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Beware, fooles - 2 April 2010
Apr. 3rd, 2010 11:15 amAs is usual for any post past the day of 1 April, we must disclaim that there’s a high probability at least one of the items in our segment today turns out to be a prank or a joke. We have attempted to screen for accuracy as best we can, but, as usual, we can make no guarantees. If you know something is a fake, let us know so we can remove it. That said, the Pennsylvania Lottery managed to make 7-7-7-7 the winning numbers in the Big 4 drawing on March 31. Thus, you can see the difficulty of telling fact from fiction - since it’s April 2, one hopes that all the pranks have been scrubbed, but that one would have been right at home. Now go enjoy your chocolate rabbits.
The Dead Pool claimed Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, designer of the Altair 8800, the first affordable home computer, at 68 years of age and Jaime Escalante, subject of the movie "Stand And Deliver" about his trials with getting inner-city kids to pass the AP exams in calculus, at 79 years. We wonder what they would think of a game of Quake II running in a browser.
Greetings, fans of certain long-running BBC science fiction serial! Coincidentally timing with the upcoming release of the first episode of the sixth series of the rebooted Doctor Who, we are exposed to time-space synaesthetes, colloquially dubbed "Time Lords" because they see time and space in a similar manner to The Doctor. Timey-Wimey ball jokes may commence...now. In our case, we’ll just point out that the TARDIS is not the only time machine available, and leave it at that.
Much more seriously, Scot Roeder, the man accused of killing Dr. George Tiller, went on a rant condemning abortion the United States for allowing it to be legal, and against the judge for not allowing him the defense he wanted to present, pictures of abortions, before he was sentenced to the remainder of his natural life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 50 years time. Mr. Roeder also believed the judge would acquit him if he followed “the higher power of God”.
Salon points out a case possibly unintended consequences - a domestic abuse ad aimed at getting men to report abuse with a picture of a man, the abuse victim, without his genitalia. The idea was intended that societal ideas abuse can make men feel less manly, but it also carries harmonic tones of the idea of “no penis, no power”, which women have been suffering from, in and out of abuse, and not necessarily sexual abuse, over time. Megan Kelley Hall reminds us that required schooling is still hell, and these days, the bullies are both not limited by physical proximity and have societal support for what they do. Phoebe Price is someone who shouldn’t have taken her own life. But given what she and other suicidal teens are likely facing at the time they make the decision, it gets harder every day for even the most jaded apologist to blame the victim.
And finally, another reminder that once poor, it is viciously difficult to get out of being poor. This time, it comes from banks and credit card companies that resort to suit and garnishment of wages of debtors who fall behind, sometimes with the persons being sued not receiving their notice, other times where they’re confused and don’t show up, allowing the creditor to get summary judgment, sometimes where those few who do intend to fight get intercepted by lawyers pressuring them to settle instead of fight, and almost all of them resulting in garnishment of wages on a debt that now has obscene interest rates (the kind you pay on your credit cards), court costs and other fees tacked on to it - seemingly designed in such a way that the debtor can never pay it off, because their garnishments are just enough to cover the interest. Did we mention that garnishment can be up to 25 percent of someone’s paycheck, so for low-income people, it’s basically a death knell? And that thanks to new laws making it harder and more expensive to declare bankruptcy, those low income people may not be able to save enough to file all the appropriate stuff. And, possibly the worst of the lot, most of those debts, if contested, would be thrown out in court, because the banks and credit card companies already sold that debt to a collector. (Which is a completely different rant.) And people wonder why there is so much animosity against creditors and banks - they certainly seem to have the science of extracting as much money from their customers as they can get away with.
Inside the world today, despite the pomp o fthe newsmedia making Yemen sound like a terrorist haven, if you ask the locals, they say al-Qaeda has realtively little power, influence, or presence in the country. Yemen may then be using the attention to try and draw in more aid, because the country has a lot of poor and a lot of internal problems that would make it difficult for prosperity.
In Africa, pirates picked the wrong target to raid - the United States naval warship they targeted captured five of them and sank their attacking boat. That’s one fast way of weeding out the stupid.
And on the new potential agreeement for nuclear weapons reduction, The Times Online indicates that Mr. Obama's position is a rejection of his predecessor's willingness to keep high levels of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and to research newer varieties of the weapons.
Domestically, more predictions ahoy, these ones suggesting that the health care bill just passed will hurt efforts to recover the economy, because of new costs imposed upon employers and the public in the short term, and the inevitable increase in costs for new entitlements over the long term.
