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Go, go, Gadget infodump! - 3 February 2010
Feb. 4th, 2010 10:09 amSalutations to those who will be the survivors of the impending zombie apocalypse - perhaps now would be a good time to practice you skills by becoming a cadaver cleaner, and then secretly utilizing that job to practice your kill shots.
Out in the world today, a columnist for the Independent put himself through "ex-gay" therapy, with the idea of exploring what it is (and providing the rest of us with plenty more reasons why no government funding organization for health care should touch it with a ten-foot pole). As expected, there's a lot of non-science to the therapy, sounding more like the charlatan psychic than someone supposed to be accredited by the licensing board.
In domestic news, new target for the LGBT crowd - state senator Eichelberger of Pennsylvania and his state constitutional amendment for heterosexual-only marriage. This, despite a law already declaring this to be so, but foes want to write discrimination in permanently, just in case someone challenges it and a judge calls it what it is.
The Pants-On-Fire Bomber is talking, and the intelligence he's giving is fresh and useful. Huh. Doing things the right way, without going outside the judicial system, does work. Not only that, it's consistent with past policy, like the one used for the shoe bomber. It's not enough for some, who say, "Sure, he's talking now, but if we had waterboarded him, what better stuff would he have given us?" Can we please now get off the "Only Torture Works!" argument? (Of course not. All that has to happen is to have the goalposts move.) Or, perhaps, we'll shift over to the terror attack will be happening in the next few months! Panic! Be Afraid! tactic. Wasn't that supposed to be the hallmark of the last administration?
College still has its benefits, although not necessarily at the numbers promoted by institutions like the College Board. The tone of the article shifts from "college may not be worth the debt - think about it" to "college may not be worth it - think about it" and back again, it seems.
And adding on another dose of paranoia for those who need it, an article on the super-powerful Secretaries of State for various states, those meddlers in elections, those partisans with the power to decide great things, because they control what counts and what doesn't. Actually, the article is about what they see as a secret liberal plot to control those Secretaries and make them more favorable to liberals by loosening the laws on validation and voter registration, but I was trying to give them a shred of credibility first.
Last out, though, let the insane attack ads commence. My opponent is Frankenstein versus the demonic sheep! Round one, fight!
In technology, marvel at the highly efficient pneumatic tube messaging system of the Stanford Hospital complex, proving that sometimes old tech is better than new, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just expended $10 billion USD on vaccination programs worldwide, as well as the retraction of a study by a UK medical journal that purported to link the MMR vaccine to autism, which makes things happier for those of us who have to work in sectors where unvaccinated children are a problem, some of the implications of three-dimensional printing getting cheaper and cheaper, including the democratization of the production process, allowing someone with a design to crank out a widget and test it, refine it, and make it more available, or for that person who always wanted The Thing that could do exactly what they wanted it to to finally be able to create it using designs bought from others or created themselves, a large multi-touch screen that can be deployed anywhere to make any non-conductive surface into a multi-touch display, spray-on liquid glass, and an interview with an ARG designer, on why games are important and awesome and powerful.
Well, that and a school in New Zealand that went totally open source and slashed their server requirements by an extreme factor by doing so.
Welcome to opinions, where we peer into the dreamworld of what could have been an awesome State of the Union address, and check out some of responses to said speech, including one sensible doctor saying that Medicare for all is the better solution the President said he was open to hearing about.
The Professor points out the reprehensibility of saying a disaster is the best thing to happen to a school, especially when the "reform" starts with trying to cut costs instead of deciding to actually fund education as it should be. In that scenario, nothing can improve, and things can only get worse as the "public-sector spending must be cut" forces win their concessions and squeeze teachers and education budgets even more. Probably so they can then buy more war toys.
Mr. Fund considers the American populace to be the winners of Friday's Q&A session between Republicans and the President, despite whatever sound bites and photo-ops both sides will use to further their agendas (and Mr. Fund - the Republicans can still be characterized as the party of NO - it's their voting records and general perception of being a party that votes against everything, sometimes regardless of the suggestions they've put up and had put into the bill that drives this particular view.)
Mr. Boortz puffs his chest out in an attempt to prove he was right all along about Iran, using a quote from the Secretary of State about the disappointing lack of progress between the U.S. and Iran. For an example of something saner and more thought-out, Mr. Stephens presents his seven myths about Iran that the country needs to realize are myths fast, like "military strikes accomplish nothing", "we can live with a nuclear Iran", and "sanctions don't work".
