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Good morning, everyone. We begin with Python (Monty) talking about what they would like to see kept in a film about the Holy Grail or something. This, in some ways, is fairly funny, but in a not-funny at all manner, the campaign to prevent your children from getting an education just scored a major victory - a school system in Texas pre-emptively banned the fifth and sixth books in a series in a blanket ban, well before those books have even been written. And an author visit was objected to based on a book that hadn't come out at the time and the author's willingness to stand up and speak for Speak. The forces have shifted tactics. Instead of witing for material to come out, be reviewed, and then ban it, they're moving toward trying to ban it before it arrives, so that way nobody has a chance to review and make an informed decision to leave it there. After all, if they never see it, they don't know what they're missing, right?
Out in the world today, being an ambulance driver in war-torn Somalia is an exceedingly dangerous occupation.
Last out, it is apparently now a religious obligation of female Israeli agents to seduce their marks and enemy agents and gain information out of them, if that tactic would work. Even the married ones, yes, whose husbands are supposed to divorce them before they do their duty and then remarry them afterwards.
Inside the United States, the crazy continues. Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell claims that she has had access to secret information detailing China's plans for America, obtained through her work with Christian missionary groups in China. This is a Jagermonster hat-eating claim, and so I want her to provide the proof and the secret information she supposedly has.
A prominent figure in the Latter Day Saints church reiterated his position that same-sex attraction is a choice that can be cured instead of an innate part of a person, because his God would never make someone fundamentally wicked and evil like that, and by extension, that efforts should be made to attempt to cure someone of such a choice and to break their addiction and temptation. For which he will be roundly mocked and the people reminded of what else Boyd Packer has said in regard to other subjects as well.
If anyone is arguing that things are getting better for the American populace economically, well, the numbers do not line up with that assertion, and, at least according to the author, globalization has much to do with that, shipping jobs overseas to work at very tiny wages, costs, and oversight. While the rich, who can extract profit from those decisions, get richer. And then give tiny things back like "helping" community colleges train their future drones by making their training worth college credit and providing some amount of pittance to do the training with.
That said, anger against the incumbents may not actually be a deciding factor in turnout and voting this year, which pretty well spins the conventional wisdom on its head. What will be a deciding factor, perhaps, is the fact that most Republicans end up working for Fox News and astroturf organizations funded by billionaires trying to look like they're regular folks. "I never should have joined the Mothers, because you always end up working for Zappa!" Except in this case, Zappa was a lot cooler than Fox will ever be. Continuing in the vein of blowing up the CW, Democrats are closing the polling gap, too. Suddenly, it's a race!
When Mr. Emanuel goes back to make his bid for mayorship of Chicago, he may find himself running into a lot of thorny bits about residency and otehr requirements.
A federal judge was released on a $50,000 bond after being arrested for buying illegal drugs from an exotic dancer and other parties.
Elsewhere, one of the last draftees that fought in Vietnam retired, conveniently having liked what he saw in the military and stayed on, rather than the many who were drafted and then got away as fast as they could once they were done.
Finally, it looks like whether a bank got TARP money depended on the regulator they talked to, which I'm sure is a real teeth-grinder for anyone looking to show that they were fair to everyone equally.
In tech, researchers at the University of Buffalo have engineered a strain of stem cells that can be grown continuously, solving the problem of having to keep going back and getting more cells from donors. Stem cell research may jump forward in significant leaps and bounds after this point.
filming embryo development after in vitro fertilization helps scientists make decisions as to which ones are the fittest, possibly eliminating "octomoms" in all cases excepting for those women that want to carry eight children to term.
one of the architects of the Internet took offense to the growing set of laws and proposed laws that would allow media cabals to arbitrarily require someone's Internet access be cut off on the alelgation of downloading something illegally.
Red Hat argues for the discontinuation of software patents, claiming that computer programs derive from things like formulas that are not patentable.
The United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that downloading music does not consist of a performance, as no actual music is being played at the time. Streaming, on the other hand, would fall under the performance definition, it sounds like.
A proposed vote-by-Internet scheme was scrapped after academic hackers proved that whatever security they had in place, wasn't enough, rewriting the options so that the University of Michigan fight song, "The Victors" (anyone who says it is "Hail to the Victors" is to be stun-gunned repeatedly until they get it right) would play when someone cast a test ballot.
