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More, more, more! - 7 September 2010
Sep. 8th, 2010 10:13 amGood morning, those who look at the stars and dream of life elsewhere. A small look in at the United States of 1961, where a President Kennedy looks at the advancing Soviet Union and wants to know if there's something big and flashy the U.S. could do to regain the lead in the space race.
And for those still concerned about the wretched hive of scum and villany back here on Terrs, here's a lit of the top ten most popular Internet scams of the 2000-2009 period.
Out in the world today, we have a textbook example of an education system designed not to teach students critical thinking, but to ensure that they participate in the Two Minutes Hate every day. How? Criticize the factual statement in the civics textbooks that makes your country look bad, look good against another minister cutting the civics budget, then stuff the saved time with nationalism, jingoism, and the State Religion, and then inculcate the hatred at such an early level that teenagers will be properly xenophobic about the makeup of their classrooms and the citizenship status of The Other. Now look at your own education system and see if they're doing the same thing.
Iran has been barring United Nations nuclear inspectors again, based on what they claim is inaccurate reporting about undeclared nuke experiments. Raise your alarm settings up a few clicks and wait for it...
In Iraq, a perhaps unforeseen consequence of the seven years of destruction is that many women reach the spinster age of thirty unmarried, which, while it seem alughable to the Unietd States, apparently carries some social force in Iraq. Seven years of dead young men meant marriage and courtship was pretty tough to impossible. And, as predicted, the troops that are left behind to advise and instruct are still having to fight insurgents and others.
And in Afghanistan, more NATO troops to train and advise, as well as reports forging the links that will be needed to justify hitting Iran, nucelar or otherwise - like how Iran is supposedly offering bonuses to Taliban soldiers that kill United States troops and destroy their vehicles.
In the United States, concern over a drug unit being cut by the budget. Which usually means it's time to point out the alternate possibility where legalizing certain drugs might stop a grand majority of trafficking and crime, both here and abroad. And then mention that research is always happening as to what the precise effects and medical uses of drugs may be, be it marijuana or other substances with interesting effects.
If your'e a Republican governor who signed a controversial immigration law, and a news organization is poking around and notes that you have a conflict of interest, in that two high-level campaign staffers are both involved in a private prison corporation, do you, A) answer their questions honestly and give them information, b) dodge the questions but still let them investigate, or c) pull all of your campaign advertisements from the network and attack their credibility without actually refuting their reporting? If you picked C, congratulations, you're Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona.
Spekaing of, I'm sure she's cheered on by the start of unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling the United States-Mexico border, although that will mean the next time she claims there are headless bodies in the desert, we'll go to the tape and see if she can back that claim.
And in the continuing Gulf oil crisis, BP has threatened that they won't be able to pay compensation for Deepwater Horizon victims if they're not able to re-open and start drilling again. Because, you know, this is their entire cash lifeblood and they're not sitting on years of record profits so they have no real money to pay the people with.
A Wal-Mart in Ohio thinks that they'll sell books better if they lump all the African-Americans into one section, regardless of what kind of book they write. Sorry, someone said the word "post-racial", did they? Furthermore, the skin diversity options in a lot of RPGs and video games are, well, lacking. Heroes tend to be Pasty White Dudes, or look like the Pasty White Dude was the base model to which some pigments have been applied. The games industry is getting a little better about, y'know, chicks in games, but we can do better about hero casting diversity.
The report on defensive medicine and malpractice liability is in, and while there's a lot of defensive medicine going on, trying to cut that out will not result in significant savings. Look elsewhere for your medicine savings, aspiring fixers-of-problems. If you follow the President, he'd like to see some infrastructure spending to put skilled tradesmen back to work and to maintain our roads, rails, and runways.
In technology, according to a new Pew American Life survey, one fifth of the American populace claims they don't use the Internet. Some of them because they don't see any value in it, others perhaps because they can't afford the access charges. (Psst. Public Library probably has free Internet access.)
Brain-mapping and software allows for researchers to transform signals from the brain into words, with some amonut of accuracy.
Opinions, yo. Starting with the declaration that the United States went to war with Iraq for twenty years and didn't learn a thing, and as the war progressed, the expectations were lowered from victory and democracy to stability and then to self-ddetermination, at which point the troops vanish and Iraq is left to decide for itself what sort of future it wants. All because someone decided that swatting the child on the bottom wasn't enough, they had to grab a switch and beat the child bloody. The next question on that docket is Will Afghanistan be a similar lack of lessons?
