - by both attorneys that participated in the Bush v. Gore decision. Well, there’s the pathway to a potential decision, whether it advances or sets back the possibilty of federal recognition or denial of homosexual marriage. If Prop 8 overturns, does that sink the DOMA with it?
The still most-consistenly-broken promise fo the Obama administration, about a period of public comment before bills are signed, is morphing into soemthing else, mostly postings to THOMAS.
The Supreme Court will decide whether a seven foot high cross is an appropriate marker to honor military veterans with, with the ACLU bringing the suit, claiming that the cross is being monoreligious and disrespectful to those servicepersons who aren’t Christian, and veterans groups believing that the symbol is more about honoring the veterans, resembling an entirely secular cross meant to honor them, rather than as a religious symbol. Am kind of wondering whether some acceptable substitute (perhaps the Fallen Soldier Cross noted in the article) could be reached so as to satisfy both parties?
First, before we get to the ugly bits, Time provides some analysis on what progress Sotomayor's nomination and confirmation could provide, noting that it won’t necessarily make thigns better overnight between minorities, as well as between minorities and the white dudes. However, speaking of whtie dudes, pour on the affirmative action and reverse racism remarks against the new Justice by the conservative leadership. We’re even going back and finding the bitter high school rivals who felt the valedictory address was theirs and the poor Hispanic woman was usurping their rightful place to get from here to there. More than a few commentators have called the nominee a racist, including Boss Limbaugh and Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, based on taking a remark of hers out of context to mean the opposite of what it meant. Mr. Will, instead, takes the tack that the nominee believes totally in her identity and that she will think exclusively along racial and gender lines in her opinion-making, so it’s racism or privileged thinking withotu actually saying as much, I think. Not that this is likely to stop her confirmation, but it definitely points out just how ugly and perhaps desperate the Republican party is getting, in that they’re reverting to the arguments against minorities that were busted forty-five years ago, prefering to focus on race and gender rather than, say, experience, of which the nominee has plenty. Mr. Turd Blossom calls her a liberal activist, with the code word for this being "empathy", and the Administration is tryign to sell her as a moderate, thinking the GOP can gain by declaring the people want impartial umpires, not those swayed by feelings - all of this “empathy” talk, we note, based on what the President said he would look for in a justice, so any candidate he selects will be attacked as this. She’s unqualified because a President who talked about “empathy” nominated her. Under that reasoning, and I thoroughly expect to see it if there’s another nomination in Obama’s presidency, all his nominees are unqualified because they’ll be "activist judges" with "empathy". (Dishonors to you, Mr. Sowell, for your parroting.)
the President indicated his support of solar and geothermal energy technologies with stimulus money for R and D.
Start the opinions! Mr. Robb suggests that we will change the way we do work before we can generate sufficient energy by renewable means to replace our current consumption - we’ll do a helluva lot more telecommuting and telework, saving in-person appearances for the truly important events. Makes me wonder what the library would be like on that idea - a free book delivery service, possibly with other multimedia, assuming the licensing will all work out?
A solid opinion today from Mr. Blinder, asking us why we pay people who take big bets well, even when their bets all turn out to be bust, and why we insulate the possibility of loss by breezily declaring someone else's money will pay to absorb them. Corporate boards, he says, could do lots to make executives and traders much more cognizant of their risks, possibly by making executive bonuses in the form of long-term stock that won’t yield anything for a while, or by making traders deposit their winnings into an account that can then be drawn on when they lose.
The WSJ turns its attention to the arbitration provisions of EFCA, believing a contract that has a scheduled amount of time before it can be sent to arbitrtation will skew demands and entrench unions.
Mr. Loyola blames President Clinton for the curretn difficulties with North Korea, because Clinton could have blown up reactors, but chose instead to be intimidated by conventional missiles pointing at Seoul.
Mr. Henninger complains the new auto fuel efficiency standards will kill the muscle-car fetish that Americans have had for decades. Which is pretty weird, but otherwise harmless. Mr. Feulner has more of a complaint against cap and trade and new environmental regs as economy-killing measures. (Well, killing that which is already dead, y’know.) such death and debt will result in a crisis where the government's credit rating itself is lowered.
