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With room to pontificate - 3 June 2010
Jun. 4th, 2010 12:33 amGreetings, persons who would enjoy owning movie props and replicas. A 1964 Aston Martin DB5 used in the James Bond movie "Thunderball" and supposedly still kitted with all the Q modifications is expected to net several million pounds at auction.
For those looking for why we push hard to put books in the hands of children, check out the study summary that correlates amount of books in your house with highest grade level completed. Having books in the house can even compensate for less education in your parents. There have got to be more ways that we can get enough books ino the houses of kids for them to read their own.
And if you’re looking for a recommendation, if the manga/novels are as good as the anime, Library Wars is going to be worth picking up off the bookshelves.
Out in the world today, the Untied States is considering sending an aircraft carrier to the Korean Peninsula as a gesture aimed at dispelling tensions between the North and South.
The prime minister of Japan has resigned amidst broken promises of moving United States military bases away from Okinawa.
The Prime Minister of Israel defends the actions of his soldiers on the aid flotilla, claiming that on one particualr ship, the soldiers were viciously attacked and had to defend themselves. Once all the video taken gets sorted out, I think we’ll be able to determine the truth value of such a statement. That doesn’t stop people from saying the whole affair is really about Iran's nuclear ambitions and Palestine's desire to obtain some nukes from Iran to use against Israel, which seems rather Occam-nightmarish to me, but that seems to be the running gag, as even the Christian Science Monitor wonders about what we're going to do with Iran in the wake of Israel's actions. (That is, when not attempting to paint the group that sent the flotilla as the most terrorist-supporting aid organization there ever was, defending the actions of the soldiers and the blockades as entirely legal, and insisting that everyone always blows things out of proportion when Israel takes self defense against hostile attacking peace activists.)
The United Nations has criticized the policy of unmanned aerial vehicle attacks in places the United States is both at war and not at war with. The United States will likely point to a successful strike that killed a high-ranking al-Qaeda member as proof that their techniques are effective and should be allowed to continue.
In the domestic department, hooray for gender equality...because a female candidate for governor in South Carolina now stands accused of having two extramarital affairs? The candidate denies both allegations, calling it dirty politics and that her opponents are trying to smear her with unfounded accusations now that she’s got a fighting chance in the race.
A homeowner's association in Texas foreclosed on a soldier's house while he was deployed and sold a $300,000-appraised house for $3,500 to pay a debt of $800 in dues to them. The wife of the deployed serviceman didn’t get the notices because she stopped reading her mail or going all that much outside. The association did not come to visit her once to talk to her about the problem, nor are they requried to by Texas law. Oh, and there is the one bit in the law saying that active-duty servicepeople can’t have their houses foreclosed on, but the association filed statements wrongly saying neither of them was active-duty. When the new owner of the house started demanding rent from the wife was when the whole sordid affair came to light. That’s a ruthless homeowner’s association. Plus, they sold the house for nearly nothing - if it’s appraised for that much, surely they should be trying to squeeze every penny they can get out of it? Keep this kind of behavior in mind when you get down to the end of the opinion section tonight, and one of the points made there should become that much clearer.
The Making Mountains of Molehills Department of the opposition continues to allege serious wrongdoing in cases where people in political races were considered for administration positions. The trade-off of possible recommendations being that they would need to drop out of their political races. It’s like having to resign your Senate seat if you’re elected President. At least, that’s what it seems like to me. If there’s actual wrongdoing or political gambiting going on, some definitive proof would be nice.
Yet another time, elements of the Congress have told the President that there will be no facility in the United States to house the residents of Guantanamo Bay. Remind me again what is so dangerous about these persons that they have to be held off-shore in a legal grey zone, rather than in a prison designed to hold all sorts of murderers and violent criminals? Is it just that people prefer the ability to acy in legally grey matters to obtain whatever they think is intelligence?
Into technology we go, where we continue to try and make machines that can replicate themselves. Pair them with the right AI, like one that learns things from environmental factors, and not programming, and we’ve got gray goo! Or perhaps we should put them to use in solving problems of machine identification of music genres.
We’re also trying to develop new tests that can spot small concentrations of marker cells that indicate cancrous growths, so they can get zapped before they even get started. We’ve also got CT machines that can image an entire organ in realtime.
Ingenuity struck, althouh not necessarily in the most positive of ways, when a Saskatchewan man alerted authorities to his stranding in the wilderness by chopping down power poles and waiting for the utility to investigate the lost power.
And finally, robots as therapy assistants and companions for autism spectrum children, helping to work on social and other skills while the brain is still mostly plastic. Hooray for communication! Oh, speaking of, dolphins can use an iPad...