In the Department of People Trying To Scare You, Mr. Puder conflates Wahabist Islam with all of Islam and says that the Park 51 project is a gesture of Wahabist triumph over the lands they've harmed. So that you think all Muslims are the bloodthirsty, blow themselves up kind of people and should never be tolerated in the United States or New York. And anything that doesn't look like that is you being fooled by deliberate deception practiced by The Bloodthirsty Religion to make you think they're something else.
Staying in the same department, Mr. Trzupek says all the members of the environmental movement are human-haters that want people to kill themselves without breeding so that nature can recover from us. Because that's what envrionmental concern doe sfor you - it twists you into someone who will kill others for the planet and will then kill yourself. And Al Gore and all the environmental people are to blame for helping them get there. It's sort of the conservative inversion and mirroring of the liberal argument that inflammatory rhetoric, while it doesn't directly send people on the path, it certainly helps them get there.
And one more - Mr. Sherk takes a statistic and makes it a doom prediction - government unions are apparently going to eat up all of the taxes and then demand increases in those taxes to pay their inflated, noncompetitive salaries. Because governments don't have to compete, so the unions get them all wrapped up and paying out far more than what the market would allow a private company to do! I'm sure he's just as doom about employment being a lot in government these days, too, since they're the people who can pay workers even if they have to run a deficit to do it with.
Mr. Carroll accuses the recent chair of the council of economic advisers of doublespeak in addition to the drumbeat of "stimulus was a failure". On the first matter, the quote he provides doesn't speak necessarily only to Keynesian economics, it talks about economic experts in general. On the other end, well, it's hard to prove that things would have been worse, so we'll give them that the numbers promised haven't been the numbers delivered. To then accuse the President of a tax hike when it would be about tax cuts expiring, though, is disingenuous at best. But then again, some people think the Presidents and liberals want to emulate King Canute and command the economy to recover itself, either by fiat or through the pulling of discrete levers.
Going out of opinions, The Washington Times goes back to the great saint of Republicanism, Ronald Reagan, and reprints some of his Labor Day words as a Take That against the current President and situation. Because hating on the President is a time-honored tradition. And because they think that Reagan has the right idea.
And last for tonight, an experiment in measuring the happiness of the family, predicting what their mood will be in the future, and how having quant data on such things affects the family.
And for those still concerned about the wretched hive of scum and villany back here on Terrs, here's a lit of the top ten most popular Internet scams of the 2000-2009 period.
Out in the world today, we have a textbook example of an education system designed not to teach students critical thinking, but to ensure that they participate in the Two Minutes Hate every day. How? Criticize the factual statement in the civics textbooks that makes your country look bad, look good against another minister cutting the civics budget, then stuff the saved time with nationalism, jingoism, and the State Religion, and then inculcate the hatred at such an early level that teenagers will be properly xenophobic about the makeup of their classrooms and the citizenship status of The Other. Now look at your own education system and see if they're doing the same thing.
Iran has been barring United Nations nuclear inspectors again, based on what they claim is inaccurate reporting about undeclared nuke experiments. Raise your alarm settings up a few clicks and wait for it...
In Iraq, a perhaps unforeseen consequence of the seven years of destruction is that many women reach the spinster age of thirty unmarried, which, while it seem alughable to the Unietd States, apparently carries some social force in Iraq. Seven years of dead young men meant marriage and courtship was pretty tough to impossible. And, as predicted, the troops that are left behind to advise and instruct are still having to fight insurgents and others.
And in Afghanistan, more NATO troops to train and advise, as well as reports forging the links that will be needed to justify hitting Iran, nucelar or otherwise - like how Iran is supposedly offering bonuses to Taliban soldiers that kill United States troops and destroy their vehicles.
In the United States, concern over a drug unit being cut by the budget. Which usually means it's time to point out the alternate possibility where legalizing certain drugs might stop a grand majority of trafficking and crime, both here and abroad. And then mention that research is always happening as to what the precise effects and medical uses of drugs may be, be it marijuana or other substances with interesting effects.
If your'e a Republican governor who signed a controversial immigration law, and a news organization is poking around and notes that you have a conflict of interest, in that two high-level campaign staffers are both involved in a private prison corporation, do you, A) answer their questions honestly and give them information, b) dodge the questions but still let them investigate, or c) pull all of your campaign advertisements from the network and attack their credibility without actually refuting their reporting? If you picked C, congratulations, you're Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona.