Just missing the cut tonight, Mr. Thomas, attacking General Powell about his strategy for rebuilding Republicans - Mr. thomas believes that the Republicans have gained strangth through dissent and divisiveness, instead of the more cooperative Republicans that were pre Newt Gingrich. Well, Mr. Thomas, this divisiveness strategy sure as hell isn’t working now. The Party of NO is not an endearment, that’s for sure. Mr. Thomas insists there are no Democrats in leadership positions who aren’t hardline liberals on everything (ignoring the Blue Dog caucus entirely), and that taking Powell’s advice about elections would be akin to Powell taking advice from a private about how to run the troops. One would think, if the private was right, though, the chain of command would find out about it. And possibly promote the private because of his good eyes and decision-making. Still, if you like, Mr. Thomas, you can continue to stress ideological purity in the party as the approval and amount of people supporting said party fades. It will be by mistakes and scrwe-ups by the current administration that the GOP regains some semblance of power or legitimacy.
Instead of attacking the nominee on her merits or demerits, Mr. DeMar attacks the concept of "social justice", considering it to be a plea for the government to step in act without regard to rules or laws, often to the detriment of everyone involved. His example of how things go horribly wrong is a program like food stamps, which enrolls a lot of people and spends and taxes lots, creating welfare slaves and diverting capital that could have been saved and invested away from its natural purpose in The Market, all hail its name. Because if you’re too poor to survive, or too poor to play with money in a bank or a stock market, then it’s your own fault and the government shouldn’t embark on programs to help you and all the other people like you. Bronze for rehashing an old meme, but kudos on the new packaging.
Stepping up the game, Mr. Bay cites a report at us that he believes is the reason people become domestic terrorists - Islam, after a slight bit of complaining that it took the DHS secretary this long to apologize for even insinuating that domestic terror and extremism groups might want to recruit military personnel into their ranks. It’s just Islam - accepting a particular interpretation, becoming convinced only certain authorities hold sawy, seeing a schism between them and the rest of us, demonizing other interpretations as heresy, trying to impose your religion on someone else, and then taking your beliefs to the political sphere. Uh, don’t look now, but if you replace “Islam” with “Christianity”, you’ve basically described the dominionist and several other fundamentalist interpretations - yet they would be up in arms if someone designated them “domestic terrorists”, despite having proven themselves to be so, but against abortion doctors and homosexuals instead of national monuments. Plus, Christianity doesn’t get the benefit of being the scary foreigner religion to help push it firmly into the terrorist ideology camp. So, for not recognizing the wider scope of your argument (and thus, its self-defeating aspect), Mr. Bay, a silver medal for you, and a recommendation that you go take a history of religion course.
Winning the dishonorable competition, though, which she probably does almost every time we run across one of her columns, Phyllis Schlafly, taking a break from antifeminism to complain about a nominee to be State's top lawyer and his willingness to look at laws outside the country as possible guides for interpreting the law inside the country. Of course, according to Ms. Schlafly, this means that he’s wholly in favor of ruling according to those foreign laws and importing them into the country. Which leads to “lots of rulings that the American people don’t want, such as approval of same-sex marriage, unlimited abortion, legalized prostitution and abolition of the death penalty...polygamy, arranged marriages between cousins, so-called honor killings of women who reject such arrangements, cutting off hands as punishment for theft, stoning women to death as punishment for adultery and prohibiting the private ownership of guns.” This is clearly bad, and worse, “most other countries do not share American values, and we certainly do not want to share theirs,” so selecting someone who would actually look at those laws for guidance is anathema. (We note that of the countries mentioned, only Zimbabwe seems to ever get mentioned in this argument, like India and most of Europe don’t exist or aren’t important.) So, the solution? Reject the heretic, and “the Senate should require all judicial nominees to proclaim their adherence to the U.S. Constitution as written, and their rejection of the use of foreign or international law to interpret American law.” Oh, okay - everything based on British common law, past or present, rejected. Laws that the United States thought was a good idea after seeing it happen in another country, vanish’t. Treaties, g’bye. The Consitution as written? The states are going to have a lot of laws to pass to manage their own affairs just to get back to the level they’re at now. Funny, I didn’t think Ms. Schlafly was an advocate of anarchic government, because I’m pretty sure her long list of things we’d be importing would lead to an inevitable anarchy or corruption of government, in her opinion. Or, perhaps, she’s violating Mabela’s father’s third piece of advice - “When you are speaking, pay attention to what you are saying.” When we go marching, we never look back. The quiche is in the back, Fo Feng, Fo Feng.
