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Greetings, people looking for information! To satisfy your odd things curiosity, the regeneration sequence for The Doctor was modeled on being worse than the worst of bad LSD trips.
For those looking back on the past with an eye of making fun of our music choices, Then That's What They Called Music offers a trip back through a particular type of compliation album, skewers at the ready. For those looking straight on at making fun of grammatical lack in comment squads, The Alot is ready for your needs.
For those looking for new perspective, the Design for the First World competition invites those in developing nations with ideas on how to solve major problems in the First World to submit them. I like this idea, even if the people who originated it think of it as a joke - brilliant people exist everywhere, and they should also be able to discuss their ideas and see how they might be implemented elsewhere.
And for your requisite lbrary-pimpage, Neil Himself on how libraries shaped him into the person he is, including the wonder of discovering Inter-Library Loans for the first time and time spent in the Reading Room of the British Museum, in the places where the famous people have been. Adding to him are singer Natalie Merchant and journalist Nicholas Kristof, having spoke and sang at the Public Library Association’s conference in Portalnd, Oregon, about their use of the library.
Out in the world today, the Vatican continues to try and find any scapegoat to blame for their pedophilia scandals. The No. 2 to the Bishop of Rome continues to assert that homosexuality causes pedophilia, which either means the Catholic Church had a lot of gay priests, something they should be squicked about, or Catholicism is not an effective cure for homosexuality or pedophilia, and thus those religious looking for “cures” should go elsewhere. It also means that the Vatican continues to deny their culpability and makes any person who has left that religion glad they’ve stayed away from it. There’s also a nice anti-science dig, where the “psychologists and psychiatrists” that keep demonstrating no link between homosexuality and pedophilia are ignored and demeaned in favor of nameless “others” who fit the biases of the speaker. It’s got about as much credibility as the child molestor who claims the five year-old girl came on to him. Ah, and additionally, another heavily Christian organization, the Boy Scouts of America, were ordered by a jury to pay part of a $1.4 million USD award to a Scout who was molested by his scout leader and the organization covered up. The local council will have to pay some of the award as well. This is before the punitive damages part of the trial, so there may be more coming.
Domestically, it’s become a bit of a joke that the people in conservative circles that protest the loudest on certain issues are usually in the closet about it. Well, what does that say about a conservative candidate alleged to send e-mails linking to naked women, bestiality, and derogatory depictions of black people?
And why is the Washington Post more interested in Eric Massa, already resigned, than John Ensign, still sitting? Ensign clearly has more meat for the investigative grill than Massa does. That said, the Republican Party is certainly taking its sweet time about removing people in office with clear ethics violations and possible lawlessness. Maybe that’s why the Post isn’t reporting on it, because there’s proabbly a snowball’s chance in Hell that Ensign will be ousted or resign?
Speaking of making jokes, there have been many a joke made about the riders in celebrity contracts for actors and musicians and such, some of which actually have good reasons. For half-term governor-turned pundit Sarah Palin, it appears luxury rooms and bendable straws on her lectern, as well as first-class flights or big private planes are her requirements. And we only know this because some enterprising students fished bits of a contract out of the trash, because the contract apparently also had a clause in it preventing dsiclosure of the contents of the contract.
Much more seriously, it has come to light that Lehman Brothers was using shell companies to shift their investments around and make themselves look better than they were. Apparently, other companies may be doing this, too, and it’s all considered legal, despite the intertwining of the big company and the small firms absorbing the risk. As an anonymous “fourteenth banker” put it, in describing the horrors of the system, "The system is built to be gamed", and the people who are trying to put the brakes on it or raise moral and ethical concerns are not being heard. And why not, when everyone else is certainly making all sorts of money off of the misery of others. It’s capitalism and The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) at its finest.
And speaking of money at the expense of misery, have a first-hand account of an experience with United Airlines where nobody who was supposed to give help, did, where despite assuring the passenger that a wheelchair would be available for them at their destination, none was, and where the supervisor brushed off her complaints about poor customer service and claimed it completely the passenger's responsibility to ensure they could carry all their baggage to and from their destination. It seems that nobody has learned the big lesson about consumer satisfaction - happy people will stay happy, but unhappy people complain, and complaints do far more damage to your reputation than happy people praising you will lift it.
