![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Greetings, yo. The Lame excuses department reports that collision rates by men increase as women switch to summer wear. Uh, guys? Eyes up there. Seriously. Especially while you’re driving. And ladies, if you haven’t already figured it out, self-identified Christian men are judging the wardrobe choices and the very actions of their potential girlfriends as immodest, tempting, or encouraging lust in their poor, widdle, helpless selves, even as they are, well, looking to do potentially immodest things with them, whether in a relationship or because they were just not strong enough to resist the female’s temptation. Take a look, ladies, and see just how much you have to do to preserve your modesty, lest a rapist decide to rape you and then blame you for inspiring the lust. *spits* (Even if they do at least indicate they’re aware their lusts are their own.)
Looking for a bookstore chain? Barnes and Noble is up for sale.
Here’s something to make the fundie’s head spin - After several years of homophobic abuse, a gay couple rescued their neighbor and his family from a house fire, a few days before the neighbor was to stand in court on harrassment charges. “But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him.”
While here in the States, a demagogue tries to sell the people on the idea that outlawing lesbians and gays from getting married will somehow fix the economy, because we spend so much money on "fractured families" - the single parents, the divorced,
Tuesday night was National Night Out, a night designed to get everyone out of their homes to meet their neighbors, figuring that neighbors who know each other well will be more inclined to stop and report crime happening in their neighborhood.
Out in the world today, if you’re a United States military person or a member of the Iraqi citizenry, you’re not feeling all that great about life expectancy - more than 500 dead in the month of July for the Iraqis and another deadliest month ever in the war in Afghanistan, for which someone will always say extra casualties are acceptable and must be allowed to happen if the strategy is to succeed.
Presidnet Obama assures us, however, that the drawdown of troops in Iraq will proceed according to schedule, which does not actually mean all the troops are gone - 50,000 of them will remain in a different capacity than combat.
And just in case you thought this administration didn’t have a plan in place, they have designs on how they will glass Iran, just in case bad things happen.
Domestically, after harping on it as a failure and a problem for years, now that the automobile bailout is a success, members of the Republican Party are flipping as fast as they can to try and take credit for it. And they’re hoping you won’t remember how outspoken they were about how much the auto bailout would be a failure.
Did we mention the RNC has also given an invite to thoroughly discredited propogandist Andrew Breitbart? Apparently, the Republicans think that doctoring videos so they lie in order to hurt political opponents is something they want to encourage.
Not that some Democrats are any better - introducing a bill to allow police and investigators to detain someone indefinitely before reading them their Miranda rights, for example, makes Rep. Schiff on the bottom of the barrel.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York gave a speech defending the right of an Islamic group to build a mosque and community center close to the site of the 11 September attacks, citing the First Amendment to the Constitution and the right for owners of private property to develop it as they see fit within the bounds of the law. The mayor strikes it spot on. However you may personally feel about Islam, the owners of the private property have a right to build what they will on it, and they also have the right to practice Islam that close to the site. If it bothers you, why? Are you so insecure in your own religion’s rightness? Do you think it gloating? Perhaps if it were al-Qaeda building, but just any mosque? You’ll have to prove it.
As part of the ongoing campaign to prevent government from getting any actual work done and then blaming the Democrats for it, judicial confirmations in the Obama administration have dropped to about 40 percent, the lowest of the last five presidents by at least 35 percent. Holds, filibusters, and other stalling tactics have been utilized across the board, whether for legislation or confirmation, and then the blame somehow shifts to the Democrats for not getting anything done despite having majorities. Like delaying aid to states because there wan't enough money cut from food stamps.
Arizona governor Jan Brewer is considering a tweaking of the Papers Please law so as to address some of the objections, while simultaneously claiming she will fight the decision as far as it will go, which to me indicates that she knows she can’t tweak her central premises and will have to fight it, but she’s hoping to get some of the secondary concerns fixed before the appeals begin so as to remove firepower from the opposition’s side. Senator Kyl, of Arizona, on the other hand, thinks that the children of illegal immigrants should not be afforded Untied States citizenship just for being born here, which would definitely help get rid of that thorny issue of separating parents and children - he could send them all back with a clean conscience.
