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Big New News Dump - 9-10 May 2010
May. 11th, 2010 12:44 amGreetings, those who seek to change the world they find themselves in. We celebrate the Dead Pool calling back Lena Horne to them at 92 years of age. Ms. Horne’s music appealed to white people, whose society insisted that she was inferoir because she was black.
Professionally speaking, the Rancocas Valley Board of Education fails horribly by removing a book about homosexuality from their shelves, one that was full of primary source accounts, no less. Literary terrorists strike again. The General has a plan on how to replace certain images in the book that was banned to make it acceptable again.
On a more positive note, check this out - your public libraries in aggregate perform just as well or better than many commercial services throughout the country.
Out in the world today, remember Haiti? Still recovering from the earthquake, to the point where children are still being abandoned tin hopes aid workers will find them and give them a better life.
Lest anyone think anti-LGBT court officials are strictly in the United States, an Israeli judge has denied gay fathers the right to bring his children into the country, refusing to order the standard paternity test. The fathers are gay, the children were carried using surrogates, and the judge thinks gay fathers have to be tested to see if they’re pedophiles or serial killers before they can be allowed in the country with their kids. There’s a cleaer double standard here, and the judge engaging in it should be run off the bench - he can find work here in the United States. I’m sure there are plenty of states that would love to have him on their benches. So they can try to deny legally married LGBT couples the right to use family camping spots.
Lithuania's first pride parade draws protestors that throw rocks at police protecting the paraders, has lawmakers arrested for attempting to climb barriers erected, and receives a lot of negative backlash from the heavily Catholic country.
Oh, and speaking of, Yet another Catholic cleric connects homosexuality and pedophilia, also claims children are spontaneously homosexual but that can be gotten rid of throguh spiritual guidance.
You know what all of this affects? People. People who want to do things but can't because the law still believes they are unworthy of it.
Elsewhere, The United Kingdom's Labour Party leader, Gordon Brown, is stepping down from his leadership position, possibly as a bid to get the Liberal Democratic Party to sign on to possible coalition-building with Labour, should the Conservatives fail to sufficiently court the Lib Dems into a coalition with them.
And finally, a peek inside a very old dormitory, one that refuses to be closed, and that charges rent at the "you get what you pay for" rate.
Domestically, this is why you need infrastructure and to maintain that infrastructure - the oldest nuclear power plant in the United States has leaked radioactive water into a major quifer near the plant.
And furthermore, the failure of the a containment box intended to cap the Gulf oil spill due to ice crystal formation gives us a great example of why we should have safety precautions and solution for things going wrong already thought of before we go doing this with possible catastrophic reactions.
Oh, finally, you know what happens when you encourage a monoculture of chemical-resistant plants and plant them next to regular weeds? If you said “chemical-resistant weeds”, then you have understand how nature works. Sucks to be you, Monsato, although you’ll probably just force everyone to use a different chemical-resistant seed.
Also of interest, President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court when he retires. The current Solicitor General may be unfriendly to ruling that LGBT people have the same rights, including marriage, as everyone else, and in fact may just be a giant question mark as to what she believes, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering there are large majorities of Democrats in Cnogress and one in he White House. Why risk the possibility of moving things even further to the right than they already are?
A sitting Republican United States Senator did not even make it to his party primary. For as much as the tea crowd can be accused and proven to be things that are not conservative or sane, they still manage to wield a disruptive influence on the Republican Party. Like having them block a nominee based on her boyfriend in 1994 that the FBI already cleared when the last President appointed her to a position. More on that in opinions.
Someone placed a phone call to 911 after overhearing someone speaking Swahili and not great English, apparently having heard “bomb on bus” or something like it. This is what the fear environment nets you, and we have both our current and previous administrations to thank for that. They’re still feeding that environment, by the way, with claims that more independently hatched plots could be coming and claiming the Pakistani taliban was behind the Times Square bomb plot.
A mother left her three year old child at Wal-Mart overnight and did not claim her until the morning of the next day. One would think it would become apparent that the child was missing on the way back, but that was apparetly not the case. The Child and Family Services unit were granted temporary custody of the missing girl and 10 other children, who were placed with relatives.
Welcome to technology, where Cory Doctorow points out how people get phished or scammed - a confluence of bad events and worse timing, even to the most tech-savvy of them all.
