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Very late - 14-15 August 2009
Aug. 17th, 2009 11:44 amThe lateness of this entry has a lot to do with me attempting to get a cleaner install of my OS on my home machine. It didn't work out all that well, and so now we're in the process of doing it all The Hard Way. *sigh*
Here up top, if something is forwarded to you and you think it's a bit on the fishy side - check for some authenticity. Reader's Digest has a nice article about the two-person team that makes Snopes the authority on urban legends it is.
The Dead Pool got someone important and influential - Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, died Tuesday at 88 years.
Internationally, in anticipation of elections, United States Marines continue to push to capture strategic towns and areas, as the President of the country hires tribesmen to guard the election places. Ms. Marlowe suggests the election may be closer than the punditry would have us believe.
In domestic matters, Politico looks at the President's word cloud, finds very little mention of wars and battle. This particular President has been focused on his domestic agenda more. Not to say he isn't keeping an eye on things abroad, but he currently prefers to be seen as a President that's for cleaning up his own house, not for continuing to be aggressive about everyone else's. Part of that may also be reflected in the administration's clear intent of dropping the phrases "war on terror", and "jihadists", while retaining the phrasing that the country is at war with al-Qaeda. This certainly helps to clarify and make more specific the focus of the efforts.
The White House is also not above asking supporters to forward mail from them debunking the myths and lies being propagated through chain e-mails and Internet postings, which could make for an interesting flood-counterflood dynamic, especially if we could track the progress of those kinds of e-mails live through the systems.
On health care reform, Politico points out that senior citizens are a bloc the Democrats have not been very effective at convincing that the health care bill will benefit them, leaving them open to both the sane and insane objections to care and how it will affect those seniors. Some Congresscritters are hitting back against those objections, with Representative Rick Larsen of Washington state delivering perhaps the zinger quote of the day regarding his side having facts and the opposition having a talk-show host who is hemorraghing advertisers for previous comments. Others are joining the Death Eater camp, perpetuating the myths that government reform really does mean old people will die because they don't have enough utility.
The Atlantic pulls up something from their vaults that makes health care reform very much a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same - a 1947 article calling for a public health care program.
Elsewhere, some economists believe the current Cash for Clunkers surge will have a bad effect on future spending, as everyone frontloads their car purchases to take advantage of the program now, instead of spreading it out over time.
Yet more on the Prosperity Gospel scam, where people who claim to be followers fo the deity that whipped moneychangers in the temple fleece people who think that giving their money to scam artists will mean they will get blessed with lots of money back. It's just helping to make those people richer. Why not, instead, follow the call of Scalzi and donate to help good magazines stay afloat?
Last out, a homeowner summoned police over a strange-looking man checking out property. As it turns out, the man was Bob Dylan, but the police officer responding, soemone of a generation without Dylan on the radio, was understandably skeptical that he was who he said he was, checked out his story by the book, and then, when confirmed, said to have a nice day and went on (and got teased a bit by the older officers). In other words, a textbook police procedure that happens to involve a rather famous person.
The opinions are on... health care, mostly. The WSJ starts off the game by trying to make the proposed reform smaller than it actually is, by claiming it's only really about the individual insurance market that's not covered by employer-based insurance, and that imposing uniform requirements and guaranteed coverage would only drive up premiums because only the sick would get insurance. They do make a sensible point about being able to get and keep insurance companies through other means than one's employer (hello, public option!), but by saying that it's first only about a small amount of insurance, because most people are covered through their employer is trying to make the reform have smaller impact than it will. They also seem to think it perfectly okay for insurers to charge heavy premiums to the people who will require care, when the point of insurance is to spread the costs across the sick and the healthy so that the sick aren't unduly or bankruptly burdened with paying for their own care. Mr. Geraghty ties it all together, and worries that even with the grass roots (real or imaginery), Democrats may pass the bill anyway and condemn us all to government health care. Mr. Geraghty's identified issues are a grab bag of the legitimate and the lie, and his feeling that those who agitated for grass roots are recoiling at actually getting is is also disingenuous, mostly based on the suspicion that much of the grass roots is astroturf, instead, but the piece itself represents a pretty solid worry - that Democrats will ignore their constituents and pass the health care bill anyway. On the other side, imagine a health care system that basically is free of the government, employment, or anything else, which might swing too far out as to be extreme in the other direction on several lines, but still worth thinking about.