We've got a bumper crop of candidates for the bottom of the dungheap tonight. Here's a preview. Sweetness and Light complains about the expense of using Air Force planes to fly the Speaker of the House around. Just her? No mention of anyone else who might give perspective on whether or not the Speaker is a heavy or light user? Or, for that matter, whether the Speaker's Office repays the Air Force for the expenses? Nope, instead they'd rather paint the Speaker as a party hound who love to abuse her ability to travel by military aircraft.
On the matter of the budget, Mr. DeHaven believes with this budget, Mr. Obama loses whatever cover he had to blame the previous administrator for deficit and debt, The WSJ characterizes the budget as a "spend-while-you-can" document that will result in inevitable tax hikes, some of which are highlighted in the article. And still unfunny comedian David Limbaugh caps the last of the trifecta by calling the Preisdent a liar about his figures and about who's to blame for a large part of the deficit.
And thus, the spiral down into the deepest parts of crap I have seen today - The bronze to Mr. Sowell, for his argument against universal health coverage and the minimum wage: TINSTAAFL. Those costs don't go away, he's right, but the argument that if the Free Market (all praise to its name) wanted to insure people and thought it was a good business idea, they would have already done so, and that the Free Market (all praise to its name) should determine what a fair wage for a job is are wrong. In the matter of universal coverage, insurance companies making business decisions will be willing to let people get sick and die because the people who need them most generate the least profit for them. This is empirically so, and one does not need to throw the dart that many times to find examples. On the other, we had a period of time where companies and employers set the wage they would give for their jobs, and the great masses that were working slaved at long hours for not enough pay to keep themselves fed - the existence of labor unions came about because employers were shortchanging their workers and living well while the workers starved or were replaced for arbitrary and capricious reasons. We don't want to go back to those times, Mr. Sowell, no matter how much you think they would be good.
Moving down the ladder, where the light is dimming, Ms. Hagelin would have you believe the latest report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute about increased teen pregnancy is all hype, and has nothing to do at all with the increased use and teaching of abstinence education. This because, apparently, the rise in teen pregnancy is mostly the 18-19 year olds, who are going off to college, that zone where abstinence education stops and "free-sex" ideas take hold. (As comparison, she offers that the pregnancy rate for 14-and-under is going down. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here.) For her, this means that abstinence education should continue through college to keep our children pure and to insist to them that they are capable of "greater things" than the "self-centered lifestyle" of the 60s. What it should be doing is setting off alarm bells. "Huh, these children are getting abstinence education while under their parents' roofs, and then, when they go out into the world for university, when immediate supervision and parental retribution is removed, they're getting pregnant. Maybe because they're having sex and their abstinence-only education hasn't told them about the ways to have safer sex?" Or, more bluntly, Abstinence Doesn't Work, and we have the data here to back that contention up. For someone who says that they want girls to be free of STDs and the fear of pregnancy, wants to encourage self-discipline and maturity, yet endorses a policy that has no backup plan other than the expectation that people whose brains are still developing will be able to act in a mature manner, using those fears she wants to get rid of to try and enforce that discipline, and puts major shame on girls who are going to have sex so they feel like a slut if they do (and thus won't go and get good information because they're sure someone will brand them with a red S), someone has a severe problem with their reality outlook. Promote abstinence all the hell you want, but don't be so phenomenally stupid as to put that plan out without making sure those teenagers know about the options available to them if they decide against following the abstinence philosophy. That's what would help get those rates down and yes, that involves contraceptives like condoms.
At the bottom, though, where things stink significantly, Mister Hawkins claims to have found the seven greatest flaws of liberal thinking, with highlights such as "Liberals believe we can always talk things out", "Liberalism is an immoral philosophy", and "Liberals have little interest whether their programs actually work or not."
...uh-huh. While it would be easier to sling mud and say "Conservatives don't care about X, Y, or Zed, if they aren't the privileged economic or ethnic group in the country", let's at least try to figure things out. "Liberals believe we can change human nature/talk things out with our enemies" - Christians believe we can change human nature with God's help - it's written right into the doctrine! And it's the same nature he describes here - that people are selfish beings who don't give a damn about their fellows so long as they have theirs. As for talking things out, well, so did the defender of adulterers, but more so - Truman was a Democrat. And he used atomic weaponry. Barack Obama is a Democrat, and routinely drops bombs on enemies.
"Liberals don't respect our traditions." Wait, need to run the translator on that one. "Liberals think the traditions of the country that harm persons of different colors, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic classes and then tell them they deserve it are bad." Just because it's a tradition doesn't mean it's good. A lot of the things that are traditions in this country, like market capitalism, corporate personhood, and televangelical Christianity, do deliberate damage to the poor and enrich the already rich. Black people are traditionally more likely to end up in jail, or grow up in poor neighborhoods, or have to work twice as hard to get to the same level as white people. That's borne out of the tradition of slavery. Nobody should respect that.