An object lesson from our “This is how you Spin” department - the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts will cost us all thousands more in tax dollars. That would be, of course, if all the tax cuts expired, including the ones that help the poor and the middle class. Now, when people talk about the expiration of those tax cuts, do you think they’d really let something like the child credit expire? There’s even a paragraph there that says “The Obama administration is working to extend the middle-class cuts but not the ones for the very rich”, but it’s buried well beneath the lead and the screaming headline. We Report, We Decide. Did we mention that even Alan Greenspan thinks that extending the tax cuts without offsetting them would be a disaster, as well as another conservative heavy-hitter, David Stockman, who says that helping out the richest in the middle of a recession is madness and completely opposite what Republicans used to stand for. (And he even mentions that all the un paid-for war spending of the last ten years has contributed mightily to all of this debt.)
And another - someone takes the story of the city of Bell, California, where the local officials bilked the city for hundreds of thousands of dollars of overpriced salaries, and turns it into a story of how newspapers are necessary. One of the comment squad nails it more precisely - journalism, not newspapers, are the necessary things. Seems like we need to fund actual journalists as much as we need instructors, libraries, and health care for all. We should get more interesting sequences like this as Fox News heads to the front of the White House press briefing room.
the government is looking for any civilian help the whistleblower Bradley Manning may have had in his leaking, further reinforcing the idea that anyone who tries to expose government wrongdoing will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, like people arresting and prosecuting citizens for taping their encounters with the police, or people investigating the morass of intelligence contracts and contractors who have access to intelligence information with insufficient oversight, instead of investigating what happened that produced the need to leak the documents or trying to reduce the amount of sensitive information being used for profiteering and warmongering. For that, and painting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a similar criminal who wants to give aid and information to the enemy and destroy western civilization, there will always be plenty of keyboarders willing to shout "Traitor". And, in fact, some government officials are ready to put the blame on the whistleblower. On their own end, the current attempt to paint the leaked documents as "nothing to see here" is a lie - for most people who are not as well-informed or have been following it as closely, there’s plenty of new material, supporting documentation, and stuff to build better cases with.
And finally, the new BP CEO says that the problem is fixed, so they're going to scale back their cleanup efforts, even as we know oil-dispersant mix is getting into the food supply.
In sciences and technologies, having lots of social friends and connections helps with longevity. Erm, duh? Also in the “um, yeah” department - people first think things will be easier than they are, then they think they'll be harder than they are when the fail the first time. I know that feeling pretty well. Perseverance eventually produces competence.
A demonstration at the Black Hat hacker conference showed off how some brands of ATM are vulnerable to malware attacks, either remotely or through direct interfacing with the machine.
Fuirthermore, it’s getting more difficult for people to successfully copy designs without someone noticing. Latest example? The U.S. Copyright Group, that apparently stole the source code wholesale from a competitor group, the Copyright Enforcement Group.
Oooh, pretty. Prepare yourself for coronal mass ejections! That’ll monkey with the magnetic field.
Good conversation synchronizes brain activity - giving new meaning to the phrase “in sync” when talking about how things click between people sometimes.
Finally, If you've got $8,000 USD to spare, you can build and launch your own satellite into a self-decaying low-earth orbit. Satellite broadcast for a few years of whatever you wanted.
Into opinions, where the private sector needs a public jobs stimulus to help kickstart the economy - something WPA-like so that the massively unemployed find themselves able to work again and we deficit spend for a bit before we start paying back the spending with a more robust economy. Or, if you believe Mr. Henninger, the public sector must shrink itself into nothing and austerity so that the private sector can stay competitive and the public sector doesn't end up taking over, centrally planning everything, and taxing everyone into the ground to pay for it all. Really, people, stop with the socialism or implied socialism meme. Obama’s already have several litmus tests on whether he’s an actual liberal with Marxist leaning or just another corporatist, imperial center-right Democrat. He’s a Democrat, which may look like socialism from as far down the right as the Tea Partiers are, but on the actual scale, he’s not very much into the left category, if he’s there at all.