Speaking of audio, using a ring of about 300 microphones, some fixed cameras, and ways of canceling out noise, it may be possible to extract a single conversation in a crowded and noisy venue, like a sport arena. How long until this technology is adapted for surveillance, so that you won't be able to have a private conversation in a public place without someone knowing about it and being able to pick out what you said? And to figure out what it is, maybe they'll scan the pulses of the people in the crowd to see who has one elevated or dropped past the normal crowd?
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have let loose a machine whose purpose is to take a small seeding of information about the language and transform it into learning facts, relations, and other things using the web and a learning algorithm. It seems to do well, excepting when it ran into problems of multiple uses of a word across widely different categories - like Internet cookies.
An interesting curiosity - the Vatican has a collection of meteorites, complete with planetary scientist Jesuit who curates the exhibit and studies them.
And in the stranger things department, genetic manipulation to turn off serious food allergies in mice and a new hypothesis that suggests certain desert squirrels self-pleasure to make sure their equipment is as free of sexually transmitted infections as possible.
Out of technology, 3D televisions without glasses.
And into opinions, where Mr. Murray advocates for open war with Pakistan, based on the current intelligence and drone strikes that suggest Pakistan is a hotbed of potential terrorists making plans against the West.
Mr. Barone suggests that the Speaker having to cast a deciding vote on whether to adjourn or not is symptomatic of how much power she's lost in the House, and that any vote that happens after they come back will go down in flames. On that idea, Mr. Morris suggests that the Republicans re-calibrate their sights and aim to capture much more than they think they can, because the electorate will surprise them in how much it supports the GOP.
Mr. McGurn says the President needs to speak up about the state of schools in the District of Columbia, lest Bad Things happen to the underprivileged, based mostly on the President's silence as voucher programs were killed and the mayor that appointed the current school chancellor was defeated in his re-election bid. I don't quite understand how that equates to throwing D.C. children to the wolves, and Mr. McGurn is not elaborating here, so someone else will have to.
Mr. Laffer campaings against the state of Washington's initiative 1098 by saying that the states who have income taxes have performed horribly compared to those without, and that those income taxes are the sole reason why...leaving off the fact that many of those states relied heavily on manufacturing jobs that have since gone elsewhere, or other blue-collar work that is rapidly being eliminated or otherwise rendered unlivable.
a familiar paen from Mr. Carroll that the current administration is subverting the rule of law through appointments and giving wide discretionary powers to unelected advisors and bureaucrats.
And then, Mr. Trzupek says the progressive movement not only has the wrong idea of what the Tea Partiers are about, but that progressivism has had its chance and has been proven the wrong strategy based on the resuls of getting their bills passed, bills that most progressives looked at and said "That's barely better than the center-rightism we have now! When are we going to get a real chance to show off what progressivism is?" Mr. Trzupek also blurs the lines trying to be set up, saying that the left accuses Tea Partiers of being corporate shills, when most accusations have been fairly clear that the Tea Party's self-styled leaders and organizations are totally being backed by corporate and billionare sollars. The Tea Partiers themselves have their own difficulties - you can't get rid of signs that show pretty much that you have fringe rightist beliefs, for example, but mostly, the left sees the ground-level Tea Partier as someone who is being manipulated into advocating for corproate interests, an oligarchic government, and their candidates through various appeals to the lizard-brain. (One could say the same about those who support the Democrats, with about the same amount of snark and seriousness, and not be wrong, just that the appeals change.)
Mr. Kelly commits a common but unsatisfactory defense when accused of racism - point to your black friend and say, "I'm friends with a black guy, so I can't be racist". In this case, he says that the Republicans can't be racist because they have minority candidates running in races. You can still be friends with minority people and have awoved policies designed to hurt them. Not everyone in an ethnic group thinks the same, which would be, y'know, racist if you said so?
Mr. Levin says that this administration is waging war on the young through the expansion of entitlement programs that suck all the wealth young people need to get started on their life journey and give it to the old people at the end of theirs. Thus, reforms like raising the retirement age, tying benefits to prices (to make sure that nobody has any more to live on that exactly what they need), and "means-testing" the programs so as to find excuses to make cuts and to encourage people to put more of their money into the always-volatile private sector where it can be vanished if you hit a recession at the wrong time. We also wonder whether Mr. Levin and those who agree with him are the kinds of people that believe if you use a social-networking site, you are clearly a lazy bum who should be working and should be investigated for benefits frauds.
