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Greetings, politically savvy and powerful individuals! Given the choice between two examples of campaign literature, one good, one bad, which would you choose?
Also ponder the latest in the long tradition of worrying about what our daughters are doing, choosing to see them in the way we're telling them not to be seen, and with all the latent fears about pelvis movement and “race music” implied.
“Totally unrelated” to the last point, did we mention that the children of lesbian parents, whether single or paired, seem to do better in all aspects of their lives than those of two heterosexual parents, according to the first results published from a study? Possibly because they get involved in parenting their children, expecting it to be a harder slog than usual? OF course, if you ask someone with a vested interest in making sure The Gays stay second class citizens, of course they're going to say it's suspect science and goes against "common sense" that a commited and involved parent who happens to be gay is better for their kid than two parents that don’t care as much and are straight. Although there are plenty of role models around for people who believe The Gay is dangerous - ask Representative Shock why he burned a light blue belt he was wearing in an innocuous photo. Apparently, even looking like you have The Gay is cause for violent and over-the-top reactions in some.
Last out, a response to the idea that new media is making us stupid and shallow, pointing out that our critical thinking faculties do not come naturally, and that the real problem is one of controlling the flow, not whether we get into the flow. I’m wondering if our on-line connected selves will be hailed as a great generation of time managers, having to control, direct, and not get washed away by several information flows in each minute.
(Interlude: police in Idaho have charged a 74 year-old woman as the person who has been dumping condiments in the library drop box for the last year or so after staff observed her dump a jar of mayonnaise. Anyone reading this, please pass along the message to your friends and children and broodlings and all the rest - if you think about doing it, don’t. If the library staff catches you doing anything like this, you will pray that the police get here before we finish killing you.)
Out in the world today, a story of an Australian citizen who has made it his calling to try and dissuade people from committing suicide at a very popular spot. It helps that his house is pretty close to the preferred point.
Going from preventing violence to causing it, mobs in Kyrgyzstan are rioting and targeting anyone they can convince themselves are ethnic Uzbeks, alleging that the Uzbeks started the violence by attacking Kyrgyz women. Gods, that line of reasoning sounds familiar - “kill the black men because they want to take our white women”, perhaps?
And finally, An American with a pistol, a sword, and some other equipment was detained in Pakistan. He claimed he was on a God-driven mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
In what might be a classic set-up to see whether the next verse will be the same as the first in terms of U.S. engagement and justification, scientists suggest that Afghanistan has significant (in trillions of USD) mineral reserves that they can’t get to because they lack the stability and technology to extract them. So...which companies are going to come out, with private security, and which ones are just going to pressure the U.S. government to stay in Afghanistan with their troops so they can make money off the locals?
Inside the United States, catch-22 in action: Prisoner wants to see her lawyer. The lawyer&apos:s brassiere has an underwire, and thus sets off the metal detector. Prison guards tell her it has to go. She takes the bra off, and then the guards tell her they can't let her in because she's not wearing a bra. Somewhere in there, someone’s going to get it for interfering with the ability to consult one’s lawyer. Also, designing the regs in that sort of way is kind of stupid, and so we hope it gets fixed, even if that means the prison stocks up on wrapped brassieres that will pass the metal detector.
the Federal Aviation Administration is receiving pressure from law enforcement and military sectors to open the domestic airways and allow unmanned aerial vehicles to fly. There are some science benefits to the matter, as well, but the main push and likely use is to put them up in the sky to track speeders or fleeing suspects or other methods so that law enforcement and private corporations can make sure you’re not doing anything they wouldn’t approve of.
Having seen the success and opposition generated by the stimulus spending of his first year in office, President Obama returned to Congress to ask them to continue those program that were working into the next year. Cue opinions and denunciations from the people who feel that there’s already been too much spending on programs at home and that we should cut that so we can spend more on our programs abroad. Or that Congressional offices are paying exorbitantly for their office rent on the taxpayer dime.
A large statue of Jesus in Ohio was destroyed by a lightning strike and subsequent fire. Those wondering about idolatry and image-making may have quite the grist to work with for a while, analyzing the motivations and choices on hy this statue at this point. Others will simply laugh that God decided he didn’t like that image and smote it.
Finally, the We Are Not Unbiased department offers Ms. Weir's commentary that a lot of people reporting on Israel and how it handles its neighbors are citizens of Israel, have ties to Israel, or are otherwise likely to be influenced into seeing Israel in a positive light, and that the reporting on that tends to reflect this positive view.
Also, in a more silly manner, apparently tweet as a verb is out at the Times unless it's birds that do it. One hopes that the Times will also then scrub articles of the other slang things that have become verbs, things such as Rickroll, for example.