Staying in the economic realms for a bit, we should be getting quantifiable data about whether tax cuts really are Inherently Superior as we watch the fallout from the stimulus bill, of which a significant portion are tax cuts.
And on health care, Members of Congress and their staff may have Senator Grassley to thank for their sudden inability to get on the federal employee health plan, because of poorly-worded language in the health care bill that was intended to get those members of Congress on state-based insurance exchanges not to be set up until 2014, but left out any mention of a later date that would give the Congresscritters and their staff sufficient time to get a plan before their federal benefits expired. This is a case against highly complex omnibus bills, sure, but this is also a case for proofreading before bringing your potential law to bear. Senator Grassley passed the buck and blamed others in different committees for redrafting his elegant work and introducing the mistakes there.
The United States government admits what most Internet-savvy persons have known all along - most of the estimates about the impact of piracy provided by media cabals are exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth. Now, they’re not saying that piracy doesn’t have an impact on the economy, just that it’s a lot harder than media cabals would have you believe to obtain a sizable and accurate picture of it.
And now, our feature item for today’s broadcast - we get to learn quite a bit about the Tea Party and the ways that Republican and other operatives have used and hoodwinked the tea partiers into giving them money that they can use to elect Republicans. First up, though, some demographics on tea party supporters - those who support the idea are pretty well balanced across demographics - the people who show up to rallies and get on camera, though, do skew toward a certain demographic. Those people tend toward the white, older, conservative men, and severely so when it comes to the people providing financial backing to the tea party idea. Also interesting - they feel alienated by a president whom they think is trying to help the poor too much, to make the country socialist and that practices a sort of reverse racism, prefering black people to white people. (There are a few who subscribe to the Secret Muslim theory, too, which shouldn’t really matter unless you believe that all Muslims are evil and want to conquer the world.) They want smaller government, but government should leave their major entitlements alone. And they will almost always vote Republican. Which leads us into the big reveal for today - the people behind the Tea Party Express created it with the idea of funneling more money into their political action campaign's coffers, and it has worked - the firm that runs the PAC has seen it grow by more than $4 million USD - and that PAC has turned around and paid its creators and another firm almost $2 million USD. The firm also counted on Fox News to promote them and graft them carefully onto the tea party movement so they would be seen as legitimate, a role Fox News played out to the hilt. Thus, we are reminded once again that there is no movement, no idea, no concept that cannot be co-opted and turned into a manner of making money for someone or for promoting the establishment. Let’s see if there is fallout from this, and of what kind.
Elsewhere, leading into science, the scientists have discovered something very strange - people lacking social anxiety apparently also lack racial biases and prejudices, although they will maintain gender biases. This suggests to many that racism really is rooted in social fear somewhere. Maybe if we recreated society in such a way that people felt more secure about their social statuses, like, oh, single-payer health insurance, and maybe a basic income guarantee, we’d find we get a long a lot better because people couldn’t play at our fears that “they’re going to take YOUR job” or “because these laxy people are getting an entitlement, you’re going to have to pay more than you can afford in taxes or premiums.”
The chief of the United States Department of Transportation spoke at a national bike summit and then published a policy change recommending state DOTs do a whole lot more to accomodate bicyclists and pedestrians in their designs and comunities. This is awesome. Now, if we can then get the city planners to build and renovate to walkable/bikable communities, we’ll make everything that much easier. Denmark has a possible idea to promote biking and renewable power - a hotel is offering meal vouchers for those that genetare 10 or more watts of electricity from a bicycle attached to a generator. Bikes being outfitted with power assistance at the beginning would probably sell better, so that people can generate their power and then use it to climb those difficult hills (like the ones we have out here).
Over the last two years, about 800,000 people abandoned their pay television subscriptions in favor of using services like Hulu, Netflix, and over-the-air broadcast to watch and follow their favorite television programs. It’s not a major subscription deletion, but there’s always the threat that things will get good enough that people will just sign up for asufficient broadband and then route all their other telecommunications and programming through that.
