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Relatively on time - 9 October 2009
Oct. 9th, 2009 11:58 pmSo, while the week is over, the challenges continue, and this is more likely what you see - Dragon Ball manga challenged for having nudity and kids making sexual jokes, administrator decides to pull books off of shelf. School librarian? Nowhere in the picture. Wonder if there is one at that system, and whether anyone listened to them.
Hrm. Library world peers in to see whether the Queens Library can stick its allegation that SirsiDynix defrauded them by assuring them development for the new Dynix ILS would continue after the merger, then telling them they would have to switch to the already rejected Unicorn when it became clear the Dynix ILS would not be used.
Out in the outer space, the LCROSS mission is given a fond farewell by its architect, we have liftoff and explanation,and... boom, suckers!, although those watching live and hoping for some special effects were disappointed.
World-wide insanity begins with... President Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his term of office. The President downplayed the award appropriately, considering it a call to action and that he did not feel like he should be in the company of other winners. The first general comment about the award is generally that it has been too soon to be giving awards. A puzzled “...?” is the mildest of responses seen so far, some of which include profanity and others which include wild and likely untrue accusations about the President and his policies, and some which say, Prizes for promises are the last thing this president needs.
On the topic of fighting extremists, al-Qaeda thinks drone strikes suck, but spies and agents who can direct those strikes and leak information suck worse, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a car bomb detonated outside the Indian Embassy, and Pakistan vows to go after their own extremists after a car bomb is detonated near the Afghanistan border.
An Iranian nuclear scientist vanished while on pilgrimage, defection rumors abound. In the United States, a group documenting and researching the various human rights violations of Iran found its funding source dry, possibly because of the new administration's stance on less confrontational negotiations.
Last out, the developing world has been spending and investing more in science than the developed world. Yay, science!
Domestically, we’re still a nation that dismisses talented and qualified people that we have spent significant amounts of money to train into military personnel based on whether they are out about their sexual orientation. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy disproportionately affects women, possibly because of very sexist reasons and the ease at which one can spread rumors about a woman being lesbian if she refuses the advances of other men. Admittedly, we just fire them. In Iraq, and elsewhere, homosexuals, outed or accused, find their lives in danger from their own families and possibly even the government.
Continuing in the military theme, a picture that accurately captures what war does to families - the four year-old daughter does not want to let go of her father. Would that we lived in a world where no fathers or mothers were deployed to far away places to fight.
Opposition to the President will use the weakening dollar value as ammunition in their fight against him. That opposition, though, may be looking to coke-addled investment traders as their paragons of good economics. Well, at least until the crash, but that’s usually the government’s fault to that side.
Authorities continue to investigate whether terror suspect Najibullah Zazi had accomplices in New York and whether he gave instructions to them.
Additionally, after CIGNA initially denied her daughter treatment and then recanted, too late to save the daughter's life, an eyewitness reports a CIGNA employee flipping off the grieving and protesting mother. The company, of course, says that was an inexcusable action, while ignoring that their decision to deny coverage was a far bigger “fuck you” to the mother than any employee could give. Here’s more sobering statistics and facts - 45,000 people die each year for lack of insurance coverage. The uninsured under 64 have a 40 percent greater chance of dying than those who have insurance. And there are still 46 million people without coverage. That’s a pretty hearty middle finger flying, wouldn’t you say?
In opinions, Mr. Ellis wishes to borrow money to wage a three-week campaign of orbital death from above. Perhaps he can point it in the direction of all the smart lawyers, so that Justice Scalia will feel better about the intellect of the profession.
The WSJ contributes an unsigned accusing the President of making General McChrystal into the enemy in Afghanistan, instead of the Taliban, and then using that enmity to hem and haw and delay on the request for more troops which should have been approved as soon as it was made, along with whatever strategy the General deemed appropriate. The military can do no wrong, recall.
Mr. Sherman is unpleased at the few amount of workdays the Congress is taking in their normal work week, despite all the important legislation they have on the docket and are trying to pass now.
the WSJ does not want to see the rules regarding unionization of airline and rail industries changed, claiming the push to do so now is a naked attempt to curry favor and standing with a more union-friendly Mediation Board and circumvent the process of the law that needs to happen to make changes.