And, to remind you that They Are Not Unbiased, either, a story that makes an ROTC instructor who refuses to pay the union's agency fee and has been threatened with being fired from his post because of nonpayment into some sort of hero. His personal feelings are that it’s extortion to get the agency fee/union dues from him, but the article only lightly mentions that the union is engaged in collective bargaining. If his position is represented or benefited in any way from having the union there (and really, that’s almost a given), then the union has the right to request that he compensate them for their actions on his behalf. If he can prove that the’res nothing about his job or work environment that’s due to the union, then we’ll talk.
In our technology department, synthetic antibodies work effectively against toxins, power grids receiving hardening against disruptive terrorism or radiation EMP, (and also having a certain type of security information protected against FOIA) electronic algorithms that parse financial articles and stock prices that currently do better than most humans when trading on mutual funds, augmented reality goggles for military ventures, and the first of the pre-E3 annoucements, namely Kinect, that which was Project Natal, is unveiled from Microsoft.
We also peer into the life of the person who wants all of the government's proceedings, whether in text, voice, or video, to be on-line and freely accessible - and that’s not just the feds, but at least the states, too.
Into opinions, where we find a good argument against devoting large amounts of space to browsable collections in academic libraries - I know that when I hit the stacks, I did so armed with call numbers - and in LC classification, shifting left or right to try and find good supplemental material on the same topic is as much a losing bet as a winning one. A good core collection is still a must, but the rest probably should be housed off-site, digitized, or otherwise moved away from the main thoroughfare. (Says the public librarian who is greedily awaiting his return to full shelving...)
Mr. Malanga complains about debt issued by municipalities, especially in California, saying that it has gotten too far out of control itself, and that we might start having public services and entities go bust because they can’t collect enough to pay their debt services and maintain their public services. Mr. Williamson goes for the full monty in claiming that our actual debt obligations are more than $100 trillion USD, which we have no capacity to actually pay for. And to cap that all off, Mr. Carroll insists that the recent spending requests are bailouts of all sorts of bad things (unions and doctors) and the only way to stop us from careening off the cliff into insolvency is to stop spending now and go back to the spending of the Reagan era, so that we have a balanced budget by the time Obama leaves office. I’ll bet there’s a lot of money in defense spending that could be cut to achieve such a thing, don’t you? And finally, Ms. Doan says it's the height of Congressional irresponsibility that they can't get a budget to pass... no, wait, it's entirely the fault of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama that a budget isn't getting passed, because she prefers to think of malice, pork spending, and spoiled children who won’t ever figure out a way to pay for their stuff instead of turning her eye to the pocess itself, where appropriations bills have to originate in the House of Representatives, make it through there, go the Senate, get through there, and then be signed by the President. In the culture of The Tarantino and today’s zealous adherents that money spent in social programs is wasted, while money spent in defense is vital to national security, does anyone believe a sane, rational, appropriate budget could be passed, not once, but twice?
Mr. Zakaria wants to know why the media has been focusing on whether the President is showing enough moral outrage and emotion in regard to the BP oil spill instead of relentlessly going after the things that are important. For comparison, Mr. Goldberg is trying to portray the President as an egghead without enough sense to know whose ass to kick in a crisis without a panel. Mr. Boortz drowns his one solid point - boycotting BP will have next-to-zero impact (not to mention being pretty damn impossible - think about how many petroleum products you use every day) in a thick tarry muck about how much he hates Jesse Jackson. Oh, and Michelle Bachmann says that if anyone from the administration comes to kick her ass, she knows [RECORDSCRATCH] karate.
Mr. Kilpatrick thinks the only solution to the problem of radicalized Islam is to wipe the world clean of Muslims, not necessarily by military force, but by finding the magic bullet that makes every Muslim question and then discard their faith as The Bloodthirsty Religion it obviously is, excepting of course, when fatwas and religious opinions appear condemning the use and financing of terroist attacks. That bullet? Put the prophet up to the scrutiny of history, point out how many flaws the writing has, how nobody has seen the miracles and the revelations brought to him, and how the whole religion is based on subjugation and the promise of eternal rewards after this life is done. Sound familiar to anyone who follows, say, a different Abraham-derived tradition capable of mass violence, that once held political sway in a major region of the world, and is also based on unverifiable miracles, claimed witnesses, and rewards to be distributed after life has finished? If the magic bullet he describes hasn’t killed Christianity, what makes him think it will kill or harm Islam?
Mr. Dowd widens this gaze in his denunciation of the recent National Security Strategy document as long on diplomatics and fantasies about international efforts and short on details on how the U.S. is going to make Iran and North Korea regret crossing us, Islam cry in its sleep for their mothers, and throw a double-deuce to the United Nations and do things our own way.