Last out of science and tech, the Big Picture goes to the International Space Station. Nice pictures. Ah, and Neil Armstrong thinks we're headed in the wrong direction for NASA and space exploration. He’s one side, though - Buzz Alrdin and Sally Ride are in favor of the way things are going. Internal debate is always healthy, especially from the peopel that know the programs best.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist takes us down a rabbit hole where a place claiming to be a seminary fires one of its faculty because he suggested that science and faith are compatible, and to deny the truth of this is to deny a truth created by the deity he and the "seminary" claim to worship, because the “seminary” finds that reality does not conform to their views, and thus reality must be wrong. The “seminary” insists their reading of the text, which is all the flavors of young-earth creationism, is inerrant and correct and that anyone suggesting otherwise must be dismissed for suggesting that the holy book is not the inerrant Word of Deity. And people wonder why evangelicals are seen as cult-y or fanatical.
A little bit on a pharmacy that attempted to be the conscience place, where there was no birth control, or pr0n, or mascara, and found out that it had no customers, either. The piece does point out possibly the most pernicious part of the operation - in places where there is competition, something like that might not survive. In places where they’re the only operation in town, though, that could make things much worse for women looking for full access to reproductive solutions.
More secular, Erica Williams debunks the idea that millenials are lazy or don't value a work ethic, because, for one, saying it’s not one of your defining traits doesn’t mean you don’t have it or value it, and further, between Millenials and older generations, it’s possibly an apple-and-oranges comparison - they don’t define “work ethic” the same way, they’re in a recession, so not as many are working, or they have a better awareness of the work done before them. Of course, they might have also bought into the narrative that they’re lazy, choosing to believe everyone else instead of their lying eyes.
And on more political topics - Fox covers the ACLU sending a note to Camp Pendleton to make sure that nobody overstepped their bounds in creating and commenting on a Facebook page created by an active-duty serviceperson against the health care bill. The hgiher-ranking officer intended to simply send a reminder that there were certain guidelines required regarding military members and political speech, and the ACLU sent an inquiry as to whether the soldier’s free speech rights had been squished. On other military matters, The Washington Times comes out against naming a ship after Representative Murtha, because they consider his well-publicized accusations of premeditated murder by Marines before charges were completely brought and his apparent love of pork-barrel spending to be a disgrace to the uniform, and crews would not feel good about working on such a ship.
Heading into economics, Mr. Reich points out that even when the economy recovers, America will not be making as much money as they did before, and many of the jobs that were in the pre-recession economy will not return in the post-recession, having been replaced by outsourcing or mechanization. Thus, the consumer doesn’t have the money to drive the economy, because they’re not getting paid as much. There’s no real blame being pointed out, just facts. Those facts, however, can lead lots of people to start throwing around blame or to make historical references to prove their point - witness Mr. Folsom's insistence that tax cuts after World War II were the real reason for economic recovery, not any of Roosevelt's programs, The WSJ's contention that unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs be eliminated, because they give people an incentive to not work and hold out for the job that pays what they want, instead of being forced into working whatever low-wage, no benefit, likely low-safety, job is available because otherwise they will starve (and good riddance to those lazy bastards, too), and others to point out income has fallen in the Obama administration, although they do at least point out that there’s a recession going on, so that’s probably what happens in recessions.
On the matter of the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, Mr. Sowell says good riddance to the justice he considers to have done great disservice to the country by "sustain[ing] racial quotas, creat[ing] "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, and [taking] away American citizens’ rights to their own homes in the infamous “Kelo” decision of 2005". Mr. Sowell focuses on making the Justice’s entire career a failure because he cast his opinion in favor of the Kelo decision (a bad one) and has basically been helping destructive Democrats wreak their activist agenda all over the court, Constitution-be-damned. the WSJ is far more sane about the matter, laying out possible nominees and the difficulties associated with each of them in an attempt to build a court of five liberals and four conservatives.
Mr. Bialosky speculates why Israel and Israelis don't like President Obama - he doesn't give Israel everything it wants without questions asked, and he keeps trying to engage other countries in the Middle East, instead of keeping a special relationship with Israel and only Israel. At least, that’s what it sounds like to me.
On the new nuclear posture and statements by the administration, Mr. Gaffney accuses the administration of simply wanting America to have no nuclear weapons, while everyone else intends on keeping and making more of their own, and the Heritage Foundation claims President Obama is nothing like President Reagan when it coems to nuclear weapons, because Reagan understood that you had to be able to threaten everyone with destruction in a conventional manner before they would give up their nuclear weapons. Mr. Hill takes it one step fruther, assuming the President actually believes that making the United States weaker and stopping claims of exceptionalism is the way to making America stronger.
