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More stuff - 1-2 May 2010
May. 3rd, 2010 02:51 amAfternoon, people of great ability. Do you think that you could spend an entire year patronizing establishments owned and operated solely by members of one ethnicity? Especially if there weren’t enough of them that you could comfortably shop for all of your regular needs?
A far easier way of doing things that might have great benefits is to join a grid project, like World Community Grid's projects that do number-crunching on various medical and health experiments when your computer is idle.
Hawaii wents closer to fruit-battiness by passing a civil unions bill that gives LGBT couplings the same rights as married couples. Unfortunately, senoir leaders in the Pentagon are not with the trend, warning he Congress that they should wait to repeal the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy until they have a plan in place to deal with dissent in the ranks.
Out in the world, Murdoch papers refuse to disclose their traffic before theri paywall goes up, making it that much harder to see whether or not their subscription insistence kills their readership. Time will tell, we guess.
a 74 year-old man was fined 14,000 EUR for repeatedly "ass-bombing" (American equivelent: Cannonball) people at his local pool and terrorizing the other swimmers.
Iran joins the United Nations Womens' Commission by being one of the two nations that put forward applications to fill the vacanices left in the Asian region. That doesn’t stop the article writers and others from saying the United States should have acted to stop it. If, say, there were more candidates available, they probably would have. But nobody else volunteered.
Domestically, Prudishness reigns at ehe Virginia Attorney General's office, as a newly designed seal that covers up the normally-exposed left breast of Virtue with a breastplate. I want to read a lot into this and make a grand extended metaphor about how it relates to Warriors for Innocence types of “nudity is unacceptable, so we must get rid of it with violence!” stuff. But I haven’t worked it all out yet.
So let’s go straight for the interesting places, where Congressman Boehner takes credit for the Republican ideas in the health care bill, before calling for the repeal of everything else that isn't a Republican idea. Everything that’s ours is good, everything that’s theirs is bad. And they wonder why bipartisanship is nowhere to be.
And then we take a tour of Hypocrisy-ville, population Pat Bertroche, who said that he wanted to microchip illegal immigrants, now denying that he ever wanted to microchip illegal immigrants, but that he said it just to throw the idea out there and start a debate. Continuing our visit, we point out Considering how many people drafting Arizona's Papers Please law, support racial profiling, how likely it is that someone of paler skin will be reasonably suspected to be illegal, and the fantastic lack of outrage from the Tea Partiers, we’re inclined to say we’ve got a lot more people in Hypocrisy-ville, Repulicans, Democrats, and Tea Partiers alike.
And from there, into the news. a bomb that did not ignite in an SUV closed Times Square down for a significant time. Yet another near-miss, the politicians weill tell us, so why haven’t we done X or Y yet to make us safe?
17 men were apprehended in the search for assailants that shot a deputy in their attempt to get into the country undetected. Cue the double spin - one side saying this is the natural consequence of open borders and the other saying this is the natural consequence of Arizona’s Papers Please law.
After the fact, everyone involved in the Gulf Oil Spill says they will analyze it. What I heard that may have been most telling, if true, is that wells like this one were built without knowing whether the safety protocols would hold. That seems to be inviting things to go wrong. In the mean time, even the Air Force is getting in on trying to contain the oil.
The longer the recession goes on, the further behind the jobless get in wages and more. So efforts to bring back employment should be good, right? And maybe we can also find the money to stimulate job creation by making the parts of the economy that are most expensive for new jobs less expensive? Maybe by nationalizing health care? That would certainly help pick up the numbers some, yes?
In opinions, One way of making up for lacking budgets, and/or financing greed in police budgets is to use civil seizure to take all your stuff if you're even suspected of a crime. I don’t know if this is as widespread as is alleged, but it would definitely be a way of boosting the budget.
Ms. Noonan opens the opinions by insisting that the border can and should be controlled and policed, but that it's politically a non-starter to try, so Arizona taking matters into their own hands was inevitable. This is a symptom of a bigger alienation of the people form their government, resulting in distrust. (Oh, and aren’t those media folks projecting their racism onto others with how fast they went to racism as a cause for the Papers Please law?) So fixing the border helps America get their trust back, even if it does cost the party that does it the Latino vote for decades.
