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All of this and more! - 22-24 May 2010
May. 25th, 2010 12:49 amGreetings, Internet-connected people with large brains and bigger IQs! A publis service announcement - always keep your computer and connection as secure as you can, which means knowing the main vectors of malware attack. That way you avoid becoming zombie meat.
Out in the world today, a secret agreement and offer to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa confims that Israel has them and now making it a question of whether they will use them rather than whether they have them, rather than the official line of “ambiguity” Israel prefers.
The United States implicated North Korea in the sinking of a South Korean ship, based on political dynamics rather than facts. Hrm, an excuse to start another land war in Asia against the Godless Commies (as opposed to the Godless Muslims, we note). Makes sense that they’d be speculating aloud now. South Korea is pressing the issue with the United Nations.
As revenues shrink, governments across Europe are rethinking the social model and entitlement services they were able to provide in boom times. A large chunk of reform is in pension services, probably an easy one to change, even though it makes a lot of people at pension age unhappy.
Anwar al-Awlaki may be the next Osama bin Laden, based on the ties he's garnering to terror plots and the messages he's sending out as part of al-Qaeda. Speaking at the commencement of the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Obama pledged to help create a new order that can defeat al-Qaeda and accomplish many other orldwide goals, like the reduction of nuclear weapons and proliferation.
A jetliner that went down in India killed more than 150 and left eight survivors. The plane overshot the runway, and in this particular venue, that’s deadly.
Into more interesting material, This year, we will finally see the unabridged autobiography of Mark Twain in wide distribution, his estate having followed to the letter his request that it not be published for 100 years after his death. The unedited transcripts and manuscripts run 5,000 pages, so the published book has a lot of material to work with.
Domestic news attacks! With the possibility that people arrested but not convicted of crimes will have their DNA taken and added to a national databse, without the requirement of a warrant. This as the United Kingdom’s Lib Dems chief and Deputy Prime Minister pledged to reduce the amount of DNA in their database, because it suffered strongly from mission creep. Much like ours will. After all, it’s not too soon that biometric ID cards will be put upon us, and then you just have to give a DNA sample to renew your license to the stronger required version...
In our “Nero fiddles while Rome burns” department, even as their companies were suffering, the perks and benefits for corporate executives remained stable or increased. The amounts weren’t necessarily large, but it points to a mentality that should make regulators and the rest of us worry.
Still in the same department, The Texas state Board of Education adopted their proposed changes, making textbooks and teaching in Texas significantly more rightwardly jingoistic, Judeo-Christian, emphasising white people and not minorities, and heaping lavish praise on The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) while decrying government. Now the question is how much influence that has on other states, or whether we’ll see a bout between California standards and Texas standards...
GOP strategists have figured out why a Democrat won the special election for Pennsylvania-12, the seat occupied by Representative John Murtha until recently - it was primary day, and the Democrats came out in force to make Arlen Specter go away. So it’s the Governor/SoS who chose the date for the election to thank/curse for the win.
Once again, because it appears to bear repeating - saying things that are demonstrably false invites the ire of the fact-checkers. Even worse is when you say the President is hiding because he hasn’t given any press conferences (he has, but the network isn’t carrying them) after having said that the President was too media-exposed not too long ago.
To further drive a point about glass houses and stones, Sarah Palin accused the President of moving slowly to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf and of crony capitalism/the President being in bed with Big Oil. (And that the scrutiny would have been tougher under the previous president). There are three words to describe the appropriate response: Drill. Baby. Drill.
A Norfolk teacher and principal have both been placed on administrative leave - the teacher for handing out small fetus dolls with religious messages on them, the principal for inviting teachers and students to pray with her before various events, tests, and school days. And the story runs with the principal, using the teacher’s decision to hand out tiny fetuses as the lead-in/throwaway. Um. Two separate articles, please, and each given the column space it deserves. As for the behavior in both places, it is unacceptable for teachers and principals to push any views on their students in such a way that the students don’t feel comfortable starting a deabte/discussion about the appropriateness of the viewpoint and of the teacher’s decision to express it.