At the end, a general opinion - Mr. Beran believes liberalism is currently in decline because it has become completely about preference politics and treating people differently, rather than balancing it and the classically liberal idea that everyone is supposed to have the greatest freedom to choose, including bad choices. Well, I won’t deny that social policies are a bigger part of the liberal strain than before, but the reason the “free to choose badly” part may have gone into retreat is because it has been used as a sledgehammer by conservatives to try and roll back or prevent things that most people agree are good things - the unemployment insurance and social assistance programs above, Social Security, Medicare, and such. The idea of “freedom” becomes contorted into an idea of “I should be free to do whatever I wish with what is mine, and if that affects other people adversely, then too bad. I Got Mine, Frak You.” So while freedom to choose should be a part of the discussion, it needs to be tempered with the idea that other people will continue to try and take advantage of others, or discriminate against them, or use their material in such a way that will be detrimental to society as a whole. The balance that Mr. Beran says is lacking can be brought back into existence if, say, both sides didn’t find they were getting better results from staying on the very fringes of their positions. If the Democratic Party is now the personfiication of the social part of liberalism, the Republican Party can be considered the personficiation of the classical part of liberalism. While opposed to each other, they create an unstable spin that wobbles heavily from one direction to the other, meaning the top spins, but always on the verge of falling down. Wouldn’t it be better to get the top to spin by allowing both sides to express the virtues of the other, so they can spin a bit closer to a real center?
And getting out of opinions, Mr. Phillips suggests the Census asking about race is still a sign that Congress and politics wants to play the race game, through gerrymandering districts to include or exclude certain groups to give a more favorable demographic for one party or another, and not for any of the stated purposes like urban planning. He’s ready for a post-racial society, but he doesn’t see the signs that one will be arriving any time soon.
Last out for tonight, a film that finds the intersection of the erotic and the mathematical, along with a book that is erotica for the blind, providing three-dimensional, touchable models of people in various states of dress. And the library of Congress is apparently acquiring the entirety of public tweeting for archival.
For those looking back on the past with an eye of making fun of our music choices, Then That's What They Called Music offers a trip back through a particular type of compliation album, skewers at the ready. For those looking straight on at making fun of grammatical lack in comment squads, The Alot is ready for your needs.
For those looking for new perspective, the Design for the First World competition invites those in developing nations with ideas on how to solve major problems in the First World to submit them. I like this idea, even if the people who originated it think of it as a joke - brilliant people exist everywhere, and they should also be able to discuss their ideas and see how they might be implemented elsewhere.
And for your requisite lbrary-pimpage, Neil Himself on how libraries shaped him into the person he is, including the wonder of discovering Inter-Library Loans for the first time and time spent in the Reading Room of the British Museum, in the places where the famous people have been. Adding to him are singer Natalie Merchant and journalist Nicholas Kristof, having spoke and sang at the Public Library Association’s conference in Portalnd, Oregon, about their use of the library.
Out in the world today, the Vatican continues to try and find any scapegoat to blame for their pedophilia scandals. The No. 2 to the Bishop of Rome continues to assert that homosexuality causes pedophilia, which either means the Catholic Church had a lot of gay priests, something they should be squicked about, or Catholicism is not an effective cure for homosexuality or pedophilia, and thus those religious looking for “cures” should go elsewhere. It also means that the Vatican continues to deny their culpability and makes any person who has left that religion glad they’ve stayed away from it. There’s also a nice anti-science dig, where the “psychologists and psychiatrists” that keep demonstrating no link between homosexuality and pedophilia are ignored and demeaned in favor of nameless “others” who fit the biases of the speaker. It’s got about as much credibility as the child molestor who claims the five year-old girl came on to him. Ah, and additionally, another heavily Christian organization, the Boy Scouts of America, were ordered by a jury to pay part of a $1.4 million USD award to a Scout who was molested by his scout leader and the organization covered up. The local council will have to pay some of the award as well. This is before the punitive damages part of the trial, so there may be more coming.
