Progress and regression - 6 January 2010

Despite the lack of fluffy white stuff here where we are, in China, and elsewhere snow has fallen in sufficient quantities for some pretty awesome sculpturing.

Oooh, look, new winners for the Darwin Awards, the contest that tries to find the people who assisted the gene pool of humanity the most by removing themselves from it.

On the international stage, those body scanners that the UK was complaining about child porn over? Canada has chosen to purchase and install several of them in their airports.

Cyber Sitter sues the Chinese government for billions of USD, alleging that the government stole code from their program and used it in creating the firewall program they require installation of for computers in schools and Internet cafes in the country. As thewayne put it, "I love it when good things happen to bad people."

Here we go - Yemen, al-Qaeda militants, clashes, embassy closures, and what might very well be the opening of another front in the continuing concept war.

The recent attack that killed several CIA members came from an agent who claimed to have information on the second-in-command of Osama bin Laden, thus he was invited inside where he could detonate his explosives. In seeking intelligence, an attack. An effective vector, unfortunately.

Not that Pakistan has suddenly vanished - One of five Americans detained as seeking to become terrorists denied links to al-Qaeda while acknowledging their intent to beome "jihadists" and attack America.

Domestically, TPM would like to know if the NRCC is trying to get people to vote against the Democratic candidate for a Tennessee Representative seat by implying he's a homosexual. The official line from the opponent is that they're attacking his liberal record and his supposed running away from that record to be palatable...while making comment about his personal blog's many comments about body image. When looking at the opponent, however, Americablog has to wonder if this isn't a case of projecting your own insecurities onto your opponent.

A human interest story of a bugler and his compatriots across the country traveling to the funerals of military veterans, after Congress authorized the playing of a recording of Taps because there are not enough buglers to meet the needs of the dead.

In the matter of reconciling the two health care bills, the method that presents one unified bill to the President may schew the formal conference proceedings so as to deny the party of delay the chance to engage in more delaying.

Leading the opinions tonight, the slacktivist gives hell to all religious authorities that require heresy police and put people to death for practicing sorcery, because their faith in their own religion is so weak they think other religions have powers that could be combative to theirs.


In our more normal fare, Mr. Olasky can't decide whether he wants to make commentary about the disillusionment of the populace with President Obama after narcissism about how they were electing a black president, or complain that the mainsteam media has been fawning all over said President since we were introduced to him on the national stage. I think the narcissism commentary wins out, but it's pretty much a mishmash of both the whole way through.

Messrs. Becker, Davis, and Murphy conclude that the current tack of domestic economic reform was a mistake because it hampers the groteh of the economy by making even more uncertainty in an already uncertain era, harming private enterprise and the desire to invest and/or hire because of an unknown amount of new costs associated with those actions. The other possibility is that in the economy, it's the right time to change the rules, so that we can build an economy that's strong on those new fundamentals that will hopefully be better sustained and regulated than the previous version.

Mr. Gleming tells us a shaggy dog story about Prohibition and its effects to say, basically, that letting moralizing mobs dictate public policy is a bad idea. Which he intends to apply to 2010 and our current crop of liberal overlords oppressing everyone, but can just as easily be applied to the screaming sidhe that insist this country be run according to their strict interpretation of their version of Christianity.

Mr. Hanson continues to try and reconcile his requirement that President Obama be a doctrinaire anti-war, Muslim-appeasement liberal with the actions the President has taken regarding terror attacks and incidents, this time concluding that the President has had to take and continue the previous administration's playbook because it is effective against terrorists, and thus, the President was wrong about being able to reset relations with his charisma alone. Never mind the cariacturing of the President going on (because he was definitely not a doctrinaire liberal by his own campaign statements), his contention that one third of terrorist plots since 11 Sept 2001 have been in 2009 provokes the ire of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department, who would like to know precisely what they called all the bombings, IEDs, shoe bombers, terror scares and other items that happened abroad and at home. "War." is most likely the response, so they can continue to believe that terror happens mostly when there are liberals in charge.

Mr. McCarthy insists that because of the Concept War, anyone thought to be an "enemy combatant" entitled to no rights should be assumed to be one, guilty until the detainee can prove their innocence, whcih I'm sure is really freaking hard when stuck somewhere like Guantanamo Bay, without access to legal professionals or anyone else who can establish that innocence. Mr. McCarthy argues further that this determination is solely the responsibility of the legislative and executive branches of the government, and that courts have no right to interfere. Because indefinite detention without charge or even any sort of stringent requirement that the person being detained is hostile is perfectly acceptable when at war against an enemy that one routinely says wears no uniforms nor abides by the conventions of war. Because they break the rules, we can, too. Does that sound like a good position to take? Mr. Crovitz insists that we handicap ourselves against terrorism because we require something more than a hunch before we start putting people on no-fly lists, checking on their visas, or otherwise flagging them as someone needing additional screening. Y'know, because we perfer to think of our terrorism matters as possible criminal cases, instead of being at war where all the rules are off and everyone is a likely terrorist. Mr. Blackwell continues the line, hoping that President Obama will "bow to reality" and treat terrorists as enemy combatants deserving no rights to be held in black facilities offshore, and tha tCongress should block any funding for civilian trials to save us all from the "extremism" of the ACLU's interpretation that terrorism is still a criminal matter. A sane criticism of the way things were handled comes from Ms. Gunlock, who chides the Embassy official for doing only the minimum required when he or she could have done a lot more when presented with the information from the underpants bomber's father.

