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A new week dawns upon us - 15 June 2009
Jun. 16th, 2009 12:06 amGreetings, everyone. It was quite a weekend, wherein we found out that Pittsburgh played better hockey than Detroit (which was pretty obvious to anyone watching that game),
Also up top, don't be these guys in the library. And if you’re wondering what happens daily at a local public library, this is a pretty good summary.
Ooh, someone's asking for input on what being part of the digital culture means. responses appreciated, as is reblogging, retweeting, et cetera.
Internationally, oh, boy. After record turnouts and a declared election winner in Iran, we now have demonstrations in the streets from supporters of both candidates, one alleging serious vote fraud and corruption, the other alleging the election results are fair. Considering telecommunications of all sorts has been sketchy since the day of the elections, and Mr. Ahmandinejad’s margin of victory is close to 2-to-1, the people alleging fraud are certainly not to be dismissed as crackpots and sore losers. Whether this leads to fracturing of the country, or works as a wake-up to other countries that Iran cannot change on its own, is yet to be seen. Begin the calls for some support from outside to the reformers.
Intent on punishing North Korea for its recent actions, the United Nations approved new sanctions and fund freezes against North Korea. North Korea responded to the new sanctions by expanding their list of actions that they would take as declarations of war.
Domestically, unlike Mancow's waterboarding, the story of a deformed baby carried to term because of the compelled-birth beliefs of its mother is a hoax. The baby is a doll. The General offers advice on how to proceed next. Perhaps getting into the market of selling the saliva of pretty people?
Because he celebrated a birthday on Friday (and happy birthday to you, sir), after celebrating his 85th birthday with a skydive from above 10,000 feet, President George H.W. Bush had the microphone to speak a bit about the current GOP and political situations,
Thinking economically, the cities of America may have to contract to survive, taking an example from Flint. Methinks this should be more like “the suburbs will have to contract to survive”, which is something I’m quite okay with, despite living in suburbian-type places myself.
More problems with earmarks and appointments, this time the nominated Army secretary, who inserted qutie a few earmarks for defense contractors from his own state before being tapped to lead the Army. Mr. Lee notes that some of the persons tapped to do ambassadorships raised significant sums of money for the Obama presidential campaign, insinuating a cash for favors relationship but not saying such.
Health care continues to be a contentious issue, with the AMA indicating they don't currently support the public option, because of reimbursement for physicians. Speaking thereof, the CDC has a large-scale immunization plan for dealing with H1N1. But going back to the politics for a bit, uh, notice that there are a lot of senators who have ties to the health care industry? This could make for a very interesting bill.
Welcoming the opinion crowds, Mr. Cline on how the supposedly left-wing liberal media gives far more voice to right-wing extremist positions without any left-wing extremism to balance them, making people believe the dlusions of the right as facts, including the delusion of a liberal media. Mostly because the far right is never camera shy and generates more than enough controversy by themselves. Thus, the actual left needs to get un-camera shy and start being loud and vocal and pushy to get on the cameras, so that way our discourse improves from actually seeing leftists, instead of the straw- and boogeymen provided on the media today. Maybe we could start with an English book suited to the task.
The slacktivist demonstrates the illogical thinking process that gets someone from thinking the unborn deserve weight in reproductive decisions to the complete opposition of any rights or empowerment for women, because that empowerment might conceivably mean women could receive legal abortion. There are plenty of opportunities to get off the ride before it jumps the tracks, but there are still plenty of people, some the heads of organizations, that prefer to ride it all the way down the cliff. On the other side of the coin, with better thinking, Mr. Sdubay advocates for creative thinking within the law, to interpret and to challenge laws that do not fit with the highest ideals of America, rather than shrugging our shoulders when a document filed on behalf of the President violates those ideals.
The WSJ makes a point that paygo as it is now is a fig leaf to hide behind, as what people think it is, is not what it is, nor is congress realy attempting all that much to adhere to its spirit, considering how little there is of the letter of it, apparently.
