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Good morning, literate and literary people. The campaign to remove learning from your schools and libraries continues, but today we have something that people sometimes forget - authors are often one of your best allies in combating the censor forces.
The AP is fantastically late to the party, and they miss the Zoolander reference, too, but they're at least admitting that libraries are successful in providing services to the iProduct generation.
Out in the world today, The United Kingdom is facing brain drain as science budget cuts have good talent looking for work somewhere that will sufficiently fund research. This can be taken in a couple of ways - for the anti-government side, it can be used as a hammer against the idea of adopting single-payer medicine or governments otherwise regulating the end products of corporate research, because government interference makes bright scientists go elsewhere, where they can work unfettered by regulations and budgets. On the flip side, this could be used as an argument that science and scientists deserve a better place and better pay in our society so they can advance humanity along its path faster.
a new tape allegedly from Osama bin Laden calls for Muslim humanitarian organizations to be formed so as to take care of the victims of Pakistan's flooding, claiming the government is not interested in their plight, or considers relief for the people to be secodnary to military spending. So Osama bin Laden is playing the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" card? Well, we can only hope that Pakistan is better than we were about responding to a major flood.
Not to say that al-Qaeda deserves a whole lot of sympathy - an offshoot of theirs is still holding five French men hostage after kidnapping them from their compound in Africa.
A large cybercrime ring spanning both the United States and the United Kingdom has been broken and arrests made. The criminals used viruses to steal information, and then provided that information to persons to make ATM withdrawals from their banks.
Back inside the United States, Presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel intends to leave his post so that he may run in the race for mayor Chicago. Mr. Emanuel will face opposition highlighting his Washington stay to paint him as out of touch with the concerns of the residents of the city and as someone who hasn't been living there. To replace him will be Pete rouse, billed as the first Asian-American Chief of Staff.
Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen has declared the increased amount of military suicides an "emergency", although the article does not elaborate more on the possible reasons why so many more soldiers are taking their lives.
Agents for the FBI were cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting of a Dearborn cleric by the attorney general of Michigan, saying the agents were justified in using their deadly force because the cleric shot at them and resisted arrest. After they sent a police dog in after him, which raised the possibility that the gunshots were to attempt to get rid of the dog, and not to shoot at the agents. Those doubts were apparently resolved in the case presented.
Last out of this section, at least one Tea Party affiliate thinks that coloring books for children is the right way to get kids and their parents to join the Tea Party. And they complained about President Obama's speech/public education being indoctrination of the young. (Well, they're right, but not for the things and reasons they think.) In either case, you can enjoy coloring in such places as the New York Stock Exchange building while reading about how economic freedom is paramount to the United States. Get your copy today and join the other thousands who believe in poorly-spelled, awfully-grammared, and historically-inaccurate propaganda for children. (We think that the General's poetic sense provides an excellent march tune to sing while perusing the coloring book.)
In sciences and technologies, at least for women, getting about 5-6.5 hours of sleep appears to be about the sweet spot for survivial chances. So don't fret, they say, if you're not getting eight hours - you may not need it.
In the opinions, Mr. Hanson tees up another round of anti-intellectualism by painting liberal politicians as condescending elitists who get frustrated when the unwashed masses don't dance to their tune, as if there weren't plenty of potent, well-funded, and very interested forces afoot in the electorate, working on all sides of the political spectrum, that prey on ignorance, emotional appeal, and being seen as "a guy you could have a beer with" to elect their rather intelligent and agenda-driven candidates. Mr. Hanson fetishizes American un-knowledge and unwillingness to get knowledge in his column and hides it as "those people looking down on you". Perhaps there's a grain of truth to the idea that they are looking down on the average voter because the electorate demonstrates repeatedly that people are dumb, panicky animals that can be lizard-brained into doing things that are clearly against their interests? Mr. Will accuses the Democrats of trying this tactic because they allegedly have no other recourse to run on, having no positive record (stimulus = failure, and health care bill = unpopular) and nothing positive to build on for the future, so they are forced to resort to personal attacks against Tea Party/Republican candidates. (The kind that indicate that past is prologue and that highlight the admitted, expressed, and campaigned-upon views of the candidates seeking office, that is.) That's the high point of lizard-brain attacks, really. I would like to know how conservatives resolve both of those issues - "jaded cynicism" would count, I think, but that's admitting that the Democrats are right about the unwashed masses. Ms. Noonan helps a bit, claiming that the Democrats are splintering, the President has lost control of his base and is setting things up to blame them when the inevitable smackdown happens, and that Republicans have to be better than the negative ads coming against them. If this sounds like Bizarro World, it's probably because you normally see the party roles reversed in commentary on negative advertising, who is supposed to be the better party, and who's being desperate by resorting to social issues.