The Slacktivist thinks the Conservative Bible Project will lift the veil on a lot of people who think they know the Bible and force them to contemplate what is actually there, and what it says, instead of what they think and believe is there.
On health care, Mr. Fund says the best way to get a bill passed is to pass the bill that comes out of the Senate Finance Committee, because everyone wants to pass a bill and quickly. No comment, we note, on whether or not the bill that comes out of there will be a good bill, although Mr. Fund seems fairly certain all the liberal parts of all the other bills will quickly be stripped out in this rush to pass a bill. Mr. Suderman suggests that because individual components of a health care bill failed when they were implemented in various states, the combination of those components is also doomed to fail expensively. He could be right, but not because those components don’t work, but because they don’t then step to the next proper and logical conclusion - if everyone has to be insured, and insurance has to be rated based on an average or something like it, the best rate you can get is if you insure the whole damn country in one big risk pool, and you don’t have to deal with shareholder pressure or anything else. In other words, single-payer health care, controlled by an entity that has no profit motive, like the government.
At the end of this section, before the descent into the darkness, Mr. Roberts details how accurate Marx and Lenin were in predicting what capitalism does to people and the economy, the outsourcing of the middle class, and the concentration of wealth in the highest places while those at the bottom starve and viciously fight for what little is left.
Starting the descent, on the other side of that argument, Mr. Stossel complains that the government is really a transfer system where the rich pay exorbitant amounts of taxes, to subsidize the poor who pay none and get refunds, and how this is socialism at its finest. Furthermore, almost half of households will pay no income tax this year, thanks to the EITC and Making Work Pay tax credits. Perhaps, Mr. Stossel, you and Mr. Xinos would like to share a drink together? The people who are paying no income tax need every penny they have, Mr. Stossel, and probably need those subsidies to survive. The people who can comfortably live on their money (and have plenty more to invest with) can afford to pay the lion’s share of taxation. After all, it’s their spare wealth, right? And if most of those people claim to be Christians, they should be reminded about the parables regarding what happens to rich people that hoard and the obligations of people to take care of each other.
Falling further down, Messrs. Cruz and Shackelford complain about the ACLU's request to have a large cross-shaped war memorial in a national preserve taken down from the land because of the possible Constitutional implications, basically saying, “It’s there to honor the dead, and their sacrifices shouldn’t be marred by politicking, so it shouldn’t matter what it is, leave it alone.” In cemeteries, this doesn’t appear to be a problem, but I’m guessing because the memorial isn’t in a cemetery is what makes things more difficult. Really, though, there should be ways of honoring soldiers on public lands that don’t involve obvious Christian symbols, unless their Christianity is such a part of them or their service that it has to be recognized. Leave personal religious symbols for personal memorials.
One worse than that, at the very worst, Mr. Williams invokes Godwin's Law unabashedly, placing it in the context that leaders who turned out to be dictatorial and killers were admired by liberals, and that our liberals want to do the same but lack the stomach to go through with killing everyone they consider stupid or backward, under the name of social justice. It’s always nice to see that the desire to better your fellows and make the world equal on the footings of nondiscrimination, try to reduce or eliminate poverty, and ensure that people who abuse others are caught and imprisoned is really a secret desire to kill anyone not as enlightened as you.
In science and technology, we may be able to fool ourselves into feeling what our digital avatars feel. Hasn’t this been a bit of a sci-fi trope for a while? The Future is Coming... and we're beginning to see web pages as web pages, not as substitutes for paper documents, thus, things like “above the fold” and “below the fold” are beginning to become obsolete. There is no longer a fold.
Other interesting bits of technology include brain activity spikes as we near death, which might explain many of the interesting experiences people have near that point, more studies that being both awake and asleep at the same time is not as rare an event as previously thought, another article about how encounters with the absurd prime your pattern-recognition brain bits, the human genome expressed in three dimensions, and big asteroid has a much smaller probability of impact. Yay, science! Oh, and concept cars. Lots and lots of concept cars.