An unintended consequence of boycotts of Arizona may be a hammering of the service industry, often known for employing lots of Hispanic people. The boycott may thus make the situation worse for Hispanic people - less work and jobs as well as being forced to carry their citizenship papers with them all the time.
New York's buses were apparently running on jet fuel, at a cost of $39 million beyond regular fuel costs. I’ll bet nobody noticed if the buses were running faster.
The Republican Party wants to make Rand Paul into less of a libertarian and more of a standard Republican, as the Republican nominee for Senate continued to inflame opinions by suggesting that government has taken unacceptable rhetoric and are zealously hunting for someone to blame with regard to BP and the oil disaster.
Into science we go. Colony collapse disorder, meet white nose syndrome, an as-yet-unknown malady affecting and destroying bat populations in the United States. These are the dangerous ones - if a species that’s vital to the process of survival goes out, and nobody knows why, not only do you get knock-on effects, you can’t necessarily stop the next one.
Technology gives us betas of an augmented-reality Android-based sattelite navigation system, a concept car that claims to be able to synthesise fuel out of carbon dioxide in the air and output oxygen as waste, and paper supercapacitors, which makes power requirements rather, erm, thin.
Voyager 2 looks to be back in order, after a memory dump revealed a flipped bit and the engineers pushed through the appropriate reset commands.
Moving into opinions, Karen Irwin gets it when it comes to the role of parent as censor of their children and nobody else. And Ms. Noonan wants the United States to get its privacy back, instead of the continued push toward more data available about everyone, searchable by anyone, and protected by noone.
On politics, Mr. Hill believes that the President has angered the "citizen class", those people who believe that America is Always Good, our citizenship rights make Americans better than just basic human rights, and Americans are the only people who should be allowed to govern or suggest what good government for Americans is. Thus, by apologizing for America, or discussing relevant problems in the country as examples on what not to do in other countries (apparently equating the Papers Please law with China’s Great Firewall and repressive tactics in the process), reaching out to other countries that aren’t traditional allies, and joining the world in condemning the Papers Please law (Mr. Brownfield continues to insist that the Papers Please law is reasonable, sane, and that instead of criticizing it, the Obama Administration should be cheering it and looking for national incremental solutions, by the way), President Obama and his agenda will suffer greatly in November when the citizen class erupts in their rage. The article itself is bog-standard “hope for change” Republican/Teabaggerism, but Mr. Hill adds his unique serration with the use of his choice phrase “citizen class” - with the implication that anyone who doesn’t believe like he does isn’t a citizen of the country, regardless of what their immigration, naturalization, or birth status is. (What, dog-whistle to Britherism, here? Never...) It’s a very narrow worldview, and we wonder what the people that Mr. Hill thinks of when he says the “citizen class” is angry.
Mr. Goodman demonstrates what happens when you let interests and corporations write your reform bills - they find out that it's easier and cheaper to pay the fine for not covering you than to pay your premiums. If that’s really true, then there’s a hole to plug with later legislation, ya? Or that’s your impetus to make the individual market affordable, or perhaps, just jump straight to single-payer and relieve the burden of premiums through the wonders of taxation. Mr. Goodman suggests a flat subsidy for insurance rates, regardless of income. (After, that is, obliquely pointing out how expensive individual coverage can be, so that the family earning less suddenly has more of their income chewed up in premiums.) Dick Morris and Eileen McGann think they have the counterweight to that - the financial regulation bill that gives the government the power to bust a bank too big to fail (Political Revenge!), the requirement to pass credit instruments through the consumer financial protection agency (Red tape! Political revenge! Slowing the market to a crawl!) and doesn't actually regulate derivatives. Well, if that’s the case, then special interests won the day for at least some part of it.
