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Hello to all of you out there with amorous intentions toward someone! Be aware that the exciting sexual chemistry of new relationships apparently lasts two years and then other chemicals take over, so that people start joking about how you're an "old married couple" or so if you've been dating for a while. It's chemicals!
For those who have skills and want to learn other skills, a concept like OurGoods' Trade School may be an excellent solution - those who have skills will teach others, and those who want to learn skills will take the classes, then hopefully turn around and teach others about their skills. It would be a very effective way of transmitting essentials in case of disaster or prohibitively expensive schooling. On the objects side of the "in case of disaster or prolonged recession", ClubOrlov describes some products that would be useful to the unemployed, the off the grid, and the person attempting to have as little tethering to the modern world and thus reduce their expenses. Why do we highlight these? Because there's a big chunk of people that are probably going to stay unemployed for a long time, even as the economy supposedly recovers. And their social safety net is showing signs of the strain.
a document claiming to be a leaked chapter of the negotiating-in-secret-to-screw-you-over ACTA treaty proves that it's not as bad as we thought, it's worse. A "three-strikes" mechanism, pushing liability on third parties to police things if they "know" copyright infringement is taking place (which could impact your library, your copy shop, and Apple, for example, because they sell devices that people can infringe with), and having ISPs terminate customer accounts of those accused (not proven, but accused) of infringement. More on the media cabal's bid to make it illegal for you to do anything at all involving media at IDG and more analysis of why this is bad for the consumer from Michael Geist.
The anatomy of a failed book challenge, from overzealous parent that believes the world should be sanitized for their children to school board that bemusedly tells her to get bent, although more politely than that, of course. "Age-appropriate" is a code word, people, for "what I approve of for your children." And worse, it's in a middle school, with multiple grade levels. "Age-appropriate" in that context means different things depending on the grade, so to do their jobs, they have to have stuff you would find objectionable for earlier ages. This is why we need librarians and advocates for the right to read, because otherwise someone with an agenda will be able to put one over on a clueless board, or worse, find themselves a sympathetic one to accomplish their end.
Finally, for those that do have some cash lying around, someone may have bought the International Banana Museum. We hope so. Perhaps people who are also interested in finding a plush monkey-shaped deity to inhabit the shrine to bananas? (Irreverence, it's not just for monotheists...)
Internationally, trouble for Iraqi elections as the largest nonsectarian Sunni party drops out after alleging interference from Iran after a mostly Shiite panel blacklisted a significant number of candidates.
The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence has been blacking out opinions of the recording agents on the paranormal and UFO sightings they were recording. So that's what some of those redactions are - covering one's arse against embarrassment because the people taking the information don't believe it and think the givers of the information are crackpots.
In the domestic sphere, some information for our delaying and dragging-their-feet Congresscritters: shifting from no homosexuals to openly serving homosexuals swiftly does not cause problems, according to a study done of foreign militaries that did it. There is, of course, the danger that the reactionaries in the U.S. military will make the transition bumpier, but in some ways, I think that has to do with the way that homosexuality has been treated in the country for the most part.
The federal government continues to conduct drug raids on persons who grow marijuana in states where state law permits it to be grown, distributed, and possessed, despite promises to respect state laws in that manner.
President Obama released a proposed health care overhaul plan, lacking a public option, in anticipation of his summit with the opposition this week. Ms. Maddow rightly noted in her tweet about the item that the President's plan is 11 pages, not the volume of paper that Politico uses as one of the pictures to accompany their article.
The residents of Tracy, California are stuck with an interesting dilemna - pay $48 now to be able to call 911 as much as needed during the year, or opt-out and pay $300 for each call made during that year. That's one way, we suppose, of getting people to pay their taxes, but I'll be fragged if it's a good way.
Staying in California, a mountain has been finally renamed from "Negrohead" to Ballard Mountain, after the explorer that discovered it. The original name for the mountain was the offensive n-word in place of Negro.
Last out, Mr. Friedman, writing for Mr. Flynt's site, wonders why nobody is paying attention to Ms. Edmonds and her insistence there are moles, spies, and foreign agents in several key spots in United States infrastructure.