Domestically, it’s become a bit of a joke that the people in conservative circles that protest the loudest on certain issues are usually in the closet about it. Well, what does that say about a conservative candidate alleged to send e-mails linking to naked women, bestiality, and derogatory depictions of black people?
And why is the Washington Post more interested in Eric Massa, already resigned, than John Ensign, still sitting? Ensign clearly has more meat for the investigative grill than Massa does. That said, the Republican Party is certainly taking its sweet time about removing people in office with clear ethics violations and possible lawlessness. Maybe that’s why the Post isn’t reporting on it, because there’s proabbly a snowball’s chance in Hell that Ensign will be ousted or resign?
Speaking of making jokes, there have been many a joke made about the riders in celebrity contracts for actors and musicians and such, some of which actually have good reasons. For half-term governor-turned pundit Sarah Palin, it appears luxury rooms and bendable straws on her lectern, as well as first-class flights or big private planes are her requirements. And we only know this because some enterprising students fished bits of a contract out of the trash, because the contract apparently also had a clause in it preventing dsiclosure of the contents of the contract.
Much more seriously, it has come to light that Lehman Brothers was using shell companies to shift their investments around and make themselves look better than they were. Apparently, other companies may be doing this, too, and it’s all considered legal, despite the intertwining of the big company and the small firms absorbing the risk. As an anonymous “fourteenth banker” put it, in describing the horrors of the system, "The system is built to be gamed", and the people who are trying to put the brakes on it or raise moral and ethical concerns are not being heard. And why not, when everyone else is certainly making all sorts of money off of the misery of others. It’s capitalism and The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) at its finest.
And speaking of money at the expense of misery, have a first-hand account of an experience with United Airlines where nobody who was supposed to give help, did, where despite assuring the passenger that a wheelchair would be available for them at their destination, none was, and where the supervisor brushed off her complaints about poor customer service and claimed it completely the passenger's responsibility to ensure they could carry all their baggage to and from their destination. It seems that nobody has learned the big lesson about consumer satisfaction - happy people will stay happy, but unhappy people complain, and complaints do far more damage to your reputation than happy people praising you will lift it.
Staying in the economic realms for a bit, we should be getting quantifiable data about whether tax cuts really are Inherently Superior as we watch the fallout from the stimulus bill, of which a significant portion are tax cuts.
And on health care, Members of Congress and their staff may have Senator Grassley to thank for their sudden inability to get on the federal employee health plan, because of poorly-worded language in the health care bill that was intended to get those members of Congress on state-based insurance exchanges not to be set up until 2014, but left out any mention of a later date that would give the Congresscritters and their staff sufficient time to get a plan before their federal benefits expired. This is a case against highly complex omnibus bills, sure, but this is also a case for proofreading before bringing your potential law to bear. Senator Grassley passed the buck and blamed others in different committees for redrafting his elegant work and introducing the mistakes there.
The United States government admits what most Internet-savvy persons have known all along - most of the estimates about the impact of piracy provided by media cabals are exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth. Now, they’re not saying that piracy doesn’t have an impact on the economy, just that it’s a lot harder than media cabals would have you believe to obtain a sizable and accurate picture of it.
And now, our feature item for today’s broadcast - we get to learn quite a bit about the Tea Party and the ways that Republican and other operatives have used and hoodwinked the tea partiers into giving them money that they can use to elect Republicans. First up, though, some demographics on tea party supporters - those who support the idea are pretty well balanced across demographics - the people who show up to rallies and get on camera, though, do skew toward a certain demographic. Those people tend toward the white, older, conservative men, and severely so when it comes to the people providing financial backing to the tea party idea. Also interesting - they feel alienated by a president whom they think is trying to help the poor too much, to make the country socialist and that practices a sort of reverse racism, prefering black people to white people. (There are a few who subscribe to the Secret Muslim theory, too, which shouldn’t really matter unless you believe that all Muslims are evil and want to conquer the world.) They want smaller government, but government should leave their major entitlements alone. And they will almost always vote Republican. Which leads us into the big reveal for today - the people behind the Tea Party Express created it with the idea of funneling more money into their political action campaign's coffers, and it has worked - the firm that runs the PAC has seen it grow by more than $4 million USD - and that PAC has turned around and paid its creators and another firm almost $2 million USD. The firm also counted on Fox News to promote them and graft them carefully onto the tea party movement so they would be seen as legitimate, a role Fox News played out to the hilt. Thus, we are reminded once again that there is no movement, no idea, no concept that cannot be co-opted and turned into a manner of making money for someone or for promoting the establishment. Let’s see if there is fallout from this, and of what kind.
