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Greetings, all - we live in fantastic settings, places where people want to redesign soda cans so they pollute less - by removing the paint and a possible excellent treatment for MS that involves simply cleaning out some veins to let blood and iron flow again, and the usage of social media and billboards generates unforseen consequences.
Unfortunately, we also have people who believe execution-style killings of police officers is an acceptable thing to do. And if and when they find the person responsible...well, they won't have a whole lot of that person left to identify. As it turns out, the police killed him before anyone else did, in the course of their normal duties in hunting for him.
Someone who will keep his head, although he will be visited by the evil spirits that Scrooge was subjected to is the person who, claiming to hate Christmas, pushed down a Salvation Army bell-ringer and took the kettle.
Internationally, to begin, Famed stage, television, and film actor Patrick Stewart tells of his experiences with domestic violence, growing up in a house where his father regularly hit his mother, and even the authorities engaged in victim-blaming.
Switzerland engages in a curious act banning the presence of minarets in the country, after an apparently successful campaign claiming that minarets were a sign that the Muslims were taking over. Appeal to xenophobia appears to work. We have our own domestic examples, like the flack Best Buy took over wishing Muslims a happy holiday in one of their fliers, prompting responses such as this one, indicating a hunter-type wanted to kill the Muslims having their meat processed at his normal plant, because he feels that the country is at war with Islam and nobody should be giving any sort of aid or comfort to the enemy.
Elsewhere in the world, the United States will soon stop having the ability to count how many Russian missiles leave the assembly line, no doubt inciting commentary about how the current administration continues to be weak on security by letting Russia hide how many missiles it has, and thus guaranteeing any arms reduction talks will be useless.
On the nuclear matter, Iran approved plans to build more uranium enrichment facilities, contravening the U.N. resolutions intended to contain its nuclear program.
Finally, a curious channel has begun broadcasting in Iraq, with images and praise for deposed and executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
Domestically, The White House touts a new report indicating the Senate's health care reform bill will actually cut costs and protect consumers, although we think that having robust public options, or better yet, a single-payer system would probably cut those costs more.
The rapid expansion of the rolls of food stamp recipients is reducting the stigma of receiving them, but there are still mroe who should probably be signed up for it and aren't. This says a couple things - one, that when you know someone who is part of group X, it becomes much harder to abstractly be against that group, and two, that things have clearly gotten pretty bad with having this many people part of the porgram. Where should the pressure be put, then, so that people can stay on their feet and have enough to feed themselves? Where should the moeny come from? Perhaps executive compensation? Or perhaps from the rolls of the people who still think any assistance to people in need discourages them from getting back on their working feet, or that all persons on public assistance are perpetuating a scam to take money from the deserving and give it to the undeserving? (Despite how many of those people receiving need do already work, and how many of them have been squeezed by the price-raising actions that usually make those at the top mroe profitable, of course.) Not that the current administration escapes blame totally - they also live in a bubble where the poor don't exist or are there because they want to be.
In what may be the first signs of a spine showing from Democrats, a proposal is on the table to increase taxes to pay for the costs of the two concurrent wars run in Asia, with high-income earners as the target demographic for war financing. Here's hoping that something gets done on the matter, whether the threat of taxation accelerates the idea of getting troops down and out, or Republicans finally go on the record as saying they're in favor of higher taxation to pay for what they deem to be necessary wars. As it turns out, they have decided to go another route - claim the Democrats are only doing this so they can take the money away from spending on war and instead spend it on domestic issues like health care reform, soemthing clearly Wrong of them to do because every war or excursion the military does is of top importance and cannot ever be questioned as to its necessity without it being made clear that you Hate The Troops or Want The Terrorists to Win. (And, of course, liberals hate economic growth and are determined to spend their way out of it.)
Regardless of how its being paid for, the plans for the new Afghanistan strategy are finally coming out - betting on a troop increase is likely to pay off.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist is irritated at a friend of his for falling for a lie, a lie saying the document he was signing on to was not at all about demonizing abortion and homosexuality, when it was most definitely. He does not like the person that lied to him, but also he wonders why his friend bought the lie. And worse, the justifications for the lie and the supporting documents, well, they don't. On the very tail end of it, the Declaration and the lie's true purpose are really just for the authors to convince themselves they&
OVO has a suggestion on how to dismantle the work week machine - take Wednesday for yourself and for others, every week. Once it's been dismantled, move on to the next days.
