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Good morning, those who seek the missives of justice and want criminals to be tried for their crimes. Flashing backwards to the past from our current time, it seesm fairly unambiguous that the rpevious administrator admitted to authorizing the torture of at least one detainee at Guanatanamo Bay, in violation of the United Nations Convention on Torture, which the United States is a signatory to. Such an admission should result in his arrest and prosecution, but more likely, nothing will happen. (One almost wonders whether these revelations are appearing precisely because he knows nothing will happen.) Even if allegations that the previous administration also conducted unethical experiments on their detainees are substantiated (the evidence presented is available at Physicians For Human Rights), nothing will likely happen. It’s infuriating at times to see the reasonable causes and enough stuff that a trial should at least be held, even if conviction doesn’t happen, but then see nobody lift a finger to do it.
On a different issue, but no less aggravating, A mural showcasing the diversity of a school in Arizona has been the subject of drive-by racial epithets and taunts, including a campaign by a city councilman to whiten the skin tone of the children on the mural. (Said councilman has been sacked form his radio job over the remarks.) And Egypt's highest court upheld the decision to strip Egyptian citizenship from women who marry Israeli men.
And then there are the disturbing cases where police departments use anti-recording laws to prosecute citizens taking video of officers at work, especially when the officers at work are doing things that hurt their reputation or things that are clearly off-procedure, like excessive force.
Out in the world today, while attempting to unite Afghanistan under the control of the central government, NATO has been helping to build a private army up into great power by sing them as contractors to protect personnel and equipment. And despite the assurances that troops will be leaving there, money is being poured into building new special operations headquarters in the country. (And the worst bit about it? The broken-down place we think of as Afghanistan now is nothing like what it used to be.)
United States military personnel claim that a string of recent offensives has left the Iraq branch of al-Qaeda devastated.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, hosted what they claimed to be the world's biggest LGBT pride parade.
Brazil was also the setting for an experiment for a city that has managed to basically ensure that all of its residents have access to high quality locally grown affordable healthy food. For very little money in the city budget. Why can’t we do something like that?
Improvements for Guantanamo Bay, despite the continued push to close the place down. If you believe that there is indeed an actual push to close it down.
The Bishop of Rome called for the international community to stop ignoring the plight of Christians in the predominantly Muslim areas of the world, calling for the need to have religious freedom everyehere. Hopefully the Bishop of Rome will be similarly accomodating about Muslims and other religions in the Chrisitan and Catholic world, and not commit an act of mass hypocrisy by claiming they need to have their souls saved or otherwise be converted from their religion.
Iran has offered to scort the next blockade-running flotilla full of aid. Whcih will certainly give a lot of people the excusese they need to do all sorts of things, should this come to pass.
Finally, I’m sure many of the prescient peoples on my list have already jokingly or otherwise said that soon we’ll need to protect the Canadian border against terrorists sneaking in, much like we have to protect the Mexico border against brown people from the south (The law is a joke, btu it’s not funny.). Well... that joke isn't necessarily a joke any more.
Domestically, an off-duty officer apparently shot at a marine thirteen times in an altercation outside a nightclub where the officer believed the marine was hitting on his girlfriend. Being a police officer, odds are good that he will escape any actual punishment for his actions, or at least be able to bargain down and justify to something not actually punishing.
A candidate for the governor of South Carolina was called a "REDACTED] raghead" and accused of being a Sikh masquerading as a Methodist, in much the same way that Barack Obama is supposed to be a secretly a Muslim. Doing the name calling was a state senator, who has now claimed he meant his remarks in jest and tried to downplay the severity of his statements. In the context of two men who were trying to get into Somalia so as to join terrorist training camps, it doesn’t seem like sucha good idea now, does it, Senator?
On economics, the spectre of a double-dip, because the defecit hawks want to cut spending now, when the right way to go about it is to wait until the markets have recovered enough to institute cuts. Of course, when you see headlines proclaiming the federal government is now $13 trillion USD in debt, you can see why the defecit hawks would start shouting louder now. In other places, they want to blame the government's current actions as the reason why the private sector isn't recovered, as if new regulations or other such things were dragging down the engine instead of letting it rev back up to where it was before in unergulated gambling and speculation, or there are complaints about how much incentive there is not to hire someone because of government spending.