And, because we haven't had one in a while, and the columnists are really getting to that point, it's time to play Worst Persons in the World.

The bronze goes to both the lunatics above who are all in favor of suspending the rules when they think nobody else is following them and Mr. Sowell, using the single example of attempted Marxism as his reasoning why intellectuals made the 20th century worse than it started, using the flimsy logic that because intellectuals supported Marxism and Marxist attempts, they are personally responsible for all the deaths from those attempts. Then, in Part II, he expands it not to be just the Marxism attempts, but all secular ideas promoted by intellectuals that are bad and have made the last century worse, because when put into practice, all of those ideas have been bad for the world and resulted in lots of deaths. So, in Sowell-world, there are no days where everybody lives, and all the improvements of the last century were made by people who were not intellectuals, because they made products, where intellectuals only make ideas. Wouldn't that mean intellectuals are off the hook for what happens when someone puts the ideas into practice, making products out of the ideas? Of course not. People who are intellectual think they're smarter than you, of course, and so they have to be blamed when things go wrong - it's always because someone thought they were smarter or cleverer than you and did something that "everyone knows" would be stupid to put into practice.

The silver effort to Mr. MacKinnon, who ramps the fear up to 11 by claiming American citizens are on their own when the next terror attack hits, because the government can't stop them (too hindered by political correctness, among other things) and will be totally ineffective in organizing a response to the next attack, being too busy covering their asses or taking care of their loved ones, and because infrastructure will crumble with the next attack. Thus, he says, everyone should have their disaster-readiness kits in place for the next inevitable attack, because, after all, you'll be on your own when it happens. Now, disaster-readiness is one thing, definitely to be encouraged, but this kind of paranoia and government-distrust is only instilling needless panic. After all, plenty of places have suffered large-scale terror attacks and they recovered. The United Kingdom survived the Blitz, for Prime's sake, and did just fine in maintaining order. Actually, the United States survived having New Orleans flooded out, and we hopefully learned a lot from that about planning, readiness, and appropriate responses.

Our winners, however, because the self-righteous holier-than-thouness is more than enough to make your skin crawl, Brit Hume, who not only didn't apologize for his "covert to Christianity" comment to Tiger Woods, but repeated it on Bill'O's show, where they also talked about what the other winner is talking about. Mr. Mike Adams, also a gold quiche recipient, talks about how much discrimination Christians and people who put Bible verses in their e-mail sigs suffer from, because the words "Jesus Christ" send nonbelievers into a frothing rage (usually expressed in dark sarcasm, we note) and they immeditely try to ban everything Christlike in sight, and, when in an academic environment, to hide behind the separation of church and state, a nonexistent concept invented to justify banning Christ everywhere (He also takes a dig at feminists, considering dark sarcasm and cattiness of a department to be correlated to the number of feminists employed). His complaint is that Bible verses in signatures could be banned at his institution, while gay pride flags, Confucius, Nietzsche, and Egyptian quotations are allowed to exist without worry. He feels offended by the presence of pride flags and speech by "homosexuals and homosexual activists" and wants them gone (based on the rainbow being the solemn contract between the being represented by the Tetragrammaton and Noah, so clearly said being would not approve of its use by abominations like homosexuals), so obviously the "Bible verses may give offense" angle can't be true, and the university has only two options on how to respond to "discomfort" from anyone - complete neutrality through doing nothing about them, or complete banning of all forms of expression that might cause discomfort. Partial measures apparently are unnaceptable. Probably because they're going against him - if pride flags were banned and Bible verses okay, I don't think he would have a problem. The other part that draws ire is his presumption to know what Jesus would do, claiming he would likely harshly punish university liberals for their beliefs and actions. Recall, Mr. Adams, that while pushing buttons, whipping those doing business in the religious house, and agitating against the life of comfort and smug moral superiority, Jesus was known to sup with tax collectors and the unclean, not smite them because they were sinners. What usually gets people to express their eye-twitch at Christians who go around throwing Jesus' name is that the people who best exemplify the life of Christ are the people least likely to draw attention to their religious preferences or the name that Mr. Adams wants every Christian to take every opportunity they can to say in the presence of nonbelievers. Instead, they pray in secret, as their Father, who sees things in secret, commanded them to, instead of trying to convert someone to their religion by irritating them with the constant mention of how holy a person and their religious figure is.

As for the homosexuals, answer me this: What kind of religion forgets its own past as the people who were persecuted in their overzealousness to persecute others? If you tell me that Christians still are persecuted in America, please turn in your university faculty credentials at the door, as you have failed to Pay Attention in School and need to go back and learn some rudimentary civics and history.

In technology, we start with Godmoding your Windows 7 install, and proceed from there into Skype going 720p HD, a push for televisions to go into the third dimension, using light pulses of different wavelengths to turn off abnormally active cells, and robots that scour the web looking for news stories or other things of interest.

Last for tonight, the Ningen, creatures of urban legends of the Japanese that exist in the water and look somewhat humanoid. And a heartwarming story about a cat that survived being frozen out in the winter cold, now thawed, mewing, and hopefully reunited with the people taking care of the cat.