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Good morning, beings of luminousness and light - today is apparently one of those convergences of numbers that people like to make mention of - regardless of which system of month/day order you use, today is 09/09/09 according to the Gregorian Calendar. Thus, we present a piece from McSweeney’s - all about the [1000Hz] sweet library on campus, from the perspective of an incoming student. And a strange photograph that will interest cryptozoologists for a bit.
Every segment from here on out tonight starts with the worst of the worst - because, unfortunately, on my trips through the intarwebs, there’s one that fits in each of our major categories. Tonight’s Potentially Internationally Worst Persons in the World are Blackwater contractors alleged to have gone shooting Iraqis as revenge for 9/11, as well as the continuing allegations against founder Erik Prince that he saw his contract in Iraq as a resumption of the Crusades, and that he sent people over with that in mind, along with weapons designed to inflict maximal human carnage.
Elsewhere in the world today (and getting a hairy eyeball about his own potentially worst status), the current vote tally in Afghanistan gives Hamid Karzai a majority, but calls for investigations into election fraud are still ringing.
German Prime Minister Merkel attempted to quell outcries over a NATO airstrike that destroyed a Taliban-abandoned fuel dump and killed the people who were scavenging it at the time.
Beware the tinfoil hats as a United Nations agency suggests creating an artificial currency with managed exchange rates as teh new reserve currency of the world.
Domestically, well, we’ve got a bumper crop of potential worst people in the world today. Let’s start with a football trip made from a public school, using a public school bus, stopped at the coach's church, where half the team was baptized. The school superintendent was also on that trip and didn’t stop the baptisms. One parent has complained that her son was baptized without her consent or knowledge. Those defending the trip claim that because the trip was voluntary and no public funds were expended for the fuel that took the players to church, it’s okay. There are also conflicting accoutns as to whether the parents were even told the church event would be happening during the trip. The General is pleased at the potentially without-consent baptism, as we knew he would be. We, on the other hand, think this has the potential for giant church-state issues.
From there, a worst person who walked off with a friends of the library group's donation quarter jar, cutting the chains attached to it and making off with $400-$500. This story does have a best person in the world ending, however, as the day after the theft, a local DJ reported on it and listeners to the radio station replaced the money within two hours of hearing about the theft.
Thus, having heard the worst, the rest can only be better, right? President Obama will chair the UN Security Council summit session on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.
Even the opinions section has it’s own worst people in the world - the media establishment that continues to believe that prosecuting officials for documented crimes and felonies is extremist and would be too great a cost to the country to enforce the laws, and that might also find themselves entangled in the matter for advocating for those lawbreakers and dismissing and demonizing those who protested as fringe people. Additionally, people who use a situation where terrorists were caught using entirely legal methods as justification for illegal wiretapping, although some of them have the presence of mind to retract and delete when they make those points in a column and get called on it.
Also dishonoring themselves - Wall Street has now made a market out of gambling on when people die. And yes, this is beyond the insurance industry as a whole, which gambles on life and death in its own way.
Mr. Feldstein is convinced that the defecits from real health care reform will cripple the economy, and that projections saying it won't are overly optimistic, because they fail to take into account interest on financing, incentive for employers to drop their health coverage, and incentive for people to underreport their taxes so they can get higher health subsidies. So, it’s going to be more expensive because we haven’t taken into account that People are Bastards and Will Cheat You When They Can? You mean, more so than they are now, especially if they’re wealthy? And that your proposed solution to conrolling those debts even after killing the health care bill is to basically cut more of Medicare costs and spending, and start taxing employer health insurance expenditures so that people are forced to buy supplemental private insurance to ensure they stay covered for their necessary equipment, medication, and the like, and employers have an incentive to drop their coverage and force people onto the individual insurance market? Well, at least you’re not being secret about your plot to kill people, Mr. Feldstein.
