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Yet a few more things - 27-28 May 2010
May. 29th, 2010 02:28 amGood morning, people who strive to be heard and understood! Recognize the sage advice of Berkley Breathed given to a young editorial cartoonist on making sure your point can't be misinterpreted (where possible). As an example, Representative Barney Frank made a satiric request to see the brith certificate of the new Republican Representative from Hawaii.
Out in the world today, A rabbi in Israel's West Bank forbade women from being candidates in the local election. As you can see, people of Fox News, it is not only certain Muslims in the Middle East that have dim views on independent women. Speaking of Muslims, although this time to talk about stupidity regarding them, Detroit may be seeing new advertisements on buses offering help for those looking to leave the religion, as if it were some sort of cult that needed an intervention to get out of. Considering the amount of Muslims in the Detroit and surrounding area, I don’t think those ads will go over all that well.
Tensions continue to go up between the Koreas.
Domestically, well, oil spill. It’s still all over the news because they’re still trying to find magical ways of fixing it. British Petroleum continues to look like an evil, evil, entity, thanks to workers invoking the right to avoid self-incrimination and wanting to get a judge that's got ties to oil companies to adjudicate their issues. They’ll also likely complain about the government wanting to preserve more land and not have it leased for exploitation rights and the suspension and cancellation of oil and gas leases pending.
As the recession continues (or the recovery continues), more and more persons are deciding to quit their jobs and go elsewhere, rather than being laid off by their employers. If you have a mind to copmlain to your Congresscritters about the situation, though, make sure that you're polite, or you might be brought up on felony harassment charges.
The United States House and Senate both approved an amendment that would end the military policy against openly LGBT people serving in the armed forces, contingent that the President, Defense Secretary, and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff sign off on it after the Pentagon completes their study on how best to go about implementing the change. That’s good. Also with that bill was another $60 billion USD for war spending, which caused budget anxiety and the removal of $24 billion for the unemployed and those on federal aid. Including Senate recess before the House could even finish their bill.
The new National Guard troops heading to the Mexcian border are there to stop the drug trade, not stop illegal immigrants, something sure to inflame conservatives thinking they had finally had some of their prayers answered.
The Republican Party opened up a website to solicit suggestions for their planks and agenda for the upcoming elections. Of course, as anyone knows, when you open up to the Internets, you get the genuinely crazy and the satirically so.
Everone has their price, we are told. For just getting your foot in the door on the promise of possibly receiving an endorsement from the Minutemen fringe group, several thousand dollars might be the price of entry, plus hiring a consulting group closely linked to them.
Making comparisons to Nazis and twisting history to suit their purposes, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said Hitler was gay and that he used gays to persecute others because straight soldiers couldn't be trained to massacre the way he wanted his soldiers to. Um...no, he wasn’t, even some of his top persons who were gay fell to the Night of Long Knives, and there were plenty of non-gay soldiers who were plenty vicious. And shame on your for trying to compare homosexuality to Hitler. Godwin’s Rule I do invoke.
Two teachers in South Florida have been suspended (and will hopefully be sacked) for sprinkling holy water on a fellow teacher as she was explaining her atheism to her students. The article is naturally unclear about whether explanation or advocating was being done, which does have repercussions for the teacher doing the explaining - while the school is officially atheist, personal beliefs of teachers should not be expressed, as a general rule. So there could be suspensions and sacking all around depending.
Speaking of school folk getting sacked, a football coach was sacked after the mother of his girlfriend e-mailed explicit video of coach and girlfriend to the principal of the school the coach worked at. And then the principal attempted to justify it by saying “we hold our teachers to a higher standard”. What, because his girlfriend was college-age? Or that he made some film about them together intended for private use? Where, exactly, is the moral failing deserving of firing here?
One of the credit ratings that blissfully passed on toxic and dangerous derivative products has threatened to downgrade the United States' credit rating based on its current spending patterns.
Finally, when defending yourself against accusations that you're dumber than a brick, it's probably a good idea to spend extra time proofing your counter-attack. Oh, and shooting at a getaway car when you are sure nobody’s life is in danger is probably not the smartest thing to do, as is stabbing your mother because she didn't bring you a cheeseburger.
In technology, a professor with an implanted chip confirmed that it could be infected by a computer virus and pass that virus along to other technology.