In technology, Google now has an energy division and is authorized to buy and sell energy at market rates, meaning that if Google so chooses, they can blanket the Googleplex in solar power and sell any excess they generate back to the grid.
Beyond that, an experiment in crowdsourcing journalism that no official publication would buy to print - the jury's still out on whether it worked, more knowledge about how the brain operated on the very edge of chaos, occasionally taking a plunge into the waters, organic materials discovered in rocks that fell to Terra, suggesting that organic life may have evolved from some amount of space stuff that found conditions it liked, DARPA's attempts to build a translator that can listen to anyone speaking and identify what they are saying, even in noisy environments, the first commercially available three dimensional bio-printer, a poll suggesting that most people believe the Internet will help to make us smarter in the coming years, and perhaps one reason why piracy of movies is a prefered way.
Welcome to opinions, where a letter from the rich about the excellence of the working caste in keeping the rich where they are might have more populist play than before. (But only if they choose to ignore the clear socialist overtones.) To add pictures to those words, have lots of graphics about how the rich have screwed the rest, with some text in between them. And then, for the dreamers, what might have been had the United States continued to tinker plicy toward keeping manufacturing strong instead of keeping Wall Street strong.
Mr. Cline leads with the declaration that if a federal agency like Immigration and Customs Enforcement can make people disappear without having to document them, hold them indefinitely without charging them, and not have to admit that they have them to anyone else, the country is certainly not anywhere near a democracy. And worse, it hangs out there a very bad possibility that a sinmilar system could be used against people for whom ICE has no truck with, but DHS does. When combined with the justifications given to extralegal actions, and the lack of an immediate negation of that reasoning and prosecution of those that acted on it, the grey area just got a lot scarier.
Ms. Blaine says that Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into an IRS building, should be treated as a disillusioned lefty, not a prime candidate for the Tea Bagger crowd. She sees the manifesto as a Marxist disillusioned with the idea that government can cure all ills, instead of the anti-government, anti-capitalism, anti-conservative Tea Party movement. Yeah, I can see where the two might be confused. Truth be told, this is basically two groups playing hot potato with Mr. Stack in the court of public opinion and waiting to see who has it when the buzzer goes off. Might be better to look at his writings and actions and decide if there isn't something wrong with the system that he was driven to this action.
Ms. Bandes thinks that CPAC is a question of potential, and that once the conservative movement decides on the way it wants to go about its business, it will make success or failure. She's right - conservatism has several options to put out in front - choosing wisely would help them. Choosing poorly would continue the political exile. Ms. Noonan suggests the way forward is for conservatives to start doing things that show they're serious about spending, but to do those things as simply as possible, fairly, and without shenangians or protections for special interests, so that the average American can understand how they're going about it, and then might trust them (or the Dems, depending on who does it better. Maybe even bipartisan trust.) with bigger and more complex things to do better.
On the other side of the spectrum, with spite, bile, and vituperance to spare, Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, declaring the proposed health care summit to be a PR trap so that the President can resurrect his health care plan and paint the opposition as being obstructionists. (When the shoe fits...) Their advice to Republicans - to say no and that the matter is closed because the populace elected Scott Brown, that Democrats shut them out of the process entirely, and that they're not going to be puppets for his theater - is, well, stupid. If they don't come to the table, the Republicans are sure to be painted as obstructionists, the party of NO, and having no ideas. And considering how much they invoke The Tarantino (I think the proper grammatical usage of this, though, would be "invoking a Tarantino, but details, details...), it's kind of hard not to see them in that light. At least by going, the Republicans can push back at the President and say "He won't listen to our great ideas", rather than ceding the ground entirely that they are the party of nothing and NO. They do run the risk, however, of being slammed harder into the ground if after coming to the table, they then turn around and oppose whatever comes out of it, because then they can be rightly accused of not supporting their own ideas in their quest to be the party of NO.