Touching on health care, but really speaking generally, Ms. Noonan believes Mr. Obama was better at becoming President than being one, and the health care material is the latest example of how slippery he's become. She touches on the complete and unified Republican opposition as a sign that Mr. Obama has not been able to achieve his promised bipartisanship and post-politics that people elected him for, starting with the stimulus bill, but there has to be some recognition that the Republican and right-wing has not been much for concilliatory or wanting to work with the President on these plans. The fringe represents the party because the party itself ahs not been doing a whole lot to indicate how fringy the fringe is and that the sane Republicans, over here, will be conducting a civil discussion on what to do about these things. If the main mesage from your opposition is "No." then you can't really negotiate with that. You pass it over their heads or you let it die. And the President believes some things are too important to let die to appease the naysayers.
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Fund thinks he's spotted a Congressional scandal in how much the members of Congress, especially Democratic leaders, use air travel and per diem to spend lots of money. Open up the books, definitely, and see what's going on. Most of it, we would think, is legitimate business. They might find better traction in the need to rewrite the consumer safety lead standards so as to give more flexibility for exemptions, those attempts to make the big club of the Law strike a little bit more accurately.
Mr. Tapscott think he's got three big stories the mainstream media misses or intentionally aren't reporting on - the sources for the DHS report, an AARP rebellion, and the Black Panthers at the voting booths dismissal. He quotes one source for the DHS report as being pretty clearly a nutjob while implying all of DHS's sources are rumors and unverified internet spouting, never you mind that a lot of people who do go on nutjob attacks and such have maintained web sites and blogs where they spout their views. On the AARP rebellion, I'm wondering if this is more that seniors have been caught in the death panel and/or care rationing arguments and are reacting mostly by saying "Get your government hands off my government-run program". Not at all unreasonable to think this might be the cause of the unrest, which means that a lot of seniors have bought into either a lie or something that cannot be characterized as complete truth. The Black Panther bit does deserve scrutiny, however, and so by that virtue, he stays up, instead of sinking to the Worst Persons derby at the bottom of th opinions section.
Mr. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, declares Mr. Obama must respect the will of Israel and take into account Palestine's continual denial of the Jewish state if he ever wants to achieve peace in the area, mostly by letting Israel do what it wants and requiring Palestine to recognize it. Mr. Luttwak is certain diplomacy with Iran will fail, because Khameini needs anti-americanism to stay in power and succeed.
Last out of our opinions sections, the perennial and perpetual derby for the worst opinions penned in this time frame. Let's begin with the bronze entrants, Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann, who bring us back to the seniors and health care issue above, playing up the idea that the health care reforms will alienate seniors and drive up costs for both seniors and young people. Not related, but interesting to note: the "six pillars" of the Democratic Party to him are the old, the young, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, union people, and single women. Leaving middle aged white men and married women to the Republicans. Do you wonder now why they're increasingly being seen as a fringe party that only caters to white men and corporations? Mr. Krauthammer tells us that preventative care is more expensive when applied to everyone, so that's not savings, despite what you may hear. We do note that his statistics could be clearer. An increase of 162 percent in costs is a little more than doubling, to me. which isn't really all that bad. Krauthamer claims it's 10 times as much costs. Big difference here. And thus, the "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" department has yet another example of how much numeracy matters.
At the silver level, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, for an unsigned opinion that plays up to senior fears because of the inevitability of rationed care, using the example of European socialized medicines (the same ones keeping Dr. Hawking alive and well cared-for) as why the health care plan really is a secret plot to kill old people. All because, of course, the government is not a limitless fount of money and will have to make decisions about quality of life and care at some point. Which insurance companies already do, and which the editors claim is very different, because it's private companies making decisions about individuals as opposed to the government making sweeping decisions for everyone. End result is the same, though - coverage and treatment denied. And how many elderly people die from denial of coverage in those socialized medicine countries compared to how many die here from lack of coverage or being denied their treatments? Morris, McGann, and Krauthammer, while all complaining about cost, are at least working somewhere in the realm of reality, statistics notwithstanding, but the WSJ's editors are clearly farther in fantasyland, thus they get the worser ranking.