If Mr. Fund's assertion that the Democrats only have youth and minorities as their backers is true, then the campaigning going on right now on college campuses makes sense. Then again, it was youth and minorities that put the Democrats in power in 2008, so it's probably something resembling an eight-count at worst to be told that Democrats are going to have to rely on and excite their base to win, whether that base is "the people who enthusiastically voted for Obama and his plans" or "the people who are still suspicious of Obama and his plans, but can be reasoned with or lizard-brained into voting for a Democrat over the alternative."
Going into other opinions about the things that Mr. Will says the Democrats can't run on, Mr. Gramm says that the current recovery resembles the recovery of the Great Depression, accusing the government of basically following the same policy of higher taxes and more regulation as the one in the 1930s and expecting different results. The key phrasing here seems to be that if the pirvate sector isn't experiencing rapid growth, then the Democratic policy isn't working, and an angry populace will replace them with people who claim they can get them that growth, through the enrichment of the already wealthy. They expect the wealthy to then turn around and shower the poor and working class with the gold that they have just been given.
And on health care, Mr. Rove says that it's not a feasible platform because most of the claims made about it are untrue, and the people hate being lied to. Let's take a closer look, though, and see if there aren't a couple of Gargoyle Moments in his argument. For example, "PriceWaterhouseCoopers has found that with health-care reform, premiums are likely to rise 111% over the next decade, compared to a projected increase of 79% if nothing had been done. This just makes sense: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act slathers on mandates, requirements and rules that can only drive up insurance costs." Wait. 111% versus 79%. The baseline comparison was already a 79% increase in premiums? What the freakin' hell is that about? Is no person curious about why insurance companies are raising those premium rates all on their own?
Furthermore, "...for between 87 million and 117 million Americans[,] [e]ither their employer will stop providing insurance, or they'll see benefits go down and co-pays rise as insurers and employers wrestle with the law's mandates." The people will suffer because their employers, or the insurance companies those employers contract with, will punish workers by making the decision to not cover them any more. That is a decision of the employer and insurance company - the government is not telling them they have to drop coverage.
Finally, Mr. Rove takes issue with the financing: "The new program is 'paid for' with 10 years of Medicare cuts and new taxes, fines and fees that start this year. But the government doesn't actually begin spending money in earnest for four years, and the program isn't fully ramped up for seven years. How sustainable is that?" From the sounds of things, that's very sustainable - collect the money that you're going to spend first, then spend it. No deficit spending there, at least for the first few years of things. For people who want to be able to run and campaign on the benefits of the plan, the slow roll is frustrating, but even the opposition is trying hard to repeal it and then replace it with the things that the people like about the plan. Clearly, something good is happening here. And I'd bet that even if there was a repeal/replace, all the things that Mr. Rove talks about now will still happen - because insurance companies follow their profit motives, and employers and employees get squeezed because of it.
Last out, Mr. Hornik believes that Israel is one again being portrayed as The Bad Guys with regard to settlements while the Palestinian Authority basically stalled through moratorium time and is now using the resumption as political weaponry, but he finds hop in the United States Senate, who sent the President a letter that didn't talk about setllements, just about their strong support for Israel and their want for the Palestinian Authority to come to the table honestly. And Mr. Klein tells a bit of a shaggy dog story about what else happened at the United Nations, waiting until the last few paragraphs before making his point that the Obama strategy of outreach to the Muslim world benefits all the extremist Muslim countries and their governments.
Last for tonight, what it takes to be a good role-playing gamer. It often boils down to one thing: Don't be an ass. With the secondary characteristic of: Don't expect the storyteller to do all the work.
