Magically saved entry bit - 8 June 2010

Greetings, perfectionists, tinkerers, and people who always want to improve. Enjoy a letter from the director of many Pixar films, who reminds us that sometimes things never get completed, just released - but that shouldn’t stop us from trying our best. In all things, we should expect more than what we're getting right now, because we won't be motivated to change and do and be our perfect selves unless we always expect more than what we have right now. Because when we settle for what we have, we write letters to the wife that was sold into slavery telling her how much we love her.

Oh, and if you’re looking for an ass to kick, find out if your employer is one of the companies deliberately saying "No Unemployed Need Apply" to their job postings. If they are, find the responsible HR person and kick them repeatedly in places that will hurt until they relent, please.

Out in the world today, a milestone passed - the conflict in Afghanistan is now officially longer-lasting than the conflict in Vietnam, which will probably prompt a fresh round of comparisons in the wake of 10 fatalities in a spate of attacks across the country.

Not that Afghanistan is the only place people see and fight terrorists - Yemen detained 12 Americans on possible links and terrorist ties, and Mali and other sub-Saharan nations are getting backing on fighting off their own desert insurgents.

Economically, cuts are the word of the day for both Germany and the United Kingdom, bringing EUR closer to alignment with USD and following the pattern of Europe more generally to reduce governmental spending on social programs.

Inside the United States, an intelligence specialist has been arrested for his role in providing documents and materials to the whistleblower site Wikileaks, material he believes needs to see the light of day. He was turned in by a hacker who believed he was endangering national security with promises to leak embassy cables and other dealings that were not on the up and up, in the specialist’s opinion. I am of two minds about this - if there is malfeasance, then it needs to be exposed. If it endangers national security, then it needs to be exposed carefully to the right people that can do something about it while maintaining the integrity of the material.

Folio Magazine takes a look inside the Christian Science Monitor's redesign from a daily print paper to a weekly newsmagazine with a heavy on-line presence, and their goals in doing so. There’s probably good fruit here for anyone watching the journalism decline or looking to knock them off a perch (Thoughtscream Media, looking at you here...)

Fainting by debt hawks may commence as the total official federal debt looks to become larget than the IMF's estimate of United States gross domestic product.

Still spiraling downward, Mr. Glenn Beck promoted the book of a Nazi sympathizer in his attempt to link the NEA and Communism, and then defended himself by saying liberals were accusing him of being contradictory things. While it would be interesting to accuse him of closet sympathies in the “protests too much” department, it’s far more likely that he was lazy and promoted a book he hadn't actually read, and it came back to bite him on the ass. Here’s hoping more people point out both the wrongeness of the book and Beck's intellectual laziness and attempts to retract and deflect away waht he did.

Currently worser than Gleen Beck, however, is the BP oil spill - the polls say the people want criminal charges, they're pissed at how BP is handling it and they're pissed at how the federal government is handling their end.

Oh, and electoral primaries - 11 of them. You may not see as many open town hall meetings this year - having taken the hint that they will be mobbed and astroturfed by disruptors who are only there to make trouble, Democrats have changed their populace-meeting tactics. This means an opportunity for conservatives to call them cowards and to lament the movement of public discourse into private enclaves of like-minded people, after having called out several politicians for saying stuff that is stupid according to the CW (but that it sounds like they secretly and not-so-secretly agree with).

Technology strikes with a private enterprise that aims to produce a completely inflatable space station, with modules that will inflate and suppsoedly dock themselves once in space.

Speaking of space, there's something consuming hydrogen and acetylene on the surface of Titan - is it possible there's a methane-based life form there?

Apple let out their intent to build an open mobile video standard that would allow for video calling between people (with the right kinds of plans with their carriers, of course).

Last out, you can upload an image for NASA to take with them on their last space shuttle missions - your face iiiiiinnnnn spaaaaaaaaace.

In the opinions, Mr. Caroll declares the stimulus once again to be a failure because it took money that the Private Sector and The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) would have used to create jobs and frittered it away. Apparently, the private sector needs a swift kick in the shorts to get itself going and job creating again - there’s probably a few incentives that could be tossed out to make that work. Payroll tax holidays, a functioning single-payer health insurance system, stuff like that.

Ms. Rubin believes the Peter Principle has taken hold with the way that the Obama administration has responded to the various crisis put before them, and that the consequences for Mr. Obama having been promoted to the level of his incompetence will be disastrous for us all.

And finally, Mr. Reynolds sees a bubble in higher education, and that when it bursts, we'll see more practical education at cheaper costs producing degrees that are actually useful, instead of women's studies majors at the cost of $100,000 USD for four years, and less people will take on lots of debt to finance those higher education institutions.