Mr. Berkowitz makes a plea for American universities to teach conservatism as a requriement in political science in addition to already required courses on liberal ideologies. Thus, avoiding the idea of “librul conspiracy” that others have advocated for, he makes a cogent point that good students of politics need to be exposed to both sides of the coin and to understand them. That it would likely fill professorships with conservatives is a side benefit, but not the point of his request. Of those in academia, how much of this is already being done, with Mr. Berkowitz not noticing or not believing current efforts are enough?
Mr. Qanbar puts up a curious opinion - a plea with the United States to not abandon Iraqi democracy. I had heard no plans to do so - what I had heard was an intent to move the timetable of withdrawal from Iraq up by referedum, if anything.
If this opinoin about more strictly enforcing the tax on the use of business phones to take personal calls is true, then the IRS are not firing on all cylinders. Not to mention, something like that will probably be ignored, because keeping track of it is fiendishly difficult.
Ms. O'Grady sees America following in the footsteps of Argentina, where the executive gained sweeping powers and how is very loath to give them up. This is clearly intended as a warning to America about the “socialist” power grabs of the current administrator, but her warning is late - it should have been sounded on the previous administration, at the very least, if not taught as a history lesson when on the segment about the Weimar Republic.
The WSJ does not appreciate the proposed trade-in vouchers that would give car owners discount money if the new car they purchase has much better gas mileage than the old car, considering it a waste of resources and damging the used car and car parts market, making already-strapped families unable to find and afford used cars.
The WSJ also complains about the tobacco-regulation bill, continuing to paint it as helping our Phillip Morris at the expense of its competitors and giving another government agency control of something it’s not qualified to run.
Just missing out on delicious flaky high-velocity pastry, Mr. Erhart attempts to pass off an opinion piece as news by talking about the people who are most affected by the GM bond deal, trying to raise some popular ire because regular folks invested lots in GM and are now finding their investments vanished.
Mr. Krauthammer accuses Mr. Obama of equivocating things of wildly disparate weight with regard to his speech in Cairo - that the persecutions of Christians and women in fundamentalist countries are so far worse than anything that women (and/or homosexuals) have in the developed world that to compare the two would be folly.
Mr. Lambro says it's time to stop the second half of the stimulus, because the first half hasn’t produced the immediate results that conservatives seem to be expecting. If I recall correctly, the stimulus spending was supposed to slow things down immediately, and then have excellent longer-term effects so that we could start away from the recession trend. To say that it’s not working when it hasn’t reached the optimal time yet is complaining that the analgesic you took for a headache didn’t immediately make the headache go away.
In the winner’s circle, though, Mr. Ball paints persons who care about the entirety of Terra and consider Humes to be disproportionate to the whole as freaks, nutjobs, and terrorists of the mold of Ted Kacynski, with a willingnes to kill humans to save others, a rejection of technologies and hybrids, as well as proposing various environmental schemes that would reduce the Hume population significantly. On the other side of this coin, Mr. Brietbart is hopping mad that the "Democrat-Media establishment" is conflating the entirety of conservatism with the shooter at the Holocaust Museum. And if they were, and doing so without proof to back them up, he would have reason to be quite mad. Mr. Brietbart takes the tack of Boss Limbaugh, indicating that the other things the shooter was apparently going for would make him a flaming liberal, based on what he was against, but the media chooses to ignore this and reference the DHS memo about “right-wing extremism” and to force conservatives to disassociate themselves from extremists all the time (the liberals don’t have to, of course, because they’re not busy defending themselves from cries and charges of socialism or anything). Not only that, the left and the media are apparently using this as a racist attack against white people, clear hypocristy because they support university departments based on Women’s Supremacy, Latino Supremacy, Black Supremacy, only they call them “Studies” departments, and the President is clearly being a racist with his “wise Latina” pick.
Going from least sane to most on the idea of a public option of health care, Robin Harris indicates the UK's NHS is certainly no model for the U.S. to follow, while making a wider point about socialism and the inability of government to run anything efficiently (because they apparently lose all knowledge of how to run a business when they get elected to office), Mr. Harrington telling us that a public-option plan would be, by its nature, anticompetitive and would soon crowd out every other plan, and Mr. Turd Blossom offering his five suggestions on how to stop "socialized health care", starting that a public option is “unnecessary” (because all those people without insurance really are okay), and going all the way to “bureaucrats decide what your care is” by way of expense, tax increases and crashing the private insurance market.