Last for tonight, a perfect end-cap on the backside of our post, the usage of gelatin, alcohol, and other colorations to create some very interesting things, and pimip my otaku ride.
Special Rage to follow regarding the firefighters who let the house burn down.
Out in the world today, being an ambulance driver in war-torn Somalia is an exceedingly dangerous occupation.
Last out, it is apparently now a religious obligation of female Israeli agents to seduce their marks and enemy agents and gain information out of them, if that tactic would work. Even the married ones, yes, whose husbands are supposed to divorce them before they do their duty and then remarry them afterwards.
Inside the United States, the crazy continues. Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell claims that she has had access to secret information detailing China's plans for America, obtained through her work with Christian missionary groups in China. This is a Jagermonster hat-eating claim, and so I want her to provide the proof and the secret information she supposedly has.
A prominent figure in the Latter Day Saints church reiterated his position that same-sex attraction is a choice that can be cured instead of an innate part of a person, because his God would never make someone fundamentally wicked and evil like that, and by extension, that efforts should be made to attempt to cure someone of such a choice and to break their addiction and temptation. For which he will be roundly mocked and the people reminded of what else Boyd Packer has said in regard to other subjects as well.
If anyone is arguing that things are getting better for the American populace economically, well, the numbers do not line up with that assertion, and, at least according to the author, globalization has much to do with that, shipping jobs overseas to work at very tiny wages, costs, and oversight. While the rich, who can extract profit from those decisions, get richer. And then give tiny things back like "helping" community colleges train their future drones by making their training worth college credit and providing some amount of pittance to do the training with.
That said, anger against the incumbents may not actually be a deciding factor in turnout and voting this year, which pretty well spins the conventional wisdom on its head. What will be a deciding factor, perhaps, is the fact that most Republicans end up working for Fox News and astroturf organizations funded by billionaires trying to look like they're regular folks. "I never should have joined the Mothers, because you always end up working for Zappa!" Except in this case, Zappa was a lot cooler than Fox will ever be. Continuing in the vein of blowing up the CW, Democrats are closing the polling gap, too. Suddenly, it's a race!
When Mr. Emanuel goes back to make his bid for mayorship of Chicago, he may find himself running into a lot of thorny bits about residency and otehr requirements.
A federal judge was released on a $50,000 bond after being arrested for buying illegal drugs from an exotic dancer and other parties.
Elsewhere, one of the last draftees that fought in Vietnam retired, conveniently having liked what he saw in the military and stayed on, rather than the many who were drafted and then got away as fast as they could once they were done.
Finally, it looks like whether a bank got TARP money depended on the regulator they talked to, which I'm sure is a real teeth-grinder for anyone looking to show that they were fair to everyone equally.
In tech, researchers at the University of Buffalo have engineered a strain of stem cells that can be grown continuously, solving the problem of having to keep going back and getting more cells from donors. Stem cell research may jump forward in significant leaps and bounds after this point.
filming embryo development after in vitro fertilization helps scientists make decisions as to which ones are the fittest, possibly eliminating "octomoms" in all cases excepting for those women that want to carry eight children to term.
one of the architects of the Internet took offense to the growing set of laws and proposed laws that would allow media cabals to arbitrarily require someone's Internet access be cut off on the alelgation of downloading something illegally.
Red Hat argues for the discontinuation of software patents, claiming that computer programs derive from things like formulas that are not patentable.
The United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that downloading music does not consist of a performance, as no actual music is being played at the time. Streaming, on the other hand, would fall under the performance definition, it sounds like.
A proposed vote-by-Internet scheme was scrapped after academic hackers proved that whatever security they had in place, wasn't enough, rewriting the options so that the University of Michigan fight song, "The Victors" (anyone who says it is "Hail to the Victors" is to be stun-gunned repeatedly until they get it right) would play when someone cast a test ballot.
Speaking of audio, using a ring of about 300 microphones, some fixed cameras, and ways of canceling out noise, it may be possible to extract a single conversation in a crowded and noisy venue, like a sport arena. How long until this technology is adapted for surveillance, so that you won't be able to have a private conversation in a public place without someone knowing about it and being able to pick out what you said? And to figure out what it is, maybe they'll scan the pulses of the people in the crowd to see who has one elevated or dropped past the normal crowd?