At the bottom, however, and putting out a gold standard for others to live down to, Mr. David Keene, who writes that the White House cannot tolerate dissent at all, and uses tactics and techniques designed to discredit his opponents, like the brave and not-at-all-funded-by-insurance-money town hall rabblerousers. His evidence? Liberal groups outside the White House organizing counter-demonstrations, the flag at whitehouse dot gov address, the fact that some Congresscritters aren't holding their meetings or screening them (because it's not productive to try and talk to people who are claerly only interestied in shouting slogans), a statement from the President rightly reasoning that the people who messed things up are not the people you want in charge of fixing it, and the canards about union bosses and Democratic officials beating up on protestors. So no actual real reason to believe that the White House and the President are unable to tolerate dissent on their plans, and are actively looking to crush any sort of rebellion, based in reality or in the fantasy alternate world where death panels, taxpayer-funded abortions, and socialized rationed care that is horrible live. Everyone is entitled to their own opinoin, but not to their own facts, and thus for not having any at all to support his assertion, Mr. Keene earns the deep dishonor of a high-velocity quiche.
In technology, a Firefox plug-in that will forward documents paid for and downloaded from federal courts to the Internet Archive, so one person's purchase can become everyone's largesse, the increasing importance of social media tools to businesses - and the businesses popping up to manage those social media tools for other businesses, how to get rid of a Firefox extension that Microsoft installs on all Windows Firefox machines (even Portable Firefox) without the user's consent, the ACLU complains about a federal rule change allowing government websites to start using tracking cookies and other technologies, making metamaterials that generate a field that looks like a mirror, but is actually passable, and a new SD standard from Toshiba that makes SD cars capable of holding up to 2 TB of data.
Last for tonight, a protest that Mr. Obama should listen to. For those looking for dfferent entertainment, or a way to revel or revile the past, Stag Mags offers covers of various mens magazines from the 50s and 60s and some of the 70s. Many of those pictures involve scantily or partially unclad women, various politically incorrect statements and depictions, and the widespread use of women as sex objects for the bachelor with means and a willingness to have sex with any got woman he could seduce. Which puts it in contrast to the person who sees Twilight's popularity because it describes the liminal space of girl adolescence so very well, with the temptations of sex, school, and stories unencumbered with modern technology.
Here up top, if something is forwarded to you and you think it's a bit on the fishy side - check for some authenticity. Reader's Digest has a nice article about the two-person team that makes Snopes the authority on urban legends it is.
The Dead Pool got someone important and influential - Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, died Tuesday at 88 years.
Internationally, in anticipation of elections, United States Marines continue to push to capture strategic towns and areas, as the President of the country hires tribesmen to guard the election places. Ms. Marlowe suggests the election may be closer than the punditry would have us believe.
In domestic matters, Politico looks at the President's word cloud, finds very little mention of wars and battle. This particular President has been focused on his domestic agenda more. Not to say he isn't keeping an eye on things abroad, but he currently prefers to be seen as a President that's for cleaning up his own house, not for continuing to be aggressive about everyone else's. Part of that may also be reflected in the administration's clear intent of dropping the phrases "war on terror", and "jihadists", while retaining the phrasing that the country is at war with al-Qaeda. This certainly helps to clarify and make more specific the focus of the efforts.
The White House is also not above asking supporters to forward mail from them debunking the myths and lies being propagated through chain e-mails and Internet postings, which could make for an interesting flood-counterflood dynamic, especially if we could track the progress of those kinds of e-mails live through the systems.
On health care reform, Politico points out that senior citizens are a bloc the Democrats have not been very effective at convincing that the health care bill will benefit them, leaving them open to both the sane and insane objections to care and how it will affect those seniors. Some Congresscritters are hitting back against those objections, with Representative Rick Larsen of Washington state delivering perhaps the zinger quote of the day regarding his side having facts and the opposition having a talk-show host who is hemorraghing advertisers for previous comments. Others are joining the Death Eater camp, perpetuating the myths that government reform really does mean old people will die because they don't have enough utility.
The Atlantic pulls up something from their vaults that makes health care reform very much a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same - a 1947 article calling for a public health care program.
Elsewhere, some economists believe the current Cash for Clunkers surge will have a bad effect on future spending, as everyone frontloads their car purchases to take advantage of the program now, instead of spreading it out over time.