Getting up there, with the silver quiche, because there’s nothing like the maniuplation of statistics to indicate they support your predetermined point, Mr. Medved takes the statistics about falling violence, divorce, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates and uses them to conclude that the country is remoralizing itself, on track for more spiritual seeking, and the continued success depends on "the continued validity of traditional religious faith". And there’s no other factors at all that would be contributing to that, like increased availability of birth control, better policing, increased education on sexual matters, and the like? I’d be intrigued to find out that people indicated becoming Christian, err, religious, as the reasoning why they decided not to kill or have sex or get an abortion. And then I would examine that study’s methodology very closely to be sure they weren’t gunning for a predetermined conclusion. And then I would wonder why I was reading it on a conservative’s blog instead of hearing it all across the news, because this would surely be something people would talk about.
But winning, because I’m pretty well stunned at the premise of the point, and I think the Unabashed Feminism department will have a field day, the suggestion that feminism has contributed to women's unhappiness, because it has given them options and opened their minds to struggles they previously did not have to fight. So, because women now have to think more for themselves, it makes them unhappy, and we shouldn’t be making women unhappy. We should think about whether untethering women from the path of domestic servitude and marriage was truly a good thing or not, says the author.
In technology, the strange speculation that scientists may be deliberately running bad experiments to hide the presence of life-possible organic compounds on Mars, the stranger decision that space stuff spotted by spy satellites is secret, instead of open (yay onomatopeia), the shrinking star Betelgeuse, (uh, Ford, is your homeworld collapsing?), an experiemnt designed to create a giant plume of debris on Luna, and hopefully confirm the presence of water there, and a chip modeled on the human ear's hearing ability that could be used to tune to several wireless bands, which might make it so your phone does radio, TV, and all sorts of other things all at once, and on the go.
Last for tonight, Construction monster!, and perhaps the only acceptable use for large amoutns of animated web graphics.
On the very tail end, relive past hysterias through the magic of old Time covers.
Also up top, don't be these guys in the library. And if you’re wondering what happens daily at a local public library, this is a pretty good summary.
Ooh, someone's asking for input on what being part of the digital culture means. responses appreciated, as is reblogging, retweeting, et cetera.
Internationally, oh, boy. After record turnouts and a declared election winner in Iran, we now have demonstrations in the streets from supporters of both candidates, one alleging serious vote fraud and corruption, the other alleging the election results are fair. Considering telecommunications of all sorts has been sketchy since the day of the elections, and Mr. Ahmandinejad’s margin of victory is close to 2-to-1, the people alleging fraud are certainly not to be dismissed as crackpots and sore losers. Whether this leads to fracturing of the country, or works as a wake-up to other countries that Iran cannot change on its own, is yet to be seen. Begin the calls for some support from outside to the reformers.
Intent on punishing North Korea for its recent actions, the United Nations approved new sanctions and fund freezes against North Korea. North Korea responded to the new sanctions by expanding their list of actions that they would take as declarations of war.
Domestically, unlike Mancow's waterboarding, the story of a deformed baby carried to term because of the compelled-birth beliefs of its mother is a hoax. The baby is a doll. The General offers advice on how to proceed next. Perhaps getting into the market of selling the saliva of pretty people?
Because he celebrated a birthday on Friday (and happy birthday to you, sir), after celebrating his 85th birthday with a skydive from above 10,000 feet, President George H.W. Bush had the microphone to speak a bit about the current GOP and political situations,
Thinking economically, the cities of America may have to contract to survive, taking an example from Flint. Methinks this should be more like “the suburbs will have to contract to survive”, which is something I’m quite okay with, despite living in suburbian-type places myself.
More problems with earmarks and appointments, this time the nominated Army secretary, who inserted qutie a few earmarks for defense contractors from his own state before being tapped to lead the Army. Mr. Lee notes that some of the persons tapped to do ambassadorships raised significant sums of money for the Obama presidential campaign, insinuating a cash for favors relationship but not saying such.