Illegal immigration sounds like a symptom of a bigger problem to me. Why would someone risk their livelihood and their life to exist illegally in another country? What is it about the funamental differences between the two that makes this feasible? Studying those parts might help, if only to know why - and to know whether there’s much that can be done to fix the problem.
On the matter of the Concept War, Mr. May claims that Western elites are surrendering to extremist Islam through self-censorship, citing Comedy Central’s brass pulling a South Park episode, Yale University not printing the caricatures of Mohammed in a book that talks about them, Major Hasan, and the removal of things like “Islamic jihad” from the lexicon. When asked about whether this deference iss hypocritical, because Jews and Christians get mocked all the time, Mr. May invokes the Godless Godwin combination and claims militant adherents are supremacists, like the Nazis and the Communists both.
As for economics and government, we’ve got twins in the crazy department. Mr. Wheeler coats a decent point about how Wall Street money lands in the coffers of both parties equally with paranoia about a "socialist" President, a game of bluff with the free-market economy as the wager, and accusations that it's only the Democrats who are corrupt, and desperately attacking the Republicans to hide their own ties, while the Republicans are merely stupid for not raising the obvious protests about how they're being smeared. And then Ms. Malkin angle-hits a solid point about revolving-door government and how much public officials can make plenty after government service and how private individuals in certain services get tapped to run government bits and flies off in her zeal to try and prove Barack Obama and his admininistration are intent on deciding for everyone how much people should make, what are "good" goods and services to make, instituting government command-and-control of the economy.
And speaking of the President, still-unfunny comedian David Limbaugh complains about the unpresidential President, and how much the country would chastise him if they only knew what kind of dastardly behavior he has undergone...because the President isn’t on camera for a large part of his life, doesn’t issue writing and speeches about what he intends on doing, and isn’t a high-profile figure that a lot of people are just waiting for gaffes on. It gets better, though. Obama gets a pass because the media are fawning liberals that don’t want to investigate, his Alinsky background means he can be a thug with a smile, (and what a divisive thug he is!) and his continual language that demonizes his opposition and insists that people who aren’t bringing productive things to the table should stop talking. If you don’t want to be called a spade, stop acting like one. It’s that simple.
Anyway, back to less specific issues. Mr. Connor says that the shift of the newest generation away from the iron-fisted Christianity of their parents and grandparents means a greater shift toward government as the ultimate authority, and thus, zOMGSOCIALISM! Because there’s No God to give us our moral authority, we can’t agree on what is and isn’t moral, and so government, in it’s wonderful atheism and liberalsm, makes it so they control everything and everything is permitted - unless, of course, you have opinions on what should be moral and permitted, and then you’re dangerous and should be silenced or mocked. One ntoes that while the Founding Fathers had ideas about the role of God, they probably noticed just as much what happens when you let religion become too much in charge as what might happen if religious principles weren’t part of the government.
Throwing back to a different issue, Mr. Driessen mocks climate change, saying there's no evidence humans are causing massive ecological disasters and that people are smart not to pay more money for their utilities so as to help reduce or reverse damage done. Besides, history has climate change in it and we turned out okay then, so we’ll do it again now.
And last out of opinions, Messrs. Abrams, Glasser, and Gora accuse the ACLU of selling out a core principle by changing to accept the idea of "reasonable" limits on campaign spending by candidates, apparently throwing their towel in with incumbents, who like to limit their opposition’s ability to speak throguh such limits. Not that all that many people ever accept public financing for their campaigns any more. The ACLU might have been making a broader point about everyone being able to spend gobs of cash to get their message out, and that “insurgent candidates” as mentioned can’t get their voices heard because they don’t have that kind of money. It would be a much different game if all candidates for federal office were required to observe the spending limits and accept public financing instead of having it just as an option. Considering the ACLU supported the Citizens United decision, I can see this being their comrpomise position, as it were - candidates are restricted, interest groups are not. The result will be the same, the money will still be an overriding issue, but at least the candidates will be able to CYA and say they didn’t spend more than the limits.