Wal-Mart has teamed up with American Public University to permit their workers to earn up to 45 percent of an associates or bachelors degree through their work at the company. Well, that’s nice, but how are they going to find time and money for the other 55 percent if they’re still working at Wal-Mart?
British Petroleum has purchased spaces on Google searches related to oil and oil spills so as to promote their corporate explanation page near the top of the search results, in the spot marked for commercial and purchased links. They say it’s because the public needs to know what they’re doing to fix things, but the cynics and skeptics say they’re trying to control the flow of information and rebuild their public image by getting people to read their PR. Mr. Cline suggests the truth is that the entire oil industry model needs to change, so as to stop letting them profit at the expense of the environment and the people affected by even normal operation. That said, if you’re an oil company exec, you probably want to set up your respite spot in Mississippi, whose governor thinks there's nothing wrong and that oil isn't a problem there. That would be with the tar balls and such, yes. And, of course, the CEO of BP says it's all uncharted stuff, and that the private sector needs to do more in the wake of the disaster, sure, if we have to.
The Kentucky State Legislature put forth a resolution expressing their copmlete support for all bits of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, seen primarily as a Take That against the hypothetical libertarian musings of Rand Paul, Republican Senate Candidate from Kentucky.
In technology, Senator Lieberman puts forward a bill to allow the government to take over civilian networks in case of an emergency. Assuming they’re considered critical infrastructure. One would think those networks have already been redundancied and hardened so as to take a hit and keep on walking.
Scientists may have hit on a possible reason why acupuncture works - the needles manipulate natural bodily responses to pain and trauma.
Also, a radar-like system to help the blind navigate.
Finally, video game players, who routinely control things in an alternate universe, are apparently better at lucid dreaming, where one attempts to control things in an alternate universe.
In the opinions, Ms. Siskind starts the fire by declaring that she would rather follow the "pro-woman" movement of Palin, Coulter, and Malkin, embracing work and motherhood and being all-inclusive, than be a "feminist", the shrill, clique-y people who didn't even support Hillary Clinton becoming a Presidential candidate. What’s missing here is that Palin and her pro-woman department are for reinforcing gender stereotypes and roles, so they’re going to seem less harsh and more warm and welcoming - they’re not going to be portrayed as shrill harpies demanding to wear pants and do the same work the menfolk do. They’d love to see a woman in charge, sure, but I wonder how much of that would be wrapped up in making sure she was married and a mother and “pro-life” and was dead-set on making sure no other woman could follow her by removing her ability to choose those things, and never lost her temper or played hardball.
Mr. Ebert shows us the path he walked, from systematic racism, through civil rights, through marriage, and now back around again to the mural in Arizona where a dark-skinned kid was getting hatred from the people around him, because they didn’t like the dark-skinned kid. He asks the important question - “How did they get that way?”, but he has no answer. He doesn’t know how it happens, why it happens, in the modern times, the supposedly post-racial times, that murals depicting dark-skinned people get hated on and ordered to change the skin tone, until the people who don’t want that in their community fight back and get it back to a proper color. Where it was linked from, one of the commentators raised the point that Ebert is looking through a privileged lens, and so he might not have an answer because he doesn’t know how to see it properly, to see that racism never really went away, it just became illegal.
Mr. Beisner believes he's found the next great junk science - the need to protect the diversity of species. From there, he suggests, the governments will once again reach into private lives to seize control and dictate to private individuals what they can and can’t do. Running on the theme, Mr. Medved says that the response to the BP disaster is a perfect example of how the federal government can't actually do anything to make your life better - state and locals might be able to, but the feds just can't do it. So clearly, one should reject every “big government” idea proposed by this administration as being similarly unable to work.
Mr. Barnes says the President's hopes of re-election rest on the removal of Nancy Pelosi from her position as the Speaker of the House (through Republican takeover), because Pelosi is too unacceptably liberal, big-government, and spend-happy to let the President shift to the right and get enough appeal from conservatives to get re-elected.