President Obama indicated he would open up some areas off the coasts of the United States for companies to drill for oil, but the measure itself seems unlikely to garner support from anyone - the left feels betrayed, the right feels it’s not enough. The CW is that even though it may have been offered as an olive branch to Republicans to get them on board with climate change legislation, it’s not going to go anywhere.
The Washington Times wants to make a bigger deal out of the fact that the nominee to a top Army lawyer post is still receiving compensation from the New York Times Co, despite the additional fact that the nominee has already agreed to recusal on issues involving his former employer.
According to recent polling, as the health care fight dragged on, support for the Democrats continued to go down. Now that the proposal has passsed, that approval and support is returning. We really are results-oriented people, aren’t we? The less we feel someone can do anything, the less likely we are to supprot their bids for election and re-election. And, as usual, everyone tries to predict the allegiance of the independents.
Some of the expensive hipster food marketed at higher prices isn't. Actually, not just isn't, but five to seven percent of the time isn't. Technology makes it easier to find some fraud, but there are always people out to make a quick buck that aren’t trying to poison you with bacteria.
Last before technology, the Dumb Criminals file strikes with a vengeance - a man fleeing police climbed a fence to get away...only to find that he had climbed into a correctional facility for women. Suffice to say, he was captured fairly soon after that.
In technology, nanoparticles with correct genes help to keep and restore sight in mice, with the researchers hoping that their work will extend to Humes, and pointing out that in a lot of cases, good genetics is dominant. Elsewhere, an experiment pointing out just what we can brute-force experiment these days, hacking the neural pathway to allow control of limbs paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, and analyzing how robots draw to help us learn about how people draw.
That, and the Spirit Mars rover, originally intended for a three-month tour but that has been working on missions for six years past that point, has probably entered hibernation for the winter. I hope that NASA engineers are studying how they built Spirit, because they clearly made a masterwork on that one. If it weren’t for Spirit being dug into soft sand and thus immobile (for the moment), it might still be out exploring lots.
And in opinions, Mr. Shelby Steele returns to the "narcissist President" argument by suggesting that President Obama feels he has to do big things because he's a historic figure, a black president, and thus Destined for something.
For something a bit less focused on the man and more on the policy, Mr. Devine sanely says that good foreign policy on war and military strength cannot be ideologically black and white, and that being “tough” is not a good criterion, nor should it be the sole criterion, for anyone to judge a President by. Which segues nicely into The American Society For the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Prosperity insisting that peace can only be achieved by making sure that we are adequately prepared for war, including keeping nuclear weapons, because the world has not yet returned to appropriate ethical principles that would render the need for weapons and war unnecessary. And had they stopped there, they might have stayed above the fringe, and made a good argument for maintaining some small amount of nuclear weapons as a deterrent, but instead, because they are a religious organization, the then take the plunge and insist that the only situation where the world will have no need of nuclear weapons is it the entire world converts to the moral and religious system they espouse. It’s not as bad as the people who plot violence based on cracked-out visions and versions of the end times, to be certain, but taking the religious element really seemed to devalue what would have been a perfectly good argument.
In a spot where careful religious analysis helps the argument, instead of devaluing it, Dr. Gary Scott Smith opines that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were Christians, while noting the important distinction that neither of them wanted Christianity to be enshrined in law, and that Jefferson wanted the professor of ethics to discuss some Godly questions, inviting discussion, rather than appointing a divinity professor, who would likely be doctrinaire in one way or another. I think Dr. Smith heads straight for the important parts, correcting misinformation and getting to the heart of the matter behind the argument, where he provides a view that highlights what those two founders thought about the provisions of the First Amendment, where many of the “Christian Nation” arguments take their root.
Mr. Schaller at FiveThirtyEight analyzes the decision of the President to give the green light to limited offshore drilling, seeing it according to the CW as a bit of an opening gambit to try and gather support for another issue later on, like a carbon bill. FireDogLake is not going along to get along, and offers a petition to tell the President to stop and keep drilling closed.
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann say that the President wants regime change in Israel, instead of focusing their anger on where it should be - at Hamas’s willingness to attack Israeli citizens from inside land ceded to the Palestinian Authority as part of trying to make peace. I believe this marks the first time I’ve seen someone say that America is wagging Israel, instead of claiming Israel is wagging America (and that it’s a good thing they do), We do live in interesting times.
