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Greetings, people! Have some banana facts. And some research indicating under certain conditions, rhesus monkeys do appear to recognize themselves in the mirror, which monkeys with the science about monkeys so far.
The Dead Pool claims Tony Curtis, father of Jamie lee Curtis and well-respected actor and playboy in his own right.
Out in the world today, a pretty good example of why former colonies will likely never become independent economic powerhouses for a long time - Germany has finally finished paying off the reparations costs that the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon them. That's the treaty that ended the first Great War. In 1919. Ninety-one years later, and with Germany having emerged as an economic player with prosperity, and the debt's finally paid off. How long will it take countries that don't actually have economic output to pay off the costs imposed on them for their wars of independence, and their further loans from the colonizers?
People making the claim that the Park 51 project was a victory monument to a terrorist act have had another target to turn their ire to, if they are indeed up in arms about making houses of worship on places where terror happens - in Hebron, a synagogue has just gone up within sight of a major terrorist attack by a Jew on Muslims. Outcry? None. Support? Plenty. Now, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt of not knowing, but soon enough, we should hear about the Hebron synagogue as a horrible, horrible thing. Any time now...
Pakistan chose to blockade a supply route into Afghanistan from NATO forces in apparent retaliation for a helicopter strike inside their country. The United States' continued drone war in Pakistan over trying to find and kill suspected terrorists, some of whom are lending credence to the idea that Pakistan doesn't try to root them out sufficiently hard (and also breaking the idea that all terrorists are Arab in descent), is getting harder to dismiss as isolated incidents with a pattern instead of an undeclared war. For some, of course, the entire mission's success hinges on opening up a third land war in Asia and fighting Pakistan as well.
Domestically, a judge ruled that a citizen does, in fact, have the right to videotape police persons who are acting in their official capacity, dismissing the argument that the officer had a right to privacy and that the footage was in violation of wiretapping laws. This seems like basic common sense to me - if the police are supposed to be accountable to the public, then they have no expectation of privacy when they interact with the public.
A disturbing statistic to go with a disturbing statistic - most people know that the United States recently crested having one percent of its population in prison (mostly on nonviolent drug offenses and with significant racial disparities), meaning about 2.3 million persons in jail as of this writing. What that also means, however, is that one in every 28 children has at least one parent in jail. A parent in jail has significant negative correlations with success in school and in family life.
Five Missouri men are being charged with sexual torture, one for keeping the young woman involved as a nonconsensual slave, and four for paying the man to take part in the torture sessions of the woman. The throwaway line is that the woman was also determined to be mentally deficient, which adds an extra dimension of "oog" to the whole situation. Taking advantage of someone to do those kinds of things is bad, but doing so to someone who might not have the mental ability to realize that it's wrong and to ask someone to stop? That's the kind of thing that gets the book thrown at you. If not several sharp objects by anyone who knows about it.
Similar sharp and pointy objects are likely destined for the student that used his own webcam and remote access to broadcast his roommate's intimate time with another man across the Internet, possibly leading to the roomie's suicidal jump off the George Washington Bridge. And if it doesn't seem like a big deal that someone's privacy was invaded like that, read the account of someone who probably would have done the same thing, were it not for a fluke of brain chemistry, and realize from this story, and all the other stories you've seen of students being bullied for whatever reason, that we have a defect in the manner that we treat children and the things children do. This makes the fourth suicide by a teenager in this month over their (perceived or real) sexual orientation. We have a problem, here. It's all well and good to say "It gets better" and to have lots of people saying it to someone, because it's usually true, but for someone in the middle of it? It doesn't look like it will get better. What they need are signs that people care and that someone is not only fighting the battle, but winning. Instead, some parents brush off the thought that their child might be either bullied or bullying, other parents join in the bullying, thinking it's totally okay to set an example for their child that some people just aren't worth anything because they're gay, or the "slut", or anything else, and some parents just think of it as endurance training in the school of hard knocks. It's more than problematic, it's killing them for us to look at this problem as something other than "needs fixing. Needs fixing now." and providing them with the resources they need to stick with life.
A Florida parent has requested the city stop the practice of pre-game prayer before their Pee Wee football league games. The organization claims that as a private organization that takes no government money, they don't have to listen to the complaint. The parent alleges that because the games are played on city property, the rules regarding religious coercion in public have to be respected and followed. To support their case, the organization collected signatures and accused the parent of being, in essence, an angry little atheist trying to make things no fun for everyone else.
In technology and sciences, a robot that learns to shoot arrows accurately, with bonus gratuitous and possibly insulting feather headdress added on, an application that will allow someone to speak a text message and will read them out when received, which, while developed as a hands-free texting idea for motor vehicle operators, has the knock-on effect of being useful for the visually impaired in all their settings, some interesting physics in proton-proton collisions where some particles stay associated with each other after impact, and the discovery of an exoplanet that lies within the theorized habitable band of its star, although it's tidally locked and so life possibilities may be limited to the part between the always on and the always off.