Mr. Fischer makes commentary on the oil spill by expressing how much he expects the Obama administration to try and push through a cap-and-trade bill under the cover of the crisis, like the health care bill and the stimulus bills before it, instead of making sensible decisions about infrastructure, like “Drill, Baby, Drill”. Mr. Cooper echoes this idea while laying the blame for lax regulation at the feet of the regulators for creating regulations that were ornerous and Market(A.P.T.I.N.)-killing. Not at all because of the revolving door between industry and government or anything like that. Mr. Goodwin goes all the way and says that the President is just incopmetent, and this most recent disaster is just another accusaion of his unsuitability for the job. The person with the most sane response to this is, remarkably, Bill'sO, who shrugs and says that the whole thing is out of the hands of the President, and that intellectually honest people would admit to this. It looks bad for a President who always wants to appear in control, he notes, but that’s about as far as things go.
On the matter of the flotilla, Mr. Krauthammer says the world is working to systematically de-legitimize all of Israel's options to defend itself, because we are apparently tired of those meddlesome Jews existing in their own state. Mr. Murphy blames the world and UN as being too quick to judge Israel, with the new footage from the IDF cut to make them look like they were attacked and killed people in self-defense. Mr. Krauthammer probably sees his justification in Ms. Thomas's remarks about the need for Israel to stop meddling and building in Palestine and Ms. Pryor's condemnation of the people who will sit idly by and let such remarks happen, getting scorn for allowing conditions that produced millions of dead Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. (Ms. Thomas is retiring from her post over the remarks and has since apologized.)
Last out of opinions, the idea that one should not think of the Tea Partiers as intellectual anything, but simply as the defenders of the attitude that "we do not need an elite to govern us", the people whose trust that things are being managed well has been destroyed sufficiently that they've become politically active. They have never been influenced by intellectuals, so they won’t pay any attention to them or their arguments that half the stuff they’re talking about is horribly old-fashioned and well out-of-date. They’re a core demographic that is fighting back against the idea that The Elite Know Better Than You with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on. That makes brilliant sense, accounts for the lasting ability of the tea partiers, despite their lack of good or new ideas, and gives even the most intellectually elite of us a reason to listen to them long enough to take their attitude and then apply it to our intellectual lives, so as to make things better, and possibly usher in the next elite that is supposed to undo some damage while creating their own.
And last for tonight, Apparently the Children of Earth didn't totally wreck the Torchwood Institute - they're baaaaaaack. And radio no longer has the beautiful strains of the Dr. Demento show - now we'll have to go on-line to get it.
Oh, and one more thing. ten peopel got into the "championship round" of the National Spelling Bee, broadcast on primetime, despite only four of them having actually maanged to spell a word to advance. The rules had their provision, but boy, that doesn’t seem all that fair at all, does it? Better to play it out like Sasuke - if there’s nobody there that make it, well, that’s what happens.
On a different issue, but no less aggravating, A mural showcasing the diversity of a school in Arizona has been the subject of drive-by racial epithets and taunts, including a campaign by a city councilman to whiten the skin tone of the children on the mural. (Said councilman has been sacked form his radio job over the remarks.) And Egypt's highest court upheld the decision to strip Egyptian citizenship from women who marry Israeli men.
And then there are the disturbing cases where police departments use anti-recording laws to prosecute citizens taking video of officers at work, especially when the officers at work are doing things that hurt their reputation or things that are clearly off-procedure, like excessive force.
Out in the world today, while attempting to unite Afghanistan under the control of the central government, NATO has been helping to build a private army up into great power by sing them as contractors to protect personnel and equipment. And despite the assurances that troops will be leaving there, money is being poured into building new special operations headquarters in the country. (And the worst bit about it? The broken-down place we think of as Afghanistan now is nothing like what it used to be.)
United States military personnel claim that a string of recent offensives has left the Iraq branch of al-Qaeda devastated.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, hosted what they claimed to be the world's biggest LGBT pride parade.
Brazil was also the setting for an experiment for a city that has managed to basically ensure that all of its residents have access to high quality locally grown affordable healthy food. For very little money in the city budget. Why can’t we do something like that?
Improvements for Guantanamo Bay, despite the continued push to close the place down. If you believe that there is indeed an actual push to close it down.
The Bishop of Rome called for the international community to stop ignoring the plight of Christians in the predominantly Muslim areas of the world, calling for the need to have religious freedom everyehere. Hopefully the Bishop of Rome will be similarly accomodating about Muslims and other religions in the Chrisitan and Catholic world, and not commit an act of mass hypocrisy by claiming they need to have their souls saved or otherwise be converted from their religion.