Ms. Seymour insists that governmental regulators are also at fault for the recent string of disasters, but that you won't hear that from the mainstream media, and that because regulators can be corrupted, the system needs more reform than the businesses. Shorter: “If you can cheat, it’s because the pit boss isn’t doing his job. Obviously, the pit boss needs to be fired. Don’t do anything to the cheaters until the pit boss can catch them. Let them keep cheating and making money.” This is in contrast to a Gaius Publius who says the country had some of its greatest prosperity when marginal tax rates on the rich and the corporate were high, and that as they've fallen, so has the prosperity, except for the CEOs that are taking all that extra money and rewarding themselves with it.
Mr. Krauthammer says that Brazil, Turkey, and others who are helping Iran or betting with Russia are doing so logically because President Obama is driving America into a full retreat from its job as World Policeman and Spreader of Freedom Everywhere.
Mr. Fund echoes the idea of a liberal-leaning media by copmlaining about how much scrutiny the Tea folk get while not paying any attention to the machinations of unions like the SEIU, which he tries to tie into the “discredited” ACORN. Sorry, what? Discredited because someone sold the United States Congress on a cut video that blatantly lied? Now, union clout isn’t necessarily getting media coverage because, well, people know that unions organize and bring their clout out for the Democrats (and occasionally the liberals) and will demonstrate. Tea people get extra coverage because they’re novel and because the positions they seem to want to hold are strange, varied, and sometimes not very progressive.
Ms. Shaw Crouse accuses the health care bill of encouraging women to stay single, so they'll continue to vote Democratic, through the use of "marriage penalties" in taxes and/or premiums on health care for those who get married. Also add in standard bit about single motherhood being the root of societal evils and responsible for the downfall of society, making the President a Bad, Bad Man for encouraging singleness instead of demanding all those young women forego their careers and get married, into the kitchen, and making babies.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Sirota points out there is no organized liberal force, and that most who claim to be liberals are Democrats, a center-right party, in masquerade.
And last for tonight, making a lot of money off of breaking a taboo (or two) - the case of pr0n going all the way to twincest.
Out in the world today, a secret agreement and offer to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa confims that Israel has them and now making it a question of whether they will use them rather than whether they have them, rather than the official line of “ambiguity” Israel prefers.
The United States implicated North Korea in the sinking of a South Korean ship, based on political dynamics rather than facts. Hrm, an excuse to start another land war in Asia against the Godless Commies (as opposed to the Godless Muslims, we note). Makes sense that they’d be speculating aloud now. South Korea is pressing the issue with the United Nations.
As revenues shrink, governments across Europe are rethinking the social model and entitlement services they were able to provide in boom times. A large chunk of reform is in pension services, probably an easy one to change, even though it makes a lot of people at pension age unhappy.
Anwar al-Awlaki may be the next Osama bin Laden, based on the ties he's garnering to terror plots and the messages he's sending out as part of al-Qaeda. Speaking at the commencement of the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Obama pledged to help create a new order that can defeat al-Qaeda and accomplish many other orldwide goals, like the reduction of nuclear weapons and proliferation.
A jetliner that went down in India killed more than 150 and left eight survivors. The plane overshot the runway, and in this particular venue, that’s deadly.
Into more interesting material, This year, we will finally see the unabridged autobiography of Mark Twain in wide distribution, his estate having followed to the letter his request that it not be published for 100 years after his death. The unedited transcripts and manuscripts run 5,000 pages, so the published book has a lot of material to work with.
Domestic news attacks! With the possibility that people arrested but not convicted of crimes will have their DNA taken and added to a national databse, without the requirement of a warrant. This as the United Kingdom’s Lib Dems chief and Deputy Prime Minister pledged to reduce the amount of DNA in their database, because it suffered strongly from mission creep. Much like ours will. After all, it’s not too soon that biometric ID cards will be put upon us, and then you just have to give a DNA sample to renew your license to the stronger required version...
