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Some good stuff for today's opening - old neon signs, coming from the Vegas strip and the world over. Learn a little bit more about the process of manufacturing noble gas signage, and, if you like, generate an image with the same sort of glow suitable for use on the web or elsewhere. Or, you can see how someone else made their advertisements just as effective in the pre-neon era by looking at some old cigarette and alcohol ads.
Out in the world today, despite the often puritanical attitudes of their fundamentalists toward sex, Joumana Haddad and her contributors publish a magazine of erotica in places such as Lebanon.
Because the enemy of my enemy is totally my friend, the United States is planning on selling Saudi Arabia a significant amount of fighter planes, interception missiles, and helicopters to let them deter the threat of Iran doing something stupid with missiles.
The family of the American hiker released on a $500,000 USD bail is asking the government of Iran to waive the charge, as they cannot afford it. This probably gives Iran the PR they think they want - look at how great we are that we've released this suspected spy on bail. If we can manage to get them to pay it, all the better, but then we can put her to death like we want to because the bail couldn't be made, not because we're doing this as a show. Assuming, of course, they don't have a different governmental carrot dangled in front of them to let her go. Whcih might be the entire point of the enterprise.
Domestically, the astroturf group FreedomWorks has decided they need to be much more visibly minority, while also claiming that they're plenty diverse, just that minoirty communities are so beholden to liberal politics that a minority person saying they're a conservative is ostracized from the society as a traitor. The snark headline is "The Tea Party decided affirmative action is good for them.", but the real question is whether or not the astroturf groups can convince the poor and minoirites that they want to support positions that make the rich richer and call for minorities to become more like the white culture those groups consider the default and correct culture. Oh, and there's also the pretty well insane segment that jumps and screams in terror if you say the word "Muslim" near them.
Despite the unconstitutional ruling of the Don't Ask, Don't tell policy, the Pentagon has no plans to reinstate or recall all of the servicepeople they've discharged for being gay. Because, as they point out, the law is still in place and needs to be repealed.
Conservative talk radio wins again - namely, with an investigation by the Justice Department Attorney General as to whether the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case was dropped for unjustifiable reasons and whether the claims made that Justice is partisan and racially motivated in its choice of prosecutions have merit.
Our Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department shows off how depending on how you interpret the numbers, you can make things like the health care bill seem like a savings or a cost.
Bill Clinton still has to defend himself from liberal commentators who note his center-rightness and call him an excellent Republican President. Mr. Clinton points out that the Republicans of his time and ours would consider him to be a closet socialist, but for what would seem to be good reasons, we don't take that much stock in the socialist designations of a party that routinely calls Democratic centrists socialist.
Into technology, where a suggestion is made that we try to develop thorium as a viable nuclear fuel, because it has a far bigger concentration of energy for the same amount of material. Of course, we'd have to see what it's byproducts are. In the interim, perhaps we could build traveling wave reactors that take depleted uranium-238 and turn it first into plutonium, and then into large amounts of power, using a small amount of uranium-235 as the catalyst to the reaction, to get enough neutrons going. In essence, the u-235 lights the wick, and then the candle slow-burns for more than a few years. Of course, the end product is whatever plutonium becomes when it's been exhausted, so it might be trading one set of waste for another.
The United States government is getting on the iris scanner routine, as well, deploying it at a border crossing point in Texas, figuring they can take the iris prints of illegal immigrants and they won't be able to get back into the country. Or that they can track where someone goes in the country, with enoguh cameras and scanners, so as to know where a potential illegal immigrant is at all times.
Windoes 7, the new 64-bit operating system that was supposed to be hardened against rootkit attacks, has been demonstrably compromised by a rootkit.
Broadband Internet access should be costing less than it is, according to researchers at Northwestern Universtiy, and they believe that broadband provider's ability to self-regulate is responsible for prices staying up.
Last out of this section is the idea that railguns aren't just for propelling bullets, but for launching spacecraft as well.
The opinions opens with the admonition that failing to learn history means that you often propose repeating it - for example, suggesting that all gay and lesbian people in the country be moved to a part of California connected by bridges, then having the bridges destroyed so that the gays and lesbians are cut off, and then waiting for them to die out so we can be rid of them, and their attempts to turn our perfect nation into a depraved place. And then there's the stinger about the obviousness of gay and lesbian parents as inferior and causing mental trauma to their adoptees. Y'know, the one refuted by the studies? Anyway, as is his wont, the General points out the obvious problems with this idea - only men are manly enough to have proper sex with men, so if we took away the gay men, then all we's have were effimate men turned on by women in their silky, lacy underthings.
Mr. Pinkerton says we're deluding ourselves in thinking that new jobs will magically open up in the supposed new-stuff sectors, like green jobs, IT, and health care, because the corporations that would normally be employing people here in the United States can outsource those jobs for cheaper, including manufacture of CFLs, the highly educated and cheaper-wages people overseas, and the government plan to cut health care costs. Mind you, it's all blamable on the Obama administration, because they make the policies that make it easy for outsourcing to happen.