At the end, a third idea to join two others. Free as in beer, free as in software, free as in library, which combines the best of both of the previous two. New ideas are a definite necessity, as conformity and lack of new ideas can be lethal to civilizations. For a price, however, you can have a facehugger of your very own. If you’re The Pirate Bay, though, you're styling in a bunker that can resist EM pulses and nukes.
Hrm. Library world peers in to see whether the Queens Library can stick its allegation that SirsiDynix defrauded them by assuring them development for the new Dynix ILS would continue after the merger, then telling them they would have to switch to the already rejected Unicorn when it became clear the Dynix ILS would not be used.
Out in the outer space, the LCROSS mission is given a fond farewell by its architect, we have liftoff and explanation,and... boom, suckers!, although those watching live and hoping for some special effects were disappointed.
World-wide insanity begins with... President Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his term of office. The President downplayed the award appropriately, considering it a call to action and that he did not feel like he should be in the company of other winners. The first general comment about the award is generally that it has been too soon to be giving awards. A puzzled “...?” is the mildest of responses seen so far, some of which include profanity and others which include wild and likely untrue accusations about the President and his policies, and some which say, Prizes for promises are the last thing this president needs.
On the topic of fighting extremists, al-Qaeda thinks drone strikes suck, but spies and agents who can direct those strikes and leak information suck worse, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a car bomb detonated outside the Indian Embassy, and Pakistan vows to go after their own extremists after a car bomb is detonated near the Afghanistan border.
An Iranian nuclear scientist vanished while on pilgrimage, defection rumors abound. In the United States, a group documenting and researching the various human rights violations of Iran found its funding source dry, possibly because of the new administration's stance on less confrontational negotiations.
Last out, the developing world has been spending and investing more in science than the developed world. Yay, science!
Domestically, we’re still a nation that dismisses talented and qualified people that we have spent significant amounts of money to train into military personnel based on whether they are out about their sexual orientation. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy disproportionately affects women, possibly because of very sexist reasons and the ease at which one can spread rumors about a woman being lesbian if she refuses the advances of other men. Admittedly, we just fire them. In Iraq, and elsewhere, homosexuals, outed or accused, find their lives in danger from their own families and possibly even the government.
Continuing in the military theme, a picture that accurately captures what war does to families - the four year-old daughter does not want to let go of her father. Would that we lived in a world where no fathers or mothers were deployed to far away places to fight.
Opposition to the President will use the weakening dollar value as ammunition in their fight against him. That opposition, though, may be looking to coke-addled investment traders as their paragons of good economics. Well, at least until the crash, but that’s usually the government’s fault to that side.
Authorities continue to investigate whether terror suspect Najibullah Zazi had accomplices in New York and whether he gave instructions to them.
Additionally, after CIGNA initially denied her daughter treatment and then recanted, too late to save the daughter's life, an eyewitness reports a CIGNA employee flipping off the grieving and protesting mother. The company, of course, says that was an inexcusable action, while ignoring that their decision to deny coverage was a far bigger “fuck you” to the mother than any employee could give. Here’s more sobering statistics and facts - 45,000 people die each year for lack of insurance coverage. The uninsured under 64 have a 40 percent greater chance of dying than those who have insurance. And there are still 46 million people without coverage. That’s a pretty hearty middle finger flying, wouldn’t you say?
In opinions, Mr. Ellis wishes to borrow money to wage a three-week campaign of orbital death from above. Perhaps he can point it in the direction of all the smart lawyers, so that Justice Scalia will feel better about the intellect of the profession.
The WSJ contributes an unsigned accusing the President of making General McChrystal into the enemy in Afghanistan, instead of the Taliban, and then using that enmity to hem and haw and delay on the request for more troops which should have been approved as soon as it was made, along with whatever strategy the General deemed appropriate. The military can do no wrong, recall.
Mr. Sherman is unpleased at the few amount of workdays the Congress is taking in their normal work week, despite all the important legislation they have on the docket and are trying to pass now.
the WSJ does not want to see the rules regarding unionization of airline and rail industries changed, claiming the push to do so now is a naked attempt to curry favor and standing with a more union-friendly Mediation Board and circumvent the process of the law that needs to happen to make changes.
The Slacktivist thinks the Conservative Bible Project will lift the veil on a lot of people who think they know the Bible and force them to contemplate what is actually there, and what it says, instead of what they think and believe is there.