Something disturbing: people are less concerned about their privacy on-line than they were before, but also something heartening: the younger you are, the more likely it is that you're trying to manage your privacy on-line. So I guess the pendulum might be swinging a bit back toward the paranoid. Maybe enough stories of Facebook defaults, sexting-gone-crazy, and bullying resulting in suicide are helping people realize the needs to have private places on-line. And then there are places like Your Open Book that intend to put a bang on the matter by showing just what can be publicly searched.
Sony demonstrates a rollable OLED display.
a gent claimed he didn't know what the dollar sign meant in pleading innocence to tax related charges.
The problem of believing an expert or your own lying eyes manifests itself again in the climate change debate, and becomes exacerbated when persons with clear agendas accuse the government of stalling on delivering information through FOIA - it makes the government look like it has something to hide.
Warner Borthers may have pirated their anti-pirate technology from a different company. The recursion, it boggles.
Finally, not one, not two, but three different bits on the usage of nanoparticles to deliver treatments directly to affected areas without disturbing the surrounding tissue.
In the opinions, Mr. Gopnik weaves in several book references and reviews in building a picture of a very complex and still-debated Jesus Christ. On his opposite side, Mr. Prager says that the rise of liberalism and the "post-Christian" world has generated greater evils than any church ever did in religion's name, proving himself to not only be ignorant of history, but blind to the present as well.
The Infamous Brad strikes again with some maths on just what it would actually take for a laughably conservative estimate of a "secure border" by the rubric that's in political vogue, and the obvious finacial and taxable repercussions of even trying to do so before they’ll start looking at solutions that might actually work on fixing illegal immigration programs. Mr. Cooper suggests that anti-terrorism technique in New York and anti-illegal immigration technique in Arizona are one and the same, and people praising New York for its work in the Time Square dud should also be praising the ability of police to ask about immigration status when they’ve stopped or arrested someone for something. (And possibly that Arizona should have a program that encourages people to spy on their neighbors and report them for suspected illegality.) Oh, and if you’re not quite properly paranoid yet, you can worry about the United Nations taking away your guns because the United States signs a treaty.
Mr. Carroll finds every way he can to blame the federal government for the size of the Deepwater Horizon accident, claiming the government had to take more decisive action, and reform the regulators so the lax attitude wouldn’t work, and that they can’t even come up with the stuff they need to while they stop others from doing things that would help. Mr. Carroll, who was operating the well when it exploded? Who has found themselves flat-footed and utilizing at least 31 year-old solutions to problems that were big problems when the depth was a mere 200 feet deep? Which company decided to forego safety in order to increase profit and speed? Who continues to insist on lowballing their estimates so as to escape extra liability? Mr. Carafano declares that the government should have a much more organized disaster response, instead of just mobilizing ordinary people and shipping them out with minimal training to clean up things. Emergency preparedness is an excellent thing, but those who can respond to an oil spill the fastest are not the same as those who can respond to a plane crash. It’s not anywhere near a 1:1 correlation. Now, if disaster response could provide the tools so that even the barely trained go out safely, that would be a noble goal. Oh, and Mr. Rove thinks the government should be blamed for not having an organized relief plan for oil spills in deep water, one that could swing into action even though the people who are supposed to know what to do had no clue.
Mr. Barr busts out the bullshit, claiming Census enumerators can demand with the power of the law to enter anyone's house or apartment to collect their statistics. Uh, yeah, right. Mr. Williams does him one better, blaming minimum wage laws as the reason why canning companies packed up from American Samoa and went elsewhere for cheap labor. The wages, no, but the corporations unwilling to pay them. Mr. Williams makes it sound like those government decrees were done with the desire to make more Samoans unemployed. Nothing but the companies and their relentless profit drives can be blamed for why they pulled up stakes.
And, of course, the continued complaints about how the PAYGO rules aren't being followed in this administration...like they weren’t in the last. And fear that the American populace has become too dependent on government assistance to be able to resist them when they encroach on their liberties.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger suggests that only real Reform against government as we know it will calm the angry electorate. And Mr. Hanson thinks that Barack Obama should focus on the things that he thinks are problems, instead of apologizing for American mistakes.
And last for tonight, the messages of the Disney Princes and Princesses. No, not the wholesome ones. The ones that come through loud and clear in their stories (and their source materials, for some of them). For something more...actually, no, we’ll just say an intended sex-educational game might not make it through the XBox review process, because it has, you know, condom-hatted marines attacking STDs and germs in crotches and rectums.