Last for tonight, a stop-motion animation of classic Super Mario Brothers - made entirely of sticky paper notes and good walls.
Also ponder the latest in the long tradition of worrying about what our daughters are doing, choosing to see them in the way we're telling them not to be seen, and with all the latent fears about pelvis movement and “race music” implied.
“Totally unrelated” to the last point, did we mention that the children of lesbian parents, whether single or paired, seem to do better in all aspects of their lives than those of two heterosexual parents, according to the first results published from a study? Possibly because they get involved in parenting their children, expecting it to be a harder slog than usual? OF course, if you ask someone with a vested interest in making sure The Gays stay second class citizens, of course they're going to say it's suspect science and goes against "common sense" that a commited and involved parent who happens to be gay is better for their kid than two parents that don’t care as much and are straight. Although there are plenty of role models around for people who believe The Gay is dangerous - ask Representative Shock why he burned a light blue belt he was wearing in an innocuous photo. Apparently, even looking like you have The Gay is cause for violent and over-the-top reactions in some.
Last out, a response to the idea that new media is making us stupid and shallow, pointing out that our critical thinking faculties do not come naturally, and that the real problem is one of controlling the flow, not whether we get into the flow. I’m wondering if our on-line connected selves will be hailed as a great generation of time managers, having to control, direct, and not get washed away by several information flows in each minute.
(Interlude: police in Idaho have charged a 74 year-old woman as the person who has been dumping condiments in the library drop box for the last year or so after staff observed her dump a jar of mayonnaise. Anyone reading this, please pass along the message to your friends and children and broodlings and all the rest - if you think about doing it, don’t. If the library staff catches you doing anything like this, you will pray that the police get here before we finish killing you.)
Out in the world today, a story of an Australian citizen who has made it his calling to try and dissuade people from committing suicide at a very popular spot. It helps that his house is pretty close to the preferred point.
Going from preventing violence to causing it, mobs in Kyrgyzstan are rioting and targeting anyone they can convince themselves are ethnic Uzbeks, alleging that the Uzbeks started the violence by attacking Kyrgyz women. Gods, that line of reasoning sounds familiar - “kill the black men because they want to take our white women”, perhaps?
And finally, An American with a pistol, a sword, and some other equipment was detained in Pakistan. He claimed he was on a God-driven mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
In what might be a classic set-up to see whether the next verse will be the same as the first in terms of U.S. engagement and justification, scientists suggest that Afghanistan has significant (in trillions of USD) mineral reserves that they can’t get to because they lack the stability and technology to extract them. So...which companies are going to come out, with private security, and which ones are just going to pressure the U.S. government to stay in Afghanistan with their troops so they can make money off the locals?
Inside the United States, catch-22 in action: Prisoner wants to see her lawyer. The lawyer&apos:s brassiere has an underwire, and thus sets off the metal detector. Prison guards tell her it has to go. She takes the bra off, and then the guards tell her they can't let her in because she's not wearing a bra. Somewhere in there, someone’s going to get it for interfering with the ability to consult one’s lawyer. Also, designing the regs in that sort of way is kind of stupid, and so we hope it gets fixed, even if that means the prison stocks up on wrapped brassieres that will pass the metal detector.
the Federal Aviation Administration is receiving pressure from law enforcement and military sectors to open the domestic airways and allow unmanned aerial vehicles to fly. There are some science benefits to the matter, as well, but the main push and likely use is to put them up in the sky to track speeders or fleeing suspects or other methods so that law enforcement and private corporations can make sure you’re not doing anything they wouldn’t approve of.
Having seen the success and opposition generated by the stimulus spending of his first year in office, President Obama returned to Congress to ask them to continue those program that were working into the next year. Cue opinions and denunciations from the people who feel that there’s already been too much spending on programs at home and that we should cut that so we can spend more on our programs abroad. Or that Congressional offices are paying exorbitantly for their office rent on the taxpayer dime.
A large statue of Jesus in Ohio was destroyed by a lightning strike and subsequent fire. Those wondering about idolatry and image-making may have quite the grist to work with for a while, analyzing the motivations and choices on hy this statue at this point. Others will simply laugh that God decided he didn’t like that image and smote it.
Finally, the We Are Not Unbiased department offers Ms. Weir's commentary that a lot of people reporting on Israel and how it handles its neighbors are citizens of Israel, have ties to Israel, or are otherwise likely to be influenced into seeing Israel in a positive light, and that the reporting on that tends to reflect this positive view.
Also, in a more silly manner, apparently tweet as a verb is out at the Times unless it's birds that do it. One hopes that the Times will also then scrub articles of the other slang things that have become verbs, things such as Rickroll, for example.