Speaking thereof, guess who's back on the Death Panel kick? That's right, Sarah Palin herself takes to the pages of the WSJ, still defending the idea that health reform will give government bureaucrats control over whether or not you live or die, before saying that tax benefits, letting people buy insurance across state lines, tort reform, and Medicare vouchers are the real solution to the problem.
And capping things off nicely, Mr. Jenkins, Jr. dives even further into the deep end, with his proposed satirical speech of what the President should be saying to the Congress, where he lays out how well the current system “drives private insurance off a cliff”, the great work that tax subsidies do in encouraging overconsumption and “free lunch” type thinking about health care, putting greater burdens on employers who then have less jobs to offer, and how a public option would only make that worse. Y’know, the point of attempting satire is not to bludgeon someone over the head with your point, but often to take the point made and extend it to logcial, if absurd, conclusions. What Mr. Jenkins is missing is the part of the country that has no insurance and knows full well what the full costs of those procedures are - and how many more people would join that crowd of emergency-only-and-we-resign-ourselves-to-bankruptcy department were we to dismantle the current system and leave nothing in its place. And that would be before another unsigned from the WSJ, warning us that any "trigger" idea will simply delay the public option and all its bad, bad things, instead of actually inspiring private isnurance to reform, because the bar will be set impossibly high for those insurers. If that’s the case, Sucks To Be You, insurance company.
There’s also a best persons, though - the response from a mother offended by the wingnut extreme encouraging children to not listen to a message telling tehm to stay in school, work hard, and keep trying. Said same extreme took heat from at least one editorial out here, too. And also, a child holding a sign intended to illustrate the sanity gap between the two sides. As an interesting riff on parenthood and politics, a new study from North Carolina State University suggests that parenthood pulls parents in opposite political directions - mothers become more liberal, fathers become more conservative, at least on the idea of government spending on social wlfare. What leaps to my mind after reading that is: “Duh! Mothers are tasked with the grand majority of raising their children, which requires sympathy, empathy, and gives firsthand knowledge of how hard it is to raise a child essentially by themselves. Fathers usually go to work to earn money which is then spent in waves on the child's needs, and they may feel hostile toward things like new taxes because they will then feel they don’t make enough money to cover all the bills, while others benefit. Thus, mothers welcome the help, fathers worry about the finances.”
As a counterpoint to the “indoctrination!” madness going about, may we present a far better example of what indoctrination would look like. Courtesy of none other than Glenn Beck. And you know, what - I’ve seen these before, I’m betting. They’ve just come back, since Mr. Beck is currently the star of the latest right-wing lunacy. The 9/12, as we've seen before, are nine principles and twelve values Mr. Beck espouses and wants you to espouse as well.. #1? “America Is Good.” Well, there’s your thinking-killing propaganda right there - if you believe that America is Good as your highest and first principle, well, that makes it really easy to actively not see a whole lot of things, doesn’t it? Adding on #2: “I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life”, and you’ve basically made sure that someone could hold just those two principles and be totally sealed in the bubble, assuming the God-thing is Approved Republican Christianity, anyway. There’s always the chance someone might get a different flavor that keeps their thinking skills alive, but I’m sure the Beck followers will do their best to ensure that’s not possible or available around them. The General provides what makes him happy about the principles, tying in some of the other aspects that Beck followers might also hold dear to their hearts, ones that are easily integrated, but tend to get you called out in public if you ever say them aloud.
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Bryce complains it isn't fair to prosecute oil companies for killing birds and not prosecute wind power companies, who kill more birds with their turbines than others.
The WSJ contributes an unsigned characterizing Van Jones as a radical leftist and saying the President can't continue to govern from the left. I take issue with their belief that the President is governing from the left, based on his track record so far, and on that rather swift manner by which all of his potential leftist connections get tossed under the bus, but I also find it rather presumptuous of them to insist that the President continue to tack to the right if he wants to be able to do anything. I also think they’re lying when they say “he didn’t tell the American people that the ‘change’ they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.” If that were the case, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hue and cry about how socialist the candidate was, considering how much of his platform he laid out on the Web for people to access and find out for themselves where the candidate stood.