In the sciences and technologies, microcapsule delivery means more drug into the bloodstream, silver nanoparticles have the potential to prevent clots in the bloodstream, using four pulsars to build a Galactic Positioning System, that we could use for interplanetary missions, should we ever jump the hurdle of getting people out there, an E-ink based reader with business audiences in mind, attempting to compete with the Kindle, a claim of a Siberian girl raised by dogs and cats, and a very depressing claim - ninety percent of e-mail traffic is spam.
Last for tonight, just because someone's blind doesn't mean they don't have preferences and possible shallowness about potential mates, rereading the Pern series and finding it far less entertaining than before, and a building designed with heated protrustions from the walls to help with muscle relaxation.
Oh, and the pretty kitty with wings, naturally.
To shake you out of this and get you going on some other track, rumors are that Hollywood's creative dearth continues, and Alien is on the track for a remake.
Going international, news continuing to confirm that the Taliban are no friends to women and to education thereof, killing teachers, destroying schools, and attacking students. The Taliban denies they’re responsible, but they’re suffering under the handicap of being an organization that doesn’t treat the mature, obedient women well as well as their past history. A little ways away, the wife of a reform candidate is stirring up some women's rights support for the candidate. And it sounds like the people might be listening.
North Korea renounced the truce of 1953, returning it and South Korea (and the United States, I believe) to an official state of war with each other. That would be your excuse, if you want to go bomb some buildings - if you’re at war, it’s much mroe excusable to destroy the enemy’s ability to make weaponry. So, hawks, make your case now - if things go back to being settled down, it will be that much harder to convince people to strike at North Korea.
Children as decoys and spies are one of the ways drug cartels probe the Mexico-United States borders for weaknesses and shipping routes. *sigh* What happened to the concept of innocent children beign shielded from all of this? (It never was, I know.)
More fun in the domestic sphere. - A gauntlet has been thrown down by the Discovery Institute, declaring no True Christaian can accept evolution. Creationsists-only, or you’re not Christian. Derision, mockery, dismissal as a fringe element within a fringe element, and acceptance and promotion by the Republican Party to follow.
A federal appeal has been filed on Proposition 8, that will likely make it to the high court - by both attorneys that participated in the Bush v. Gore decision. Well, there’s the pathway to a potential decision, whether it advances or sets back the possibilty of federal recognition or denial of homosexual marriage. If Prop 8 overturns, does that sink the DOMA with it?
The still most-consistenly-broken promise fo the Obama administration, about a period of public comment before bills are signed, is morphing into soemthing else, mostly postings to THOMAS.
The Supreme Court will decide whether a seven foot high cross is an appropriate marker to honor military veterans with, with the ACLU bringing the suit, claiming that the cross is being monoreligious and disrespectful to those servicepersons who aren’t Christian, and veterans groups believing that the symbol is more about honoring the veterans, resembling an entirely secular cross meant to honor them, rather than as a religious symbol. Am kind of wondering whether some acceptable substitute (perhaps the Fallen Soldier Cross noted in the article) could be reached so as to satisfy both parties?