Mr. Fund suggests the Democrats are running scared of their electoral chances, and thus any attempts at pushing through any liberal or potentially controversial legislations will die horribly. Mr. Krauthammer, instead, blames it all on President Obama and the Democrats for misreading the country and trying to impose a liberal plan on a conservative country, for whcih the Republicans and the popular will asserted themselves in stopping him, just like the system should. With no help at all from vested corporate interests or politicians looking to make themselves look good to the people they wanted to court for re-election. Not at all. Explain, then, Mr. Krauthammer, why the issues in the plan consistenly poll well everywhere, but when taken together as a package, a strange metanarrative about "government control" appears. Something is obviously thwarting the popular will. I wonder what it is?
Because we haven't had one in a while, It's time to play for high-velocity pastry. Ms. Saunders almost makes the running with her piece on how ideologues have made a boondoggle for climate change people, because the recent material unravels their claims and air of scientific infallibility. *sigh* It's not "snowing refutes global warming", which is base stupidity, it's "since this piece and this piece have been shown to be suspect, the whole theory is wrong!", which is slightly higher-order stupidity. One report and its data block versus all the other reports and their data blocks does not a change in opinion make. For the record, climate change is also very much about variance and extremes of climate. Warm winter last year leading into snow-pocalpyse this year? That's climate change. It's not hypocrisy to be saying "really warm winters are bad" and "really cold winters are bad", because they both are bad. Stability good, variance bad. Back to school for you.
And speaking of schooling, our bronze medal entrant awaits. Mr. Stossel, so nice to see you and your insistence that public schools compete with private schools, without even the barest of nods anywhere to the differences of their situations, other than, of course, your statistic about the amounts of money we spend on public schools that doesn't seem to work, as opposed to the shiny private schools that can do better for apparent fractions of the spending. Here's some questions for you, then. What's the class size of your average private school clasroom? Average enrollment? How much in vouchers or subsisidies are needed to put the average kid in the area into a private school? Does the school have to fear their funding will be cut if their students don't test well? Can the school discriminate on who it wants to accept, or expel and make it stick? Does the school have to contend for funding with other government departments and fight off bureaucrats who think education can be cut in favor of some other program? Hell, does the school have a librarian? An art program? Music? Theater? Private schools have so many more advantages over public schools, so of course they're going to look better on tests and education. Once you start comparing apples to apples, Mr. Stossel, I think you'll see most of the arguments and comparisons you make must be qualified or discarded entirely because they can't be compared. Unless, of course, you want all schooling to be private so you can create an uneducated underclass that will only ever have minimum-wage work and can be exploited without fear that they will rebel or sue.
Hitting the runner-up position is Mr. W. Williams, complaining about the additional questions on the Census form, because the Census is only supposed to be about counting people to draw districts with and any other demographic data collected is none of the government's business. Constitutionally speaking, he's on reasonable ground - the census described by law is only for that purpose. However, the bait and switch in his column is not about the census, but about the American Community Survey, a thing that used to be sent during the censuses and is now used in the off-years, as it were, to try and keep the picture of America current. Going back to the Article I argument, though, Mr. Williams - the Constitution gives the Congress the power to take the count in the manner of their choosing - which means they could totally make a law saying that demographic data has to be provided as part of the counting. And as for that "intrusion" into your life, the government wants to, y'know, spend money in a manner that benefits its citizens. Which might include information or planning about people's sex lives and marriage fidelity as a matter of public health. Without data to help them, it would be a pretty blind shoot. Well-monitored and targeted spending might even make for later tax breaks. So there are a lot of reasons to permit this "intrusion", too, instead of fighting against it (and possibly against the chance that your area gets improved by government spending.)
But because you still can't beat real action, regardless of how many columns you pen, tonight's Worst People In The World are Bank of America, foreclosing on a house that had been bought with cash, liquidating and discarding the property within, all because they chose to ignore all the notices and warnings sent to them that they had the wrong address in their file. Repeatedly they were informed that they had the wrong address on file, they said they would fix it, and nothing happened. They put lockboxes on teh house, removed the things inside, and turned off the water and electricity - the pipes burst from the cold temperatures, too, to add more insult to injury. Apparently, they're either too stupid to fix a problem, too certain that they're right, or beset by the bureaucratic plague. In all cases, Worst Persons In The World (and there should be a lot of award monies and sackings...)