Leading opinions, The Slacktivist notes the curious absence of people complaining about his lack of poverty when they say he's reading the Bible wrong, often in their rush to condemn his positions on chastity. In doing so, they make a minor issue more important than it is and ignore one of the core issues of the work. In any academic setting, they would probably be laughed out of the lecture hall for not having read the text.
Mr. Frank points out that even dyed-in-the-teabag conservatives have been curiously all for more regulation and oversight in the midst of the Deepwater Horizons problem. Nobody seems willing to champion the cause of less regulation and restrictions when the consequences of those actions are spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico day by day. Even Sarah Palin is trying to spin this as “Well, if you had just let us drill where we know it’s safe, this wouldn’t have happened.” Until the next oil spill in the wildlife refuge or the next rusted pipe or whatever. It’s a curious place, our current times, where the poles are “more drilling but more regulation” and “let’s get off the oil habit as much as we can so we don’t have to risk these kinds of disasters”. For those still holding out that the disaster is modest, try this visualization that will put the slick right where you are, or look into the slideshow of how the people of the Gulf are trying to wait it out or stop it. Yes, that includes prayer.
Mr. Carroll is quick to list as many new undocumented costs of the health care bill passed as he can come across and push ahrder for repeal of the whole thing. If he’s willing to replace it with something better, stronger, and possible single-payer, I think he’d be able to make a great case. Returning things to the way they are, though, will not solve the problem. One must be able to propose ways of moving forward if one wants to undo what has passed.
Mr. Ingrassia says there are lots of lessons to learn about how not to run corporations or the government in how the GM bailout was handled, comparing their management style and union accomodation to the more power-concentrated Ford company that made hard decisions in management and “stood up” to the unions.
Mr. McGurn is irritated that the media and the political sphere seem out of touch with Americans on the issue of abortion, pointing to a Gallup survey that indicates people call themselves pro life and favor limited-availability abortions and contrasting it with media impressions that everyone who calls themselves pro-life is a Scott Roeder or wants to prevent women from having any choice at all. While yes, the media will go for something that sells ads, there are far too many stories of “there’s no abortion clinic around me”, “my pharmacist believes that birth control is evil and refuses to fill it”, and “my local politicians all say taht anyone seeking abortion is going to hell” across the country for anyone to argue that we can do “legal abortion only under certain circumstances” and be assured that teh girl in Renton, Washington has the same access that the girl in Missouri, or the outskirts of Texas, or Badaxe, Michigan. We can wrangle the specifics of what’s allowed and when, but until we have a baseline established that women have access to legal services without hindrance from local officials or unelected mobs, it will ultimately be a fruitless endeavour.
Rolling to the close of our opinions, we get a pair of persons perturbed by the now-nearly-pariah Rand Paul. First up, Mr. Williams says that all private businesses and individuals should have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, and that the government has no standing to tell them they can’t. He doesn’t think they will, because the lure of profit is far too strong for someone to discriminate. Mr. Stossel agrees with Mr. Paul, saying that it's time to repeal the part of the 1964 Civil Rights act that prohibits discrimination by private businesses that serve the public, and that he fully agrees that government shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate, so he’s not at all any sort of racist or needing to be fired for being a consistent libertarian. The argument he uses, that The Law is Not A Scalpel, and thus cannot effectively determine which forms of dsicrimination are okay and which are not, is the right one to use (in addition to the Lure of Profits mentioned above) in explaining his position. (He wrecks it at the end by claiming that The People acting privately will almost always do things that you like, while government’s track record is much more spotty on the issue, but I don’t think he recognizes that he’s only confirming a confirmation bias instead of making an objective point.)
I think they’re both wrong, that the Lure of Profits isn’t actually as strong as well-vested discrimination when it comes to business decisions, that there are enough people in any given community who will patronize discriminatory places to keep them solvent (perhaps because they’re discriminatory and they want some place to be where “those uppity X” won’t be allowed), and that enabling private persons and businesses to discriminate generates enclaves of discriminatory thought and insular bubble communities that will try to stay insular, lest one be exposed to outsiders (who will likely be actively run off the land if they don’t conform to the community’s prejudices). What Mr. Williams and Mr. Stossel are advocating is something like a nation of the very worst properties of gated communities and homeowners’ associations. Everything must be done their way or you can’t live with them, and heaven help you if you look different or don’t make enough to keep up with your peers or appearances. Preventing private businesses from discriminating keeps us mixing, instead of letting us separate out into our component parts. If we want to get rid of stupid discriminatory attitudes, fostering an environment where they can flourish seems a bit backwards, yeh?
Last for tonight, Steve Martin's sense of humor cleanly displayed in his personalized fan mail form response letters, and the problems of not checking your acronyms before going to press...or forming your organization, one or the other.