Speaking of blaming the President, Ms. Charen says that the President and the Democrats have been deluding themselves that they know how to fix economic problems, and their arrogance is the only thing getting in the way of the realization of how incompetent they are. She pooh-poohs the idea that a Republican opposition dedicated to ensuring nothing passes as intendeed or with enough strength to achieve the stated goals would somehow interfere with whether or not the plans proposed would end up working as intended. After all, he's the majority, right? He should be able to just pass whatever he wants. This is while, of course, the Republicans continue to prevent things from coming up for votes and insisting that any plan proposed be watered down to uselessness before they'll let it go by.
That same reasoning about how the intransigent minority can't actually stop the not-a-supermajority can be applied to economics, too, as Mr. Carrol does, accusing the President of planning a massive tax increase for the wealthy and small businesses in the middle of a recession and denying that Republicans could ever hold middle-class tax relief hostage because they're not the majority. Two canards, one column - the expiration of the Bush tax cuts does not a "massive tax increase" make. Trust us.
Tonight's star performance in the columns, however, is Mr. D'Souza, who says anyone who thinks of the Obama Administration as clueless or socialist is only scratching the surface, and that the President is actually only understanable if you view him as a Kenyan anti-colonialist who conned his way into the Presidency of the United States - a position echoed by Newt Gingrich, a person who helped fan the flames of the Park 51 media fiasco. Apparently, Obama hates Western values because they created the Kenya that his father grew up in, and he wants to take away all the wealth and power of the West, especially the United States, the last colonial power, and redistribute it back to Africa and other former colonies as a revenge against the countries that oppressed them for so long. It's the agenda of his father, expressed in the son. It's not socialism, but revenge - to bring the wealthy and the powerful under his control and use them to his purposes. (He also thinks that NASA really has been repurposed as a Muslim outreach organization, instead of a space program, so if you haven't already, make sure that you have a sufficient salt supply to take this with.) If that is the case, and Mr. D'Souza is correct, then he would have to tip his hat to the con that Mr. Obama would have had to run to hide his true ambitions from the party that scrutinized him and then put him up as a candidate for President. Occam, however, brandishes switchblades at anyone who takes it seriously over explanations that require far less reaching.
Last for tonight, the Burning Man ultramarathon, performed in the early hours of the morning in the desert.
And as a postscript, for those creating, worry not about your influences, just make your work uniquely yours. This totally means blending all those influences together in your own way, sometimes much more than the idea of having an idea that nobody else has had.
Out in the world today, despite the often puritanical attitudes of their fundamentalists toward sex, Joumana Haddad and her contributors publish a magazine of erotica in places such as Lebanon.
Because the enemy of my enemy is totally my friend, the United States is planning on selling Saudi Arabia a significant amount of fighter planes, interception missiles, and helicopters to let them deter the threat of Iran doing something stupid with missiles.
The family of the American hiker released on a $500,000 USD bail is asking the government of Iran to waive the charge, as they cannot afford it. This probably gives Iran the PR they think they want - look at how great we are that we've released this suspected spy on bail. If we can manage to get them to pay it, all the better, but then we can put her to death like we want to because the bail couldn't be made, not because we're doing this as a show. Assuming, of course, they don't have a different governmental carrot dangled in front of them to let her go. Whcih might be the entire point of the enterprise.
Domestically, the astroturf group FreedomWorks has decided they need to be much more visibly minority, while also claiming that they're plenty diverse, just that minoirty communities are so beholden to liberal politics that a minority person saying they're a conservative is ostracized from the society as a traitor. The snark headline is "The Tea Party decided affirmative action is good for them.", but the real question is whether or not the astroturf groups can convince the poor and minoirites that they want to support positions that make the rich richer and call for minorities to become more like the white culture those groups consider the default and correct culture. Oh, and there's also the pretty well insane segment that jumps and screams in terror if you say the word "Muslim" near them.
Despite the unconstitutional ruling of the Don't Ask, Don't tell policy, the Pentagon has no plans to reinstate or recall all of the servicepeople they've discharged for being gay. Because, as they point out, the law is still in place and needs to be repealed.
Conservative talk radio wins again - namely, with an investigation by the Justice Department Attorney General as to whether the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case was dropped for unjustifiable reasons and whether the claims made that Justice is partisan and racially motivated in its choice of prosecutions have merit.
Our Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department shows off how depending on how you interpret the numbers, you can make things like the health care bill seem like a savings or a cost.
Bill Clinton still has to defend himself from liberal commentators who note his center-rightness and call him an excellent Republican President. Mr. Clinton points out that the Republicans of his time and ours would consider him to be a closet socialist, but for what would seem to be good reasons, we don't take that much stock in the socialist designations of a party that routinely calls Democratic centrists socialist.