Last for tonight, cats in yoga postures, recalling a comment from a particular six year-old about how cats should be classified as liquids, and pictures of Carnival.
For those who have skills and want to learn other skills, a concept like OurGoods' Trade School may be an excellent solution - those who have skills will teach others, and those who want to learn skills will take the classes, then hopefully turn around and teach others about their skills. It would be a very effective way of transmitting essentials in case of disaster or prohibitively expensive schooling. On the objects side of the "in case of disaster or prolonged recession", ClubOrlov describes some products that would be useful to the unemployed, the off the grid, and the person attempting to have as little tethering to the modern world and thus reduce their expenses. Why do we highlight these? Because there's a big chunk of people that are probably going to stay unemployed for a long time, even as the economy supposedly recovers. And their social safety net is showing signs of the strain.
a document claiming to be a leaked chapter of the negotiating-in-secret-to-screw-you-over ACTA treaty proves that it's not as bad as we thought, it's worse. A "three-strikes" mechanism, pushing liability on third parties to police things if they "know" copyright infringement is taking place (which could impact your library, your copy shop, and Apple, for example, because they sell devices that people can infringe with), and having ISPs terminate customer accounts of those accused (not proven, but accused) of infringement. More on the media cabal's bid to make it illegal for you to do anything at all involving media at IDG and more analysis of why this is bad for the consumer from Michael Geist.
The anatomy of a failed book challenge, from overzealous parent that believes the world should be sanitized for their children to school board that bemusedly tells her to get bent, although more politely than that, of course. "Age-appropriate" is a code word, people, for "what I approve of for your children." And worse, it's in a middle school, with multiple grade levels. "Age-appropriate" in that context means different things depending on the grade, so to do their jobs, they have to have stuff you would find objectionable for earlier ages. This is why we need librarians and advocates for the right to read, because otherwise someone with an agenda will be able to put one over on a clueless board, or worse, find themselves a sympathetic one to accomplish their end.
Finally, for those that do have some cash lying around, someone may have bought the International Banana Museum. We hope so. Perhaps people who are also interested in finding a plush monkey-shaped deity to inhabit the shrine to bananas? (Irreverence, it's not just for monotheists...)
Internationally, trouble for Iraqi elections as the largest nonsectarian Sunni party drops out after alleging interference from Iran after a mostly Shiite panel blacklisted a significant number of candidates.
The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence has been blacking out opinions of the recording agents on the paranormal and UFO sightings they were recording. So that's what some of those redactions are - covering one's arse against embarrassment because the people taking the information don't believe it and think the givers of the information are crackpots.
In the domestic sphere, some information for our delaying and dragging-their-feet Congresscritters: shifting from no homosexuals to openly serving homosexuals swiftly does not cause problems, according to a study done of foreign militaries that did it. There is, of course, the danger that the reactionaries in the U.S. military will make the transition bumpier, but in some ways, I think that has to do with the way that homosexuality has been treated in the country for the most part.
The federal government continues to conduct drug raids on persons who grow marijuana in states where state law permits it to be grown, distributed, and possessed, despite promises to respect state laws in that manner.
President Obama released a proposed health care overhaul plan, lacking a public option, in anticipation of his summit with the opposition this week. Ms. Maddow rightly noted in her tweet about the item that the President's plan is 11 pages, not the volume of paper that Politico uses as one of the pictures to accompany their article.
The residents of Tracy, California are stuck with an interesting dilemna - pay $48 now to be able to call 911 as much as needed during the year, or opt-out and pay $300 for each call made during that year. That's one way, we suppose, of getting people to pay their taxes, but I'll be fragged if it's a good way.
Staying in California, a mountain has been finally renamed from "Negrohead" to Ballard Mountain, after the explorer that discovered it. The original name for the mountain was the offensive n-word in place of Negro.
Last out, Mr. Friedman, writing for Mr. Flynt's site, wonders why nobody is paying attention to Ms. Edmonds and her insistence there are moles, spies, and foreign agents in several key spots in United States infrastructure.
In technology, Google now has an energy division and is authorized to buy and sell energy at market rates, meaning that if Google so chooses, they can blanket the Googleplex in solar power and sell any excess they generate back to the grid.