And, to remind you that They Are Not Unbiased, either, a story that makes an ROTC instructor who refuses to pay the union's agency fee and has been threatened with being fired from his post because of nonpayment into some sort of hero. His personal feelings are that it’s extortion to get the agency fee/union dues from him, but the article only lightly mentions that the union is engaged in collective bargaining. If his position is represented or benefited in any way from having the union there (and really, that’s almost a given), then the union has the right to request that he compensate them for their actions on his behalf. If he can prove that the’res nothing about his job or work environment that’s due to the union, then we’ll talk.
In our technology department, synthetic antibodies work effectively against toxins, power grids receiving hardening against disruptive terrorism or radiation EMP, (and also having a certain type of security information protected against FOIA) electronic algorithms that parse financial articles and stock prices that currently do better than most humans when trading on mutual funds, augmented reality goggles for military ventures, and the first of the pre-E3 annoucements, namely Kinect, that which was Project Natal, is unveiled from Microsoft.
We also peer into the life of the person who wants all of the government's proceedings, whether in text, voice, or video, to be on-line and freely accessible - and that’s not just the feds, but at least the states, too.
Into opinions, where we find a good argument against devoting large amounts of space to browsable collections in academic libraries - I know that when I hit the stacks, I did so armed with call numbers - and in LC classification, shifting left or right to try and find good supplemental material on the same topic is as much a losing bet as a winning one. A good core collection is still a must, but the rest probably should be housed off-site, digitized, or otherwise moved away from the main thoroughfare. (Says the public librarian who is greedily awaiting his return to full shelving...)
Mr. Malanga complains about debt issued by municipalities, especially in California, saying that it has gotten too far out of control itself, and that we might start having public services and entities go bust because they can’t collect enough to pay their debt services and maintain their public services. Mr. Williamson goes for the full monty in claiming that our actual debt obligations are more than $100 trillion USD, which we have no capacity to actually pay for. And to cap that all off, Mr. Carroll insists that the recent spending requests are bailouts of all sorts of bad things (unions and doctors) and the only way to stop us from careening off the cliff into insolvency is to stop spending now and go back to the spending of the Reagan era, so that we have a balanced budget by the time Obama leaves office. I’ll bet there’s a lot of money in defense spending that could be cut to achieve such a thing, don’t you? And finally, Ms. Doan says it's the height of Congressional irresponsibility that they can't get a budget to pass... no, wait, it's entirely the fault of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama that a budget isn't getting passed, because she prefers to think of malice, pork spending, and spoiled children who won’t ever figure out a way to pay for their stuff instead of turning her eye to the pocess itself, where appropriations bills have to originate in the House of Representatives, make it through there, go the Senate, get through there, and then be signed by the President. In the culture of The Tarantino and today’s zealous adherents that money spent in social programs is wasted, while money spent in defense is vital to national security, does anyone believe a sane, rational, appropriate budget could be passed, not once, but twice?
Mr. Zakaria wants to know why the media has been focusing on whether the President is showing enough moral outrage and emotion in regard to the BP oil spill instead of relentlessly going after the things that are important. For comparison, Mr. Goldberg is trying to portray the President as an egghead without enough sense to know whose ass to kick in a crisis without a panel. Mr. Boortz drowns his one solid point - boycotting BP will have next-to-zero impact (not to mention being pretty damn impossible - think about how many petroleum products you use every day) in a thick tarry muck about how much he hates Jesse Jackson. Oh, and Michelle Bachmann says that if anyone from the administration comes to kick her ass, she knows [RECORDSCRATCH] karate.
Mr. Kilpatrick thinks the only solution to the problem of radicalized Islam is to wipe the world clean of Muslims, not necessarily by military force, but by finding the magic bullet that makes every Muslim question and then discard their faith as The Bloodthirsty Religion it obviously is, excepting of course, when fatwas and religious opinions appear condemning the use and financing of terroist attacks. That bullet? Put the prophet up to the scrutiny of history, point out how many flaws the writing has, how nobody has seen the miracles and the revelations brought to him, and how the whole religion is based on subjugation and the promise of eternal rewards after this life is done. Sound familiar to anyone who follows, say, a different Abraham-derived tradition capable of mass violence, that once held political sway in a major region of the world, and is also based on unverifiable miracles, claimed witnesses, and rewards to be distributed after life has finished? If the magic bullet he describes hasn’t killed Christianity, what makes him think it will kill or harm Islam?
Mr. Dowd widens this gaze in his denunciation of the recent National Security Strategy document as long on diplomatics and fantasies about international efforts and short on details on how the U.S. is going to make Iran and North Korea regret crossing us, Islam cry in its sleep for their mothers, and throw a double-deuce to the United Nations and do things our own way.
Last for tonight, a stop-motion animation of classic Super Mario Brothers - made entirely of sticky paper notes and good walls.