In opinions, an excellent example of bending things to make them fit your talking points - Mr. Carroll criticizes a bill that would give the United States power to punish the imports of countries seen to be manipulating their currency values, starting with his opinion that trade protectionism caused the Great Depression, then getting into China, making his point, and then, through a series of machinations, he manages to get in the talking point that the U.S. is becoming more like Communist China because of government involvement, and from there, to promote the Heritage plan for fixing everything here in the United States. I thought this was supposed to be an article about trade protectionism and its consequences?
Further bending, mixed with a healthy dose of amnesia, is Mr. Morris's comments on Democratic ad campaigns and the inevitable crushing defeat that awaits the Dems in November. He claims a lack of a singular Democratic message, then talks about the "fall-back" arguments of Democrats, which would indicate a singular Democratic message. He's actually reasonably right that Democrats are choosing not to run on their own accomplishments (something highly frustrating if your name ends in Maddow and you happen to have a cable show), but instead to focus on the things that their opponents are on the record as being in favor of. When explaining what the Republican responses to the "prefab" negative attacks are, though, he points out why Democrats might want to use them.
Furthermore, it's September. You want to see a unified Democratic narrative? Watch what happens this month - excepting for those Democrats that are trying to get re-elected by running away from the President, you're going to see some more unified messages. And you might even see Democrats running on their record in opposition to the ads that claim their record is bad.
Mr. Williams thinks he knows why the mainstream media gives a pass on some politicians saying stupid things while hammering others - they're racists against white people and black conservatives. So Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller being in favor of a requirement that the federal government ensure that every pregnant woman have her kid, regardless of how she got pregnant is fair game, while Barack Obama mentioning that he's visited "57" states, possibly in the context of "Great Maker, campaign season is long and I feel tired, like there are extra states in the Union" is hushed by the media because they don't want to be accused of racism for making fun of him. Condolezza Rice and Colin Powell can be mocked repeatedly by political cartoonists as being token minorities, but someone publishing a picture of say, Obama as a witch doctor would cause an outrage. Linda McMahon being against a livable minimum wage, or perhaps even a minimum wage in general is perfect for getting jumped on, as is Meg Whitman's continued employment of an undocumented worker, but Barack Obama's "kill your grandmother and bankrupt you" plans are always going to be portrayed as doing good for the country. It's a racial double-standard, he says, firmly making sure his blinders are on tight so that no context accidentally comes into his vision, and the only way to fix it is to treat all black people like you would treat white people, holding them to the more stringent standards that white people have of each other. And if we can do that, I will shout praises to just about every pantheon I can think of, because it will mean a major step forward for all of us. (Also, if you're going to talk racial standards, point out that while sometimes you see a lower hurdle, there are also places where the hurdle is obscenely higher, especially when you want to talk about how society expects black men to be thugs, druggies, and degenerates, raising the bar significantly for any black man who wants to be taken seriously and seen as an upright man.)
Last out of opinions for tonight, though, Mr. Tooley gives us excellent reasons why we would want to unite with the rally planned to show how much the country isn't in the thrall of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, while attempting to tell us why that rally should be dismissed as a mere case of penis envy regarding Beck and the Tea Party. Swinging an argument that the fringe left-leaning sponsors and organizations in attendance means the rally can't claim mainstreamness or any sort of legitimacy (a claim we assume he's also forfeiting on the Beck rally, because of, well, Beck, but also the sponsors of his rally), he offers up what the people there will be uniting for:
Last for tonight, last.fm throws variables into the blender and comes out with information about the gender appeal of artists on the service, along with a few other fun plots.
The Dead Pool claims Tony Curtis, father of Jamie lee Curtis and well-respected actor and playboy in his own right.
Out in the world today, a pretty good example of why former colonies will likely never become independent economic powerhouses for a long time - Germany has finally finished paying off the reparations costs that the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon them. That's the treaty that ended the first Great War. In 1919. Ninety-one years later, and with Germany having emerged as an economic player with prosperity, and the debt's finally paid off. How long will it take countries that don't actually have economic output to pay off the costs imposed on them for their wars of independence, and their further loans from the colonizers?
People making the claim that the Park 51 project was a victory monument to a terrorist act have had another target to turn their ire to, if they are indeed up in arms about making houses of worship on places where terror happens - in Hebron, a synagogue has just gone up within sight of a major terrorist attack by a Jew on Muslims. Outcry? None. Support? Plenty. Now, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt of not knowing, but soon enough, we should hear about the Hebron synagogue as a horrible, horrible thing. Any time now...