Beyond that, an experiment in crowdsourcing journalism that no official publication would buy to print - the jury's still out on whether it worked, more knowledge about how the brain operated on the very edge of chaos, occasionally taking a plunge into the waters, organic materials discovered in rocks that fell to Terra, suggesting that organic life may have evolved from some amount of space stuff that found conditions it liked, DARPA's attempts to build a translator that can listen to anyone speaking and identify what they are saying, even in noisy environments, the first commercially available three dimensional bio-printer, a poll suggesting that most people believe the Internet will help to make us smarter in the coming years, and perhaps one reason why piracy of movies is a prefered way.
Welcome to opinions, where a letter from the rich about the excellence of the working caste in keeping the rich where they are might have more populist play than before. (But only if they choose to ignore the clear socialist overtones.) To add pictures to those words, have lots of graphics about how the rich have screwed the rest, with some text in between them. And then, for the dreamers, what might have been had the United States continued to tinker plicy toward keeping manufacturing strong instead of keeping Wall Street strong.
Mr. Cline leads with the declaration that if a federal agency like Immigration and Customs Enforcement can make people disappear without having to document them, hold them indefinitely without charging them, and not have to admit that they have them to anyone else, the country is certainly not anywhere near a democracy. And worse, it hangs out there a very bad possibility that a sinmilar system could be used against people for whom ICE has no truck with, but DHS does. When combined with the justifications given to extralegal actions, and the lack of an immediate negation of that reasoning and prosecution of those that acted on it, the grey area just got a lot scarier.
Ms. Blaine says that Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into an IRS building, should be treated as a disillusioned lefty, not a prime candidate for the Tea Bagger crowd. She sees the manifesto as a Marxist disillusioned with the idea that government can cure all ills, instead of the anti-government, anti-capitalism, anti-conservative Tea Party movement. Yeah, I can see where the two might be confused. Truth be told, this is basically two groups playing hot potato with Mr. Stack in the court of public opinion and waiting to see who has it when the buzzer goes off. Might be better to look at his writings and actions and decide if there isn't something wrong with the system that he was driven to this action.
Ms. Bandes thinks that CPAC is a question of potential, and that once the conservative movement decides on the way it wants to go about its business, it will make success or failure. She's right - conservatism has several options to put out in front - choosing wisely would help them. Choosing poorly would continue the political exile. Ms. Noonan suggests the way forward is for conservatives to start doing things that show they're serious about spending, but to do those things as simply as possible, fairly, and without shenangians or protections for special interests, so that the average American can understand how they're going about it, and then might trust them (or the Dems, depending on who does it better. Maybe even bipartisan trust.) with bigger and more complex things to do better.
On the other side of the spectrum, with spite, bile, and vituperance to spare, Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, declaring the proposed health care summit to be a PR trap so that the President can resurrect his health care plan and paint the opposition as being obstructionists. (When the shoe fits...) Their advice to Republicans - to say no and that the matter is closed because the populace elected Scott Brown, that Democrats shut them out of the process entirely, and that they're not going to be puppets for his theater - is, well, stupid. If they don't come to the table, the Republicans are sure to be painted as obstructionists, the party of NO, and having no ideas. And considering how much they invoke The Tarantino (I think the proper grammatical usage of this, though, would be "invoking a Tarantino, but details, details...), it's kind of hard not to see them in that light. At least by going, the Republicans can push back at the President and say "He won't listen to our great ideas", rather than ceding the ground entirely that they are the party of nothing and NO. They do run the risk, however, of being slammed harder into the ground if after coming to the table, they then turn around and oppose whatever comes out of it, because then they can be rightly accused of not supporting their own ideas in their quest to be the party of NO.
Mr. Fund suggests the Democrats are running scared of their electoral chances, and thus any attempts at pushing through any liberal or potentially controversial legislations will die horribly. Mr. Krauthammer, instead, blames it all on President Obama and the Democrats for misreading the country and trying to impose a liberal plan on a conservative country, for whcih the Republicans and the popular will asserted themselves in stopping him, just like the system should. With no help at all from vested corporate interests or politicians looking to make themselves look good to the people they wanted to court for re-election. Not at all. Explain, then, Mr. Krauthammer, why the issues in the plan consistenly poll well everywhere, but when taken together as a package, a strange metanarrative about "government control" appears. Something is obviously thwarting the popular will. I wonder what it is?