Oh, and duct tape prom clothing is in season again. And the entries are all looking very good.
For those looking for why we push hard to put books in the hands of children, check out the study summary that correlates amount of books in your house with highest grade level completed. Having books in the house can even compensate for less education in your parents. There have got to be more ways that we can get enough books ino the houses of kids for them to read their own.
And if you’re looking for a recommendation, if the manga/novels are as good as the anime, Library Wars is going to be worth picking up off the bookshelves.
Out in the world today, the Untied States is considering sending an aircraft carrier to the Korean Peninsula as a gesture aimed at dispelling tensions between the North and South.
The prime minister of Japan has resigned amidst broken promises of moving United States military bases away from Okinawa.
The Prime Minister of Israel defends the actions of his soldiers on the aid flotilla, claiming that on one particualr ship, the soldiers were viciously attacked and had to defend themselves. Once all the video taken gets sorted out, I think we’ll be able to determine the truth value of such a statement. That doesn’t stop people from saying the whole affair is really about Iran's nuclear ambitions and Palestine's desire to obtain some nukes from Iran to use against Israel, which seems rather Occam-nightmarish to me, but that seems to be the running gag, as even the Christian Science Monitor wonders about what we're going to do with Iran in the wake of Israel's actions. (That is, when not attempting to paint the group that sent the flotilla as the most terrorist-supporting aid organization there ever was, defending the actions of the soldiers and the blockades as entirely legal, and insisting that everyone always blows things out of proportion when Israel takes self defense against hostile attacking peace activists.)
The United Nations has criticized the policy of unmanned aerial vehicle attacks in places the United States is both at war and not at war with. The United States will likely point to a successful strike that killed a high-ranking al-Qaeda member as proof that their techniques are effective and should be allowed to continue.
In the domestic department, hooray for gender equality...because a female candidate for governor in South Carolina now stands accused of having two extramarital affairs? The candidate denies both allegations, calling it dirty politics and that her opponents are trying to smear her with unfounded accusations now that she’s got a fighting chance in the race.
A homeowner's association in Texas foreclosed on a soldier's house while he was deployed and sold a $300,000-appraised house for $3,500 to pay a debt of $800 in dues to them. The wife of the deployed serviceman didn’t get the notices because she stopped reading her mail or going all that much outside. The association did not come to visit her once to talk to her about the problem, nor are they requried to by Texas law. Oh, and there is the one bit in the law saying that active-duty servicepeople can’t have their houses foreclosed on, but the association filed statements wrongly saying neither of them was active-duty. When the new owner of the house started demanding rent from the wife was when the whole sordid affair came to light. That’s a ruthless homeowner’s association. Plus, they sold the house for nearly nothing - if it’s appraised for that much, surely they should be trying to squeeze every penny they can get out of it? Keep this kind of behavior in mind when you get down to the end of the opinion section tonight, and one of the points made there should become that much clearer.
The Making Mountains of Molehills Department of the opposition continues to allege serious wrongdoing in cases where people in political races were considered for administration positions. The trade-off of possible recommendations being that they would need to drop out of their political races. It’s like having to resign your Senate seat if you’re elected President. At least, that’s what it seems like to me. If there’s actual wrongdoing or political gambiting going on, some definitive proof would be nice.
Yet another time, elements of the Congress have told the President that there will be no facility in the United States to house the residents of Guantanamo Bay. Remind me again what is so dangerous about these persons that they have to be held off-shore in a legal grey zone, rather than in a prison designed to hold all sorts of murderers and violent criminals? Is it just that people prefer the ability to acy in legally grey matters to obtain whatever they think is intelligence?
Into technology we go, where we continue to try and make machines that can replicate themselves. Pair them with the right AI, like one that learns things from environmental factors, and not programming, and we’ve got gray goo! Or perhaps we should put them to use in solving problems of machine identification of music genres.
We’re also trying to develop new tests that can spot small concentrations of marker cells that indicate cancrous growths, so they can get zapped before they even get started. We’ve also got CT machines that can image an entire organ in realtime.
Ingenuity struck, althouh not necessarily in the most positive of ways, when a Saskatchewan man alerted authorities to his stranding in the wilderness by chopping down power poles and waiting for the utility to investigate the lost power.
And finally, robots as therapy assistants and companions for autism spectrum children, helping to work on social and other skills while the brain is still mostly plastic. Hooray for communication! Oh, speaking of, dolphins can use an iPad...
Leading opinions, The Slacktivist notes the curious absence of people complaining about his lack of poverty when they say he's reading the Bible wrong, often in their rush to condemn his positions on chastity. In doing so, they make a minor issue more important than it is and ignore one of the core issues of the work. In any academic setting, they would probably be laughed out of the lecture hall for not having read the text.