But also a place where when the private sector screws you to the tune of millions, they get slapped with tiny fines that make no real difference in whether they're going to keep doing it.
The WSJ looks at 2.4 percent growth of the economy, and because they can't say anything nice about this president, they say "MORE! MORE! Where's our unrealistic growth?! Clearly the stimulus is a failure because it's not working well enough!" Let’s step back from that perspective, shall we, and take a note about how the American people are obsolete to the wealthy class that the Republicans are so interested in protecting, with the suggestion that perhaps the American populace needs to move and become the immigrant labor for those countries where the investors and Wall Street wizards are putting their money and chartering studies to tell us that their bailout was justified and necessary, because if we did nothing things would be so much worse. The New york Times suggests we've already started that process. Or we could look at how employers and corporations used the cover of the recession to fire a lot of people and cut the hours of others so they could increase their profits. Corporations don’t care about their workers, they care about their shareholders and profits. This is why a corporation is not a person - a person will at least have a pang of empathy somewhere along the process. Or worse, see signs that the economy may not recover well, if at all, and instead will slide further down the harmful slope. So what’s left to do? Use what little power you have left to put people in who aren't in corporate pockets, for one thing.
It’s also a place of conspiracies based on apparent dual-meanings of the group wanting to build a mosque near the site of the 11 September attacks, making Western audiences think of brotherhood and peace while signalling to Muslims their intent to wage fanatical war. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, and such, but this triggers something in my memory - have we ever had this many conspiracies thrown up about events in this while. I know that the bit about the Iraq war justification being faked was a conspiracy - until it was true, that is, but it seems like we have an awful lot more of conspiracies either by or against the American people...often involving Muslims...and especially focused on names. What gives? Is it just that there’s a Democrat in the office, and so all the conspiracists that were being held in check are now allowed outside to do what damage they can?
In politics, it appears that the Obama-Clinton ticket is going to take a tour as a zombie for 2012.
Mr. Gingrich says we need to invade Iran and North Korea, because of how fantastically the Iraq invasion turned out in the stopping of nuclear weapons production. If you take the points of Mr. Walt, which pegs foreign policy successes at zero for four, although at least one of them is not the current President's fault for being a zero, then adding more things on is not the way to go.
Of course, there are plenty of keyboarders who think that we should be staying on in Afghanistan indefinitely, lest the scariest, least likely of disaster scenarioes come to pass.
Mr. Laffer says that raising tax rates on the rich doesn't work because the rich will always find a way to hide their money from taxes. So he proposes letting the tax cuts stay in place because it will result in more real revenue. Nowhere does he comment on the immorality of evading one’s taxes, whether personal or corporate. That admission really should send up a red flag to the IRS to audit anyone whose famous enough to have name recognition but appears to only be making an average salary. And any corporation that has record profits according to their shareholders but appears to be operating at a loss to the SEC or the IRS. Plus, shouldn’t we be stomping on tax evasion through our moral outlets - people want deficits to be reduced, then they should pay up what they actually owe in taxes, instead of looking for all the loopholes and tricky ways of getting out of it. To claim that spending cuts, and only spending cuts, on social programs, are the way out is to believe in magic money that appears when taxes are cut and to turn a very blind eye to the other complex that’s driven the deficits so high - military-industrial, contractors and all.
The WSJ sits in the unenviable position of criticizing both the original cap-and-trade bill, which they hated, and the whittled-down-so-the-Republicans-will-maybe-please-pass-it version, denying entirely that they and the Republicans might have had something to do with stalling out the original bill and crafting the sinecure that follows it. It’s a fantastic bit of denial, blaming the Democrats for everything being wrong in the first place, and then blaming the Democrats for having everything wrong when the one that’s supposed to appeal to the Republicans appears.