Because we haven't had one in a while, It's time to play for high-velocity pastry. Ms. Saunders almost makes the running with her piece on how ideologues have made a boondoggle for climate change people, because the recent material unravels their claims and air of scientific infallibility. *sigh* It's not "snowing refutes global warming", which is base stupidity, it's "since this piece and this piece have been shown to be suspect, the whole theory is wrong!", which is slightly higher-order stupidity. One report and its data block versus all the other reports and their data blocks does not a change in opinion make. For the record, climate change is also very much about variance and extremes of climate. Warm winter last year leading into snow-pocalpyse this year? That's climate change. It's not hypocrisy to be saying "really warm winters are bad" and "really cold winters are bad", because they both are bad. Stability good, variance bad. Back to school for you.
And speaking of schooling, our bronze medal entrant awaits. Mr. Stossel, so nice to see you and your insistence that public schools compete with private schools, without even the barest of nods anywhere to the differences of their situations, other than, of course, your statistic about the amounts of money we spend on public schools that doesn't seem to work, as opposed to the shiny private schools that can do better for apparent fractions of the spending. Here's some questions for you, then. What's the class size of your average private school clasroom? Average enrollment? How much in vouchers or subsisidies are needed to put the average kid in the area into a private school? Does the school have to fear their funding will be cut if their students don't test well? Can the school discriminate on who it wants to accept, or expel and make it stick? Does the school have to contend for funding with other government departments and fight off bureaucrats who think education can be cut in favor of some other program? Hell, does the school have a librarian? An art program? Music? Theater? Private schools have so many more advantages over public schools, so of course they're going to look better on tests and education. Once you start comparing apples to apples, Mr. Stossel, I think you'll see most of the arguments and comparisons you make must be qualified or discarded entirely because they can't be compared. Unless, of course, you want all schooling to be private so you can create an uneducated underclass that will only ever have minimum-wage work and can be exploited without fear that they will rebel or sue.
Hitting the runner-up position is Mr. W. Williams, complaining about the additional questions on the Census form, because the Census is only supposed to be about counting people to draw districts with and any other demographic data collected is none of the government's business. Constitutionally speaking, he's on reasonable ground - the census described by law is only for that purpose. However, the bait and switch in his column is not about the census, but about the American Community Survey, a thing that used to be sent during the censuses and is now used in the off-years, as it were, to try and keep the picture of America current. Going back to the Article I argument, though, Mr. Williams - the Constitution gives the Congress the power to take the count in the manner of their choosing - which means they could totally make a law saying that demographic data has to be provided as part of the counting. And as for that "intrusion" into your life, the government wants to, y'know, spend money in a manner that benefits its citizens. Which might include information or planning about people's sex lives and marriage fidelity as a matter of public health. Without data to help them, it would be a pretty blind shoot. Well-monitored and targeted spending might even make for later tax breaks. So there are a lot of reasons to permit this "intrusion", too, instead of fighting against it (and possibly against the chance that your area gets improved by government spending.)
But because you still can't beat real action, regardless of how many columns you pen, tonight's Worst People In The World are Bank of America, foreclosing on a house that had been bought with cash, liquidating and discarding the property within, all because they chose to ignore all the notices and warnings sent to them that they had the wrong address in their file. Repeatedly they were informed that they had the wrong address on file, they said they would fix it, and nothing happened. They put lockboxes on teh house, removed the things inside, and turned off the water and electricity - the pipes burst from the cold temperatures, too, to add more insult to injury. Apparently, they're either too stupid to fix a problem, too certain that they're right, or beset by the bureaucratic plague. In all cases, Worst Persons In The World (and there should be a lot of award monies and sackings...)
Last for tonight, cats in yoga postures, recalling a comment from a particular six year-old about how cats should be classified as liquids, and pictures of Carnival.