"Liberals are fundamentally immoral / think being a liberal automatically makes you good". Translation, please? "Liberals behave in an 'anything goes' fashion, and see themselves as right, regardless of truth value". Wait, which side of the spectrum is coarsening the political debate through wild accusations that the President is not an American citizen? Which side routinely likens moderate political positions to those espoused by dictators and genocidal murderers? Which side has shown a fundamental willingness to ignore or deliberately disobey the laws of the land if they get in the way of their agenda? (Okay, both sides are guilty of this one. For noble and ignoble reasons.) Which side is currently agitating people to act against their better interests by raising spectres of nonexistent programs and effects of those programs? Which side's administrator said "You're either with us, or with the terrorists?" And you want to play the "immoral" card? Speck-plank problem and then some.
And then, the only critique that might actually function as one, assuming it had more than a speck of truth value to it - "Liberals trust government too much, and don't actually care whether their programs work or not". I would say that the strain of deregulation and Inherent Superiority of the Private Market (All Praise to Its Name) indicates far too much trust of said private sector, which has a demonstrable record of working against the people and being destructive to them. See argument against Sowell's column above. But, what he really means is "Liberals believe with the right people in charge, government works efficiently and quickly, and that's never going to be true." What an unpatriotic statement. Not to mention that it encourages people do nothing about trying to reform government, since it presupposes it will always be run inefficiently and poorly. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. If they're all corrupt, may as well vote in the one who will be corrupt in our favor.
As for not caring about whether a program works or not, if that were really and truly true, then the budget would be a mess - everything would be funded with no worries about accountability, deficits would be spent cavalierly, and there would have been absolutely no furor raised from the liberal side about accountability for banks that were spending taxpayer cash, for example. Or there would be no talk of trying to reform entitlement programs so they stay able to operate over years and years. Or there would be no real championing of "x million jobs saved or created" from the stimulus bill. If they really didn't care, then they wouldn't be trying to justify it to the people that vote for or against them, or the budget people who can decide to include their earmark or reject it. Seriously. Ill-thought out and mostly untrue generalizations intended to demonize an alternative philosophy make you, Mr. Hawkins, tonight's recipient of high-velocity pastry.
Last out for tonight, a columnist is perturbed about the prevalence of products for women to...modify their vaginal areas.
Out in the world today, a columnist for the Independent put himself through "ex-gay" therapy, with the idea of exploring what it is (and providing the rest of us with plenty more reasons why no government funding organization for health care should touch it with a ten-foot pole). As expected, there's a lot of non-science to the therapy, sounding more like the charlatan psychic than someone supposed to be accredited by the licensing board.
In domestic news, new target for the LGBT crowd - state senator Eichelberger of Pennsylvania and his state constitutional amendment for heterosexual-only marriage. This, despite a law already declaring this to be so, but foes want to write discrimination in permanently, just in case someone challenges it and a judge calls it what it is.
The Pants-On-Fire Bomber is talking, and the intelligence he's giving is fresh and useful. Huh. Doing things the right way, without going outside the judicial system, does work. Not only that, it's consistent with past policy, like the one used for the shoe bomber. It's not enough for some, who say, "Sure, he's talking now, but if we had waterboarded him, what better stuff would he have given us?" Can we please now get off the "Only Torture Works!" argument? (Of course not. All that has to happen is to have the goalposts move.) Or, perhaps, we'll shift over to the terror attack will be happening in the next few months! Panic! Be Afraid! tactic. Wasn't that supposed to be the hallmark of the last administration?
College still has its benefits, although not necessarily at the numbers promoted by institutions like the College Board. The tone of the article shifts from "college may not be worth the debt - think about it" to "college may not be worth it - think about it" and back again, it seems.
And adding on another dose of paranoia for those who need it, an article on the super-powerful Secretaries of State for various states, those meddlers in elections, those partisans with the power to decide great things, because they control what counts and what doesn't. Actually, the article is about what they see as a secret liberal plot to control those Secretaries and make them more favorable to liberals by loosening the laws on validation and voter registration, but I was trying to give them a shred of credibility first.
Last out, though, let the insane attack ads commence. My opponent is Frankenstein versus the demonic sheep! Round one, fight!