Yet more on the Prosperity Gospel scam, where people who claim to be followers fo the deity that whipped moneychangers in the temple fleece people who think that giving their money to scam artists will mean they will get blessed with lots of money back. It's just helping to make those people richer. Why not, instead, follow the call of Scalzi and donate to help good magazines stay afloat?
Last out, a homeowner summoned police over a strange-looking man checking out property. As it turns out, the man was Bob Dylan, but the police officer responding, soemone of a generation without Dylan on the radio, was understandably skeptical that he was who he said he was, checked out his story by the book, and then, when confirmed, said to have a nice day and went on (and got teased a bit by the older officers). In other words, a textbook police procedure that happens to involve a rather famous person.
The opinions are on... health care, mostly. The WSJ starts off the game by trying to make the proposed reform smaller than it actually is, by claiming it's only really about the individual insurance market that's not covered by employer-based insurance, and that imposing uniform requirements and guaranteed coverage would only drive up premiums because only the sick would get insurance. They do make a sensible point about being able to get and keep insurance companies through other means than one's employer (hello, public option!), but by saying that it's first only about a small amount of insurance, because most people are covered through their employer is trying to make the reform have smaller impact than it will. They also seem to think it perfectly okay for insurers to charge heavy premiums to the people who will require care, when the point of insurance is to spread the costs across the sick and the healthy so that the sick aren't unduly or bankruptly burdened with paying for their own care. Mr. Geraghty ties it all together, and worries that even with the grass roots (real or imaginery), Democrats may pass the bill anyway and condemn us all to government health care. Mr. Geraghty's identified issues are a grab bag of the legitimate and the lie, and his feeling that those who agitated for grass roots are recoiling at actually getting is is also disingenuous, mostly based on the suspicion that much of the grass roots is astroturf, instead, but the piece itself represents a pretty solid worry - that Democrats will ignore their constituents and pass the health care bill anyway. On the other side, imagine a health care system that basically is free of the government, employment, or anything else, which might swing too far out as to be extreme in the other direction on several lines, but still worth thinking about.
Touching on health care, but really speaking generally, Ms. Noonan believes Mr. Obama was better at becoming President than being one, and the health care material is the latest example of how slippery he's become. She touches on the complete and unified Republican opposition as a sign that Mr. Obama has not been able to achieve his promised bipartisanship and post-politics that people elected him for, starting with the stimulus bill, but there has to be some recognition that the Republican and right-wing has not been much for concilliatory or wanting to work with the President on these plans. The fringe represents the party because the party itself ahs not been doing a whole lot to indicate how fringy the fringe is and that the sane Republicans, over here, will be conducting a civil discussion on what to do about these things. If the main mesage from your opposition is "No." then you can't really negotiate with that. You pass it over their heads or you let it die. And the President believes some things are too important to let die to appease the naysayers.
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Fund thinks he's spotted a Congressional scandal in how much the members of Congress, especially Democratic leaders, use air travel and per diem to spend lots of money. Open up the books, definitely, and see what's going on. Most of it, we would think, is legitimate business. They might find better traction in the need to rewrite the consumer safety lead standards so as to give more flexibility for exemptions, those attempts to make the big club of the Law strike a little bit more accurately.
Mr. Tapscott think he's got three big stories the mainstream media misses or intentionally aren't reporting on - the sources for the DHS report, an AARP rebellion, and the Black Panthers at the voting booths dismissal. He quotes one source for the DHS report as being pretty clearly a nutjob while implying all of DHS's sources are rumors and unverified internet spouting, never you mind that a lot of people who do go on nutjob attacks and such have maintained web sites and blogs where they spout their views. On the AARP rebellion, I'm wondering if this is more that seniors have been caught in the death panel and/or care rationing arguments and are reacting mostly by saying "Get your government hands off my government-run program". Not at all unreasonable to think this might be the cause of the unrest, which means that a lot of seniors have bought into either a lie or something that cannot be characterized as complete truth. The Black Panther bit does deserve scrutiny, however, and so by that virtue, he stays up, instead of sinking to the Worst Persons derby at the bottom of th opinions section.