Health care continues to be a contentious issue, with the AMA indicating they don't currently support the public option, because of reimbursement for physicians. Speaking thereof, the CDC has a large-scale immunization plan for dealing with H1N1. But going back to the politics for a bit, uh, notice that there are a lot of senators who have ties to the health care industry? This could make for a very interesting bill.
Welcoming the opinion crowds, Mr. Cline on how the supposedly left-wing liberal media gives far more voice to right-wing extremist positions without any left-wing extremism to balance them, making people believe the dlusions of the right as facts, including the delusion of a liberal media. Mostly because the far right is never camera shy and generates more than enough controversy by themselves. Thus, the actual left needs to get un-camera shy and start being loud and vocal and pushy to get on the cameras, so that way our discourse improves from actually seeing leftists, instead of the straw- and boogeymen provided on the media today. Maybe we could start with an English book suited to the task.
The slacktivist demonstrates the illogical thinking process that gets someone from thinking the unborn deserve weight in reproductive decisions to the complete opposition of any rights or empowerment for women, because that empowerment might conceivably mean women could receive legal abortion. There are plenty of opportunities to get off the ride before it jumps the tracks, but there are still plenty of people, some the heads of organizations, that prefer to ride it all the way down the cliff. On the other side of the coin, with better thinking, Mr. Sdubay advocates for creative thinking within the law, to interpret and to challenge laws that do not fit with the highest ideals of America, rather than shrugging our shoulders when a document filed on behalf of the President violates those ideals.
The WSJ makes a point that paygo as it is now is a fig leaf to hide behind, as what people think it is, is not what it is, nor is congress realy attempting all that much to adhere to its spirit, considering how little there is of the letter of it, apparently.
Mr. Berkowitz makes a plea for American universities to teach conservatism as a requriement in political science in addition to already required courses on liberal ideologies. Thus, avoiding the idea of “librul conspiracy” that others have advocated for, he makes a cogent point that good students of politics need to be exposed to both sides of the coin and to understand them. That it would likely fill professorships with conservatives is a side benefit, but not the point of his request. Of those in academia, how much of this is already being done, with Mr. Berkowitz not noticing or not believing current efforts are enough?
Mr. Qanbar puts up a curious opinion - a plea with the United States to not abandon Iraqi democracy. I had heard no plans to do so - what I had heard was an intent to move the timetable of withdrawal from Iraq up by referedum, if anything.
If this opinoin about more strictly enforcing the tax on the use of business phones to take personal calls is true, then the IRS are not firing on all cylinders. Not to mention, something like that will probably be ignored, because keeping track of it is fiendishly difficult.
Ms. O'Grady sees America following in the footsteps of Argentina, where the executive gained sweeping powers and how is very loath to give them up. This is clearly intended as a warning to America about the “socialist” power grabs of the current administrator, but her warning is late - it should have been sounded on the previous administration, at the very least, if not taught as a history lesson when on the segment about the Weimar Republic.
The WSJ does not appreciate the proposed trade-in vouchers that would give car owners discount money if the new car they purchase has much better gas mileage than the old car, considering it a waste of resources and damging the used car and car parts market, making already-strapped families unable to find and afford used cars.
The WSJ also complains about the tobacco-regulation bill, continuing to paint it as helping our Phillip Morris at the expense of its competitors and giving another government agency control of something it’s not qualified to run.
Just missing out on delicious flaky high-velocity pastry, Mr. Erhart attempts to pass off an opinion piece as news by talking about the people who are most affected by the GM bond deal, trying to raise some popular ire because regular folks invested lots in GM and are now finding their investments vanished.
Mr. Krauthammer accuses Mr. Obama of equivocating things of wildly disparate weight with regard to his speech in Cairo - that the persecutions of Christians and women in fundamentalist countries are so far worse than anything that women (and/or homosexuals) have in the developed world that to compare the two would be folly.