As for health care, Messrs. Barnett, Stewart, and Gaziano provides their long-form explanation as to why an individual mandate is unconcstitutional, as it’s pretty well agreed that something like this has very few, if any, precedents. Before getting to the argument, the paper lays out that regardless of whether it really is Constitutional, the Court will find a way to make it legal (echoes of Darth Sidious, anyone?), and that there are other ways Congress could have done it legally, but that are being avoided because it would ruin the image of being budget-neutral or having savings. So, before they get to the argument, they recognize that even if they win the fight, they won’t repeal it, just change it. That said, the argument they make is such: The mandate is a violation of the enumerated powers of the Constitution, and is not covered under the Commerce Clause (because it fails to regulate an activity, instead regulating inactivity, and that opens up a big can of worms), that it is not the same as state requirements to buy insurance for things such as automobiles (because people choose whether to buy automobiles, as opposed to having automobiles forced on them, and automobile insurance is fundamentally geared toward making sure a third party is not bankrupted by a driver's stupidity), and that the type of tax that Congress can create constitutionally would either be an income tax and have to be budgeted or have to be apportioned among the states by population, not by health or income standards, and thus exceptions like those that exist in the bill would not be possible. For all these reasons, they conclude the Court unlikely to grant Congress that their mandate is Constitutional. That’s the long form. On the short form, however, Mr. Elder resorts simply to saying that when the left points out instances of teabaggers carrying hateful signs, they're cherry-picking the worst and declaring everyone who opposes the health care bill to be like them, while supplying his own list of quotes that people said about the previous administrator. He then concludes that nobody opposing health care is doing it for racist or otherwise unacceptable reasons, performing a leap of logic much like Homer Simpson’s attempt to cross the Springfield Gorge, and with the same result.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Stossel does his very best to make politicians seem stupid by claiming all their science that says we should move away from fossil fuels is no match for the power of The Market (All Praise To Its Name), because The Market (All Praise To Its Name) has decided that alternative power sources are too expensive to build. Thus, more gas, more coal, more oil, and nothing for nuclear, solar, or wind, because they don’t provide enough good return on investment. What he does end up doing, though, is making his fellows appear pretty stupid, with a stunt about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide and his rant that doing things like banning plastic bags and incandescent bulbs are also stupid because they have no major impact, or people will use the forbidden objects elsewhere in the cycle, wiping out any benefit.
Finally, at the end of it all, images of what ordinary people wanted to see on Mars, thanks to NASA letting the people suggest where to point the HiRise camera for a bit, a photo set titled "A History of President Obama Feigning Interest In Mundane Things"and its companion, "President Obama looking at Awesome Things"
And possibly people cooking bacon from the waste heat of machine gun fire.
The Dead Pool claimed Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, designer of the Altair 8800, the first affordable home computer, at 68 years of age and Jaime Escalante, subject of the movie "Stand And Deliver" about his trials with getting inner-city kids to pass the AP exams in calculus, at 79 years. We wonder what they would think of a game of Quake II running in a browser.
Greetings, fans of certain long-running BBC science fiction serial! Coincidentally timing with the upcoming release of the first episode of the sixth series of the rebooted Doctor Who, we are exposed to time-space synaesthetes, colloquially dubbed "Time Lords" because they see time and space in a similar manner to The Doctor. Timey-Wimey ball jokes may commence...now. In our case, we’ll just point out that the TARDIS is not the only time machine available, and leave it at that.
Much more seriously, Scot Roeder, the man accused of killing Dr. George Tiller, went on a rant condemning abortion the United States for allowing it to be legal, and against the judge for not allowing him the defense he wanted to present, pictures of abortions, before he was sentenced to the remainder of his natural life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 50 years time. Mr. Roeder also believed the judge would acquit him if he followed “the higher power of God”.
Salon points out a case possibly unintended consequences - a domestic abuse ad aimed at getting men to report abuse with a picture of a man, the abuse victim, without his genitalia. The idea was intended that societal ideas abuse can make men feel less manly, but it also carries harmonic tones of the idea of “no penis, no power”, which women have been suffering from, in and out of abuse, and not necessarily sexual abuse, over time. Megan Kelley Hall reminds us that required schooling is still hell, and these days, the bullies are both not limited by physical proximity and have societal support for what they do. Phoebe Price is someone who shouldn’t have taken her own life. But given what she and other suicidal teens are likely facing at the time they make the decision, it gets harder every day for even the most jaded apologist to blame the victim.