Iran has offered to scort the next blockade-running flotilla full of aid. Whcih will certainly give a lot of people the excusese they need to do all sorts of things, should this come to pass.
Finally, I’m sure many of the prescient peoples on my list have already jokingly or otherwise said that soon we’ll need to protect the Canadian border against terrorists sneaking in, much like we have to protect the Mexico border against brown people from the south (The law is a joke, btu it’s not funny.). Well... that joke isn't necessarily a joke any more.
Domestically, an off-duty officer apparently shot at a marine thirteen times in an altercation outside a nightclub where the officer believed the marine was hitting on his girlfriend. Being a police officer, odds are good that he will escape any actual punishment for his actions, or at least be able to bargain down and justify to something not actually punishing.
A candidate for the governor of South Carolina was called a "REDACTED] raghead" and accused of being a Sikh masquerading as a Methodist, in much the same way that Barack Obama is supposed to be a secretly a Muslim. Doing the name calling was a state senator, who has now claimed he meant his remarks in jest and tried to downplay the severity of his statements. In the context of two men who were trying to get into Somalia so as to join terrorist training camps, it doesn’t seem like sucha good idea now, does it, Senator?
On economics, the spectre of a double-dip, because the defecit hawks want to cut spending now, when the right way to go about it is to wait until the markets have recovered enough to institute cuts. Of course, when you see headlines proclaiming the federal government is now $13 trillion USD in debt, you can see why the defecit hawks would start shouting louder now. In other places, they want to blame the government's current actions as the reason why the private sector isn't recovered, as if new regulations or other such things were dragging down the engine instead of letting it rev back up to where it was before in unergulated gambling and speculation, or there are complaints about how much incentive there is not to hire someone because of government spending.
Wal-Mart has teamed up with American Public University to permit their workers to earn up to 45 percent of an associates or bachelors degree through their work at the company. Well, that’s nice, but how are they going to find time and money for the other 55 percent if they’re still working at Wal-Mart?
British Petroleum has purchased spaces on Google searches related to oil and oil spills so as to promote their corporate explanation page near the top of the search results, in the spot marked for commercial and purchased links. They say it’s because the public needs to know what they’re doing to fix things, but the cynics and skeptics say they’re trying to control the flow of information and rebuild their public image by getting people to read their PR. Mr. Cline suggests the truth is that the entire oil industry model needs to change, so as to stop letting them profit at the expense of the environment and the people affected by even normal operation. That said, if you’re an oil company exec, you probably want to set up your respite spot in Mississippi, whose governor thinks there's nothing wrong and that oil isn't a problem there. That would be with the tar balls and such, yes. And, of course, the CEO of BP says it's all uncharted stuff, and that the private sector needs to do more in the wake of the disaster, sure, if we have to.
The Kentucky State Legislature put forth a resolution expressing their copmlete support for all bits of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, seen primarily as a Take That against the hypothetical libertarian musings of Rand Paul, Republican Senate Candidate from Kentucky.
In technology, Senator Lieberman puts forward a bill to allow the government to take over civilian networks in case of an emergency. Assuming they’re considered critical infrastructure. One would think those networks have already been redundancied and hardened so as to take a hit and keep on walking.
Scientists may have hit on a possible reason why acupuncture works - the needles manipulate natural bodily responses to pain and trauma.
Also, a radar-like system to help the blind navigate.
Finally, video game players, who routinely control things in an alternate universe, are apparently better at lucid dreaming, where one attempts to control things in an alternate universe.
In the opinions, Ms. Siskind starts the fire by declaring that she would rather follow the "pro-woman" movement of Palin, Coulter, and Malkin, embracing work and motherhood and being all-inclusive, than be a "feminist", the shrill, clique-y people who didn't even support Hillary Clinton becoming a Presidential candidate. What’s missing here is that Palin and her pro-woman department are for reinforcing gender stereotypes and roles, so they’re going to seem less harsh and more warm and welcoming - they’re not going to be portrayed as shrill harpies demanding to wear pants and do the same work the menfolk do. They’d love to see a woman in charge, sure, but I wonder how much of that would be wrapped up in making sure she was married and a mother and “pro-life” and was dead-set on making sure no other woman could follow her by removing her ability to choose those things, and never lost her temper or played hardball.