First, before we get to the ugly bits, Time provides some analysis on what progress Sotomayor's nomination and confirmation could provide, noting that it won’t necessarily make thigns better overnight between minorities, as well as between minorities and the white dudes. However, speaking of whtie dudes, pour on the affirmative action and reverse racism remarks against the new Justice by the conservative leadership. We’re even going back and finding the bitter high school rivals who felt the valedictory address was theirs and the poor Hispanic woman was usurping their rightful place to get from here to there. More than a few commentators have called the nominee a racist, including Boss Limbaugh and Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, based on taking a remark of hers out of context to mean the opposite of what it meant. Mr. Will, instead, takes the tack that the nominee believes totally in her identity and that she will think exclusively along racial and gender lines in her opinion-making, so it’s racism or privileged thinking withotu actually saying as much, I think. Not that this is likely to stop her confirmation, but it definitely points out just how ugly and perhaps desperate the Republican party is getting, in that they’re reverting to the arguments against minorities that were busted forty-five years ago, prefering to focus on race and gender rather than, say, experience, of which the nominee has plenty. Mr. Turd Blossom calls her a liberal activist, with the code word for this being "empathy", and the Administration is tryign to sell her as a moderate, thinking the GOP can gain by declaring the people want impartial umpires, not those swayed by feelings - all of this “empathy” talk, we note, based on what the President said he would look for in a justice, so any candidate he selects will be attacked as this. She’s unqualified because a President who talked about “empathy” nominated her. Under that reasoning, and I thoroughly expect to see it if there’s another nomination in Obama’s presidency, all his nominees are unqualified because they’ll be "activist judges" with "empathy". (Dishonors to you, Mr. Sowell, for your parroting.)
the President indicated his support of solar and geothermal energy technologies with stimulus money for R and D.
Start the opinions! Mr. Robb suggests that we will change the way we do work before we can generate sufficient energy by renewable means to replace our current consumption - we’ll do a helluva lot more telecommuting and telework, saving in-person appearances for the truly important events. Makes me wonder what the library would be like on that idea - a free book delivery service, possibly with other multimedia, assuming the licensing will all work out?
A solid opinion today from Mr. Blinder, asking us why we pay people who take big bets well, even when their bets all turn out to be bust, and why we insulate the possibility of loss by breezily declaring someone else's money will pay to absorb them. Corporate boards, he says, could do lots to make executives and traders much more cognizant of their risks, possibly by making executive bonuses in the form of long-term stock that won’t yield anything for a while, or by making traders deposit their winnings into an account that can then be drawn on when they lose.
The WSJ turns its attention to the arbitration provisions of EFCA, believing a contract that has a scheduled amount of time before it can be sent to arbitrtation will skew demands and entrench unions.
Mr. Loyola blames President Clinton for the curretn difficulties with North Korea, because Clinton could have blown up reactors, but chose instead to be intimidated by conventional missiles pointing at Seoul.
Mr. Henninger complains the new auto fuel efficiency standards will kill the muscle-car fetish that Americans have had for decades. Which is pretty weird, but otherwise harmless. Mr. Feulner has more of a complaint against cap and trade and new environmental regs as economy-killing measures. (Well, killing that which is already dead, y’know.) such death and debt will result in a crisis where the government's credit rating itself is lowered.
Just missing the cut tonight, Mr. Thomas, attacking General Powell about his strategy for rebuilding Republicans - Mr. thomas believes that the Republicans have gained strangth through dissent and divisiveness, instead of the more cooperative Republicans that were pre Newt Gingrich. Well, Mr. Thomas, this divisiveness strategy sure as hell isn’t working now. The Party of NO is not an endearment, that’s for sure. Mr. Thomas insists there are no Democrats in leadership positions who aren’t hardline liberals on everything (ignoring the Blue Dog caucus entirely), and that taking Powell’s advice about elections would be akin to Powell taking advice from a private about how to run the troops. One would think, if the private was right, though, the chain of command would find out about it. And possibly promote the private because of his good eyes and decision-making. Still, if you like, Mr. Thomas, you can continue to stress ideological purity in the party as the approval and amount of people supporting said party fades. It will be by mistakes and scrwe-ups by the current administration that the GOP regains some semblance of power or legitimacy.