Spekaing of, I'm sure she's cheered on by the start of unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling the United States-Mexico border, although that will mean the next time she claims there are headless bodies in the desert, we'll go to the tape and see if she can back that claim.
And in the continuing Gulf oil crisis, BP has threatened that they won't be able to pay compensation for Deepwater Horizon victims if they're not able to re-open and start drilling again. Because, you know, this is their entire cash lifeblood and they're not sitting on years of record profits so they have no real money to pay the people with.
A Wal-Mart in Ohio thinks that they'll sell books better if they lump all the African-Americans into one section, regardless of what kind of book they write. Sorry, someone said the word "post-racial", did they? Furthermore, the skin diversity options in a lot of RPGs and video games are, well, lacking. Heroes tend to be Pasty White Dudes, or look like the Pasty White Dude was the base model to which some pigments have been applied. The games industry is getting a little better about, y'know, chicks in games, but we can do better about hero casting diversity.
The report on defensive medicine and malpractice liability is in, and while there's a lot of defensive medicine going on, trying to cut that out will not result in significant savings. Look elsewhere for your medicine savings, aspiring fixers-of-problems. If you follow the President, he'd like to see some infrastructure spending to put skilled tradesmen back to work and to maintain our roads, rails, and runways.
In technology, according to a new Pew American Life survey, one fifth of the American populace claims they don't use the Internet. Some of them because they don't see any value in it, others perhaps because they can't afford the access charges. (Psst. Public Library probably has free Internet access.)
Brain-mapping and software allows for researchers to transform signals from the brain into words, with some amonut of accuracy.
Opinions, yo. Starting with the declaration that the United States went to war with Iraq for twenty years and didn't learn a thing, and as the war progressed, the expectations were lowered from victory and democracy to stability and then to self-ddetermination, at which point the troops vanish and Iraq is left to decide for itself what sort of future it wants. All because someone decided that swatting the child on the bottom wasn't enough, they had to grab a switch and beat the child bloody. The next question on that docket is Will Afghanistan be a similar lack of lessons?
In the Department of People Trying To Scare You, Mr. Puder conflates Wahabist Islam with all of Islam and says that the Park 51 project is a gesture of Wahabist triumph over the lands they've harmed. So that you think all Muslims are the bloodthirsty, blow themselves up kind of people and should never be tolerated in the United States or New York. And anything that doesn't look like that is you being fooled by deliberate deception practiced by The Bloodthirsty Religion to make you think they're something else.
Staying in the same department, Mr. Trzupek says all the members of the environmental movement are human-haters that want people to kill themselves without breeding so that nature can recover from us. Because that's what envrionmental concern doe sfor you - it twists you into someone who will kill others for the planet and will then kill yourself. And Al Gore and all the environmental people are to blame for helping them get there. It's sort of the conservative inversion and mirroring of the liberal argument that inflammatory rhetoric, while it doesn't directly send people on the path, it certainly helps them get there.
And one more - Mr. Sherk takes a statistic and makes it a doom prediction - government unions are apparently going to eat up all of the taxes and then demand increases in those taxes to pay their inflated, noncompetitive salaries. Because governments don't have to compete, so the unions get them all wrapped up and paying out far more than what the market would allow a private company to do! I'm sure he's just as doom about employment being a lot in government these days, too, since they're the people who can pay workers even if they have to run a deficit to do it with.
Mr. Carroll accuses the recent chair of the council of economic advisers of doublespeak in addition to the drumbeat of "stimulus was a failure". On the first matter, the quote he provides doesn't speak necessarily only to Keynesian economics, it talks about economic experts in general. On the other end, well, it's hard to prove that things would have been worse, so we'll give them that the numbers promised haven't been the numbers delivered. To then accuse the President of a tax hike when it would be about tax cuts expiring, though, is disingenuous at best. But then again, some people think the Presidents and liberals want to emulate King Canute and command the economy to recover itself, either by fiat or through the pulling of discrete levers.
Going out of opinions, The Washington Times goes back to the great saint of Republicanism, Ronald Reagan, and reprints some of his Labor Day words as a Take That against the current President and situation. Because hating on the President is a time-honored tradition. And because they think that Reagan has the right idea.
And last for tonight, an experiment in measuring the happiness of the family, predicting what their mood will be in the future, and how having quant data on such things affects the family.