Into technology, where a suggestion is made that we try to develop thorium as a viable nuclear fuel, because it has a far bigger concentration of energy for the same amount of material. Of course, we'd have to see what it's byproducts are. In the interim, perhaps we could build traveling wave reactors that take depleted uranium-238 and turn it first into plutonium, and then into large amounts of power, using a small amount of uranium-235 as the catalyst to the reaction, to get enough neutrons going. In essence, the u-235 lights the wick, and then the candle slow-burns for more than a few years. Of course, the end product is whatever plutonium becomes when it's been exhausted, so it might be trading one set of waste for another.
The United States government is getting on the iris scanner routine, as well, deploying it at a border crossing point in Texas, figuring they can take the iris prints of illegal immigrants and they won't be able to get back into the country. Or that they can track where someone goes in the country, with enoguh cameras and scanners, so as to know where a potential illegal immigrant is at all times.
Windoes 7, the new 64-bit operating system that was supposed to be hardened against rootkit attacks, has been demonstrably compromised by a rootkit.
Broadband Internet access should be costing less than it is, according to researchers at Northwestern Universtiy, and they believe that broadband provider's ability to self-regulate is responsible for prices staying up.
Last out of this section is the idea that railguns aren't just for propelling bullets, but for launching spacecraft as well.
The opinions opens with the admonition that failing to learn history means that you often propose repeating it - for example, suggesting that all gay and lesbian people in the country be moved to a part of California connected by bridges, then having the bridges destroyed so that the gays and lesbians are cut off, and then waiting for them to die out so we can be rid of them, and their attempts to turn our perfect nation into a depraved place. And then there's the stinger about the obviousness of gay and lesbian parents as inferior and causing mental trauma to their adoptees. Y'know, the one refuted by the studies? Anyway, as is his wont, the General points out the obvious problems with this idea - only men are manly enough to have proper sex with men, so if we took away the gay men, then all we's have were effimate men turned on by women in their silky, lacy underthings.
Mr. Pinkerton says we're deluding ourselves in thinking that new jobs will magically open up in the supposed new-stuff sectors, like green jobs, IT, and health care, because the corporations that would normally be employing people here in the United States can outsource those jobs for cheaper, including manufacture of CFLs, the highly educated and cheaper-wages people overseas, and the government plan to cut health care costs. Mind you, it's all blamable on the Obama administration, because they make the policies that make it easy for outsourcing to happen.
Speaking of blaming the President, Ms. Charen says that the President and the Democrats have been deluding themselves that they know how to fix economic problems, and their arrogance is the only thing getting in the way of the realization of how incompetent they are. She pooh-poohs the idea that a Republican opposition dedicated to ensuring nothing passes as intendeed or with enough strength to achieve the stated goals would somehow interfere with whether or not the plans proposed would end up working as intended. After all, he's the majority, right? He should be able to just pass whatever he wants. This is while, of course, the Republicans continue to prevent things from coming up for votes and insisting that any plan proposed be watered down to uselessness before they'll let it go by.
That same reasoning about how the intransigent minority can't actually stop the not-a-supermajority can be applied to economics, too, as Mr. Carrol does, accusing the President of planning a massive tax increase for the wealthy and small businesses in the middle of a recession and denying that Republicans could ever hold middle-class tax relief hostage because they're not the majority. Two canards, one column - the expiration of the Bush tax cuts does not a "massive tax increase" make. Trust us.
Tonight's star performance in the columns, however, is Mr. D'Souza, who says anyone who thinks of the Obama Administration as clueless or socialist is only scratching the surface, and that the President is actually only understanable if you view him as a Kenyan anti-colonialist who conned his way into the Presidency of the United States - a position echoed by Newt Gingrich, a person who helped fan the flames of the Park 51 media fiasco. Apparently, Obama hates Western values because they created the Kenya that his father grew up in, and he wants to take away all the wealth and power of the West, especially the United States, the last colonial power, and redistribute it back to Africa and other former colonies as a revenge against the countries that oppressed them for so long. It's the agenda of his father, expressed in the son. It's not socialism, but revenge - to bring the wealthy and the powerful under his control and use them to his purposes. (He also thinks that NASA really has been repurposed as a Muslim outreach organization, instead of a space program, so if you haven't already, make sure that you have a sufficient salt supply to take this with.) If that is the case, and Mr. D'Souza is correct, then he would have to tip his hat to the con that Mr. Obama would have had to run to hide his true ambitions from the party that scrutinized him and then put him up as a candidate for President. Occam, however, brandishes switchblades at anyone who takes it seriously over explanations that require far less reaching.
Last for tonight, the Burning Man ultramarathon, performed in the early hours of the morning in the desert.
And as a postscript, for those creating, worry not about your influences, just make your work uniquely yours. This totally means blending all those influences together in your own way, sometimes much more than the idea of having an idea that nobody else has had.
