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All the rest of this stuff - 8 July 2009
Jul. 9th, 2009 12:14 amMorning, everyone. There’s always plenty to be done in the news, tod... what do you mean, we’ve only got the story of the squirrel jumping out of the woman's top during a police interview? All I can do with that is make a joke about a Ray Stevens song (As the squirrel made laps inside her dress...). Get back out there on the Internets and find me some material!
...a man running 100 yards while on fire to set a new world record? Really, guys, you can do better than this. Someone falling into a vat of chocolate and drowning is better, it has no celebrity. At least tell us something like Oscar Meyer died, or something. That way the Dead Pool people will be happy.
Professionally, if you want to know what the news was like in the country during the latter parts of last century through the early parts of this one, The Library of Congress has the Chronicling America project to satisfy that need. Don’t you love libraries?
So, going to the International desk, a highly-coordinated computer attack is thought to be the work of North Korea, according to the South Korean and United states governmetns, whose governmental computer systems were the target of the attack.
In sport news, eyes continue to stay on the cycling race in France, where Lance Armstrong continues to stay in the main pack.
Domestically, Sarah Palin's popularity appears not to have dropped any with her decision to resign her governorship, which means she might be able to use that for gathering true power away from the political space, mimicking the current party leader, Boss Limbaugh.
To anyone what lives there, this is obvious, but L.A. has the worst and the most costly traffic jams in the country.
Good and bad news for fans of streaming and Internet radio stations - a deal was struck regarding the royalties those stations need to pay, so outfits that were going to be crushed by the original fee schedule will still be able to broadcast. Good news - stations stay on. Bad news - fee structure still doesn’t seem all that fair to popular Internet stations that have to rely on either ads or donations (or both) to continue operation.
Another step in the path of health care reform - hospitals forego some funding to help defray costs.
Massachusettes files suit against the federal government, declaring the federal DOMA to be unconstitutional, because it forces the state to discriminate between legally married couples with regard to federal benefits, and this violates the idea of equal protection under the law. It’s a nice gambit, and I’d like to see it work (and possibly take down DADT as a similar violation).
The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a litany of all the domestic terror attacks, arrests, and several near-misses since Timothy McVeigh, as supporting evidence of the idea that DHS was not off the mark in preparing a report about right-wing extremism and violence as something to watch for.
Last out before opinions, the Californians Against Hate want to know where the non-profit filings are for the National Organization for Marriage, the people behind the reviled advertisement “A Gathering Storm”, and have not yet apparently been granted them, nor does the IRS have any record of such an organization on file. If it’s a shell group, it’s a very visible shell group - who’s behind it?
In the opinions, Musings and Migraines considers the death of McNamara, and places him above the other warmongers, because he at least looked like he understood the consequences of his actions, and while he didn’t ask for apology, he did try to keep us from making the same stupid mistake later on.
The spin war regarding Sonia Sotomayor continues, with Republicans using the NRA's concerns as an attack, and the Dems responding with a "tough on crime" opinion based on her judicial opinions.
A First Amendment lawyer opines about the difficulty of weighing threatening speech against inciting violence or speech that will soon lead to violence, and that a case involving someone arrested with illegal bullets after having posted inflammatory remarks should still permit First Amendment defenses to be made (correlation =/= causation).
Deals aren't sufficient to remove the spectre of health care rationing from the opposition, so either the Democrats bull through or they find a way of making Republicans happy that still achieves the Democratic goals. That said, the full Democratic proposal got good marks from the CBO, making it a good possibility (although much less fanfare about this good score than there was noise about the bad scores of the incomplete one), so maybe the right idea is to just go through objections and filibusters and pass it. Mr. Krugman puts not too fine a point on those advocating against the public option - for being a country that has a supposedly robust private insurance industry, the government still pays more in medical costs than that industry, by almost ten percent of total health expenditures. And, that private industry will employ evil, dirty tricks to make sure they don’t end up actually paying out, but instead encouraging the employers buying the coverage to fire the expensive employees, and then they can drop them from the coverage, eventually force them onto Medicare, and ruin their employability, because they will keep sticking employers with the costs of treating someone with an expensive condition, forcing them to choose between firing the employee that resulted in this unpayable surcharge on their insurance premiums and bankruptcy. Instead of paying out as a functional company should, they will behave like a profit-obsessed company that believes each denied claim is more profit in premiums, and that anyone who is actually going to be a draw on their profits should be kicked off coverage as soon as possible. So they will make the employer do something dubious and unscrupulous to save the company, or they will bankrupt the company making it pay for the care and treatment of the employee, instead of doing what insurance really should do. This story by itself should make everyond, from peon to lawmaker, demand real reforms or the public option, with single-payer. Then add on all the uninsured. And the underinsured. That’s millions of reasons why health care coverage should be a guarantee, as part of living up to the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Thus, those insurance companies that go through this practice are all Worst Persons in the World, perhaps in greater or lesser degrees, in perpetuity.