And now your regularly scheduled bit - 9 June 2010

Huh. Had the entry there all ready to go and then never hit the send button. So I guess it’s a two-for-one deal. That’s it! Special price today, come on down...

Out in the world today, the new United Kingdom government still solidly backs the mission in Afghanistan, according to the new defence minister.

United States Border Patrol agents shot a young Mexican teen accused of throwing rocks at them. Really? A rock gets thrown, and the response is to shoot and kill? That’s the kind of behavior that encourages rock-throwing and then bullet-throwing at such border patrollers.

In the United States, we peek in on the phenomenon of Spanglish and its increased usage, showing off the ease at which people raised in a bilingual environment can blend together both the languages they speak.

Oh, FINALLY. The Office of Congressional Ethics has decided they want to look into Members of Congress staying at the C Street house, paying well below market rent for their time, and what connections their residencies have with The Family, a secretive religious organization with lobbying influence.

The people looking to solely blame the current administration for the BP oil disaster are stretching. Hard. Witness the following conspiracy that requires Rahm Emanuel, as a pay back for staying with someone who did consulting for BP, did not regulate BP. Ignoring totally all the years of regress beforehand by the Republicans in charge before him. And several other things that would make for much simpler explanations instead of grand conspiracies.

Oh, we should mention the other oil spill, the one in the supposedly safe Alaskan area, having dumped about 100,000 gallons of oil into the environment. And the oil spills in the Nigerian area that have been ongoing without media attention. Oh, also, anyone from BP claiming they didn't see this coming is talking out their ass.

Not that the potential for stupid is strictly limited to people blaming BP The Attorney General for Virginia filed his legal brief against the health care bill by citing...the reasons for the Boston Tea Party. Not precedent, not previous cases, not even necessarily the Constitution, but the Boston Tea Party.

And then there’s the Delaware lawmaker who said people who believed in separation of church and state were Nazis. He has apologized for the remark in the sense of “Oh, that was not at all what I meant to say - I meant to say that Hitler used separation of church and state to bad ends and those advocating for it here in America also want to use it for bad ends”.

Anyway, there were some primary races in several states yesterday. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln survived a serious challenge to her seat from the Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter, managing to survive having joined the filibuster against the public option by helping out with the rest of the agenda. In Nevada, the Tea Party backed candidate beat the candidate that had suggested bartering for medical care to earn the right to face the Majority Leader in November. Considering that she’s against Social Security for younger workers, the Education Department, and the federal income tax, I think she’s going to have an uphill fight. And in South Carolina, the candidate accused of having multiple affairs was forced into a runoff for the Republican nomination.

In technology, sometimes, when reading the dispatches and arcane meanderings of the sciences and technologies, you wonder why they don’t try to bring it to a level that ordinary people can understand. After reading this letter about the differences between creating one's ideal work environment and administering it, as well as teh difficulties of dealing with ordinary people, I think I might understand a bit more of both sides - the frustration of having enius and having to deal with people not on your level, and the need to be able to bring things to the ordinary level, no matter how frustrating it is.

And then there are the cases of the governments that want their citizens to enjoy the Internet and social networking sites, but only those that don't contradict state ideology or advocate against the government. Against them, and those that want to censor with a more subtle hand (than China’s rather Jaegermonster-style approach), organizations like Wikileaks continue, even when one of their contributors is arrested on charges of leaking classified information.

Encouraging news: India may be at the forefront of a coalition designed to sabotage the still-being-negotiated-in-secret ACTA and force those pushing it to give it up. Should India succeed, media cabals might have to negotiate openly to get their whims imposed on the rest of us.

And then, technology put to excellent use - Nokia unveils a cellular phone charger powered by bicycle, which they will roll out in Kenya soon, providing a stable source of power to charge the means by which most Africans communicate, receive news, and connect with other people.

Speaking of neat stuff for the world around us, a treated paper test provides a blood typing for approximately 10 cents USD, whcih would help improve medicine in very poor areas. As could figuring out ways to disrupt communication ebtween bacteria so that skin cells could heal cuts faster.

The United States military has been looking into using technology that powers football broadcasts so that they can find, catalogue, sort, and pick out the interesting bits from the millions of hours of recorded video from drone flights and strikes.

Finally, recall that lots of people think ambient solar radiation has more than enough power in it to be beamed down to Terra and used to run our electrical world and are working toward making that world a reality.

Opinions opens up with quick htis from the Slacktivist about bicycle generators, vadals, and peopel who claim separation of church and state started with Hitler.

From there, the General's Inner Frenchman lambasts the Prescott City Council and school for their despicable behavior regarding the lightening of the child's skin on the mural.