Mr. Ebert shows us the path he walked, from systematic racism, through civil rights, through marriage, and now back around again to the mural in Arizona where a dark-skinned kid was getting hatred from the people around him, because they didn’t like the dark-skinned kid. He asks the important question - “How did they get that way?”, but he has no answer. He doesn’t know how it happens, why it happens, in the modern times, the supposedly post-racial times, that murals depicting dark-skinned people get hated on and ordered to change the skin tone, until the people who don’t want that in their community fight back and get it back to a proper color. Where it was linked from, one of the commentators raised the point that Ebert is looking through a privileged lens, and so he might not have an answer because he doesn’t know how to see it properly, to see that racism never really went away, it just became illegal.
Mr. Beisner believes he's found the next great junk science - the need to protect the diversity of species. From there, he suggests, the governments will once again reach into private lives to seize control and dictate to private individuals what they can and can’t do. Running on the theme, Mr. Medved says that the response to the BP disaster is a perfect example of how the federal government can't actually do anything to make your life better - state and locals might be able to, but the feds just can't do it. So clearly, one should reject every “big government” idea proposed by this administration as being similarly unable to work.
Mr. Barnes says the President's hopes of re-election rest on the removal of Nancy Pelosi from her position as the Speaker of the House (through Republican takeover), because Pelosi is too unacceptably liberal, big-government, and spend-happy to let the President shift to the right and get enough appeal from conservatives to get re-elected.
Mr. Fischer makes commentary on the oil spill by expressing how much he expects the Obama administration to try and push through a cap-and-trade bill under the cover of the crisis, like the health care bill and the stimulus bills before it, instead of making sensible decisions about infrastructure, like “Drill, Baby, Drill”. Mr. Cooper echoes this idea while laying the blame for lax regulation at the feet of the regulators for creating regulations that were ornerous and Market(A.P.T.I.N.)-killing. Not at all because of the revolving door between industry and government or anything like that. Mr. Goodwin goes all the way and says that the President is just incopmetent, and this most recent disaster is just another accusaion of his unsuitability for the job. The person with the most sane response to this is, remarkably, Bill'sO, who shrugs and says that the whole thing is out of the hands of the President, and that intellectually honest people would admit to this. It looks bad for a President who always wants to appear in control, he notes, but that’s about as far as things go.
On the matter of the flotilla, Mr. Krauthammer says the world is working to systematically de-legitimize all of Israel's options to defend itself, because we are apparently tired of those meddlesome Jews existing in their own state. Mr. Murphy blames the world and UN as being too quick to judge Israel, with the new footage from the IDF cut to make them look like they were attacked and killed people in self-defense. Mr. Krauthammer probably sees his justification in Ms. Thomas's remarks about the need for Israel to stop meddling and building in Palestine and Ms. Pryor's condemnation of the people who will sit idly by and let such remarks happen, getting scorn for allowing conditions that produced millions of dead Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. (Ms. Thomas is retiring from her post over the remarks and has since apologized.)
Last out of opinions, the idea that one should not think of the Tea Partiers as intellectual anything, but simply as the defenders of the attitude that "we do not need an elite to govern us", the people whose trust that things are being managed well has been destroyed sufficiently that they've become politically active. They have never been influenced by intellectuals, so they won’t pay any attention to them or their arguments that half the stuff they’re talking about is horribly old-fashioned and well out-of-date. They’re a core demographic that is fighting back against the idea that The Elite Know Better Than You with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on. That makes brilliant sense, accounts for the lasting ability of the tea partiers, despite their lack of good or new ideas, and gives even the most intellectually elite of us a reason to listen to them long enough to take their attitude and then apply it to our intellectual lives, so as to make things better, and possibly usher in the next elite that is supposed to undo some damage while creating their own.
And last for tonight, Apparently the Children of Earth didn't totally wreck the Torchwood Institute - they're baaaaaaack. And radio no longer has the beautiful strains of the Dr. Demento show - now we'll have to go on-line to get it.
Oh, and one more thing. ten peopel got into the "championship round" of the National Spelling Bee, broadcast on primetime, despite only four of them having actually maanged to spell a word to advance. The rules had their provision, but boy, that doesn’t seem all that fair at all, does it? Better to play it out like Sasuke - if there’s nobody there that make it, well, that’s what happens.