Last for tonight, Police officers in Montreal help elderly ladies of a local nursing hom go on a pub crawl for a drink or two.
A far easier way of doing things that might have great benefits is to join a grid project, like World Community Grid's projects that do number-crunching on various medical and health experiments when your computer is idle.
Hawaii wents closer to fruit-battiness by passing a civil unions bill that gives LGBT couplings the same rights as married couples. Unfortunately, senoir leaders in the Pentagon are not with the trend, warning he Congress that they should wait to repeal the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy until they have a plan in place to deal with dissent in the ranks.
Out in the world, Murdoch papers refuse to disclose their traffic before theri paywall goes up, making it that much harder to see whether or not their subscription insistence kills their readership. Time will tell, we guess.
a 74 year-old man was fined 14,000 EUR for repeatedly "ass-bombing" (American equivelent: Cannonball) people at his local pool and terrorizing the other swimmers.
Iran joins the United Nations Womens' Commission by being one of the two nations that put forward applications to fill the vacanices left in the Asian region. That doesn’t stop the article writers and others from saying the United States should have acted to stop it. If, say, there were more candidates available, they probably would have. But nobody else volunteered.
Domestically, Prudishness reigns at ehe Virginia Attorney General's office, as a newly designed seal that covers up the normally-exposed left breast of Virtue with a breastplate. I want to read a lot into this and make a grand extended metaphor about how it relates to Warriors for Innocence types of “nudity is unacceptable, so we must get rid of it with violence!” stuff. But I haven’t worked it all out yet.
So let’s go straight for the interesting places, where Congressman Boehner takes credit for the Republican ideas in the health care bill, before calling for the repeal of everything else that isn't a Republican idea. Everything that’s ours is good, everything that’s theirs is bad. And they wonder why bipartisanship is nowhere to be.
And then we take a tour of Hypocrisy-ville, population Pat Bertroche, who said that he wanted to microchip illegal immigrants, now denying that he ever wanted to microchip illegal immigrants, but that he said it just to throw the idea out there and start a debate. Continuing our visit, we point out Considering how many people drafting Arizona's Papers Please law, support racial profiling, how likely it is that someone of paler skin will be reasonably suspected to be illegal, and the fantastic lack of outrage from the Tea Partiers, we’re inclined to say we’ve got a lot more people in Hypocrisy-ville, Repulicans, Democrats, and Tea Partiers alike.
And from there, into the news. a bomb that did not ignite in an SUV closed Times Square down for a significant time. Yet another near-miss, the politicians weill tell us, so why haven’t we done X or Y yet to make us safe?
17 men were apprehended in the search for assailants that shot a deputy in their attempt to get into the country undetected. Cue the double spin - one side saying this is the natural consequence of open borders and the other saying this is the natural consequence of Arizona’s Papers Please law.
After the fact, everyone involved in the Gulf Oil Spill says they will analyze it. What I heard that may have been most telling, if true, is that wells like this one were built without knowing whether the safety protocols would hold. That seems to be inviting things to go wrong. In the mean time, even the Air Force is getting in on trying to contain the oil.
The longer the recession goes on, the further behind the jobless get in wages and more. So efforts to bring back employment should be good, right? And maybe we can also find the money to stimulate job creation by making the parts of the economy that are most expensive for new jobs less expensive? Maybe by nationalizing health care? That would certainly help pick up the numbers some, yes?
In opinions, One way of making up for lacking budgets, and/or financing greed in police budgets is to use civil seizure to take all your stuff if you're even suspected of a crime. I don’t know if this is as widespread as is alleged, but it would definitely be a way of boosting the budget.
Ms. Noonan opens the opinions by insisting that the border can and should be controlled and policed, but that it's politically a non-starter to try, so Arizona taking matters into their own hands was inevitable. This is a symptom of a bigger alienation of the people form their government, resulting in distrust. (Oh, and aren’t those media folks projecting their racism onto others with how fast they went to racism as a cause for the Papers Please law?) So fixing the border helps America get their trust back, even if it does cost the party that does it the Latino vote for decades.
