New Month, new news - 1 June 2009

On the big stage, new longer-range missile tests for North Korea, even as the possibility of strong sanctions is downplayed, considering China and Russia will both likely tread lightly.

Expect a flurry of “appeasement!” and “weak” and other derogatory adjectives to accompany the President's second trip to the Middle East, with both sides looking for the President to do more than talk, although what they want him to do are probably on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either way, the President can probably capitalize on a retreat of religiously hardline parties in various countries of the Middle East.

Domestically, Christian Fundamentalist Terrorism. Call it what it is. Fueled by certain pinheads, who will do their best to dodge any sort of association of responsibility, egged on by a culture that chooses not to make the doctors into the heroes, one that horribly chooses to idolize the fetus and hate or ignore the actual child born,

If looking to do some good - there's a big list of charities that could use some donation cash. Mr. Olbermann suggested that persons, in an attempt to get Fox News to hurt for letting pinheads talk in an inflammatory manner, refuse to frequent a business that plays Fox News on its televisions.

Elsewhere, The General gives us an account of something involving the word nigger and a karate chop, delivered by the executive director of a PAC..., and there’s also the potential secessionist charged with possessing guns, a right denied him because of a previous felony.

Politico cribs a bit from elsewhere to tell us about some broken Obama promises - like the things that the people at the Obamameter are keeping track of?

Last before opinions, GM finally files for bankruptcy. The government will get a significant share of the company, for which the Romanian car czar tells us government involvement in car manufacture is a bad idea. The WSJ agrees, and piles on that it will be expensive.

Mr. Brookhiser opens the line with a suggestion that conservatives do as William F. Buckley did, fighting the GOP when it strays from their purposes, but never suggesting that people break off from it and form their own groups.

We may finally be moving from the era of search to the era of answers, says Mr. Crovitz, with the introduction of potential competitors to Google.

And, because they feel that it’s not getting near enough coverage, the WSJ crows that May was the least deadly month of the Iraq conflict so far, in terms of death by terrorist violence . Huh, funny. It’s fairly stable, there’s an exit plan, and look, the casualties are going down. Correclation is not causation, but I’d say those things probably haven’t hurt.

Quiche fight begins... Mr. Prelutsky makes a strong showing with is mockery of the deisgnation of Palestinians as refugees still, affirmative action, and Colin Powell, whom he was shocked to see still calling himself a Republican.

He can’t hold a candle to Ms. Parker, who rails against government health care, saying we need more markets and more personal responsibility, because all the treating we do for alcohol abuse, sedentary lifestyle, STDs, and HIV/AIDS happens in the lower classes, who get their health care for free. So clearly, according to her, they’re taking advantage of other people paying for their health and engaging in unhealthy lifestyle choices. Yes, even HIV is an unhealthy lifestyle choice for her, and if those people were forced to a reckoning of how much their health care really cost, they’d make better choices. Ah, no. Not even close. We’ve got plenty of data already about how being poor contributes to bad health, expensive prices, living in places where exercise is almost an impossibility, and the inability to pay for routine health examinations, the insurances, and the treatment that would result from them. Despite what you may think, Ms. Parker, the poor are not that way because they have some moral failing or somehow chose it.

Even so, with all that, Mr. Bialosky takes the quiche home, cranking up the “English only” language and declaring that the President of a nation that prides itself on its multiculturalism should insist English be the official language of that country and thus force everyone to learn it. Because people who don’t learn English are at such a giant disadvantage that one should force them to correct that if they want to be part of the country. After all, it’s the only way they will get anywhere in life. Because everyone speaks English. Well, if Mr. Bialosky is willing to say that the government should put forth the expenditure it will take to teach all those people English, and is willing to pay their living expenses sufficiently that they can take time and devote to their studies, and is also willing to require that the natives learn how to speak another language at least as well as they will have to speak English, in case, say, Chinese takes over as the language of business (say hey, Firefly universe!) then maybe he can have a point. Until then, he’s not getting the one that says you have to be able to engage people on their own language before you can bring them into the English-language fold.

Technology: rehabilitation of diseased cells can produce stem cells. Cool. Also, world's most powerful laser to date unveiled, and Twitterites, participate in a scientific study on remote viewing over the 140-character network.

Last for tonight, here's hoping a vanished jet turns up intact with everyone on board and alive.

More books talked - 2 June 2009

More kids talked to today. Did not get smote upon walking into Catholic school. Took it as a good sign. More kids hopefully excited about the prospect of reading over the summer, but my inner cynic says it’s the prizes that pull them in. And then turns around and says, “Hey, if it works..” Anyway, let’s talk news.

Internationally, Kazhakstan reports many of their uranium mines were transferred illegally into private control by a former minister, which is a damn sight different than that headline - “Kashakstan’s uranium ‘stolen’ by former official”.

The Taliban in Afghanistan abducted students, staff, and relatives of a boys school in the country. Abducting children only lowers the already rock-bottom opinion of the Taliban. Now, of course, if the troops could just find enough of the Taliban, they’d be more than happy to crush them. Pakistan's troops should keep going, after their retaking of Swat, according to the WSJ, with some possible spillover benefits if the Pakistani army continues to root out Taliban.