Oh, and one last thing - the presence of hyperlinks and out Web-browsing habits is rewiring our brains for breadth and not depth, mirroring the design of the Web.
Out in the world today, A rabbi in Israel's West Bank forbade women from being candidates in the local election. As you can see, people of Fox News, it is not only certain Muslims in the Middle East that have dim views on independent women. Speaking of Muslims, although this time to talk about stupidity regarding them, Detroit may be seeing new advertisements on buses offering help for those looking to leave the religion, as if it were some sort of cult that needed an intervention to get out of. Considering the amount of Muslims in the Detroit and surrounding area, I don’t think those ads will go over all that well.
Tensions continue to go up between the Koreas.
Domestically, well, oil spill. It’s still all over the news because they’re still trying to find magical ways of fixing it. British Petroleum continues to look like an evil, evil, entity, thanks to workers invoking the right to avoid self-incrimination and wanting to get a judge that's got ties to oil companies to adjudicate their issues. They’ll also likely complain about the government wanting to preserve more land and not have it leased for exploitation rights and the suspension and cancellation of oil and gas leases pending.
As the recession continues (or the recovery continues), more and more persons are deciding to quit their jobs and go elsewhere, rather than being laid off by their employers. If you have a mind to copmlain to your Congresscritters about the situation, though, make sure that you're polite, or you might be brought up on felony harassment charges.
The United States House and Senate both approved an amendment that would end the military policy against openly LGBT people serving in the armed forces, contingent that the President, Defense Secretary, and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff sign off on it after the Pentagon completes their study on how best to go about implementing the change. That’s good. Also with that bill was another $60 billion USD for war spending, which caused budget anxiety and the removal of $24 billion for the unemployed and those on federal aid. Including Senate recess before the House could even finish their bill.
The new National Guard troops heading to the Mexcian border are there to stop the drug trade, not stop illegal immigrants, something sure to inflame conservatives thinking they had finally had some of their prayers answered.
The Republican Party opened up a website to solicit suggestions for their planks and agenda for the upcoming elections. Of course, as anyone knows, when you open up to the Internets, you get the genuinely crazy and the satirically so.
Everone has their price, we are told. For just getting your foot in the door on the promise of possibly receiving an endorsement from the Minutemen fringe group, several thousand dollars might be the price of entry, plus hiring a consulting group closely linked to them.
Making comparisons to Nazis and twisting history to suit their purposes, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said Hitler was gay and that he used gays to persecute others because straight soldiers couldn't be trained to massacre the way he wanted his soldiers to. Um...no, he wasn’t, even some of his top persons who were gay fell to the Night of Long Knives, and there were plenty of non-gay soldiers who were plenty vicious. And shame on your for trying to compare homosexuality to Hitler. Godwin’s Rule I do invoke.
Two teachers in South Florida have been suspended (and will hopefully be sacked) for sprinkling holy water on a fellow teacher as she was explaining her atheism to her students. The article is naturally unclear about whether explanation or advocating was being done, which does have repercussions for the teacher doing the explaining - while the school is officially atheist, personal beliefs of teachers should not be expressed, as a general rule. So there could be suspensions and sacking all around depending.
Speaking of school folk getting sacked, a football coach was sacked after the mother of his girlfriend e-mailed explicit video of coach and girlfriend to the principal of the school the coach worked at. And then the principal attempted to justify it by saying “we hold our teachers to a higher standard”. What, because his girlfriend was college-age? Or that he made some film about them together intended for private use? Where, exactly, is the moral failing deserving of firing here?
One of the credit ratings that blissfully passed on toxic and dangerous derivative products has threatened to downgrade the United States' credit rating based on its current spending patterns.
Finally, when defending yourself against accusations that you're dumber than a brick, it's probably a good idea to spend extra time proofing your counter-attack. Oh, and shooting at a getaway car when you are sure nobody’s life is in danger is probably not the smartest thing to do, as is stabbing your mother because she didn't bring you a cheeseburger.
In technology, a professor with an implanted chip confirmed that it could be infected by a computer virus and pass that virus along to other technology.
Something disturbing: people are less concerned about their privacy on-line than they were before, but also something heartening: the younger you are, the more likely it is that you're trying to manage your privacy on-line. So I guess the pendulum might be swinging a bit back toward the paranoid. Maybe enough stories of Facebook defaults, sexting-gone-crazy, and bullying resulting in suicide are helping people realize the needs to have private places on-line. And then there are places like Your Open Book that intend to put a bang on the matter by showing just what can be publicly searched.