Mr. Frank points out that even dyed-in-the-teabag conservatives have been curiously all for more regulation and oversight in the midst of the Deepwater Horizons problem. Nobody seems willing to champion the cause of less regulation and restrictions when the consequences of those actions are spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico day by day. Even Sarah Palin is trying to spin this as “Well, if you had just let us drill where we know it’s safe, this wouldn’t have happened.” Until the next oil spill in the wildlife refuge or the next rusted pipe or whatever. It’s a curious place, our current times, where the poles are “more drilling but more regulation” and “let’s get off the oil habit as much as we can so we don’t have to risk these kinds of disasters”. For those still holding out that the disaster is modest, try this visualization that will put the slick right where you are, or look into the slideshow of how the people of the Gulf are trying to wait it out or stop it. Yes, that includes prayer.
Mr. Carroll is quick to list as many new undocumented costs of the health care bill passed as he can come across and push ahrder for repeal of the whole thing. If he’s willing to replace it with something better, stronger, and possible single-payer, I think he’d be able to make a great case. Returning things to the way they are, though, will not solve the problem. One must be able to propose ways of moving forward if one wants to undo what has passed.
Mr. Ingrassia says there are lots of lessons to learn about how not to run corporations or the government in how the GM bailout was handled, comparing their management style and union accomodation to the more power-concentrated Ford company that made hard decisions in management and “stood up” to the unions.
Mr. McGurn is irritated that the media and the political sphere seem out of touch with Americans on the issue of abortion, pointing to a Gallup survey that indicates people call themselves pro life and favor limited-availability abortions and contrasting it with media impressions that everyone who calls themselves pro-life is a Scott Roeder or wants to prevent women from having any choice at all. While yes, the media will go for something that sells ads, there are far too many stories of “there’s no abortion clinic around me”, “my pharmacist believes that birth control is evil and refuses to fill it”, and “my local politicians all say taht anyone seeking abortion is going to hell” across the country for anyone to argue that we can do “legal abortion only under certain circumstances” and be assured that teh girl in Renton, Washington has the same access that the girl in Missouri, or the outskirts of Texas, or Badaxe, Michigan. We can wrangle the specifics of what’s allowed and when, but until we have a baseline established that women have access to legal services without hindrance from local officials or unelected mobs, it will ultimately be a fruitless endeavour.
Rolling to the close of our opinions, we get a pair of persons perturbed by the now-nearly-pariah Rand Paul. First up, Mr. Williams says that all private businesses and individuals should have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, and that the government has no standing to tell them they can’t. He doesn’t think they will, because the lure of profit is far too strong for someone to discriminate. Mr. Stossel agrees with Mr. Paul, saying that it's time to repeal the part of the 1964 Civil Rights act that prohibits discrimination by private businesses that serve the public, and that he fully agrees that government shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate, so he’s not at all any sort of racist or needing to be fired for being a consistent libertarian. The argument he uses, that The Law is Not A Scalpel, and thus cannot effectively determine which forms of dsicrimination are okay and which are not, is the right one to use (in addition to the Lure of Profits mentioned above) in explaining his position. (He wrecks it at the end by claiming that The People acting privately will almost always do things that you like, while government’s track record is much more spotty on the issue, but I don’t think he recognizes that he’s only confirming a confirmation bias instead of making an objective point.)
I think they’re both wrong, that the Lure of Profits isn’t actually as strong as well-vested discrimination when it comes to business decisions, that there are enough people in any given community who will patronize discriminatory places to keep them solvent (perhaps because they’re discriminatory and they want some place to be where “those uppity X” won’t be allowed), and that enabling private persons and businesses to discriminate generates enclaves of discriminatory thought and insular bubble communities that will try to stay insular, lest one be exposed to outsiders (who will likely be actively run off the land if they don’t conform to the community’s prejudices). What Mr. Williams and Mr. Stossel are advocating is something like a nation of the very worst properties of gated communities and homeowners’ associations. Everything must be done their way or you can’t live with them, and heaven help you if you look different or don’t make enough to keep up with your peers or appearances. Preventing private businesses from discriminating keeps us mixing, instead of letting us separate out into our component parts. If we want to get rid of stupid discriminatory attitudes, fostering an environment where they can flourish seems a bit backwards, yeh?
Last for tonight, Steve Martin's sense of humor cleanly displayed in his personalized fan mail form response letters, and the problems of not checking your acronyms before going to press...or forming your organization, one or the other.
Oh, and duct tape prom clothing is in season again. And the entries are all looking very good.