Which almost inevitably leads to the speculation that a second American Revolution will be sparked because of the egregiousness of the Obama presidency in destroying America and the rule of law through passed legilsation leading to regulatory control of everything. Including people who dance on the knife's edge of openly supporting violence by conservative elements against liberals and the government.
Last for tonight, inforgraphics about Burning Man, the yearly attempt to create a temporary autonomous zone out in the desert of Nevada.
Looking for a bookstore chain? Barnes and Noble is up for sale.
Here’s something to make the fundie’s head spin - After several years of homophobic abuse, a gay couple rescued their neighbor and his family from a house fire, a few days before the neighbor was to stand in court on harrassment charges. “But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him.”
While here in the States, a demagogue tries to sell the people on the idea that outlawing lesbians and gays from getting married will somehow fix the economy, because we spend so much money on "fractured families" - the single parents, the divorced,
Tuesday night was National Night Out, a night designed to get everyone out of their homes to meet their neighbors, figuring that neighbors who know each other well will be more inclined to stop and report crime happening in their neighborhood.
Out in the world today, if you’re a United States military person or a member of the Iraqi citizenry, you’re not feeling all that great about life expectancy - more than 500 dead in the month of July for the Iraqis and another deadliest month ever in the war in Afghanistan, for which someone will always say extra casualties are acceptable and must be allowed to happen if the strategy is to succeed.
Presidnet Obama assures us, however, that the drawdown of troops in Iraq will proceed according to schedule, which does not actually mean all the troops are gone - 50,000 of them will remain in a different capacity than combat.
And just in case you thought this administration didn’t have a plan in place, they have designs on how they will glass Iran, just in case bad things happen.
Domestically, after harping on it as a failure and a problem for years, now that the automobile bailout is a success, members of the Republican Party are flipping as fast as they can to try and take credit for it. And they’re hoping you won’t remember how outspoken they were about how much the auto bailout would be a failure.
Did we mention the RNC has also given an invite to thoroughly discredited propogandist Andrew Breitbart? Apparently, the Republicans think that doctoring videos so they lie in order to hurt political opponents is something they want to encourage.
Not that some Democrats are any better - introducing a bill to allow police and investigators to detain someone indefinitely before reading them their Miranda rights, for example, makes Rep. Schiff on the bottom of the barrel.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York gave a speech defending the right of an Islamic group to build a mosque and community center close to the site of the 11 September attacks, citing the First Amendment to the Constitution and the right for owners of private property to develop it as they see fit within the bounds of the law. The mayor strikes it spot on. However you may personally feel about Islam, the owners of the private property have a right to build what they will on it, and they also have the right to practice Islam that close to the site. If it bothers you, why? Are you so insecure in your own religion’s rightness? Do you think it gloating? Perhaps if it were al-Qaeda building, but just any mosque? You’ll have to prove it.
As part of the ongoing campaign to prevent government from getting any actual work done and then blaming the Democrats for it, judicial confirmations in the Obama administration have dropped to about 40 percent, the lowest of the last five presidents by at least 35 percent. Holds, filibusters, and other stalling tactics have been utilized across the board, whether for legislation or confirmation, and then the blame somehow shifts to the Democrats for not getting anything done despite having majorities. Like delaying aid to states because there wan't enough money cut from food stamps.
Arizona governor Jan Brewer is considering a tweaking of the Papers Please law so as to address some of the objections, while simultaneously claiming she will fight the decision as far as it will go, which to me indicates that she knows she can’t tweak her central premises and will have to fight it, but she’s hoping to get some of the secondary concerns fixed before the appeals begin so as to remove firepower from the opposition’s side. Senator Kyl, of Arizona, on the other hand, thinks that the children of illegal immigrants should not be afforded Untied States citizenship just for being born here, which would definitely help get rid of that thorny issue of separating parents and children - he could send them all back with a clean conscience.