Illegal immigration sounds like a symptom of a bigger problem to me. Why would someone risk their livelihood and their life to exist illegally in another country? What is it about the funamental differences between the two that makes this feasible? Studying those parts might help, if only to know why - and to know whether there’s much that can be done to fix the problem.
On the matter of the Concept War, Mr. May claims that Western elites are surrendering to extremist Islam through self-censorship, citing Comedy Central’s brass pulling a South Park episode, Yale University not printing the caricatures of Mohammed in a book that talks about them, Major Hasan, and the removal of things like “Islamic jihad” from the lexicon. When asked about whether this deference iss hypocritical, because Jews and Christians get mocked all the time, Mr. May invokes the Godless Godwin combination and claims militant adherents are supremacists, like the Nazis and the Communists both.
As for economics and government, we’ve got twins in the crazy department. Mr. Wheeler coats a decent point about how Wall Street money lands in the coffers of both parties equally with paranoia about a "socialist" President, a game of bluff with the free-market economy as the wager, and accusations that it's only the Democrats who are corrupt, and desperately attacking the Republicans to hide their own ties, while the Republicans are merely stupid for not raising the obvious protests about how they're being smeared. And then Ms. Malkin angle-hits a solid point about revolving-door government and how much public officials can make plenty after government service and how private individuals in certain services get tapped to run government bits and flies off in her zeal to try and prove Barack Obama and his admininistration are intent on deciding for everyone how much people should make, what are "good" goods and services to make, instituting government command-and-control of the economy.
And speaking of the President, still-unfunny comedian David Limbaugh complains about the unpresidential President, and how much the country would chastise him if they only knew what kind of dastardly behavior he has undergone...because the President isn’t on camera for a large part of his life, doesn’t issue writing and speeches about what he intends on doing, and isn’t a high-profile figure that a lot of people are just waiting for gaffes on. It gets better, though. Obama gets a pass because the media are fawning liberals that don’t want to investigate, his Alinsky background means he can be a thug with a smile, (and what a divisive thug he is!) and his continual language that demonizes his opposition and insists that people who aren’t bringing productive things to the table should stop talking. If you don’t want to be called a spade, stop acting like one. It’s that simple.
Anyway, back to less specific issues. Mr. Connor says that the shift of the newest generation away from the iron-fisted Christianity of their parents and grandparents means a greater shift toward government as the ultimate authority, and thus, zOMGSOCIALISM! Because there’s No God to give us our moral authority, we can’t agree on what is and isn’t moral, and so government, in it’s wonderful atheism and liberalsm, makes it so they control everything and everything is permitted - unless, of course, you have opinions on what should be moral and permitted, and then you’re dangerous and should be silenced or mocked. One ntoes that while the Founding Fathers had ideas about the role of God, they probably noticed just as much what happens when you let religion become too much in charge as what might happen if religious principles weren’t part of the government.
Throwing back to a different issue, Mr. Driessen mocks climate change, saying there's no evidence humans are causing massive ecological disasters and that people are smart not to pay more money for their utilities so as to help reduce or reverse damage done. Besides, history has climate change in it and we turned out okay then, so we’ll do it again now.
And last out of opinions, Messrs. Abrams, Glasser, and Gora accuse the ACLU of selling out a core principle by changing to accept the idea of "reasonable" limits on campaign spending by candidates, apparently throwing their towel in with incumbents, who like to limit their opposition’s ability to speak throguh such limits. Not that all that many people ever accept public financing for their campaigns any more. The ACLU might have been making a broader point about everyone being able to spend gobs of cash to get their message out, and that “insurgent candidates” as mentioned can’t get their voices heard because they don’t have that kind of money. It would be a much different game if all candidates for federal office were required to observe the spending limits and accept public financing instead of having it just as an option. Considering the ACLU supported the Citizens United decision, I can see this being their comrpomise position, as it were - candidates are restricted, interest groups are not. The result will be the same, the money will still be an overriding issue, but at least the candidates will be able to CYA and say they didn’t spend more than the limits.
Last for tonight, Police officers in Montreal help elderly ladies of a local nursing hom go on a pub crawl for a drink or two.