Mr. Singel hopes that a more private, more secure, more controllable version of Facebook hits the Internets soon so as to stop Facebook's continued trend of making everything posted to them public, whether we like it or not.
Looking in at how news may be distributed in Africa - not over broadcast media or broadband, but SMS and mobile technology.
Last out, someone decided to answer the question of which illegal substance is least environmentally harmful, and natural technology that you can see from space - dam.
In opinions, Mr. Winship remembers the very short-lived fury that came from the Kent State shootings, and how history seems to be repeating itself on matters like Wall Street reform. Short-lived fury that gave way to distraction or just stopping caring.
Mr. Lilla talks about the roots of the Tea Party - the American creed that is going liberal-libertarian on individual issues and conservative-libertarian on economic issues, resulting in a group with no leader that demands government get out of every aspect of their lives, from what they do with their money to whether they have to follow safety regulations. An an anarchic party, they’re not likely to have sustained pressure, but they can corrupt the Republicans into becoming like them and using their machine to do the Tea Party’s bidding. That would be pretty bad. Of course, you have to believe that’s what’s happening. Mr. Senik claims the country is moving rightward, and the GOP is just capitalizing on this movement. No problems here, sir - the populace just said they wanted to be closer to the waterline. Give me a hand with these deck chairs. And Mr. Orly, err O'Reilly says that the fault lies with the President suggesting that there is such a thing as enough money made, as the President will be a hypocrite on whether he has enough money. Liberal individualism, conservative individualism fused together nicely into one big libertarian festival.
The end result, as The Infamous Brad points out, is that if we're going to get Republican policies regardless of who we elect, we may as well just elect Republicans so we can stick the right people with the blame.
Mr. Dean may or may not have been intending to make this point, but his column about the difficulties religious organizations are facing in Former Soviet Republics is an excellent description of how things go wrong when you try to use The Law to keep undesirable religious elements out. Because The Law is a big giant unwieldy club, not a scalpel. Christian warriors looking to change things here in the United States should take note.
Mr. Carroll dismisses the good-looking numbers of the recovery, claiming the only people profiting are lawyers and lobbyists, which companies are spending more on to protect themselves from the government’s controlling hand. For those worried about spending, The Washington Times is all about using Greece as an example of where America is going, and Mike Huckabee is not above serious inflation of the debt numbers to try and make things more dire than they are.
Mr. Will devotes most of his column to talking about how he doesn't like the United States being used as a nation-building force (we think) before throwing in a stinger at the end about how much Americans suck because they have no stomach for long conflicts. Despite the two land wars in Asia still going on, we add.
Mr. Rove, still affectionately Turd Blossom, calls Barack Obama a hypocrite for talking about a need to return to civility while encouraging the divisive and name-calling politics he's crusading against. Mostly because the President isn’t telling his staff and the Democratic Congresscritters that they need to behave with their language. Nothing at all in there about what the Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Fox News have been slinging from day one of his accepted nomination - no, if the President is serious, he has to rein in all of those Democrats who are mouthing off, regardless of the truth value of what they are saying, or he’s not serious.
Ms. Knoploh touts abstincence as actually working, based on statistics from places that have a vested interest in showing that abstinence works, while ignoring the point made by the columnist she’s commenting on that teaching abstinence encourage not planning for the possibility that someone might not wait for marriage in her zeal to say, “But she’s wrong in the numbers! My totally biased sources say so!” (Standard Reminder: We Are Not Unbiased, Either...)
Mr. Scherz reads very deeply into an AMA request to its members to conduct their poltical speech with sensitivity to their patients and with respect to their practice and beleives it a muzzle order against anyone who wants to criticize the health reform bill. It was probably the AMA saying, “Look, ‘First, Do No Harm’ means you don’t turn people away at the door by posting signs that say ‘If you voted for the current President, you should go take your business elsewhere’" in a bit more flowery language. For Mr. Scherz, though, it’s the AMA going CYA about their role in passing the health care bill, which is obviously going horribly, expensively, wrong on all regards, intrudes on doctor-patient regulations (and kills Grandma!), and telling their member doctors to tow the line that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Occam would have a fit.
And out of opinions, Mr. Yogerst praises Iron Man 2 as the ultimate patriotic film and an example of Hollywood getting reality right, with the anti-government anti-media patriot Tony Stark refuses to turn his weapon over, which gets the government in the snares of someone else and...yeah. It might be conservative fantasy-land, but it’s not getting anything ”right“.