An object lesson from our “This is how you Spin” department - the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts will cost us all thousands more in tax dollars. That would be, of course, if all the tax cuts expired, including the ones that help the poor and the middle class. Now, when people talk about the expiration of those tax cuts, do you think they’d really let something like the child credit expire? There’s even a paragraph there that says “The Obama administration is working to extend the middle-class cuts but not the ones for the very rich”, but it’s buried well beneath the lead and the screaming headline. We Report, We Decide. Did we mention that even Alan Greenspan thinks that extending the tax cuts without offsetting them would be a disaster, as well as another conservative heavy-hitter, David Stockman, who says that helping out the richest in the middle of a recession is madness and completely opposite what Republicans used to stand for. (And he even mentions that all the un paid-for war spending of the last ten years has contributed mightily to all of this debt.)
And another - someone takes the story of the city of Bell, California, where the local officials bilked the city for hundreds of thousands of dollars of overpriced salaries, and turns it into a story of how newspapers are necessary. One of the comment squad nails it more precisely - journalism, not newspapers, are the necessary things. Seems like we need to fund actual journalists as much as we need instructors, libraries, and health care for all. We should get more interesting sequences like this as Fox News heads to the front of the White House press briefing room.
the government is looking for any civilian help the whistleblower Bradley Manning may have had in his leaking, further reinforcing the idea that anyone who tries to expose government wrongdoing will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, like people arresting and prosecuting citizens for taping their encounters with the police, or people investigating the morass of intelligence contracts and contractors who have access to intelligence information with insufficient oversight, instead of investigating what happened that produced the need to leak the documents or trying to reduce the amount of sensitive information being used for profiteering and warmongering. For that, and painting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a similar criminal who wants to give aid and information to the enemy and destroy western civilization, there will always be plenty of keyboarders willing to shout "Traitor". And, in fact, some government officials are ready to put the blame on the whistleblower. On their own end, the current attempt to paint the leaked documents as "nothing to see here" is a lie - for most people who are not as well-informed or have been following it as closely, there’s plenty of new material, supporting documentation, and stuff to build better cases with.
And finally, the new BP CEO says that the problem is fixed, so they're going to scale back their cleanup efforts, even as we know oil-dispersant mix is getting into the food supply.
In sciences and technologies, having lots of social friends and connections helps with longevity. Erm, duh? Also in the “um, yeah” department - people first think things will be easier than they are, then they think they'll be harder than they are when the fail the first time. I know that feeling pretty well. Perseverance eventually produces competence.
A demonstration at the Black Hat hacker conference showed off how some brands of ATM are vulnerable to malware attacks, either remotely or through direct interfacing with the machine.
Fuirthermore, it’s getting more difficult for people to successfully copy designs without someone noticing. Latest example? The U.S. Copyright Group, that apparently stole the source code wholesale from a competitor group, the Copyright Enforcement Group.
Oooh, pretty. Prepare yourself for coronal mass ejections! That’ll monkey with the magnetic field.
Good conversation synchronizes brain activity - giving new meaning to the phrase “in sync” when talking about how things click between people sometimes.
Finally, If you've got $8,000 USD to spare, you can build and launch your own satellite into a self-decaying low-earth orbit. Satellite broadcast for a few years of whatever you wanted.
Into opinions, where the private sector needs a public jobs stimulus to help kickstart the economy - something WPA-like so that the massively unemployed find themselves able to work again and we deficit spend for a bit before we start paying back the spending with a more robust economy. Or, if you believe Mr. Henninger, the public sector must shrink itself into nothing and austerity so that the private sector can stay competitive and the public sector doesn't end up taking over, centrally planning everything, and taxing everyone into the ground to pay for it all. Really, people, stop with the socialism or implied socialism meme. Obama’s already have several litmus tests on whether he’s an actual liberal with Marxist leaning or just another corporatist, imperial center-right Democrat. He’s a Democrat, which may look like socialism from as far down the right as the Tea Partiers are, but on the actual scale, he’s not very much into the left category, if he’s there at all.
But also a place where when the private sector screws you to the tune of millions, they get slapped with tiny fines that make no real difference in whether they're going to keep doing it.