Instead of attacking the nominee on her merits or demerits, Mr. DeMar attacks the concept of "social justice", considering it to be a plea for the government to step in act without regard to rules or laws, often to the detriment of everyone involved. His example of how things go horribly wrong is a program like food stamps, which enrolls a lot of people and spends and taxes lots, creating welfare slaves and diverting capital that could have been saved and invested away from its natural purpose in The Market, all hail its name. Because if you’re too poor to survive, or too poor to play with money in a bank or a stock market, then it’s your own fault and the government shouldn’t embark on programs to help you and all the other people like you. Bronze for rehashing an old meme, but kudos on the new packaging.
Stepping up the game, Mr. Bay cites a report at us that he believes is the reason people become domestic terrorists - Islam, after a slight bit of complaining that it took the DHS secretary this long to apologize for even insinuating that domestic terror and extremism groups might want to recruit military personnel into their ranks. It’s just Islam - accepting a particular interpretation, becoming convinced only certain authorities hold sawy, seeing a schism between them and the rest of us, demonizing other interpretations as heresy, trying to impose your religion on someone else, and then taking your beliefs to the political sphere. Uh, don’t look now, but if you replace “Islam” with “Christianity”, you’ve basically described the dominionist and several other fundamentalist interpretations - yet they would be up in arms if someone designated them “domestic terrorists”, despite having proven themselves to be so, but against abortion doctors and homosexuals instead of national monuments. Plus, Christianity doesn’t get the benefit of being the scary foreigner religion to help push it firmly into the terrorist ideology camp. So, for not recognizing the wider scope of your argument (and thus, its self-defeating aspect), Mr. Bay, a silver medal for you, and a recommendation that you go take a history of religion course.
Winning the dishonorable competition, though, which she probably does almost every time we run across one of her columns, Phyllis Schlafly, taking a break from antifeminism to complain about a nominee to be State's top lawyer and his willingness to look at laws outside the country as possible guides for interpreting the law inside the country. Of course, according to Ms. Schlafly, this means that he’s wholly in favor of ruling according to those foreign laws and importing them into the country. Which leads to “lots of rulings that the American people don’t want, such as approval of same-sex marriage, unlimited abortion, legalized prostitution and abolition of the death penalty...polygamy, arranged marriages between cousins, so-called honor killings of women who reject such arrangements, cutting off hands as punishment for theft, stoning women to death as punishment for adultery and prohibiting the private ownership of guns.” This is clearly bad, and worse, “most other countries do not share American values, and we certainly do not want to share theirs,” so selecting someone who would actually look at those laws for guidance is anathema. (We note that of the countries mentioned, only Zimbabwe seems to ever get mentioned in this argument, like India and most of Europe don’t exist or aren’t important.) So, the solution? Reject the heretic, and “the Senate should require all judicial nominees to proclaim their adherence to the U.S. Constitution as written, and their rejection of the use of foreign or international law to interpret American law.” Oh, okay - everything based on British common law, past or present, rejected. Laws that the United States thought was a good idea after seeing it happen in another country, vanish’t. Treaties, g’bye. The Consitution as written? The states are going to have a lot of laws to pass to manage their own affairs just to get back to the level they’re at now. Funny, I didn’t think Ms. Schlafly was an advocate of anarchic government, because I’m pretty sure her long list of things we’d be importing would lead to an inevitable anarchy or corruption of government, in her opinion. Or, perhaps, she’s violating Mabela’s father’s third piece of advice - “When you are speaking, pay attention to what you are saying.” When we go marching, we never look back. The quiche is in the back, Fo Feng, Fo Feng.
In the sciences and technologies, microcapsule delivery means more drug into the bloodstream, silver nanoparticles have the potential to prevent clots in the bloodstream, using four pulsars to build a Galactic Positioning System, that we could use for interplanetary missions, should we ever jump the hurdle of getting people out there, an E-ink based reader with business audiences in mind, attempting to compete with the Kindle, a claim of a Siberian girl raised by dogs and cats, and a very depressing claim - ninety percent of e-mail traffic is spam.
Last for tonight, just because someone's blind doesn't mean they don't have preferences and possible shallowness about potential mates, rereading the Pern series and finding it far less entertaining than before, and a building designed with heated protrustions from the walls to help with muscle relaxation.
Oh, and the pretty kitty with wings, naturally.