And finally, another reminder that once poor, it is viciously difficult to get out of being poor. This time, it comes from banks and credit card companies that resort to suit and garnishment of wages of debtors who fall behind, sometimes with the persons being sued not receiving their notice, other times where they’re confused and don’t show up, allowing the creditor to get summary judgment, sometimes where those few who do intend to fight get intercepted by lawyers pressuring them to settle instead of fight, and almost all of them resulting in garnishment of wages on a debt that now has obscene interest rates (the kind you pay on your credit cards), court costs and other fees tacked on to it - seemingly designed in such a way that the debtor can never pay it off, because their garnishments are just enough to cover the interest. Did we mention that garnishment can be up to 25 percent of someone’s paycheck, so for low-income people, it’s basically a death knell? And that thanks to new laws making it harder and more expensive to declare bankruptcy, those low income people may not be able to save enough to file all the appropriate stuff. And, possibly the worst of the lot, most of those debts, if contested, would be thrown out in court, because the banks and credit card companies already sold that debt to a collector. (Which is a completely different rant.) And people wonder why there is so much animosity against creditors and banks - they certainly seem to have the science of extracting as much money from their customers as they can get away with.
Inside the world today, despite the pomp o fthe newsmedia making Yemen sound like a terrorist haven, if you ask the locals, they say al-Qaeda has realtively little power, influence, or presence in the country. Yemen may then be using the attention to try and draw in more aid, because the country has a lot of poor and a lot of internal problems that would make it difficult for prosperity.
In Africa, pirates picked the wrong target to raid - the United States naval warship they targeted captured five of them and sank their attacking boat. That’s one fast way of weeding out the stupid.
And on the new potential agreeement for nuclear weapons reduction, The Times Online indicates that Mr. Obama's position is a rejection of his predecessor's willingness to keep high levels of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and to research newer varieties of the weapons.
Domestically, more predictions ahoy, these ones suggesting that the health care bill just passed will hurt efforts to recover the economy, because of new costs imposed upon employers and the public in the short term, and the inevitable increase in costs for new entitlements over the long term.
President Obama indicated he would open up some areas off the coasts of the United States for companies to drill for oil, but the measure itself seems unlikely to garner support from anyone - the left feels betrayed, the right feels it’s not enough. The CW is that even though it may have been offered as an olive branch to Republicans to get them on board with climate change legislation, it’s not going to go anywhere.
The Washington Times wants to make a bigger deal out of the fact that the nominee to a top Army lawyer post is still receiving compensation from the New York Times Co, despite the additional fact that the nominee has already agreed to recusal on issues involving his former employer.
According to recent polling, as the health care fight dragged on, support for the Democrats continued to go down. Now that the proposal has passsed, that approval and support is returning. We really are results-oriented people, aren’t we? The less we feel someone can do anything, the less likely we are to supprot their bids for election and re-election. And, as usual, everyone tries to predict the allegiance of the independents.
Some of the expensive hipster food marketed at higher prices isn't. Actually, not just isn't, but five to seven percent of the time isn't. Technology makes it easier to find some fraud, but there are always people out to make a quick buck that aren’t trying to poison you with bacteria.
Last before technology, the Dumb Criminals file strikes with a vengeance - a man fleeing police climbed a fence to get away...only to find that he had climbed into a correctional facility for women. Suffice to say, he was captured fairly soon after that.
In technology, nanoparticles with correct genes help to keep and restore sight in mice, with the researchers hoping that their work will extend to Humes, and pointing out that in a lot of cases, good genetics is dominant. Elsewhere, an experiment pointing out just what we can brute-force experiment these days, hacking the neural pathway to allow control of limbs paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, and analyzing how robots draw to help us learn about how people draw.
That, and the Spirit Mars rover, originally intended for a three-month tour but that has been working on missions for six years past that point, has probably entered hibernation for the winter. I hope that NASA engineers are studying how they built Spirit, because they clearly made a masterwork on that one. If it weren’t for Spirit being dug into soft sand and thus immobile (for the moment), it might still be out exploring lots.
And in opinions, Mr. Shelby Steele returns to the "narcissist President" argument by suggesting that President Obama feels he has to do big things because he's a historic figure, a black president, and thus Destined for something.