Last for tonight, peruse advertisements for steamship travel in Japan. And remember, the world can be saved by steam! Just so long as you don’t start getting instances of some new jargon occurring.
Professionally speaking, the Rancocas Valley Board of Education fails horribly by removing a book about homosexuality from their shelves, one that was full of primary source accounts, no less. Literary terrorists strike again. The General has a plan on how to replace certain images in the book that was banned to make it acceptable again.
On a more positive note, check this out - your public libraries in aggregate perform just as well or better than many commercial services throughout the country.
Out in the world today, remember Haiti? Still recovering from the earthquake, to the point where children are still being abandoned tin hopes aid workers will find them and give them a better life.
Lest anyone think anti-LGBT court officials are strictly in the United States, an Israeli judge has denied gay fathers the right to bring his children into the country, refusing to order the standard paternity test. The fathers are gay, the children were carried using surrogates, and the judge thinks gay fathers have to be tested to see if they’re pedophiles or serial killers before they can be allowed in the country with their kids. There’s a cleaer double standard here, and the judge engaging in it should be run off the bench - he can find work here in the United States. I’m sure there are plenty of states that would love to have him on their benches. So they can try to deny legally married LGBT couples the right to use family camping spots.
Lithuania's first pride parade draws protestors that throw rocks at police protecting the paraders, has lawmakers arrested for attempting to climb barriers erected, and receives a lot of negative backlash from the heavily Catholic country.
Oh, and speaking of, Yet another Catholic cleric connects homosexuality and pedophilia, also claims children are spontaneously homosexual but that can be gotten rid of throguh spiritual guidance.
You know what all of this affects? People. People who want to do things but can't because the law still believes they are unworthy of it.
Elsewhere, The United Kingdom's Labour Party leader, Gordon Brown, is stepping down from his leadership position, possibly as a bid to get the Liberal Democratic Party to sign on to possible coalition-building with Labour, should the Conservatives fail to sufficiently court the Lib Dems into a coalition with them.
And finally, a peek inside a very old dormitory, one that refuses to be closed, and that charges rent at the "you get what you pay for" rate.
Domestically, this is why you need infrastructure and to maintain that infrastructure - the oldest nuclear power plant in the United States has leaked radioactive water into a major quifer near the plant.
And furthermore, the failure of the a containment box intended to cap the Gulf oil spill due to ice crystal formation gives us a great example of why we should have safety precautions and solution for things going wrong already thought of before we go doing this with possible catastrophic reactions.
Oh, finally, you know what happens when you encourage a monoculture of chemical-resistant plants and plant them next to regular weeds? If you said “chemical-resistant weeds”, then you have understand how nature works. Sucks to be you, Monsato, although you’ll probably just force everyone to use a different chemical-resistant seed.
Also of interest, President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court when he retires. The current Solicitor General may be unfriendly to ruling that LGBT people have the same rights, including marriage, as everyone else, and in fact may just be a giant question mark as to what she believes, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering there are large majorities of Democrats in Cnogress and one in he White House. Why risk the possibility of moving things even further to the right than they already are?
A sitting Republican United States Senator did not even make it to his party primary. For as much as the tea crowd can be accused and proven to be things that are not conservative or sane, they still manage to wield a disruptive influence on the Republican Party. Like having them block a nominee based on her boyfriend in 1994 that the FBI already cleared when the last President appointed her to a position. More on that in opinions.
Someone placed a phone call to 911 after overhearing someone speaking Swahili and not great English, apparently having heard “bomb on bus” or something like it. This is what the fear environment nets you, and we have both our current and previous administrations to thank for that. They’re still feeding that environment, by the way, with claims that more independently hatched plots could be coming and claiming the Pakistani taliban was behind the Times Square bomb plot.
A mother left her three year old child at Wal-Mart overnight and did not claim her until the morning of the next day. One would think it would become apparent that the child was missing on the way back, but that was apparetly not the case. The Child and Family Services unit were granted temporary custody of the missing girl and 10 other children, who were placed with relatives.
Welcome to technology, where Cory Doctorow points out how people get phished or scammed - a confluence of bad events and worse timing, even to the most tech-savvy of them all.
Mr. Singel hopes that a more private, more secure, more controllable version of Facebook hits the Internets soon so as to stop Facebook's continued trend of making everything posted to them public, whether we like it or not.
Looking in at how news may be distributed in Africa - not over broadcast media or broadband, but SMS and mobile technology.