Today’s “foot in mouth” opinionater, however, is Fox Noise's Brian Kilmeade, who ran right through the stop signal when taking issue with a study saying married people do better than divorcees at not getting Alzheimer's - the study, apparently, was bogus because it was done in coutnries with "pure" genes, marrying people of the same ethnicity, as opposed to us Americans, who marry people of any nationality or genetic makeup. As the person preporting on this notes, invoking Godwin’s Law is rather difficult not to do in this case. If you want to watch the train wreck happen, Gawker has the clip, which apparently also included some offstage whistling of "If I Only Had A Brain" as well as the co-host's attempts to tell him that he missed touching first base, much less second and third on his way to his self-thought home run.
In technology, Google announces a Chrome operating system, to be installed on netbook-type computers as an alternative to Microsoft OS, using Google cloud-based services for many tasks (At least one PC World commenter dooms Chrome because it's not Windows, and people will always want Windows, because lots of developers will only develop for Windows, because Windows is all anyone runs. Additionally, speculation on whether or not the Google Android platform will be able to compete with Windows Mobile and Blackberry.
The first node in what may be an interplanetary or intersystem data transmission network was locked into place aboard the ISS.
Additionally, the past thought the future would be able to synthesize foodstuff from waste organics (actually, the recent past still thinks the future will be able to synthesize foodstuff from organic and/or waste matter), looking back at the death masks of the past (and those making tableware from parts of their own bodies), the development of artificial skin for inexpensive, the second space race, to be conducted not by governments but commercial entities, utilizing string theory to help explain a particular physical phenomenon, stimulating the brain magnetically helps learning stick, using solar collectors and a Stirling engine to provide heating and electricity to areas that alternate between very dark and cold and very sunny and warm, fabric that, when given current, acts like a rudimentary camera, the possibility that your iPhone might double as a hearing aid, based on an app, the health benefits of regular amounts of vitamin D, and a scientific claim to have generated sperm cells from stem cells.
Last for tonight, some advertisements that will definitely engage the creep factor. To get those away from you, the dirty letters of James Joyce and The Dreadnought hoax, where intellectuals conned the military into believing they were foreign dignitaries
...a man running 100 yards while on fire to set a new world record? Really, guys, you can do better than this. Someone falling into a vat of chocolate and drowning is better, it has no celebrity. At least tell us something like Oscar Meyer died, or something. That way the Dead Pool people will be happy.
Professionally, if you want to know what the news was like in the country during the latter parts of last century through the early parts of this one, The Library of Congress has the Chronicling America project to satisfy that need. Don’t you love libraries?
So, going to the International desk, a highly-coordinated computer attack is thought to be the work of North Korea, according to the South Korean and United states governmetns, whose governmental computer systems were the target of the attack.
In sport news, eyes continue to stay on the cycling race in France, where Lance Armstrong continues to stay in the main pack.
Domestically, Sarah Palin's popularity appears not to have dropped any with her decision to resign her governorship, which means she might be able to use that for gathering true power away from the political space, mimicking the current party leader, Boss Limbaugh.
To anyone what lives there, this is obvious, but L.A. has the worst and the most costly traffic jams in the country.
Good and bad news for fans of streaming and Internet radio stations - a deal was struck regarding the royalties those stations need to pay, so outfits that were going to be crushed by the original fee schedule will still be able to broadcast. Good news - stations stay on. Bad news - fee structure still doesn’t seem all that fair to popular Internet stations that have to rely on either ads or donations (or both) to continue operation.
Another step in the path of health care reform - hospitals forego some funding to help defray costs.
Massachusettes files suit against the federal government, declaring the federal DOMA to be unconstitutional, because it forces the state to discriminate between legally married couples with regard to federal benefits, and this violates the idea of equal protection under the law. It’s a nice gambit, and I’d like to see it work (and possibly take down DADT as a similar violation).
The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a litany of all the domestic terror attacks, arrests, and several near-misses since Timothy McVeigh, as supporting evidence of the idea that DHS was not off the mark in preparing a report about right-wing extremism and violence as something to watch for.
Last out before opinions, the Californians Against Hate want to know where the non-profit filings are for the National Organization for Marriage, the people behind the reviled advertisement “A Gathering Storm”, and have not yet apparently been granted them, nor does the IRS have any record of such an organization on file. If it’s a shell group, it’s a very visible shell group - who’s behind it?