In our “Nero fiddles while Rome burns” department, even as their companies were suffering, the perks and benefits for corporate executives remained stable or increased. The amounts weren’t necessarily large, but it points to a mentality that should make regulators and the rest of us worry.
Still in the same department, The Texas state Board of Education adopted their proposed changes, making textbooks and teaching in Texas significantly more rightwardly jingoistic, Judeo-Christian, emphasising white people and not minorities, and heaping lavish praise on The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) while decrying government. Now the question is how much influence that has on other states, or whether we’ll see a bout between California standards and Texas standards...
GOP strategists have figured out why a Democrat won the special election for Pennsylvania-12, the seat occupied by Representative John Murtha until recently - it was primary day, and the Democrats came out in force to make Arlen Specter go away. So it’s the Governor/SoS who chose the date for the election to thank/curse for the win.
Once again, because it appears to bear repeating - saying things that are demonstrably false invites the ire of the fact-checkers. Even worse is when you say the President is hiding because he hasn’t given any press conferences (he has, but the network isn’t carrying them) after having said that the President was too media-exposed not too long ago.
To further drive a point about glass houses and stones, Sarah Palin accused the President of moving slowly to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf and of crony capitalism/the President being in bed with Big Oil. (And that the scrutiny would have been tougher under the previous president). There are three words to describe the appropriate response: Drill. Baby. Drill.
A Norfolk teacher and principal have both been placed on administrative leave - the teacher for handing out small fetus dolls with religious messages on them, the principal for inviting teachers and students to pray with her before various events, tests, and school days. And the story runs with the principal, using the teacher’s decision to hand out tiny fetuses as the lead-in/throwaway. Um. Two separate articles, please, and each given the column space it deserves. As for the behavior in both places, it is unacceptable for teachers and principals to push any views on their students in such a way that the students don’t feel comfortable starting a deabte/discussion about the appropriateness of the viewpoint and of the teacher’s decision to express it.
An unintended consequence of boycotts of Arizona may be a hammering of the service industry, often known for employing lots of Hispanic people. The boycott may thus make the situation worse for Hispanic people - less work and jobs as well as being forced to carry their citizenship papers with them all the time.
New York's buses were apparently running on jet fuel, at a cost of $39 million beyond regular fuel costs. I’ll bet nobody noticed if the buses were running faster.
The Republican Party wants to make Rand Paul into less of a libertarian and more of a standard Republican, as the Republican nominee for Senate continued to inflame opinions by suggesting that government has taken unacceptable rhetoric and are zealously hunting for someone to blame with regard to BP and the oil disaster.
Into science we go. Colony collapse disorder, meet white nose syndrome, an as-yet-unknown malady affecting and destroying bat populations in the United States. These are the dangerous ones - if a species that’s vital to the process of survival goes out, and nobody knows why, not only do you get knock-on effects, you can’t necessarily stop the next one.
Technology gives us betas of an augmented-reality Android-based sattelite navigation system, a concept car that claims to be able to synthesise fuel out of carbon dioxide in the air and output oxygen as waste, and paper supercapacitors, which makes power requirements rather, erm, thin.
Voyager 2 looks to be back in order, after a memory dump revealed a flipped bit and the engineers pushed through the appropriate reset commands.
Moving into opinions, Karen Irwin gets it when it comes to the role of parent as censor of their children and nobody else. And Ms. Noonan wants the United States to get its privacy back, instead of the continued push toward more data available about everyone, searchable by anyone, and protected by noone.