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have let loose a machine whose purpose is to take a small seeding of information about the language and transform it into learning facts, relations, and other things using the web and a learning algorithm. It seems to do well, excepting when it ran into problems of multiple uses of a word across widely different categories - like Internet cookies.
An interesting curiosity - the Vatican has a collection of meteorites, complete with planetary scientist Jesuit who curates the exhibit and studies them.
And in the stranger things department, genetic manipulation to turn off serious food allergies in mice and a new hypothesis that suggests certain desert squirrels self-pleasure to make sure their equipment is as free of sexually transmitted infections as possible.
Out of technology, 3D televisions without glasses.
And into opinions, where Mr. Murray advocates for open war with Pakistan, based on the current intelligence and drone strikes that suggest Pakistan is a hotbed of potential terrorists making plans against the West.
Mr. Barone suggests that the Speaker having to cast a deciding vote on whether to adjourn or not is symptomatic of how much power she's lost in the House, and that any vote that happens after they come back will go down in flames. On that idea, Mr. Morris suggests that the Republicans re-calibrate their sights and aim to capture much more than they think they can, because the electorate will surprise them in how much it supports the GOP.
Mr. McGurn says the President needs to speak up about the state of schools in the District of Columbia, lest Bad Things happen to the underprivileged, based mostly on the President's silence as voucher programs were killed and the mayor that appointed the current school chancellor was defeated in his re-election bid. I don't quite understand how that equates to throwing D.C. children to the wolves, and Mr. McGurn is not elaborating here, so someone else will have to.
Mr. Laffer campaings against the state of Washington's initiative 1098 by saying that the states who have income taxes have performed horribly compared to those without, and that those income taxes are the sole reason why...leaving off the fact that many of those states relied heavily on manufacturing jobs that have since gone elsewhere, or other blue-collar work that is rapidly being eliminated or otherwise rendered unlivable.
a familiar paen from Mr. Carroll that the current administration is subverting the rule of law through appointments and giving wide discretionary powers to unelected advisors and bureaucrats.
And then, Mr. Trzupek says the progressive movement not only has the wrong idea of what the Tea Partiers are about, but that progressivism has had its chance and has been proven the wrong strategy based on the resuls of getting their bills passed, bills that most progressives looked at and said "That's barely better than the center-rightism we have now! When are we going to get a real chance to show off what progressivism is?" Mr. Trzupek also blurs the lines trying to be set up, saying that the left accuses Tea Partiers of being corporate shills, when most accusations have been fairly clear that the Tea Party's self-styled leaders and organizations are totally being backed by corporate and billionare sollars. The Tea Partiers themselves have their own difficulties - you can't get rid of signs that show pretty much that you have fringe rightist beliefs, for example, but mostly, the left sees the ground-level Tea Partier as someone who is being manipulated into advocating for corproate interests, an oligarchic government, and their candidates through various appeals to the lizard-brain. (One could say the same about those who support the Democrats, with about the same amount of snark and seriousness, and not be wrong, just that the appeals change.)
Mr. Kelly commits a common but unsatisfactory defense when accused of racism - point to your black friend and say, "I'm friends with a black guy, so I can't be racist". In this case, he says that the Republicans can't be racist because they have minority candidates running in races. You can still be friends with minority people and have awoved policies designed to hurt them. Not everyone in an ethnic group thinks the same, which would be, y'know, racist if you said so?
Mr. Levin says that this administration is waging war on the young through the expansion of entitlement programs that suck all the wealth young people need to get started on their life journey and give it to the old people at the end of theirs. Thus, reforms like raising the retirement age, tying benefits to prices (to make sure that nobody has any more to live on that exactly what they need), and "means-testing" the programs so as to find excuses to make cuts and to encourage people to put more of their money into the always-volatile private sector where it can be vanished if you hit a recession at the wrong time. We also wonder whether Mr. Levin and those who agree with him are the kinds of people that believe if you use a social-networking site, you are clearly a lazy bum who should be working and should be investigated for benefits frauds.
Last for tonight, a perfect end-cap on the backside of our post, the usage of gelatin, alcohol, and other colorations to create some very interesting things, and pimip my otaku ride.
Special Rage to follow regarding the firefighters who let the house burn down.