Elsewhere, leading into science, the scientists have discovered something very strange - people lacking social anxiety apparently also lack racial biases and prejudices, although they will maintain gender biases. This suggests to many that racism really is rooted in social fear somewhere. Maybe if we recreated society in such a way that people felt more secure about their social statuses, like, oh, single-payer health insurance, and maybe a basic income guarantee, we’d find we get a long a lot better because people couldn’t play at our fears that “they’re going to take YOUR job” or “because these laxy people are getting an entitlement, you’re going to have to pay more than you can afford in taxes or premiums.”
The chief of the United States Department of Transportation spoke at a national bike summit and then published a policy change recommending state DOTs do a whole lot more to accomodate bicyclists and pedestrians in their designs and comunities. This is awesome. Now, if we can then get the city planners to build and renovate to walkable/bikable communities, we’ll make everything that much easier. Denmark has a possible idea to promote biking and renewable power - a hotel is offering meal vouchers for those that genetare 10 or more watts of electricity from a bicycle attached to a generator. Bikes being outfitted with power assistance at the beginning would probably sell better, so that people can generate their power and then use it to climb those difficult hills (like the ones we have out here).
Over the last two years, about 800,000 people abandoned their pay television subscriptions in favor of using services like Hulu, Netflix, and over-the-air broadcast to watch and follow their favorite television programs. It’s not a major subscription deletion, but there’s always the threat that things will get good enough that people will just sign up for asufficient broadband and then route all their other telecommunications and programming through that.
Last out of science and tech, the Big Picture goes to the International Space Station. Nice pictures. Ah, and Neil Armstrong thinks we're headed in the wrong direction for NASA and space exploration. He’s one side, though - Buzz Alrdin and Sally Ride are in favor of the way things are going. Internal debate is always healthy, especially from the peopel that know the programs best.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist takes us down a rabbit hole where a place claiming to be a seminary fires one of its faculty because he suggested that science and faith are compatible, and to deny the truth of this is to deny a truth created by the deity he and the "seminary" claim to worship, because the “seminary” finds that reality does not conform to their views, and thus reality must be wrong. The “seminary” insists their reading of the text, which is all the flavors of young-earth creationism, is inerrant and correct and that anyone suggesting otherwise must be dismissed for suggesting that the holy book is not the inerrant Word of Deity. And people wonder why evangelicals are seen as cult-y or fanatical.
A little bit on a pharmacy that attempted to be the conscience place, where there was no birth control, or pr0n, or mascara, and found out that it had no customers, either. The piece does point out possibly the most pernicious part of the operation - in places where there is competition, something like that might not survive. In places where they’re the only operation in town, though, that could make things much worse for women looking for full access to reproductive solutions.
More secular, Erica Williams debunks the idea that millenials are lazy or don't value a work ethic, because, for one, saying it’s not one of your defining traits doesn’t mean you don’t have it or value it, and further, between Millenials and older generations, it’s possibly an apple-and-oranges comparison - they don’t define “work ethic” the same way, they’re in a recession, so not as many are working, or they have a better awareness of the work done before them. Of course, they might have also bought into the narrative that they’re lazy, choosing to believe everyone else instead of their lying eyes.
And on more political topics - Fox covers the ACLU sending a note to Camp Pendleton to make sure that nobody overstepped their bounds in creating and commenting on a Facebook page created by an active-duty serviceperson against the health care bill. The hgiher-ranking officer intended to simply send a reminder that there were certain guidelines required regarding military members and political speech, and the ACLU sent an inquiry as to whether the soldier’s free speech rights had been squished. On other military matters, The Washington Times comes out against naming a ship after Representative Murtha, because they consider his well-publicized accusations of premeditated murder by Marines before charges were completely brought and his apparent love of pork-barrel spending to be a disgrace to the uniform, and crews would not feel good about working on such a ship.