Mr. Lambro says it's time to stop the second half of the stimulus, because the first half hasn’t produced the immediate results that conservatives seem to be expecting. If I recall correctly, the stimulus spending was supposed to slow things down immediately, and then have excellent longer-term effects so that we could start away from the recession trend. To say that it’s not working when it hasn’t reached the optimal time yet is complaining that the analgesic you took for a headache didn’t immediately make the headache go away.
In the winner’s circle, though, Mr. Ball paints persons who care about the entirety of Terra and consider Humes to be disproportionate to the whole as freaks, nutjobs, and terrorists of the mold of Ted Kacynski, with a willingnes to kill humans to save others, a rejection of technologies and hybrids, as well as proposing various environmental schemes that would reduce the Hume population significantly. On the other side of this coin, Mr. Brietbart is hopping mad that the "Democrat-Media establishment" is conflating the entirety of conservatism with the shooter at the Holocaust Museum. And if they were, and doing so without proof to back them up, he would have reason to be quite mad. Mr. Brietbart takes the tack of Boss Limbaugh, indicating that the other things the shooter was apparently going for would make him a flaming liberal, based on what he was against, but the media chooses to ignore this and reference the DHS memo about “right-wing extremism” and to force conservatives to disassociate themselves from extremists all the time (the liberals don’t have to, of course, because they’re not busy defending themselves from cries and charges of socialism or anything). Not only that, the left and the media are apparently using this as a racist attack against white people, clear hypocristy because they support university departments based on Women’s Supremacy, Latino Supremacy, Black Supremacy, only they call them “Studies” departments, and the President is clearly being a racist with his “wise Latina” pick.
Going from least sane to most on the idea of a public option of health care, Robin Harris indicates the UK's NHS is certainly no model for the U.S. to follow, while making a wider point about socialism and the inability of government to run anything efficiently (because they apparently lose all knowledge of how to run a business when they get elected to office), Mr. Harrington telling us that a public-option plan would be, by its nature, anticompetitive and would soon crowd out every other plan, and Mr. Turd Blossom offering his five suggestions on how to stop "socialized health care", starting that a public option is “unnecessary” (because all those people without insurance really are okay), and going all the way to “bureaucrats decide what your care is” by way of expense, tax increases and crashing the private insurance market.
Getting up there, with the silver quiche, because there’s nothing like the maniuplation of statistics to indicate they support your predetermined point, Mr. Medved takes the statistics about falling violence, divorce, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates and uses them to conclude that the country is remoralizing itself, on track for more spiritual seeking, and the continued success depends on "the continued validity of traditional religious faith". And there’s no other factors at all that would be contributing to that, like increased availability of birth control, better policing, increased education on sexual matters, and the like? I’d be intrigued to find out that people indicated becoming Christian, err, religious, as the reasoning why they decided not to kill or have sex or get an abortion. And then I would examine that study’s methodology very closely to be sure they weren’t gunning for a predetermined conclusion. And then I would wonder why I was reading it on a conservative’s blog instead of hearing it all across the news, because this would surely be something people would talk about.
But winning, because I’m pretty well stunned at the premise of the point, and I think the Unabashed Feminism department will have a field day, the suggestion that feminism has contributed to women's unhappiness, because it has given them options and opened their minds to struggles they previously did not have to fight. So, because women now have to think more for themselves, it makes them unhappy, and we shouldn’t be making women unhappy. We should think about whether untethering women from the path of domestic servitude and marriage was truly a good thing or not, says the author.
In technology, the strange speculation that scientists may be deliberately running bad experiments to hide the presence of life-possible organic compounds on Mars, the stranger decision that space stuff spotted by spy satellites is secret, instead of open (yay onomatopeia), the shrinking star Betelgeuse, (uh, Ford, is your homeworld collapsing?), an experiemnt designed to create a giant plume of debris on Luna, and hopefully confirm the presence of water there, and a chip modeled on the human ear's hearing ability that could be used to tune to several wireless bands, which might make it so your phone does radio, TV, and all sorts of other things all at once, and on the go.
Last for tonight, Construction monster!, and perhaps the only acceptable use for large amoutns of animated web graphics.
On the very tail end, relive past hysterias through the magic of old Time covers.