The WSJ looks at 2.4 percent growth of the economy, and because they can't say anything nice about this president, they say "MORE! MORE! Where's our unrealistic growth?! Clearly the stimulus is a failure because it's not working well enough!" Let’s step back from that perspective, shall we, and take a note about how the American people are obsolete to the wealthy class that the Republicans are so interested in protecting, with the suggestion that perhaps the American populace needs to move and become the immigrant labor for those countries where the investors and Wall Street wizards are putting their money and chartering studies to tell us that their bailout was justified and necessary, because if we did nothing things would be so much worse. The New york Times suggests we've already started that process. Or we could look at how employers and corporations used the cover of the recession to fire a lot of people and cut the hours of others so they could increase their profits. Corporations don’t care about their workers, they care about their shareholders and profits. This is why a corporation is not a person - a person will at least have a pang of empathy somewhere along the process. Or worse, see signs that the economy may not recover well, if at all, and instead will slide further down the harmful slope. So what’s left to do? Use what little power you have left to put people in who aren't in corporate pockets, for one thing.
It’s also a place of conspiracies based on apparent dual-meanings of the group wanting to build a mosque near the site of the 11 September attacks, making Western audiences think of brotherhood and peace while signalling to Muslims their intent to wage fanatical war. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, and such, but this triggers something in my memory - have we ever had this many conspiracies thrown up about events in this while. I know that the bit about the Iraq war justification being faked was a conspiracy - until it was true, that is, but it seems like we have an awful lot more of conspiracies either by or against the American people...often involving Muslims...and especially focused on names. What gives? Is it just that there’s a Democrat in the office, and so all the conspiracists that were being held in check are now allowed outside to do what damage they can?
In politics, it appears that the Obama-Clinton ticket is going to take a tour as a zombie for 2012.
Mr. Gingrich says we need to invade Iran and North Korea, because of how fantastically the Iraq invasion turned out in the stopping of nuclear weapons production. If you take the points of Mr. Walt, which pegs foreign policy successes at zero for four, although at least one of them is not the current President's fault for being a zero, then adding more things on is not the way to go.
Of course, there are plenty of keyboarders who think that we should be staying on in Afghanistan indefinitely, lest the scariest, least likely of disaster scenarioes come to pass.
Mr. Laffer says that raising tax rates on the rich doesn't work because the rich will always find a way to hide their money from taxes. So he proposes letting the tax cuts stay in place because it will result in more real revenue. Nowhere does he comment on the immorality of evading one’s taxes, whether personal or corporate. That admission really should send up a red flag to the IRS to audit anyone whose famous enough to have name recognition but appears to only be making an average salary. And any corporation that has record profits according to their shareholders but appears to be operating at a loss to the SEC or the IRS. Plus, shouldn’t we be stomping on tax evasion through our moral outlets - people want deficits to be reduced, then they should pay up what they actually owe in taxes, instead of looking for all the loopholes and tricky ways of getting out of it. To claim that spending cuts, and only spending cuts, on social programs, are the way out is to believe in magic money that appears when taxes are cut and to turn a very blind eye to the other complex that’s driven the deficits so high - military-industrial, contractors and all.
The WSJ sits in the unenviable position of criticizing both the original cap-and-trade bill, which they hated, and the whittled-down-so-the-Republicans-will-maybe-please-pass-it version, denying entirely that they and the Republicans might have had something to do with stalling out the original bill and crafting the sinecure that follows it. It’s a fantastic bit of denial, blaming the Democrats for everything being wrong in the first place, and then blaming the Democrats for having everything wrong when the one that’s supposed to appeal to the Republicans appears.
Which almost inevitably leads to the speculation that a second American Revolution will be sparked because of the egregiousness of the Obama presidency in destroying America and the rule of law through passed legilsation leading to regulatory control of everything. Including people who dance on the knife's edge of openly supporting violence by conservative elements against liberals and the government.
Last for tonight, inforgraphics about Burning Man, the yearly attempt to create a temporary autonomous zone out in the desert of Nevada.