Heading into economics, Mr. Reich points out that even when the economy recovers, America will not be making as much money as they did before, and many of the jobs that were in the pre-recession economy will not return in the post-recession, having been replaced by outsourcing or mechanization. Thus, the consumer doesn’t have the money to drive the economy, because they’re not getting paid as much. There’s no real blame being pointed out, just facts. Those facts, however, can lead lots of people to start throwing around blame or to make historical references to prove their point - witness Mr. Folsom's insistence that tax cuts after World War II were the real reason for economic recovery, not any of Roosevelt's programs, The WSJ's contention that unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs be eliminated, because they give people an incentive to not work and hold out for the job that pays what they want, instead of being forced into working whatever low-wage, no benefit, likely low-safety, job is available because otherwise they will starve (and good riddance to those lazy bastards, too), and others to point out income has fallen in the Obama administration, although they do at least point out that there’s a recession going on, so that’s probably what happens in recessions.
On the matter of the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, Mr. Sowell says good riddance to the justice he considers to have done great disservice to the country by "sustain[ing] racial quotas, creat[ing] "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, and [taking] away American citizens’ rights to their own homes in the infamous “Kelo” decision of 2005". Mr. Sowell focuses on making the Justice’s entire career a failure because he cast his opinion in favor of the Kelo decision (a bad one) and has basically been helping destructive Democrats wreak their activist agenda all over the court, Constitution-be-damned. the WSJ is far more sane about the matter, laying out possible nominees and the difficulties associated with each of them in an attempt to build a court of five liberals and four conservatives.
Mr. Bialosky speculates why Israel and Israelis don't like President Obama - he doesn't give Israel everything it wants without questions asked, and he keeps trying to engage other countries in the Middle East, instead of keeping a special relationship with Israel and only Israel. At least, that’s what it sounds like to me.
On the new nuclear posture and statements by the administration, Mr. Gaffney accuses the administration of simply wanting America to have no nuclear weapons, while everyone else intends on keeping and making more of their own, and the Heritage Foundation claims President Obama is nothing like President Reagan when it coems to nuclear weapons, because Reagan understood that you had to be able to threaten everyone with destruction in a conventional manner before they would give up their nuclear weapons. Mr. Hill takes it one step fruther, assuming the President actually believes that making the United States weaker and stopping claims of exceptionalism is the way to making America stronger.
At the end, a general opinion - Mr. Beran believes liberalism is currently in decline because it has become completely about preference politics and treating people differently, rather than balancing it and the classically liberal idea that everyone is supposed to have the greatest freedom to choose, including bad choices. Well, I won’t deny that social policies are a bigger part of the liberal strain than before, but the reason the “free to choose badly” part may have gone into retreat is because it has been used as a sledgehammer by conservatives to try and roll back or prevent things that most people agree are good things - the unemployment insurance and social assistance programs above, Social Security, Medicare, and such. The idea of “freedom” becomes contorted into an idea of “I should be free to do whatever I wish with what is mine, and if that affects other people adversely, then too bad. I Got Mine, Frak You.” So while freedom to choose should be a part of the discussion, it needs to be tempered with the idea that other people will continue to try and take advantage of others, or discriminate against them, or use their material in such a way that will be detrimental to society as a whole. The balance that Mr. Beran says is lacking can be brought back into existence if, say, both sides didn’t find they were getting better results from staying on the very fringes of their positions. If the Democratic Party is now the personfiication of the social part of liberalism, the Republican Party can be considered the personficiation of the classical part of liberalism. While opposed to each other, they create an unstable spin that wobbles heavily from one direction to the other, meaning the top spins, but always on the verge of falling down. Wouldn’t it be better to get the top to spin by allowing both sides to express the virtues of the other, so they can spin a bit closer to a real center?
And getting out of opinions, Mr. Phillips suggests the Census asking about race is still a sign that Congress and politics wants to play the race game, through gerrymandering districts to include or exclude certain groups to give a more favorable demographic for one party or another, and not for any of the stated purposes like urban planning. He’s ready for a post-racial society, but he doesn’t see the signs that one will be arriving any time soon.
Last out for tonight, a film that finds the intersection of the erotic and the mathematical, along with a book that is erotica for the blind, providing three-dimensional, touchable models of people in various states of dress. And the library of Congress is apparently acquiring the entirety of public tweeting for archival.