In technology, marvel at the highly efficient pneumatic tube messaging system of the Stanford Hospital complex, proving that sometimes old tech is better than new, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just expended $10 billion USD on vaccination programs worldwide, as well as the retraction of a study by a UK medical journal that purported to link the MMR vaccine to autism, which makes things happier for those of us who have to work in sectors where unvaccinated children are a problem, some of the implications of three-dimensional printing getting cheaper and cheaper, including the democratization of the production process, allowing someone with a design to crank out a widget and test it, refine it, and make it more available, or for that person who always wanted The Thing that could do exactly what they wanted it to to finally be able to create it using designs bought from others or created themselves, a large multi-touch screen that can be deployed anywhere to make any non-conductive surface into a multi-touch display, spray-on liquid glass, and an interview with an ARG designer, on why games are important and awesome and powerful.
Well, that and a school in New Zealand that went totally open source and slashed their server requirements by an extreme factor by doing so.
Welcome to opinions, where we peer into the dreamworld of what could have been an awesome State of the Union address, and check out some of responses to said speech, including one sensible doctor saying that Medicare for all is the better solution the President said he was open to hearing about.
The Professor points out the reprehensibility of saying a disaster is the best thing to happen to a school, especially when the "reform" starts with trying to cut costs instead of deciding to actually fund education as it should be. In that scenario, nothing can improve, and things can only get worse as the "public-sector spending must be cut" forces win their concessions and squeeze teachers and education budgets even more. Probably so they can then buy more war toys.
Mr. Fund considers the American populace to be the winners of Friday's Q&A session between Republicans and the President, despite whatever sound bites and photo-ops both sides will use to further their agendas (and Mr. Fund - the Republicans can still be characterized as the party of NO - it's their voting records and general perception of being a party that votes against everything, sometimes regardless of the suggestions they've put up and had put into the bill that drives this particular view.)
Mr. Boortz puffs his chest out in an attempt to prove he was right all along about Iran, using a quote from the Secretary of State about the disappointing lack of progress between the U.S. and Iran. For an example of something saner and more thought-out, Mr. Stephens presents his seven myths about Iran that the country needs to realize are myths fast, like "military strikes accomplish nothing", "we can live with a nuclear Iran", and "sanctions don't work".
We've got a bumper crop of candidates for the bottom of the dungheap tonight. Here's a preview. Sweetness and Light complains about the expense of using Air Force planes to fly the Speaker of the House around. Just her? No mention of anyone else who might give perspective on whether or not the Speaker is a heavy or light user? Or, for that matter, whether the Speaker's Office repays the Air Force for the expenses? Nope, instead they'd rather paint the Speaker as a party hound who love to abuse her ability to travel by military aircraft.
On the matter of the budget, Mr. DeHaven believes with this budget, Mr. Obama loses whatever cover he had to blame the previous administrator for deficit and debt, The WSJ characterizes the budget as a "spend-while-you-can" document that will result in inevitable tax hikes, some of which are highlighted in the article. And still unfunny comedian David Limbaugh caps the last of the trifecta by calling the Preisdent a liar about his figures and about who's to blame for a large part of the deficit.
And thus, the spiral down into the deepest parts of crap I have seen today - The bronze to Mr. Sowell, for his argument against universal health coverage and the minimum wage: TINSTAAFL. Those costs don't go away, he's right, but the argument that if the Free Market (all praise to its name) wanted to insure people and thought it was a good business idea, they would have already done so, and that the Free Market (all praise to its name) should determine what a fair wage for a job is are wrong. In the matter of universal coverage, insurance companies making business decisions will be willing to let people get sick and die because the people who need them most generate the least profit for them. This is empirically so, and one does not need to throw the dart that many times to find examples. On the other, we had a period of time where companies and employers set the wage they would give for their jobs, and the great masses that were working slaved at long hours for not enough pay to keep themselves fed - the existence of labor unions came about because employers were shortchanging their workers and living well while the workers starved or were replaced for arbitrary and capricious reasons. We don't want to go back to those times, Mr. Sowell, no matter how much you think they would be good.