In the opinions, Musings and Migraines considers the death of McNamara, and places him above the other warmongers, because he at least looked like he understood the consequences of his actions, and while he didn’t ask for apology, he did try to keep us from making the same stupid mistake later on.
The spin war regarding Sonia Sotomayor continues, with Republicans using the NRA's concerns as an attack, and the Dems responding with a "tough on crime" opinion based on her judicial opinions.
A First Amendment lawyer opines about the difficulty of weighing threatening speech against inciting violence or speech that will soon lead to violence, and that a case involving someone arrested with illegal bullets after having posted inflammatory remarks should still permit First Amendment defenses to be made (correlation =/= causation).
Deals aren't sufficient to remove the spectre of health care rationing from the opposition, so either the Democrats bull through or they find a way of making Republicans happy that still achieves the Democratic goals. That said, the full Democratic proposal got good marks from the CBO, making it a good possibility (although much less fanfare about this good score than there was noise about the bad scores of the incomplete one), so maybe the right idea is to just go through objections and filibusters and pass it. Mr. Krugman puts not too fine a point on those advocating against the public option - for being a country that has a supposedly robust private insurance industry, the government still pays more in medical costs than that industry, by almost ten percent of total health expenditures. And, that private industry will employ evil, dirty tricks to make sure they don’t end up actually paying out, but instead encouraging the employers buying the coverage to fire the expensive employees, and then they can drop them from the coverage, eventually force them onto Medicare, and ruin their employability, because they will keep sticking employers with the costs of treating someone with an expensive condition, forcing them to choose between firing the employee that resulted in this unpayable surcharge on their insurance premiums and bankruptcy. Instead of paying out as a functional company should, they will behave like a profit-obsessed company that believes each denied claim is more profit in premiums, and that anyone who is actually going to be a draw on their profits should be kicked off coverage as soon as possible. So they will make the employer do something dubious and unscrupulous to save the company, or they will bankrupt the company making it pay for the care and treatment of the employee, instead of doing what insurance really should do. This story by itself should make everyond, from peon to lawmaker, demand real reforms or the public option, with single-payer. Then add on all the uninsured. And the underinsured. That’s millions of reasons why health care coverage should be a guarantee, as part of living up to the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Thus, those insurance companies that go through this practice are all Worst Persons in the World, perhaps in greater or lesser degrees, in perpetuity.
Today’s “foot in mouth” opinionater, however, is Fox Noise's Brian Kilmeade, who ran right through the stop signal when taking issue with a study saying married people do better than divorcees at not getting Alzheimer's - the study, apparently, was bogus because it was done in coutnries with "pure" genes, marrying people of the same ethnicity, as opposed to us Americans, who marry people of any nationality or genetic makeup. As the person preporting on this notes, invoking Godwin’s Law is rather difficult not to do in this case. If you want to watch the train wreck happen, Gawker has the clip, which apparently also included some offstage whistling of "If I Only Had A Brain" as well as the co-host's attempts to tell him that he missed touching first base, much less second and third on his way to his self-thought home run.
In technology, Google announces a Chrome operating system, to be installed on netbook-type computers as an alternative to Microsoft OS, using Google cloud-based services for many tasks (At least one PC World commenter dooms Chrome because it's not Windows, and people will always want Windows, because lots of developers will only develop for Windows, because Windows is all anyone runs. Additionally, speculation on whether or not the Google Android platform will be able to compete with Windows Mobile and Blackberry.
The first node in what may be an interplanetary or intersystem data transmission network was locked into place aboard the ISS.
Additionally, the past thought the future would be able to synthesize foodstuff from waste organics (actually, the recent past still thinks the future will be able to synthesize foodstuff from organic and/or waste matter), looking back at the death masks of the past (and those making tableware from parts of their own bodies), the development of artificial skin for inexpensive, the second space race, to be conducted not by governments but commercial entities, utilizing string theory to help explain a particular physical phenomenon, stimulating the brain magnetically helps learning stick, using solar collectors and a Stirling engine to provide heating and electricity to areas that alternate between very dark and cold and very sunny and warm, fabric that, when given current, acts like a rudimentary camera, the possibility that your iPhone might double as a hearing aid, based on an app, the health benefits of regular amounts of vitamin D, and a scientific claim to have generated sperm cells from stem cells.
Last for tonight, some advertisements that will definitely engage the creep factor. To get those away from you, the dirty letters of James Joyce and The Dreadnought hoax, where intellectuals conned the military into believing they were foreign dignitaries