Pakistan chose to blockade a supply route into Afghanistan from NATO forces in apparent retaliation for a helicopter strike inside their country. The United States' continued drone war in Pakistan over trying to find and kill suspected terrorists, some of whom are lending credence to the idea that Pakistan doesn't try to root them out sufficiently hard (and also breaking the idea that all terrorists are Arab in descent), is getting harder to dismiss as isolated incidents with a pattern instead of an undeclared war. For some, of course, the entire mission's success hinges on opening up a third land war in Asia and fighting Pakistan as well.
Domestically, a judge ruled that a citizen does, in fact, have the right to videotape police persons who are acting in their official capacity, dismissing the argument that the officer had a right to privacy and that the footage was in violation of wiretapping laws. This seems like basic common sense to me - if the police are supposed to be accountable to the public, then they have no expectation of privacy when they interact with the public.
A disturbing statistic to go with a disturbing statistic - most people know that the United States recently crested having one percent of its population in prison (mostly on nonviolent drug offenses and with significant racial disparities), meaning about 2.3 million persons in jail as of this writing. What that also means, however, is that one in every 28 children has at least one parent in jail. A parent in jail has significant negative correlations with success in school and in family life.
Five Missouri men are being charged with sexual torture, one for keeping the young woman involved as a nonconsensual slave, and four for paying the man to take part in the torture sessions of the woman. The throwaway line is that the woman was also determined to be mentally deficient, which adds an extra dimension of "oog" to the whole situation. Taking advantage of someone to do those kinds of things is bad, but doing so to someone who might not have the mental ability to realize that it's wrong and to ask someone to stop? That's the kind of thing that gets the book thrown at you. If not several sharp objects by anyone who knows about it.
Similar sharp and pointy objects are likely destined for the student that used his own webcam and remote access to broadcast his roommate's intimate time with another man across the Internet, possibly leading to the roomie's suicidal jump off the George Washington Bridge. And if it doesn't seem like a big deal that someone's privacy was invaded like that, read the account of someone who probably would have done the same thing, were it not for a fluke of brain chemistry, and realize from this story, and all the other stories you've seen of students being bullied for whatever reason, that we have a defect in the manner that we treat children and the things children do. This makes the fourth suicide by a teenager in this month over their (perceived or real) sexual orientation. We have a problem, here. It's all well and good to say "It gets better" and to have lots of people saying it to someone, because it's usually true, but for someone in the middle of it? It doesn't look like it will get better. What they need are signs that people care and that someone is not only fighting the battle, but winning. Instead, some parents brush off the thought that their child might be either bullied or bullying, other parents join in the bullying, thinking it's totally okay to set an example for their child that some people just aren't worth anything because they're gay, or the "slut", or anything else, and some parents just think of it as endurance training in the school of hard knocks. It's more than problematic, it's killing them for us to look at this problem as something other than "needs fixing. Needs fixing now." and providing them with the resources they need to stick with life.
A Florida parent has requested the city stop the practice of pre-game prayer before their Pee Wee football league games. The organization claims that as a private organization that takes no government money, they don't have to listen to the complaint. The parent alleges that because the games are played on city property, the rules regarding religious coercion in public have to be respected and followed. To support their case, the organization collected signatures and accused the parent of being, in essence, an angry little atheist trying to make things no fun for everyone else.
In technology and sciences, a robot that learns to shoot arrows accurately, with bonus gratuitous and possibly insulting feather headdress added on, an application that will allow someone to speak a text message and will read them out when received, which, while developed as a hands-free texting idea for motor vehicle operators, has the knock-on effect of being useful for the visually impaired in all their settings, some interesting physics in proton-proton collisions where some particles stay associated with each other after impact, and the discovery of an exoplanet that lies within the theorized habitable band of its star, although it's tidally locked and so life possibilities may be limited to the part between the always on and the always off.
In opinions, an excellent example of bending things to make them fit your talking points - Mr. Carroll criticizes a bill that would give the United States power to punish the imports of countries seen to be manipulating their currency values, starting with his opinion that trade protectionism caused the Great Depression, then getting into China, making his point, and then, through a series of machinations, he manages to get in the talking point that the U.S. is becoming more like Communist China because of government involvement, and from there, to promote the Heritage plan for fixing everything here in the United States. I thought this was supposed to be an article about trade protectionism and its consequences?
Further bending, mixed with a healthy dose of amnesia, is Mr. Morris's comments on Democratic ad campaigns and the inevitable crushing defeat that awaits the Dems in November. He claims a lack of a singular Democratic message, then talks about the "fall-back" arguments of Democrats, which would indicate a singular Democratic message. He's actually reasonably right that Democrats are choosing not to run on their own accomplishments (something highly frustrating if your name ends in Maddow and you happen to have a cable show), but instead to focus on the things that their opponents are on the record as being in favor of. When explaining what the Republican responses to the "prefab" negative attacks are, though, he points out why Democrats might want to use them.