Moving down the ladder, where the light is dimming, Ms. Hagelin would have you believe the latest report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute about increased teen pregnancy is all hype, and has nothing to do at all with the increased use and teaching of abstinence education. This because, apparently, the rise in teen pregnancy is mostly the 18-19 year olds, who are going off to college, that zone where abstinence education stops and "free-sex" ideas take hold. (As comparison, she offers that the pregnancy rate for 14-and-under is going down. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here.) For her, this means that abstinence education should continue through college to keep our children pure and to insist to them that they are capable of "greater things" than the "self-centered lifestyle" of the 60s. What it should be doing is setting off alarm bells. "Huh, these children are getting abstinence education while under their parents' roofs, and then, when they go out into the world for university, when immediate supervision and parental retribution is removed, they're getting pregnant. Maybe because they're having sex and their abstinence-only education hasn't told them about the ways to have safer sex?" Or, more bluntly, Abstinence Doesn't Work, and we have the data here to back that contention up. For someone who says that they want girls to be free of STDs and the fear of pregnancy, wants to encourage self-discipline and maturity, yet endorses a policy that has no backup plan other than the expectation that people whose brains are still developing will be able to act in a mature manner, using those fears she wants to get rid of to try and enforce that discipline, and puts major shame on girls who are going to have sex so they feel like a slut if they do (and thus won't go and get good information because they're sure someone will brand them with a red S), someone has a severe problem with their reality outlook. Promote abstinence all the hell you want, but don't be so phenomenally stupid as to put that plan out without making sure those teenagers know about the options available to them if they decide against following the abstinence philosophy. That's what would help get those rates down and yes, that involves contraceptives like condoms.
At the bottom, though, where things stink significantly, Mister Hawkins claims to have found the seven greatest flaws of liberal thinking, with highlights such as "Liberals believe we can always talk things out", "Liberalism is an immoral philosophy", and "Liberals have little interest whether their programs actually work or not."
...uh-huh. While it would be easier to sling mud and say "Conservatives don't care about X, Y, or Zed, if they aren't the privileged economic or ethnic group in the country", let's at least try to figure things out. "Liberals believe we can change human nature/talk things out with our enemies" - Christians believe we can change human nature with God's help - it's written right into the doctrine! And it's the same nature he describes here - that people are selfish beings who don't give a damn about their fellows so long as they have theirs. As for talking things out, well, so did the defender of adulterers, but more so - Truman was a Democrat. And he used atomic weaponry. Barack Obama is a Democrat, and routinely drops bombs on enemies.
"Liberals don't respect our traditions." Wait, need to run the translator on that one. "Liberals think the traditions of the country that harm persons of different colors, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic classes and then tell them they deserve it are bad." Just because it's a tradition doesn't mean it's good. A lot of the things that are traditions in this country, like market capitalism, corporate personhood, and televangelical Christianity, do deliberate damage to the poor and enrich the already rich. Black people are traditionally more likely to end up in jail, or grow up in poor neighborhoods, or have to work twice as hard to get to the same level as white people. That's borne out of the tradition of slavery. Nobody should respect that.
"Liberals are fundamentally immoral / think being a liberal automatically makes you good". Translation, please? "Liberals behave in an 'anything goes' fashion, and see themselves as right, regardless of truth value". Wait, which side of the spectrum is coarsening the political debate through wild accusations that the President is not an American citizen? Which side routinely likens moderate political positions to those espoused by dictators and genocidal murderers? Which side has shown a fundamental willingness to ignore or deliberately disobey the laws of the land if they get in the way of their agenda? (Okay, both sides are guilty of this one. For noble and ignoble reasons.) Which side is currently agitating people to act against their better interests by raising spectres of nonexistent programs and effects of those programs? Which side's administrator said "You're either with us, or with the terrorists?" And you want to play the "immoral" card? Speck-plank problem and then some.
And then, the only critique that might actually function as one, assuming it had more than a speck of truth value to it - "Liberals trust government too much, and don't actually care whether their programs work or not". I would say that the strain of deregulation and Inherent Superiority of the Private Market (All Praise to Its Name) indicates far too much trust of said private sector, which has a demonstrable record of working against the people and being destructive to them. See argument against Sowell's column above. But, what he really means is "Liberals believe with the right people in charge, government works efficiently and quickly, and that's never going to be true." What an unpatriotic statement. Not to mention that it encourages people do nothing about trying to reform government, since it presupposes it will always be run inefficiently and poorly. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. If they're all corrupt, may as well vote in the one who will be corrupt in our favor.
As for not caring about whether a program works or not, if that were really and truly true, then the budget would be a mess - everything would be funded with no worries about accountability, deficits would be spent cavalierly, and there would have been absolutely no furor raised from the liberal side about accountability for banks that were spending taxpayer cash, for example. Or there would be no talk of trying to reform entitlement programs so they stay able to operate over years and years. Or there would be no real championing of "x million jobs saved or created" from the stimulus bill. If they really didn't care, then they wouldn't be trying to justify it to the people that vote for or against them, or the budget people who can decide to include their earmark or reject it. Seriously. Ill-thought out and mostly untrue generalizations intended to demonize an alternative philosophy make you, Mr. Hawkins, tonight's recipient of high-velocity pastry.
Last out for tonight, a columnist is perturbed about the prevalence of products for women to...modify their vaginal areas.