On health care, Mr. Fund says the best way to get a bill passed is to pass the bill that comes out of the Senate Finance Committee, because everyone wants to pass a bill and quickly. No comment, we note, on whether or not the bill that comes out of there will be a good bill, although Mr. Fund seems fairly certain all the liberal parts of all the other bills will quickly be stripped out in this rush to pass a bill. Mr. Suderman suggests that because individual components of a health care bill failed when they were implemented in various states, the combination of those components is also doomed to fail expensively. He could be right, but not because those components don’t work, but because they don’t then step to the next proper and logical conclusion - if everyone has to be insured, and insurance has to be rated based on an average or something like it, the best rate you can get is if you insure the whole damn country in one big risk pool, and you don’t have to deal with shareholder pressure or anything else. In other words, single-payer health care, controlled by an entity that has no profit motive, like the government.
At the end of this section, before the descent into the darkness, Mr. Roberts details how accurate Marx and Lenin were in predicting what capitalism does to people and the economy, the outsourcing of the middle class, and the concentration of wealth in the highest places while those at the bottom starve and viciously fight for what little is left.
Starting the descent, on the other side of that argument, Mr. Stossel complains that the government is really a transfer system where the rich pay exorbitant amounts of taxes, to subsidize the poor who pay none and get refunds, and how this is socialism at its finest. Furthermore, almost half of households will pay no income tax this year, thanks to the EITC and Making Work Pay tax credits. Perhaps, Mr. Stossel, you and Mr. Xinos would like to share a drink together? The people who are paying no income tax need every penny they have, Mr. Stossel, and probably need those subsidies to survive. The people who can comfortably live on their money (and have plenty more to invest with) can afford to pay the lion’s share of taxation. After all, it’s their spare wealth, right? And if most of those people claim to be Christians, they should be reminded about the parables regarding what happens to rich people that hoard and the obligations of people to take care of each other.
Falling further down, Messrs. Cruz and Shackelford complain about the ACLU's request to have a large cross-shaped war memorial in a national preserve taken down from the land because of the possible Constitutional implications, basically saying, “It’s there to honor the dead, and their sacrifices shouldn’t be marred by politicking, so it shouldn’t matter what it is, leave it alone.” In cemeteries, this doesn’t appear to be a problem, but I’m guessing because the memorial isn’t in a cemetery is what makes things more difficult. Really, though, there should be ways of honoring soldiers on public lands that don’t involve obvious Christian symbols, unless their Christianity is such a part of them or their service that it has to be recognized. Leave personal religious symbols for personal memorials.
One worse than that, at the very worst, Mr. Williams invokes Godwin's Law unabashedly, placing it in the context that leaders who turned out to be dictatorial and killers were admired by liberals, and that our liberals want to do the same but lack the stomach to go through with killing everyone they consider stupid or backward, under the name of social justice. It’s always nice to see that the desire to better your fellows and make the world equal on the footings of nondiscrimination, try to reduce or eliminate poverty, and ensure that people who abuse others are caught and imprisoned is really a secret desire to kill anyone not as enlightened as you.
In science and technology, we may be able to fool ourselves into feeling what our digital avatars feel. Hasn’t this been a bit of a sci-fi trope for a while? The Future is Coming... and we're beginning to see web pages as web pages, not as substitutes for paper documents, thus, things like “above the fold” and “below the fold” are beginning to become obsolete. There is no longer a fold.
Other interesting bits of technology include brain activity spikes as we near death, which might explain many of the interesting experiences people have near that point, more studies that being both awake and asleep at the same time is not as rare an event as previously thought, another article about how encounters with the absurd prime your pattern-recognition brain bits, the human genome expressed in three dimensions, and big asteroid has a much smaller probability of impact. Yay, science! Oh, and concept cars. Lots and lots of concept cars.
At the end, a third idea to join two others. Free as in beer, free as in software, free as in library, which combines the best of both of the previous two. New ideas are a definite necessity, as conformity and lack of new ideas can be lethal to civilizations. For a price, however, you can have a facehugger of your very own. If you’re The Pirate Bay, though, you're styling in a bunker that can resist EM pulses and nukes.