For something a bit less focused on the man and more on the policy, Mr. Devine sanely says that good foreign policy on war and military strength cannot be ideologically black and white, and that being “tough” is not a good criterion, nor should it be the sole criterion, for anyone to judge a President by. Which segues nicely into The American Society For the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Prosperity insisting that peace can only be achieved by making sure that we are adequately prepared for war, including keeping nuclear weapons, because the world has not yet returned to appropriate ethical principles that would render the need for weapons and war unnecessary. And had they stopped there, they might have stayed above the fringe, and made a good argument for maintaining some small amount of nuclear weapons as a deterrent, but instead, because they are a religious organization, the then take the plunge and insist that the only situation where the world will have no need of nuclear weapons is it the entire world converts to the moral and religious system they espouse. It’s not as bad as the people who plot violence based on cracked-out visions and versions of the end times, to be certain, but taking the religious element really seemed to devalue what would have been a perfectly good argument.
In a spot where careful religious analysis helps the argument, instead of devaluing it, Dr. Gary Scott Smith opines that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were Christians, while noting the important distinction that neither of them wanted Christianity to be enshrined in law, and that Jefferson wanted the professor of ethics to discuss some Godly questions, inviting discussion, rather than appointing a divinity professor, who would likely be doctrinaire in one way or another. I think Dr. Smith heads straight for the important parts, correcting misinformation and getting to the heart of the matter behind the argument, where he provides a view that highlights what those two founders thought about the provisions of the First Amendment, where many of the “Christian Nation” arguments take their root.
Mr. Schaller at FiveThirtyEight analyzes the decision of the President to give the green light to limited offshore drilling, seeing it according to the CW as a bit of an opening gambit to try and gather support for another issue later on, like a carbon bill. FireDogLake is not going along to get along, and offers a petition to tell the President to stop and keep drilling closed.
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann say that the President wants regime change in Israel, instead of focusing their anger on where it should be - at Hamas’s willingness to attack Israeli citizens from inside land ceded to the Palestinian Authority as part of trying to make peace. I believe this marks the first time I’ve seen someone say that America is wagging Israel, instead of claiming Israel is wagging America (and that it’s a good thing they do), We do live in interesting times.
As for health care, Messrs. Barnett, Stewart, and Gaziano provides their long-form explanation as to why an individual mandate is unconcstitutional, as it’s pretty well agreed that something like this has very few, if any, precedents. Before getting to the argument, the paper lays out that regardless of whether it really is Constitutional, the Court will find a way to make it legal (echoes of Darth Sidious, anyone?), and that there are other ways Congress could have done it legally, but that are being avoided because it would ruin the image of being budget-neutral or having savings. So, before they get to the argument, they recognize that even if they win the fight, they won’t repeal it, just change it. That said, the argument they make is such: The mandate is a violation of the enumerated powers of the Constitution, and is not covered under the Commerce Clause (because it fails to regulate an activity, instead regulating inactivity, and that opens up a big can of worms), that it is not the same as state requirements to buy insurance for things such as automobiles (because people choose whether to buy automobiles, as opposed to having automobiles forced on them, and automobile insurance is fundamentally geared toward making sure a third party is not bankrupted by a driver's stupidity), and that the type of tax that Congress can create constitutionally would either be an income tax and have to be budgeted or have to be apportioned among the states by population, not by health or income standards, and thus exceptions like those that exist in the bill would not be possible. For all these reasons, they conclude the Court unlikely to grant Congress that their mandate is Constitutional. That’s the long form. On the short form, however, Mr. Elder resorts simply to saying that when the left points out instances of teabaggers carrying hateful signs, they're cherry-picking the worst and declaring everyone who opposes the health care bill to be like them, while supplying his own list of quotes that people said about the previous administrator. He then concludes that nobody opposing health care is doing it for racist or otherwise unacceptable reasons, performing a leap of logic much like Homer Simpson’s attempt to cross the Springfield Gorge, and with the same result.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Stossel does his very best to make politicians seem stupid by claiming all their science that says we should move away from fossil fuels is no match for the power of The Market (All Praise To Its Name), because The Market (All Praise To Its Name) has decided that alternative power sources are too expensive to build. Thus, more gas, more coal, more oil, and nothing for nuclear, solar, or wind, because they don’t provide enough good return on investment. What he does end up doing, though, is making his fellows appear pretty stupid, with a stunt about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide and his rant that doing things like banning plastic bags and incandescent bulbs are also stupid because they have no major impact, or people will use the forbidden objects elsewhere in the cycle, wiping out any benefit.
Finally, at the end of it all, images of what ordinary people wanted to see on Mars, thanks to NASA letting the people suggest where to point the HiRise camera for a bit, a photo set titled "A History of President Obama Feigning Interest In Mundane Things"and its companion, "President Obama looking at Awesome Things"
And possibly people cooking bacon from the waste heat of machine gun fire.