And last out of opinions, Mr. Olson makes the case that corporations and unions should be allowed to make and distribute political messages as a right of free speech, instead of being restricted by campaign finance laws that prohibit them from doing so because of their ability to raise massive war chests and spend them, which could lead to them outspending any public or campaign money and drowning out competing messages. The other possible problem is having money used from either union dues or corporate profits/programs to endorse political messages one does not particularly care for (although one might be able to argue that this happens anyway, in one way or another). We’re already hip-deep in allegations that health-care corporations were insisting that their employees attend town halls and speak against health care reform or require them to log in and possibly send e-mails to Congresscritters espousing their opposition to health care reform on company time (and monitoring compliance with the demand). So there are possible problems. One possible benefit might be that we know firsthand which corporations the politicians are in the pockets of, by tracking their expenditures and endorsements. Of course, it might be that it becomes more important to get a corporate endorsement for your campaign than, say, a newspaper’s.
How about a technology worst persons in the world to start - that would be the companies marketing invasive spyware as child Internet-safety software - they don't tell you they're also recording your children's IM conversations and selling them to marketers so they can fine-tune how to sell your children their products.
Also, the company whose sole profitability is filing patents on any and everything they can think up and then threatening litigation against anyone who actually does the work to bring that idea to fruition.
On the tamer science and tech stuff, pinpointing some differences in brain chemistry that might lead to ADHD symptoms, an experiment in writing a novel that has video components as chapter bridges, a phone that plugs into a TV communication tool to analyze and provide helpful suggestions for the phone user, new knowledge about how the colors someone wears can change how people evaluate them (experienced taekwondo judges scoring the red player higher, even when the clip played was the same, just digitally swapping the jerseys), salmonella bacteria as a possible tumor killer, tapping trees to power nanosensors, longevity went up .2 of a year, and an experiment that indicates over the long run, you get better returns in a group by rewarding those who help others rather than punishing those who don't chip in.
That’s all for tonight, where our best impulses and our worst constructions meet and have a knock-down brawl between themselves.
Every segment from here on out tonight starts with the worst of the worst - because, unfortunately, on my trips through the intarwebs, there’s one that fits in each of our major categories. Tonight’s Potentially Internationally Worst Persons in the World are Blackwater contractors alleged to have gone shooting Iraqis as revenge for 9/11, as well as the continuing allegations against founder Erik Prince that he saw his contract in Iraq as a resumption of the Crusades, and that he sent people over with that in mind, along with weapons designed to inflict maximal human carnage.
Elsewhere in the world today (and getting a hairy eyeball about his own potentially worst status), the current vote tally in Afghanistan gives Hamid Karzai a majority, but calls for investigations into election fraud are still ringing.
German Prime Minister Merkel attempted to quell outcries over a NATO airstrike that destroyed a Taliban-abandoned fuel dump and killed the people who were scavenging it at the time.
Beware the tinfoil hats as a United Nations agency suggests creating an artificial currency with managed exchange rates as teh new reserve currency of the world.
Domestically, well, we’ve got a bumper crop of potential worst people in the world today. Let’s start with a football trip made from a public school, using a public school bus, stopped at the coach's church, where half the team was baptized. The school superintendent was also on that trip and didn’t stop the baptisms. One parent has complained that her son was baptized without her consent or knowledge. Those defending the trip claim that because the trip was voluntary and no public funds were expended for the fuel that took the players to church, it’s okay. There are also conflicting accoutns as to whether the parents were even told the church event would be happening during the trip. The General is pleased at the potentially without-consent baptism, as we knew he would be. We, on the other hand, think this has the potential for giant church-state issues.
From there, a worst person who walked off with a friends of the library group's donation quarter jar, cutting the chains attached to it and making off with $400-$500. This story does have a best person in the world ending, however, as the day after the theft, a local DJ reported on it and listeners to the radio station replaced the money within two hours of hearing about the theft.