Sony demonstrates a rollable OLED display.
a gent claimed he didn't know what the dollar sign meant in pleading innocence to tax related charges.
The problem of believing an expert or your own lying eyes manifests itself again in the climate change debate, and becomes exacerbated when persons with clear agendas accuse the government of stalling on delivering information through FOIA - it makes the government look like it has something to hide.
Warner Borthers may have pirated their anti-pirate technology from a different company. The recursion, it boggles.
Finally, not one, not two, but three different bits on the usage of nanoparticles to deliver treatments directly to affected areas without disturbing the surrounding tissue.
In the opinions, Mr. Gopnik weaves in several book references and reviews in building a picture of a very complex and still-debated Jesus Christ. On his opposite side, Mr. Prager says that the rise of liberalism and the "post-Christian" world has generated greater evils than any church ever did in religion's name, proving himself to not only be ignorant of history, but blind to the present as well.
The Infamous Brad strikes again with some maths on just what it would actually take for a laughably conservative estimate of a "secure border" by the rubric that's in political vogue, and the obvious finacial and taxable repercussions of even trying to do so before they’ll start looking at solutions that might actually work on fixing illegal immigration programs. Mr. Cooper suggests that anti-terrorism technique in New York and anti-illegal immigration technique in Arizona are one and the same, and people praising New York for its work in the Time Square dud should also be praising the ability of police to ask about immigration status when they’ve stopped or arrested someone for something. (And possibly that Arizona should have a program that encourages people to spy on their neighbors and report them for suspected illegality.) Oh, and if you’re not quite properly paranoid yet, you can worry about the United Nations taking away your guns because the United States signs a treaty.
Mr. Carroll finds every way he can to blame the federal government for the size of the Deepwater Horizon accident, claiming the government had to take more decisive action, and reform the regulators so the lax attitude wouldn’t work, and that they can’t even come up with the stuff they need to while they stop others from doing things that would help. Mr. Carroll, who was operating the well when it exploded? Who has found themselves flat-footed and utilizing at least 31 year-old solutions to problems that were big problems when the depth was a mere 200 feet deep? Which company decided to forego safety in order to increase profit and speed? Who continues to insist on lowballing their estimates so as to escape extra liability? Mr. Carafano declares that the government should have a much more organized disaster response, instead of just mobilizing ordinary people and shipping them out with minimal training to clean up things. Emergency preparedness is an excellent thing, but those who can respond to an oil spill the fastest are not the same as those who can respond to a plane crash. It’s not anywhere near a 1:1 correlation. Now, if disaster response could provide the tools so that even the barely trained go out safely, that would be a noble goal. Oh, and Mr. Rove thinks the government should be blamed for not having an organized relief plan for oil spills in deep water, one that could swing into action even though the people who are supposed to know what to do had no clue.
Mr. Barr busts out the bullshit, claiming Census enumerators can demand with the power of the law to enter anyone's house or apartment to collect their statistics. Uh, yeah, right. Mr. Williams does him one better, blaming minimum wage laws as the reason why canning companies packed up from American Samoa and went elsewhere for cheap labor. The wages, no, but the corporations unwilling to pay them. Mr. Williams makes it sound like those government decrees were done with the desire to make more Samoans unemployed. Nothing but the companies and their relentless profit drives can be blamed for why they pulled up stakes.
And, of course, the continued complaints about how the PAYGO rules aren't being followed in this administration...like they weren’t in the last. And fear that the American populace has become too dependent on government assistance to be able to resist them when they encroach on their liberties.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger suggests that only real Reform against government as we know it will calm the angry electorate. And Mr. Hanson thinks that Barack Obama should focus on the things that he thinks are problems, instead of apologizing for American mistakes.
And last for tonight, the messages of the Disney Princes and Princesses. No, not the wholesome ones. The ones that come through loud and clear in their stories (and their source materials, for some of them). For something more...actually, no, we’ll just say an intended sex-educational game might not make it through the XBox review process, because it has, you know, condom-hatted marines attacking STDs and germs in crotches and rectums.
Oh, and one last thing - the presence of hyperlinks and out Web-browsing habits is rewiring our brains for breadth and not depth, mirroring the design of the Web.