On politics, Mr. Hill believes that the President has angered the "citizen class", those people who believe that America is Always Good, our citizenship rights make Americans better than just basic human rights, and Americans are the only people who should be allowed to govern or suggest what good government for Americans is. Thus, by apologizing for America, or discussing relevant problems in the country as examples on what not to do in other countries (apparently equating the Papers Please law with China’s Great Firewall and repressive tactics in the process), reaching out to other countries that aren’t traditional allies, and joining the world in condemning the Papers Please law (Mr. Brownfield continues to insist that the Papers Please law is reasonable, sane, and that instead of criticizing it, the Obama Administration should be cheering it and looking for national incremental solutions, by the way), President Obama and his agenda will suffer greatly in November when the citizen class erupts in their rage. The article itself is bog-standard “hope for change” Republican/Teabaggerism, but Mr. Hill adds his unique serration with the use of his choice phrase “citizen class” - with the implication that anyone who doesn’t believe like he does isn’t a citizen of the country, regardless of what their immigration, naturalization, or birth status is. (What, dog-whistle to Britherism, here? Never...) It’s a very narrow worldview, and we wonder what the people that Mr. Hill thinks of when he says the “citizen class” is angry.
Mr. Goodman demonstrates what happens when you let interests and corporations write your reform bills - they find out that it's easier and cheaper to pay the fine for not covering you than to pay your premiums. If that’s really true, then there’s a hole to plug with later legislation, ya? Or that’s your impetus to make the individual market affordable, or perhaps, just jump straight to single-payer and relieve the burden of premiums through the wonders of taxation. Mr. Goodman suggests a flat subsidy for insurance rates, regardless of income. (After, that is, obliquely pointing out how expensive individual coverage can be, so that the family earning less suddenly has more of their income chewed up in premiums.) Dick Morris and Eileen McGann think they have the counterweight to that - the financial regulation bill that gives the government the power to bust a bank too big to fail (Political Revenge!), the requirement to pass credit instruments through the consumer financial protection agency (Red tape! Political revenge! Slowing the market to a crawl!) and doesn't actually regulate derivatives. Well, if that’s the case, then special interests won the day for at least some part of it.
Ms. Seymour insists that governmental regulators are also at fault for the recent string of disasters, but that you won't hear that from the mainstream media, and that because regulators can be corrupted, the system needs more reform than the businesses. Shorter: “If you can cheat, it’s because the pit boss isn’t doing his job. Obviously, the pit boss needs to be fired. Don’t do anything to the cheaters until the pit boss can catch them. Let them keep cheating and making money.” This is in contrast to a Gaius Publius who says the country had some of its greatest prosperity when marginal tax rates on the rich and the corporate were high, and that as they've fallen, so has the prosperity, except for the CEOs that are taking all that extra money and rewarding themselves with it.
Mr. Krauthammer says that Brazil, Turkey, and others who are helping Iran or betting with Russia are doing so logically because President Obama is driving America into a full retreat from its job as World Policeman and Spreader of Freedom Everywhere.
Mr. Fund echoes the idea of a liberal-leaning media by copmlaining about how much scrutiny the Tea folk get while not paying any attention to the machinations of unions like the SEIU, which he tries to tie into the “discredited” ACORN. Sorry, what? Discredited because someone sold the United States Congress on a cut video that blatantly lied? Now, union clout isn’t necessarily getting media coverage because, well, people know that unions organize and bring their clout out for the Democrats (and occasionally the liberals) and will demonstrate. Tea people get extra coverage because they’re novel and because the positions they seem to want to hold are strange, varied, and sometimes not very progressive.
Ms. Shaw Crouse accuses the health care bill of encouraging women to stay single, so they'll continue to vote Democratic, through the use of "marriage penalties" in taxes and/or premiums on health care for those who get married. Also add in standard bit about single motherhood being the root of societal evils and responsible for the downfall of society, making the President a Bad, Bad Man for encouraging singleness instead of demanding all those young women forego their careers and get married, into the kitchen, and making babies.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Sirota points out there is no organized liberal force, and that most who claim to be liberals are Democrats, a center-right party, in masquerade.
And last for tonight, making a lot of money off of breaking a taboo (or two) - the case of pr0n going all the way to twincest.