Thus, having heard the worst, the rest can only be better, right? President Obama will chair the UN Security Council summit session on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.
Even the opinions section has it’s own worst people in the world - the media establishment that continues to believe that prosecuting officials for documented crimes and felonies is extremist and would be too great a cost to the country to enforce the laws, and that might also find themselves entangled in the matter for advocating for those lawbreakers and dismissing and demonizing those who protested as fringe people. Additionally, people who use a situation where terrorists were caught using entirely legal methods as justification for illegal wiretapping, although some of them have the presence of mind to retract and delete when they make those points in a column and get called on it.
Also dishonoring themselves - Wall Street has now made a market out of gambling on when people die. And yes, this is beyond the insurance industry as a whole, which gambles on life and death in its own way.
Mr. Feldstein is convinced that the defecits from real health care reform will cripple the economy, and that projections saying it won't are overly optimistic, because they fail to take into account interest on financing, incentive for employers to drop their health coverage, and incentive for people to underreport their taxes so they can get higher health subsidies. So, it’s going to be more expensive because we haven’t taken into account that People are Bastards and Will Cheat You When They Can? You mean, more so than they are now, especially if they’re wealthy? And that your proposed solution to conrolling those debts even after killing the health care bill is to basically cut more of Medicare costs and spending, and start taxing employer health insurance expenditures so that people are forced to buy supplemental private insurance to ensure they stay covered for their necessary equipment, medication, and the like, and employers have an incentive to drop their coverage and force people onto the individual insurance market? Well, at least you’re not being secret about your plot to kill people, Mr. Feldstein.
Speaking thereof, guess who's back on the Death Panel kick? That's right, Sarah Palin herself takes to the pages of the WSJ, still defending the idea that health reform will give government bureaucrats control over whether or not you live or die, before saying that tax benefits, letting people buy insurance across state lines, tort reform, and Medicare vouchers are the real solution to the problem.
And capping things off nicely, Mr. Jenkins, Jr. dives even further into the deep end, with his proposed satirical speech of what the President should be saying to the Congress, where he lays out how well the current system “drives private insurance off a cliff”, the great work that tax subsidies do in encouraging overconsumption and “free lunch” type thinking about health care, putting greater burdens on employers who then have less jobs to offer, and how a public option would only make that worse. Y’know, the point of attempting satire is not to bludgeon someone over the head with your point, but often to take the point made and extend it to logcial, if absurd, conclusions. What Mr. Jenkins is missing is the part of the country that has no insurance and knows full well what the full costs of those procedures are - and how many more people would join that crowd of emergency-only-and-we-resign-ourselves-to-bankruptcy department were we to dismantle the current system and leave nothing in its place. And that would be before another unsigned from the WSJ, warning us that any "trigger" idea will simply delay the public option and all its bad, bad things, instead of actually inspiring private isnurance to reform, because the bar will be set impossibly high for those insurers. If that’s the case, Sucks To Be You, insurance company.
There’s also a best persons, though - the response from a mother offended by the wingnut extreme encouraging children to not listen to a message telling tehm to stay in school, work hard, and keep trying. Said same extreme took heat from at least one editorial out here, too. And also, a child holding a sign intended to illustrate the sanity gap between the two sides. As an interesting riff on parenthood and politics, a new study from North Carolina State University suggests that parenthood pulls parents in opposite political directions - mothers become more liberal, fathers become more conservative, at least on the idea of government spending on social wlfare. What leaps to my mind after reading that is: “Duh! Mothers are tasked with the grand majority of raising their children, which requires sympathy, empathy, and gives firsthand knowledge of how hard it is to raise a child essentially by themselves. Fathers usually go to work to earn money which is then spent in waves on the child's needs, and they may feel hostile toward things like new taxes because they will then feel they don’t make enough money to cover all the bills, while others benefit. Thus, mothers welcome the help, fathers worry about the finances.”