A North Korean general is indicated as a key player in the production and distribution of high-quality $100 US counterfeits, according to the Washington Times - which could give an economic reason to freeze out North Korea in anticipation of some other action.

Domestically, President Obama has declared June to be LGBT pride month, perhaps as the herald of doing some things on the pressing LGBT issues. Keep an eye out to see whether the President shows his pride the LGBT community. And, remarkably, on the issue of gay marriage, even Dick Cheney supports freedom for everyone.

A thousand words' worth about what the anti-choice terrorist movement thinks about Dr. Tiller's murder. And then an article on someone who attacked a military recruitment center - I’d bet if you put the two together in the same room and asked them about their motivations, you’ld hear something similar. Details and names would change, but the reasons would still be the same. Can we get moving on the idea that there are domestic terrorists in the country, born here, and they probably haven’t picked up whatever manifesto all terrorists are supposed to subscribe to? As the last word on the subject tonight, the Slacktivist gives us historical perspective - this has been done before, with groups rushing to denounce the madman who took them at their word...but continuing, though, to say those words as if they were serious. Must be one or the other - either you do believe what you say, or you decide it’s madness and stop saying it. So long as you try for both, there will be more of these antiabortion terrorists.

Guantanamo residents cleared for release are receiving training on laptop computers as part of getting them adjusted to their new lives in America.

In the opinions, Mr. Tapscott thinks letting the government restrict speech in specific circumstances, like lobbying on the stimulus, is the beginning of the slippery slope to government regulation of all speech, due to mission creep on what can be considered acceptable.

A suggestion to President Obama when he visits Egypt - suggest that the Egyptian President get some term limits. It will apparently garner great goodwill for him.

Mr. Curl is attempting to make the recent Presidential trip into an example of taxpayers being charged for private affairs of the President, and that the President should reimburse the government for the full cost of everything - tickets, salaries of the Secret Service people who had to plan and acommpany him, and so forth. Which precedes an article from the WSJ looking into how the lawmakers spend their expenditure monies. Interesting - a president starts talking about things like corporate irresponsibility, and suddenly a lot of people are interested in how the government spends its money. I’m actually pretty okay with this, assuming that it isn’t used as some sort of partisan fodder and both sides of the aisle are investigated thoroughly. Mr. Priest feels that America following in European footsteps by trustbusting successful companies will be at best a backfire in this economy.

The WSJ says that ethanol is more expensive than we think, and points at government studies to support the claim.

The WSJ also takes a sarcastic tone about the non-running of GM the government is busily engaged in.

In quiche competition, Mr. McGurn implies that a college that accepts no federal money because of the Solomon Amendment requiring military recruiters on campus is morally superior to Harvard, which accepts federal money but makes it clear that the military is only being tolerated because of the Amendment. The reason? While the little college can tell the military to go fly a kite, they’re quite accommodating and cordial. Harvard, because they’re not friendly and cordial, of course, is in an inferior position. And the fact that their hands are tied on the matter has nothing to do with it, apparently.

Mr. Stephens uses an entire article about how proliferation is often done with help from others to go for a point about how the United States should be modernizing its own nuclear arsenal, and how wrong the Obama Administration is to refuse to do this. It’s a shaggy dog story, really. Mr. Stuttaford goes back to older comments about how liberal Obama is and how well he sold people that they would benefit from his election, which of course means there’s an angry, grinning mob staring at the wealthy, the losers in this last election, even though some of them voted for Obama. We just haven’t produced the new aristocracy to kill them and take their place.

At the pinnacle today, Mr. Ingrassia has pegged why GM folded - the management coddled the union instead of antagonizing them, and signing on to generous labor contracts that made them buckle instead of their competitors. He also feels the new GM is going to make the same mistakes of the old ones, because they aren’t going to change enough.

And before we get to the tech section, a justification for the Iraq War that says, mixed as the opinions are from other perspectives, for the people of Iraq, the war was just and they are doing better now than they were before.


In technology, here come the robot farm assistants, an AI unit that can compose unique and pleasant music continuously, thus freeing persons waiting from the Top 100 and freeing others from the need to pay copyright fees on said Top 100, building a database of hundreds of millions of images to test new image search tools with, designing phones that provide appropriate feedback when the user cannot divert their eyes to the screen, and Project Natal, an XBox peripheral that claims to do full motion-capture as control, along with facial recognition and natural language processing, so that you can wave your hands and navigate or play, the camera sees you and signs you in, and it will follow your conversation and playing.

Also, common medicines given to people to help them sleep may cause cognitive impairment in older adults, rethinking some of the H1N1 models, because their projections and the current count of the infected are very different, a prediction that May 2013 will be a sunspot peak, so expect some radio interference, and looking at pictures of penguin poop from space, so as to try and map where emperor penguin colonies are.

Last for tonight, more of the art that you don’t see when the book is open - the Boston Public Library's collcetion of fore-edge art, brilliant bookcases to put those books on, the calling cards of some old Chicago crews, buildings swallowed up by the relentless desert, and religious buildings, abandoned by people and reclaimed by nature.