The AP is fantastically late to the party, and they miss the Zoolander reference, too, but they're at least admitting that libraries are successful in providing services to the iProduct generation.
Out in the world today, The United Kingdom is facing brain drain as science budget cuts have good talent looking for work somewhere that will sufficiently fund research. This can be taken in a couple of ways - for the anti-government side, it can be used as a hammer against the idea of adopting single-payer medicine or governments otherwise regulating the end products of corporate research, because government interference makes bright scientists go elsewhere, where they can work unfettered by regulations and budgets. On the flip side, this could be used as an argument that science and scientists deserve a better place and better pay in our society so they can advance humanity along its path faster.
a new tape allegedly from Osama bin Laden calls for Muslim humanitarian organizations to be formed so as to take care of the victims of Pakistan's flooding, claiming the government is not interested in their plight, or considers relief for the people to be secodnary to military spending. So Osama bin Laden is playing the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" card? Well, we can only hope that Pakistan is better than we were about responding to a major flood.
Not to say that al-Qaeda deserves a whole lot of sympathy - an offshoot of theirs is still holding five French men hostage after kidnapping them from their compound in Africa.
A large cybercrime ring spanning both the United States and the United Kingdom has been broken and arrests made. The criminals used viruses to steal information, and then provided that information to persons to make ATM withdrawals from their banks.
Back inside the United States, Presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel intends to leave his post so that he may run in the race for mayor Chicago. Mr. Emanuel will face opposition highlighting his Washington stay to paint him as out of touch with the concerns of the residents of the city and as someone who hasn't been living there. To replace him will be Pete rouse, billed as the first Asian-American Chief of Staff.
Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen has declared the increased amount of military suicides an "emergency", although the article does not elaborate more on the possible reasons why so many more soldiers are taking their lives.
Agents for the FBI were cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting of a Dearborn cleric by the attorney general of Michigan, saying the agents were justified in using their deadly force because the cleric shot at them and resisted arrest. After they sent a police dog in after him, which raised the possibility that the gunshots were to attempt to get rid of the dog, and not to shoot at the agents. Those doubts were apparently resolved in the case presented.
Last out of this section, at least one Tea Party affiliate thinks that coloring books for children is the right way to get kids and their parents to join the Tea Party. And they complained about President Obama's speech/public education being indoctrination of the young. (Well, they're right, but not for the things and reasons they think.) In either case, you can enjoy coloring in such places as the New York Stock Exchange building while reading about how economic freedom is paramount to the United States. Get your copy today and join the other thousands who believe in poorly-spelled, awfully-grammared, and historically-inaccurate propaganda for children. (We think that the General's poetic sense provides an excellent march tune to sing while perusing the coloring book.)
In sciences and technologies, at least for women, getting about 5-6.5 hours of sleep appears to be about the sweet spot for survivial chances. So don't fret, they say, if you're not getting eight hours - you may not need it.
In the opinions, Mr. Hanson tees up another round of anti-intellectualism by painting liberal politicians as condescending elitists who get frustrated when the unwashed masses don't dance to their tune, as if there weren't plenty of potent, well-funded, and very interested forces afoot in the electorate, working on all sides of the political spectrum, that prey on ignorance, emotional appeal, and being seen as "a guy you could have a beer with" to elect their rather intelligent and agenda-driven candidates. Mr. Hanson fetishizes American un-knowledge and unwillingness to get knowledge in his column and hides it as "those people looking down on you". Perhaps there's a grain of truth to the idea that they are looking down on the average voter because the electorate demonstrates repeatedly that people are dumb, panicky animals that can be lizard-brained into doing things that are clearly against their interests? Mr. Will accuses the Democrats of trying this tactic because they allegedly have no other recourse to run on, having no positive record (stimulus = failure, and health care bill = unpopular) and nothing positive to build on for the future, so they are forced to resort to personal attacks against Tea Party/Republican candidates. (The kind that indicate that past is prologue and that highlight the admitted, expressed, and campaigned-upon views of the candidates seeking office, that is.) That's the high point of lizard-brain attacks, really. I would like to know how conservatives resolve both of those issues - "jaded cynicism" would count, I think, but that's admitting that the Democrats are right about the unwashed masses. Ms. Noonan helps a bit, claiming that the Democrats are splintering, the President has lost control of his base and is setting things up to blame them when the inevitable smackdown happens, and that Republicans have to be better than the negative ads coming against them. If this sounds like Bizarro World, it's probably because you normally see the party roles reversed in commentary on negative advertising, who is supposed to be the better party, and who's being desperate by resorting to social issues.