The Washington Times suggests that the President is being very cautious about going to the press corps, attributing the reason to the flap that happened when the President mentioned police officers in Cambridge acted stupidly in their handling of Mr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Times also mocks the presence of a special VIP event where former Vice President Al Gore will do a meet-and-greet at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference - mostly because we suspect they think the price is too high. Speaking of climate change, a unit of the UK government admitted that much of their original climate change data was discarded in a move from one facility to another, which has the potential of turning a housecleaning incident into yet another example of how the Climate Change Conspiracy falsifies data and then destroys the original so they cannot be fact-checked and exposed as the frauds they are. And, as if I intended these things to be together, here cometh the WSJ's editorial board, claiming that this and the other stolen e-mails prove that climate change is a rigged game with only one acceptable outcome and all others erased, and that scientists colluded with each other in their erasures of raw data so they could not be checked and disproven. Ms. Strassel talks about Mr. Inhofe's crowing about being "right" about climate change all along. And Mr. Barone makes the accusation above about climate change personages being frauds - all based on one institution's e-mails let loose by a hacker. Amazing how easy it is to generalize about a whole group based on selecting the member of the group that best bits your preconceptions, isn't it?
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Sowell declares that politicians will willingly make stupid decisions with taxpayer money, like the FHA giving out loans for very small down payment amounts and the FDIC raising the deposit limit, because they're trying to get re-elected, not fix problems. Mr. Sowell's argument could be extended out to just about any action the government takes that we don't like, including fighting two land wars in Asia, deregulating large institution in such a way that allowed them to become "too big to fail" or repeatedly saying that only certain types of unions are valid and that all others must be content with second class status. Cuts both ways, Mr. Sowell. I hope you agree. Making a more scoped argument, Mr. Mellon says that the government's continued presence in the banking sector is retarding growth and private-secotr economics, to the detriment of everyone, and touches on his fear that continued government defecits will increase government interference and presence in the banking sector for years. Mr. Rove contends that defecits are what are on people's minds, and that if the Obama administration wants better approval ratings, it should scrap the expensive health-care and climate change bills entirely. Thus, the elections would do better, as well.
On the other side of various economic crises, A University of Arizona professor suggests that for a large amount of people whose equity is less than the amount of their mortgage, with a little planning, their best option is to walk away from their mortgages and pay the penalties.
On health care, Mr. Krauthammer says that packing all of reform into one monster bill is wrong, and that the big bill should be killed in favor of smaller bills, each needing to work their way through, starting with his priorities - tort reform, allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, and taxing employer-provided benefit plans. Y'know, things that will skip on the surface, but will otherwise leave the underlying structure unchanged and still allow insurance companies to do their arbitrary rate-raising and coverage-denying thing. The WSJ considers the recent revision of mammogram guidelines to be a harbinger of the liberal rationing of care to come under the new health care bill, if it should be passed, where panels decide what care people get, and cost is more important than saving lives.
Mr. Williams pens an opinion in favor of removing the ban on tangible compensation for bone marrow donation, because the shortage of compatible donors and supply is more of a problem than anyone deeciding to make it a business of selling their marrow to others. The possibly problem with that is that it may become a farming decision for many people, depending on what the compensation is - that also raises all sorts of hairy issues about the poor being used so the rich can live. It's definitely a worthwhile ethics discussion. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide the justification on the ban, because I'm sure it's not "overzealous bureaucrats wielding power for the sake of wielding power".
Less economically and more broadly, Mr. Barnes suggests that Mr. Obama is to blame for the increased partisanship in politics, because he misread his personal victory as a Democratic mandate and set out to pass a liberal agenda, one that is clearly unpopular, and had he simply decided to govern as if the Republicans were still in charge, none of this bickering would have happened. Ms. Noonan finds the story about President Obama already shaping up, and it's not a positive one, although she seems ambivalent about whether she also prefers the story of an amateur, closed-ranks White House that mismanages America's power and is excessively deferential to foreign nations. Politico offers seven of what they think are narratives the administration doesn't want to become entrenched, while Mr. Hawkins finds five promises he thinks Barack Obama should have made, based on what he's done since the election, that would have been more accurate and given the voters a chance to vote against him.
With all that said and done, Mr. Walker has the correct point to be focusing on - as a nation, we've degenerated so much that we need an intervention, starting with our admission of our addiction to greed and exceptionalist delusions.
In the scientific and technological realms, The MPAA says that if you oppose the secret draconian copyright treaty in any way, You Hate Hollywood and Intellectual Property.
Furthermore, we have artificially grown meat, revisiting an old experiment to find out it doesn't have the same effect, (we're apparently much better about having lots of choices), the social life of plants, a deal struck between Apple and a company that was selling regular generic PCs properly hacked to run Mac OS X, of which the suit was that the PC hacker was distributing copies of the OS without having bought the corresponding licenses to do so, a three-dimensional map of the world that could hem be mashed-up to make some very interesting experiences, and Barnes and Noble unveils their e-book reader.
Last for tonight, manageable tongue-twisters, and a list of toys that probably should stay on the shelves this season. And the three doctors who inspire many a person. Although we think there should be a Dr. Who on there, too.