Author Meghan Lindholm, also writing as Robin Hobb, explains why she thinks drugs like Ritalin are the very worst thing you can do to yourself or your kids, because drugs have consequences that take you away from your super-special natural self, and that everyone should be forced to cope without those kinds of drugs. Especailly if you ever want to have any success as an artist - you just have to accept the crazy and deal, or you can take the drugs and become a soulless, mindless zombie! Um, yeah.

Mr. Rubin suggests he's got the basics of radical terrorism strategies, most of which is “we’ll try to make bad PR for you and force you into making mistakes that we can exploit”. Which is asymmetric warfare at its finest. Mr. Rubin thinks the best way to beat such terror groups is to not be convinced by their pyschology attacks and to keep fighting them forever, without believing there is such a thing as a diplomatic solution of a military one. The actual point of his column, however, is to say that liberals and bright people are perpetually deluded and pawns of terrorists when they believe that diplomacy or military solutions are possible and doable. I'm guessing there's also some sort of required support for Israel against THEM implied or required.

The WSJ's editorial board claims not to be bkaming the president for the BP oil disaster, but they are trying to take a smug superiority in that the complaints about regulators and industry being too close together has been a conservative staple for years. That may be true, but the conservative solution to that problem has been to get rid of the regulators and let the companies operate with no oversight, instead of attempting to rein in the coziness and put the regulators back in the regulator seat. Whcih is what the WSJ is all about in their implication that Barack Obama is deluded in believing that regulation can still work.

Speaking of accusing the president of delusions, Ms. Rabinowitz chooses her words carefully in describing the "alien" in the White House, being very careful to talk only about his governming philosophy, his apparent out-of-touchness with the regular American, his treatment of old allies as foreign persons and enemies as people in teh same boat together. It would not do at all to actually accuse him of being an illegal alien, because that’s nonsense, but if we can manage to raise that spectre through talking about how foreign he is, well, what conclusions people draw is their own business. Just remember, says she, he can’t or won’t name “radical Islam” as The Enemy and go crusading (see how word choice matters?) against them like the last president did.

Another delusion accusation flung around more generally - Mr. Carrol says there's an easy way to balance the budget - go back to spending only as much as Reagan did in his era, or at least back to the beginning of the Bush 43 presidency, and the budget will balance itself without any tax increases. And then, of course, expect the Republicans to sit on demands for tax cuts or to spend the surpluses we might generate in attempting to make a balanced budget on military spending. And the Democrats to not use surpluses to fund the social program funds that have been raided by Republicans and Democrats alike to pay for other things. And the people to be okay with the government taxing them lots so as to pay for debt obligations and an actual budget. Delusions all around.

And last out of opinions tonight, Mr. Klein claimed that liberals fail basic economics based on responses to a Zogby survey that counted which political groups made "unenlightened" answers to their questions, based on whether they agreed or diagreed with the statements made. The statements themselves are:

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable,(“UE”: Disagree)
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (“UE”: Disagree)
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (“UE”: Disagree)
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages(“UE”: Disagree)
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (“UE”: Agree)
6. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (“UE”: Agree)
7. Free trade leads to unemployment (“UE”: Agree)
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (“UE”: Disagree)

. They claimed that only a few of their statements are designed to touch liberal sensibilities, but I can only see one of them that isn’t interpretable or bias-friendly. The question about monopolies has an objective definition. All others are subjective (although “Standard of living” as an economic term probably has an objective definition, too. If they mentioned that they wanted to have people use economic definitions, then maybe they can add that one as objective.) and their answers will change based on whether you think solely of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) where doing anything to impede the free flow of naked capitalism imposes costs and disadvantages, or whether you want to work out in the real world, where economic costs are balanced against social costs and benefits and the composite picture is one that is evaluated. For example, whether Third World workers are being exploited depends entirely on what your definition of a fair wage is - if it’s the minimum wage of the United States, then a lot of those workers are being exploited, because they’re not being paid that amount, and they certainly don’t get any of the benefits those American companies usually offer their American workers.

If you’re going to accuse someone of failing basic economics, one must first define what sort of economics you’re talking about, and then communicate to the people you’re asking about what kind of economics you’re talking about, then define your questions and statements in such a way as to be as objective as possible, and even then, you have to collect more detailed responses so you can discard the responses that are clearly not talking about the kind of economics you’re talking about. If, after that point, you still have a statistical sample worthy of reporting on, then you can talk about it, having mentioned all the other people that were discarded for being unsuitable. I’m thinking his ignorant liberals probably wouldn’t pass the statistical muster.

Last for tonight, critical analysis of couch cushion construction, and then more critical analysis of couch cushion construction.