The Republican answers are simple. Republicans want a 23 percent value-added tax (VAT) only as part of eliminating the income tax. Some Republicans do back letting people under 55 divert one-third of their FICA taxes to approved investment alternatives, and most voters agree with them. But, on the campaign trail, simply saying — accurately — that "I oppose any change at all in Social Security for our seniors" takes care of it. And Republicans rebut the jobs overseas charge by citing how the incumbent backed cash-for-clunkers, where 40 percent of the cars bought were foreign; the TARP bailout, which paid billions to overseas banks; and the GM bailout, where two-thirds of the jobs were overseas.So, the Republicans want to eliminate the progressive income tax in favor of a severely regressive VAT, are okay with letting people gamble more of their retirement on the market, if they aren't explicitly in favor of forcing people to gamble all of their retirement on the market, and then offer a non-sequitur and collective amnesia about who precisely passed TARP (a Republican). Cash-for-clunkers bought foreign cars...who all have plants here in the United States. Honestly. And the GM bailout? Turns a profit and helped to keep factories and jobs in the United States instead of being lost. Really, though, the accusation about outsourcing jobs is related to the deregulation accusations - republicans favor laissez-faire and say The Market, All Praise To Its Name, Knows Best on where jobs and capital should go. And it's all going where they can pay the least in labor costs, safety violations, and raw materials. If Republicans really want to accuse the Democrats of supporting outsourcing, they should at least have to prove it. On that regard, their argument that the President has basically been fellating unions wherever they are works against their accusations that Democrats want to encourage outsourcing.
Furthermore, it's September. You want to see a unified Democratic narrative? Watch what happens this month - excepting for those Democrats that are trying to get re-elected by running away from the President, you're going to see some more unified messages. And you might even see Democrats running on their record in opposition to the ads that claim their record is bad.
Mr. Williams thinks he knows why the mainstream media gives a pass on some politicians saying stupid things while hammering others - they're racists against white people and black conservatives. So Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller being in favor of a requirement that the federal government ensure that every pregnant woman have her kid, regardless of how she got pregnant is fair game, while Barack Obama mentioning that he's visited "57" states, possibly in the context of "Great Maker, campaign season is long and I feel tired, like there are extra states in the Union" is hushed by the media because they don't want to be accused of racism for making fun of him. Condolezza Rice and Colin Powell can be mocked repeatedly by political cartoonists as being token minorities, but someone publishing a picture of say, Obama as a witch doctor would cause an outrage. Linda McMahon being against a livable minimum wage, or perhaps even a minimum wage in general is perfect for getting jumped on, as is Meg Whitman's continued employment of an undocumented worker, but Barack Obama's "kill your grandmother and bankrupt you" plans are always going to be portrayed as doing good for the country. It's a racial double-standard, he says, firmly making sure his blinders are on tight so that no context accidentally comes into his vision, and the only way to fix it is to treat all black people like you would treat white people, holding them to the more stringent standards that white people have of each other. And if we can do that, I will shout praises to just about every pantheon I can think of, because it will mean a major step forward for all of us. (Also, if you're going to talk racial standards, point out that while sometimes you see a lower hurdle, there are also places where the hurdle is obscenely higher, especially when you want to talk about how society expects black men to be thugs, druggies, and degenerates, raising the bar significantly for any black man who wants to be taken seriously and seen as an upright man.)
Last out of opinions for tonight, though, Mr. Tooley gives us excellent reasons why we would want to unite with the rally planned to show how much the country isn't in the thrall of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, while attempting to tell us why that rally should be dismissed as a mere case of penis envy regarding Beck and the Tea Party. Swinging an argument that the fringe left-leaning sponsors and organizations in attendance means the rally can't claim mainstreamness or any sort of legitimacy (a claim we assume he's also forfeiting on the Beck rally, because of, well, Beck, but also the sponsors of his rally), he offers up what the people there will be uniting for:
...more federal stimulus for local governments, more mortgage bail-outs, liberalized bankruptcy laws, more coerced unionization, a higher minimum wage, reduced military spending, public option health care, and protections from workplace "discrimination" for every conceivable self-described sexual minority, including "gender identity or expression," which presumably includes transsexuality and cross dressing.So I'm supposed to be against getting more money for front-line drones, better health care, more funding for government services like schools and libraries, more people being able to keep their homes and restructure their debts so as to survive, less warfare conducted in my name, and being secure that I won't be fired from my job because an angry mob/my boss is out to purge the world of anyone who doesn't present as a cisgendered straight person? Exactly why am I supposed to oppose those things?
Last for tonight, last.fm throws variables into the blender and comes out with information about the gender appeal of artists on the service, along with a few other fun plots.