If Mr. Fund's assertion that the Democrats only have youth and minorities as their backers is true, then the campaigning going on right now on college campuses makes sense. Then again, it was youth and minorities that put the Democrats in power in 2008, so it's probably something resembling an eight-count at worst to be told that Democrats are going to have to rely on and excite their base to win, whether that base is "the people who enthusiastically voted for Obama and his plans" or "the people who are still suspicious of Obama and his plans, but can be reasoned with or lizard-brained into voting for a Democrat over the alternative."
Going into other opinions about the things that Mr. Will says the Democrats can't run on, Mr. Gramm says that the current recovery resembles the recovery of the Great Depression, accusing the government of basically following the same policy of higher taxes and more regulation as the one in the 1930s and expecting different results. The key phrasing here seems to be that if the pirvate sector isn't experiencing rapid growth, then the Democratic policy isn't working, and an angry populace will replace them with people who claim they can get them that growth, through the enrichment of the already wealthy. They expect the wealthy to then turn around and shower the poor and working class with the gold that they have just been given.
And on health care, Mr. Rove says that it's not a feasible platform because most of the claims made about it are untrue, and the people hate being lied to. Let's take a closer look, though, and see if there aren't a couple of Gargoyle Moments in his argument. For example, "PriceWaterhouseCoopers has found that with health-care reform, premiums are likely to rise 111% over the next decade, compared to a projected increase of 79% if nothing had been done. This just makes sense: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act slathers on mandates, requirements and rules that can only drive up insurance costs." Wait. 111% versus 79%. The baseline comparison was already a 79% increase in premiums? What the freakin' hell is that about? Is no person curious about why insurance companies are raising those premium rates all on their own?
Furthermore, "...for between 87 million and 117 million Americans[,] [e]ither their employer will stop providing insurance, or they'll see benefits go down and co-pays rise as insurers and employers wrestle with the law's mandates." The people will suffer because their employers, or the insurance companies those employers contract with, will punish workers by making the decision to not cover them any more. That is a decision of the employer and insurance company - the government is not telling them they have to drop coverage.
Finally, Mr. Rove takes issue with the financing: "The new program is 'paid for' with 10 years of Medicare cuts and new taxes, fines and fees that start this year. But the government doesn't actually begin spending money in earnest for four years, and the program isn't fully ramped up for seven years. How sustainable is that?" From the sounds of things, that's very sustainable - collect the money that you're going to spend first, then spend it. No deficit spending there, at least for the first few years of things. For people who want to be able to run and campaign on the benefits of the plan, the slow roll is frustrating, but even the opposition is trying hard to repeal it and then replace it with the things that the people like about the plan. Clearly, something good is happening here. And I'd bet that even if there was a repeal/replace, all the things that Mr. Rove talks about now will still happen - because insurance companies follow their profit motives, and employers and employees get squeezed because of it.
Last out, Mr. Hornik believes that Israel is one again being portrayed as The Bad Guys with regard to settlements while the Palestinian Authority basically stalled through moratorium time and is now using the resumption as political weaponry, but he finds hop in the United States Senate, who sent the President a letter that didn't talk about setllements, just about their strong support for Israel and their want for the Palestinian Authority to come to the table honestly. And Mr. Klein tells a bit of a shaggy dog story about what else happened at the United Nations, waiting until the last few paragraphs before making his point that the Obama strategy of outreach to the Muslim world benefits all the extremist Muslim countries and their governments.
Last for tonight, what it takes to be a good role-playing gamer. It often boils down to one thing: Don't be an ass. With the secondary characteristic of: Don't expect the storyteller to do all the work.