On the postscript - confirming what we have long suspected, people impart o God the same views as they hold on issues. "Of course God believes as I do, otherwise I wouldn't be right and such a crusader for my own views."
Unfortunately, we also have people who believe execution-style killings of police officers is an acceptable thing to do. And if and when they find the person responsible...well, they won't have a whole lot of that person left to identify. As it turns out, the police killed him before anyone else did, in the course of their normal duties in hunting for him.
Someone who will keep his head, although he will be visited by the evil spirits that Scrooge was subjected to is the person who, claiming to hate Christmas, pushed down a Salvation Army bell-ringer and took the kettle.
Internationally, to begin, Famed stage, television, and film actor Patrick Stewart tells of his experiences with domestic violence, growing up in a house where his father regularly hit his mother, and even the authorities engaged in victim-blaming.
Switzerland engages in a curious act banning the presence of minarets in the country, after an apparently successful campaign claiming that minarets were a sign that the Muslims were taking over. Appeal to xenophobia appears to work. We have our own domestic examples, like the flack Best Buy took over wishing Muslims a happy holiday in one of their fliers, prompting responses such as this one, indicating a hunter-type wanted to kill the Muslims having their meat processed at his normal plant, because he feels that the country is at war with Islam and nobody should be giving any sort of aid or comfort to the enemy.
Elsewhere in the world, the United States will soon stop having the ability to count how many Russian missiles leave the assembly line, no doubt inciting commentary about how the current administration continues to be weak on security by letting Russia hide how many missiles it has, and thus guaranteeing any arms reduction talks will be useless.
On the nuclear matter, Iran approved plans to build more uranium enrichment facilities, contravening the U.N. resolutions intended to contain its nuclear program.
Finally, a curious channel has begun broadcasting in Iraq, with images and praise for deposed and executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
Domestically, The White House touts a new report indicating the Senate's health care reform bill will actually cut costs and protect consumers, although we think that having robust public options, or better yet, a single-payer system would probably cut those costs more.
The rapid expansion of the rolls of food stamp recipients is reducting the stigma of receiving them, but there are still mroe who should probably be signed up for it and aren't. This says a couple things - one, that when you know someone who is part of group X, it becomes much harder to abstractly be against that group, and two, that things have clearly gotten pretty bad with having this many people part of the porgram. Where should the pressure be put, then, so that people can stay on their feet and have enough to feed themselves? Where should the moeny come from? Perhaps executive compensation? Or perhaps from the rolls of the people who still think any assistance to people in need discourages them from getting back on their working feet, or that all persons on public assistance are perpetuating a scam to take money from the deserving and give it to the undeserving? (Despite how many of those people receiving need do already work, and how many of them have been squeezed by the price-raising actions that usually make those at the top mroe profitable, of course.) Not that the current administration escapes blame totally - they also live in a bubble where the poor don't exist or are there because they want to be.
In what may be the first signs of a spine showing from Democrats, a proposal is on the table to increase taxes to pay for the costs of the two concurrent wars run in Asia, with high-income earners as the target demographic for war financing. Here's hoping that something gets done on the matter, whether the threat of taxation accelerates the idea of getting troops down and out, or Republicans finally go on the record as saying they're in favor of higher taxation to pay for what they deem to be necessary wars. As it turns out, they have decided to go another route - claim the Democrats are only doing this so they can take the money away from spending on war and instead spend it on domestic issues like health care reform, soemthing clearly Wrong of them to do because every war or excursion the military does is of top importance and cannot ever be questioned as to its necessity without it being made clear that you Hate The Troops or Want The Terrorists to Win. (And, of course, liberals hate economic growth and are determined to spend their way out of it.)
Regardless of how its being paid for, the plans for the new Afghanistan strategy are finally coming out - betting on a troop increase is likely to pay off.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist is irritated at a friend of his for falling for a lie, a lie saying the document he was signing on to was not at all about demonizing abortion and homosexuality, when it was most definitely. He does not like the person that lied to him, but also he wonders why his friend bought the lie. And worse, the justifications for the lie and the supporting documents, well, they don't. On the very tail end of it, the Declaration and the lie's true purpose are really just for the authors to convince themselves they&
OVO has a suggestion on how to dismantle the work week machine - take Wednesday for yourself and for others, every week. Once it's been dismantled, move on to the next days.