As a counterpoint to the “indoctrination!” madness going about, may we present a far better example of what indoctrination would look like. Courtesy of none other than Glenn Beck. And you know, what - I’ve seen these before, I’m betting. They’ve just come back, since Mr. Beck is currently the star of the latest right-wing lunacy. The 9/12, as we've seen before, are nine principles and twelve values Mr. Beck espouses and wants you to espouse as well.. #1? “America Is Good.” Well, there’s your thinking-killing propaganda right there - if you believe that America is Good as your highest and first principle, well, that makes it really easy to actively not see a whole lot of things, doesn’t it? Adding on #2: “I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life”, and you’ve basically made sure that someone could hold just those two principles and be totally sealed in the bubble, assuming the God-thing is Approved Republican Christianity, anyway. There’s always the chance someone might get a different flavor that keeps their thinking skills alive, but I’m sure the Beck followers will do their best to ensure that’s not possible or available around them. The General provides what makes him happy about the principles, tying in some of the other aspects that Beck followers might also hold dear to their hearts, ones that are easily integrated, but tend to get you called out in public if you ever say them aloud.
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Bryce complains it isn't fair to prosecute oil companies for killing birds and not prosecute wind power companies, who kill more birds with their turbines than others.
The WSJ contributes an unsigned characterizing Van Jones as a radical leftist and saying the President can't continue to govern from the left. I take issue with their belief that the President is governing from the left, based on his track record so far, and on that rather swift manner by which all of his potential leftist connections get tossed under the bus, but I also find it rather presumptuous of them to insist that the President continue to tack to the right if he wants to be able to do anything. I also think they’re lying when they say “he didn’t tell the American people that the ‘change’ they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.” If that were the case, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hue and cry about how socialist the candidate was, considering how much of his platform he laid out on the Web for people to access and find out for themselves where the candidate stood.
And last out of opinions, Mr. Olson makes the case that corporations and unions should be allowed to make and distribute political messages as a right of free speech, instead of being restricted by campaign finance laws that prohibit them from doing so because of their ability to raise massive war chests and spend them, which could lead to them outspending any public or campaign money and drowning out competing messages. The other possible problem is having money used from either union dues or corporate profits/programs to endorse political messages one does not particularly care for (although one might be able to argue that this happens anyway, in one way or another). We’re already hip-deep in allegations that health-care corporations were insisting that their employees attend town halls and speak against health care reform or require them to log in and possibly send e-mails to Congresscritters espousing their opposition to health care reform on company time (and monitoring compliance with the demand). So there are possible problems. One possible benefit might be that we know firsthand which corporations the politicians are in the pockets of, by tracking their expenditures and endorsements. Of course, it might be that it becomes more important to get a corporate endorsement for your campaign than, say, a newspaper’s.
How about a technology worst persons in the world to start - that would be the companies marketing invasive spyware as child Internet-safety software - they don't tell you they're also recording your children's IM conversations and selling them to marketers so they can fine-tune how to sell your children their products.
Also, the company whose sole profitability is filing patents on any and everything they can think up and then threatening litigation against anyone who actually does the work to bring that idea to fruition.
On the tamer science and tech stuff, pinpointing some differences in brain chemistry that might lead to ADHD symptoms, an experiment in writing a novel that has video components as chapter bridges, a phone that plugs into a TV communication tool to analyze and provide helpful suggestions for the phone user, new knowledge about how the colors someone wears can change how people evaluate them (experienced taekwondo judges scoring the red player higher, even when the clip played was the same, just digitally swapping the jerseys), salmonella bacteria as a possible tumor killer, tapping trees to power nanosensors, longevity went up .2 of a year, and an experiment that indicates over the long run, you get better returns in a group by rewarding those who help others rather than punishing those who don't chip in.
That’s all for tonight, where our best impulses and our worst constructions meet and have a knock-down brawl between themselves.