Mr. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, declares Mr. Obama must respect the will of Israel and take into account Palestine's continual denial of the Jewish state if he ever wants to achieve peace in the area, mostly by letting Israel do what it wants and requiring Palestine to recognize it. Mr. Luttwak is certain diplomacy with Iran will fail, because Khameini needs anti-americanism to stay in power and succeed.
Last out of our opinions sections, the perennial and perpetual derby for the worst opinions penned in this time frame. Let's begin with the bronze entrants, Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann, who bring us back to the seniors and health care issue above, playing up the idea that the health care reforms will alienate seniors and drive up costs for both seniors and young people. Not related, but interesting to note: the "six pillars" of the Democratic Party to him are the old, the young, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, union people, and single women. Leaving middle aged white men and married women to the Republicans. Do you wonder now why they're increasingly being seen as a fringe party that only caters to white men and corporations? Mr. Krauthammer tells us that preventative care is more expensive when applied to everyone, so that's not savings, despite what you may hear. We do note that his statistics could be clearer. An increase of 162 percent in costs is a little more than doubling, to me. which isn't really all that bad. Krauthamer claims it's 10 times as much costs. Big difference here. And thus, the "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" department has yet another example of how much numeracy matters.
At the silver level, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, for an unsigned opinion that plays up to senior fears because of the inevitability of rationed care, using the example of European socialized medicines (the same ones keeping Dr. Hawking alive and well cared-for) as why the health care plan really is a secret plot to kill old people. All because, of course, the government is not a limitless fount of money and will have to make decisions about quality of life and care at some point. Which insurance companies already do, and which the editors claim is very different, because it's private companies making decisions about individuals as opposed to the government making sweeping decisions for everyone. End result is the same, though - coverage and treatment denied. And how many elderly people die from denial of coverage in those socialized medicine countries compared to how many die here from lack of coverage or being denied their treatments? Morris, McGann, and Krauthammer, while all complaining about cost, are at least working somewhere in the realm of reality, statistics notwithstanding, but the WSJ's editors are clearly farther in fantasyland, thus they get the worser ranking.
At the bottom, however, and putting out a gold standard for others to live down to, Mr. David Keene, who writes that the White House cannot tolerate dissent at all, and uses tactics and techniques designed to discredit his opponents, like the brave and not-at-all-funded-by-insurance-money town hall rabblerousers. His evidence? Liberal groups outside the White House organizing counter-demonstrations, the flag at whitehouse dot gov address, the fact that some Congresscritters aren't holding their meetings or screening them (because it's not productive to try and talk to people who are claerly only interestied in shouting slogans), a statement from the President rightly reasoning that the people who messed things up are not the people you want in charge of fixing it, and the canards about union bosses and Democratic officials beating up on protestors. So no actual real reason to believe that the White House and the President are unable to tolerate dissent on their plans, and are actively looking to crush any sort of rebellion, based in reality or in the fantasy alternate world where death panels, taxpayer-funded abortions, and socialized rationed care that is horrible live. Everyone is entitled to their own opinoin, but not to their own facts, and thus for not having any at all to support his assertion, Mr. Keene earns the deep dishonor of a high-velocity quiche.
In technology, a Firefox plug-in that will forward documents paid for and downloaded from federal courts to the Internet Archive, so one person's purchase can become everyone's largesse, the increasing importance of social media tools to businesses - and the businesses popping up to manage those social media tools for other businesses, how to get rid of a Firefox extension that Microsoft installs on all Windows Firefox machines (even Portable Firefox) without the user's consent, the ACLU complains about a federal rule change allowing government websites to start using tracking cookies and other technologies, making metamaterials that generate a field that looks like a mirror, but is actually passable, and a new SD standard from Toshiba that makes SD cars capable of holding up to 2 TB of data.
Last for tonight, a protest that Mr. Obama should listen to. For those looking for dfferent entertainment, or a way to revel or revile the past, Stag Mags offers covers of various mens magazines from the 50s and 60s and some of the 70s. Many of those pictures involve scantily or partially unclad women, various politically incorrect statements and depictions, and the widespread use of women as sex objects for the bachelor with means and a willingness to have sex with any got woman he could seduce. Which puts it in contrast to the person who sees Twilight's popularity because it describes the liminal space of girl adolescence so very well, with the temptations of sex, school, and stories unencumbered with modern technology.