The Washington Times suggests that the President is being very cautious about going to the press corps, attributing the reason to the flap that happened when the President mentioned police officers in Cambridge acted stupidly in their handling of Mr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Times also mocks the presence of a special VIP event where former Vice President Al Gore will do a meet-and-greet at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference - mostly because we suspect they think the price is too high. Speaking of climate change, a unit of the UK government admitted that much of their original climate change data was discarded in a move from one facility to another, which has the potential of turning a housecleaning incident into yet another example of how the Climate Change Conspiracy falsifies data and then destroys the original so they cannot be fact-checked and exposed as the frauds they are. And, as if I intended these things to be together, here cometh the WSJ's editorial board, claiming that this and the other stolen e-mails prove that climate change is a rigged game with only one acceptable outcome and all others erased, and that scientists colluded with each other in their erasures of raw data so they could not be checked and disproven. Ms. Strassel talks about Mr. Inhofe's crowing about being "right" about climate change all along. And Mr. Barone makes the accusation above about climate change personages being frauds - all based on one institution's e-mails let loose by a hacker. Amazing how easy it is to generalize about a whole group based on selecting the member of the group that best bits your preconceptions, isn't it?
Elsewhere in opinions, Mr. Sowell declares that politicians will willingly make stupid decisions with taxpayer money, like the FHA giving out loans for very small down payment amounts and the FDIC raising the deposit limit, because they're trying to get re-elected, not fix problems. Mr. Sowell's argument could be extended out to just about any action the government takes that we don't like, including fighting two land wars in Asia, deregulating large institution in such a way that allowed them to become "too big to fail" or repeatedly saying that only certain types of unions are valid and that all others must be content with second class status. Cuts both ways, Mr. Sowell. I hope you agree. Making a more scoped argument, Mr. Mellon says that the government's continued presence in the banking sector is retarding growth and private-secotr economics, to the detriment of everyone, and touches on his fear that continued government defecits will increase government interference and presence in the banking sector for years. Mr. Rove contends that defecits are what are on people's minds, and that if the Obama administration wants better approval ratings, it should scrap the expensive health-care and climate change bills entirely. Thus, the elections would do better, as well.
On the other side of various economic crises, A University of Arizona professor suggests that for a large amount of people whose equity is less than the amount of their mortgage, with a little planning, their best option is to walk away from their mortgages and pay the penalties.
On health care, Mr. Krauthammer says that packing all of reform into one monster bill is wrong, and that the big bill should be killed in favor of smaller bills, each needing to work their way through, starting with his priorities - tort reform, allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, and taxing employer-provided benefit plans. Y'know, things that will skip on the surface, but will otherwise leave the underlying structure unchanged and still allow insurance companies to do their arbitrary rate-raising and coverage-denying thing. The WSJ considers the recent revision of mammogram guidelines to be a harbinger of the liberal rationing of care to come under the new health care bill, if it should be passed, where panels decide what care people get, and cost is more important than saving lives.
Mr. Williams pens an opinion in favor of removing the ban on tangible compensation for bone marrow donation, because the shortage of compatible donors and supply is more of a problem than anyone deeciding to make it a business of selling their marrow to others. The possibly problem with that is that it may become a farming decision for many people, depending on what the compensation is - that also raises all sorts of hairy issues about the poor being used so the rich can live. It's definitely a worthwhile ethics discussion. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide the justification on the ban, because I'm sure it's not "overzealous bureaucrats wielding power for the sake of wielding power".
Less economically and more broadly, Mr. Barnes suggests that Mr. Obama is to blame for the increased partisanship in politics, because he misread his personal victory as a Democratic mandate and set out to pass a liberal agenda, one that is clearly unpopular, and had he simply decided to govern as if the Republicans were still in charge, none of this bickering would have happened. Ms. Noonan finds the story about President Obama already shaping up, and it's not a positive one, although she seems ambivalent about whether she also prefers the story of an amateur, closed-ranks White House that mismanages America's power and is excessively deferential to foreign nations. Politico offers seven of what they think are narratives the administration doesn't want to become entrenched, while Mr. Hawkins finds five promises he thinks Barack Obama should have made, based on what he's done since the election, that would have been more accurate and given the voters a chance to vote against him.
With all that said and done, Mr. Walker has the correct point to be focusing on - as a nation, we've degenerated so much that we need an intervention, starting with our admission of our addiction to greed and exceptionalist delusions.
In the scientific and technological realms, The MPAA says that if you oppose the secret draconian copyright treaty in any way, You Hate Hollywood and Intellectual Property.
Furthermore, we have artificially grown meat, revisiting an old experiment to find out it doesn't have the same effect, (we're apparently much better about having lots of choices), the social life of plants, a deal struck between Apple and a company that was selling regular generic PCs properly hacked to run Mac OS X, of which the suit was that the PC hacker was distributing copies of the OS without having bought the corresponding licenses to do so, a three-dimensional map of the world that could hem be mashed-up to make some very interesting experiences, and Barnes and Noble unveils their e-book reader.
Last for tonight, manageable tongue-twisters, and a list of toys that probably should stay on the shelves this season. And the three doctors who inspire many a person. Although we think there should be a Dr. Who on there, too.
On the postscript - confirming what we have long suspected, people impart o God the same views as they hold on issues. "Of course God believes as I do, otherwise I wouldn't be right and such a crusader for my own views."