Last out, someone decided to answer the question of which illegal substance is least environmentally harmful, and natural technology that you can see from space - dam.
In opinions, Mr. Winship remembers the very short-lived fury that came from the Kent State shootings, and how history seems to be repeating itself on matters like Wall Street reform. Short-lived fury that gave way to distraction or just stopping caring.
Mr. Lilla talks about the roots of the Tea Party - the American creed that is going liberal-libertarian on individual issues and conservative-libertarian on economic issues, resulting in a group with no leader that demands government get out of every aspect of their lives, from what they do with their money to whether they have to follow safety regulations. An an anarchic party, they’re not likely to have sustained pressure, but they can corrupt the Republicans into becoming like them and using their machine to do the Tea Party’s bidding. That would be pretty bad. Of course, you have to believe that’s what’s happening. Mr. Senik claims the country is moving rightward, and the GOP is just capitalizing on this movement. No problems here, sir - the populace just said they wanted to be closer to the waterline. Give me a hand with these deck chairs. And Mr. Orly, err O'Reilly says that the fault lies with the President suggesting that there is such a thing as enough money made, as the President will be a hypocrite on whether he has enough money. Liberal individualism, conservative individualism fused together nicely into one big libertarian festival.
The end result, as The Infamous Brad points out, is that if we're going to get Republican policies regardless of who we elect, we may as well just elect Republicans so we can stick the right people with the blame.
Mr. Dean may or may not have been intending to make this point, but his column about the difficulties religious organizations are facing in Former Soviet Republics is an excellent description of how things go wrong when you try to use The Law to keep undesirable religious elements out. Because The Law is a big giant unwieldy club, not a scalpel. Christian warriors looking to change things here in the United States should take note.
Mr. Carroll dismisses the good-looking numbers of the recovery, claiming the only people profiting are lawyers and lobbyists, which companies are spending more on to protect themselves from the government’s controlling hand. For those worried about spending, The Washington Times is all about using Greece as an example of where America is going, and Mike Huckabee is not above serious inflation of the debt numbers to try and make things more dire than they are.
Mr. Will devotes most of his column to talking about how he doesn't like the United States being used as a nation-building force (we think) before throwing in a stinger at the end about how much Americans suck because they have no stomach for long conflicts. Despite the two land wars in Asia still going on, we add.
Mr. Rove, still affectionately Turd Blossom, calls Barack Obama a hypocrite for talking about a need to return to civility while encouraging the divisive and name-calling politics he's crusading against. Mostly because the President isn’t telling his staff and the Democratic Congresscritters that they need to behave with their language. Nothing at all in there about what the Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Fox News have been slinging from day one of his accepted nomination - no, if the President is serious, he has to rein in all of those Democrats who are mouthing off, regardless of the truth value of what they are saying, or he’s not serious.
Ms. Knoploh touts abstincence as actually working, based on statistics from places that have a vested interest in showing that abstinence works, while ignoring the point made by the columnist she’s commenting on that teaching abstinence encourage not planning for the possibility that someone might not wait for marriage in her zeal to say, “But she’s wrong in the numbers! My totally biased sources say so!” (Standard Reminder: We Are Not Unbiased, Either...)
Mr. Scherz reads very deeply into an AMA request to its members to conduct their poltical speech with sensitivity to their patients and with respect to their practice and beleives it a muzzle order against anyone who wants to criticize the health reform bill. It was probably the AMA saying, “Look, ‘First, Do No Harm’ means you don’t turn people away at the door by posting signs that say ‘If you voted for the current President, you should go take your business elsewhere’" in a bit more flowery language. For Mr. Scherz, though, it’s the AMA going CYA about their role in passing the health care bill, which is obviously going horribly, expensively, wrong on all regards, intrudes on doctor-patient regulations (and kills Grandma!), and telling their member doctors to tow the line that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Occam would have a fit.
And out of opinions, Mr. Yogerst praises Iron Man 2 as the ultimate patriotic film and an example of Hollywood getting reality right, with the anti-government anti-media patriot Tony Stark refuses to turn his weapon over, which gets the government in the snares of someone else and...yeah. It might be conservative fantasy-land, but it’s not getting anything ”right“.
Last for tonight, peruse advertisements for steamship travel in Japan. And remember, the world can be saved by steam! Just so long as you don’t start getting instances of some new jargon occurring.
