Interesting Stuff, or so we hope - 09-11 October 2010

We start today with what can only be described as surreal - involving trumped-up visits from Social and Health Services, repeated home invasions, cutting of telephone and internet lines, erasure of answering machine messages, all appearing to originate from one source - the house next door - and local law enforcement and elsewhere is too close to the action to do their jobs properly.

As part of today's designation as National Coming Out Day, the very prominent blogger behind The Beautiful Kind, a blog about sex, polyamory, kinkiness, divorce, and more sex, has come out and revealed her name and general area. I suspect there are a lot of people who would like to be more open about their lifes, proclivities, and inclinations but are otherwise restricted from doing so, whether over conerns that their job will be eliminated, their neighborhood will turn on them, or their life will just be made hell by being actually out about themselves. It is out hope that soon everyone will be able to feel comfortable coming out about themselves, and that the environment they come out to will be accepting of them as the complete person they are. (Yes, even those people. Acceptance is important even if you believe the person there should then try to find a way to channel their desires elsewhere. Once you acknowledge the reality of them, you can then work on things that will have meaning and reality, rather than trying to change someone's core while holding them at arms' length.)

Out in the world today, a toxic flood in Hungary will likely resulte in the demolition of three towns, declaring them all total losses.

While the United States has a fairly high percentage of minorities incarcerated, England and Wales have incarcerated black males at about seven times the proportion of black men to the whole of people in England. And the people in charge think that the real danger is that those men will become Muslims in prison, so to fix one problem of outsized minority presence, they plan on stigmatizing a different minority. This does not add up anywhere near to the right sum. Furthermore, every time someone issues a security alert about a possible terrorist attack, it creates the conditions that al-Qaeda wants to have, and without have to expend the resources to generate it themselves.

Your reminder that Them, Over There are subhuman savages who deserve to be eradicated - an aid worker was killed by the Taliban during a NATO attempt to rescue her from the kidnapping she suffered. In this particular case, if it is true, the anger would be justifiable, as aid workers should never really be part of a conflict in that way. However, a conflicting account says she may have been killed by the detonation of a grenade her intended rescuers threw, which changes the anger situation to be against the people who managed to kill the person they were trying to rescue.

And finally, Iran says they've had spies in the nuclear facilities. This is really a shrugging affair, as saying so and then claiming that there will be no new spies is boilerplate.

Here in the country, recipients of Social Security were trated to a displeasing announcement - no adjustment of their checks for cost of living increases. So sorry, you have to hope that prices hold and stay down or that you can cut some things out of your life. This is the second straight year there has been no COLA for Social Security. Hope those executives, you know, the ones stealing the taxpayers blind while they run their companies feel good about the money that they have, as the rest of us have to continue to suffer under no real wage gains for the potentially forseeable future, and the increasing fact that employers want Superpeople with insame qualifications to hire in the recession, rather than hiring qualified people and expending some money on training them into the niche roles they want.

General Motors breaks its self-imposed moratorium on political donations, now that it's back to being profitable. I think it's a bit soon from being rescued from the brink to be headed back to making political donations, regardless of what News Corp. and the astroturfers are doing. I'm fairly certain we'd all be howling if the bailed out bank were doing that kind of thing.

Carl Paladino is either an idiot or a hypocrite. He says that he's a "live and let live" person when it comes to QUILTBAG people, yet he says that children should not be " brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option". These two statements are mutually incompatible, and that he said them so close to each other indicates he's clearly not honest enough or smart enough to hold the office of governor. Get frakked, Carl Paladino, of bestality e-mails and homophobic remarks.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, sees conspiracies and the subversion of ordained government where there is none, claiming two cities have had their regular court system overturned and that Sharia law reigns there. I would think, if that were anything resembling true, we would have heard it from people other than Sharron Angle much, much earlier. Anyone near Dearborn that can tell me whether they've suddenly declared themselves an Islamic state and seceded?

A candidate for the United States House in Ohio will have to justify his interest in playing a member of the Nazi SS in World War II re-enactment. Kind of a hot-button issue, there, but the candidate handles it well by saying, "Context, people. Someone has to play the other side in the re-enactors department." when confronted with the idea that playing any Nazi at all would be offensive. That said, when digging deeper, the people he's playing with apparently are not on the historically accurate side of things, and so the candidate's foundations shake significantly.

The FBI is quite interested in you if you have a friend who is Middle Eastern and who might have made a blow-off post on a blog. We know this because someone found the tracking device the agency attached to his car. Additionally, If you belong to a liberal or radical group, the agency is also probably looking at rallies or meetings you might attend, just in case you spark some violent riot.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine held a contest to write poetry about stem cells and picked winners, leading to at least one fundamentalist organization protesting that honoring stem cell science was blasphemous and promoting an agenda to create and kill human life in the form of embyros. In response to that small but venemous noisemaking, CIRM pulled the poems from their website - but you can see them at the first link in this paragraph. One wonders why CIRM would do such a thing, but then we read about a different fundamentalist smashing a case and destroying a lithograph because she perceived it to be portraying Jesus Christ having sex with another man and suddenly it becomes all too clear.

More Republicans say they would support having a strip joint near the 11 September attack site than a mosque, ignoring history, the present, and any pretense of the opposition being about morality all in one admission.

Speaking of polls, just in time for the midterms, look! A poll comparing whether people think that Mr. Bush's eight years in office were better than Mr Obama's two. The conventional wisdom from this is that Democrats should stop saying that the Republicans want to bring things back to the G.W. Bush days, because it's not a political winner for them. Stop being Democrats, the wisdom and polls are interpreted to say. Conservatives outnumber everyone, and they're going to shred you and put in their own Tea Party-backed candidates and Republicans along for the ride.

The National Security Adviser, Mr. Jones, is stepping down, to be replaced by Mr. Donilon.

And last, knowing full well what they were invoking, a headline that reads "Man Bites Dog, police say".

In tech, goodbye, cityofno dot com. Hooray!

If you want to see just how badly the record industry screws artists while promoting them to the world at large, have two pie charts, side by side.

A new study suggests that those who doodle during boring presentations have better recall than those who do not, because they don't drop into daydreaming, which takes up more brainpower.

There may be bigger support for the idea of preventing malware-infected computers from accessing the Internet at large by cutting off their bandwidth pipe than the more sensible "walled garden" approach that would pester those users to get their security and anti-virus in order.

Google is test-driving self-driving cars on the streets and highways of the country, hoping to develop them into real and usable vehicles. Robot cars driving themselves have far greater potential to prevent accidents, as well as not make human mistakes. They will make robot mistakes, of course, and it seemed like they're not quite ready to handle sudden situations, such as a biker ignoring the don't walk sign, for example, but robotically-driven cruise would be pretty awesome, even if it were limited only to the highways.

Finally, Your ISP likely reserves the right to snoop through your communications and traffic, but will probably not do so unless they get specific information or a lawful order to do so. Yay, privacy.

Welcome to opinions, where the point that classical music is standing on the wrong side of its own wall as it tries to gain devotees again is eloquently made, and support for those who are trying to modernize classical is given. (Although, not necessarily for those people who are trying to keep classical as separated from pop.) I think that they have some media to work through - as popular things like movies and video games sill often use scores that have classical and other instruments together. It might be quite fun to watch your local symphony provide a live score to a film. Or to do as the Arnie Roth tours and Video Games Live have done and play symphonic arrangements of chiptunes and the scores from modern video games. That might be their in to getting back to having some followers - start writing and playing pieces that resemble what the kids are listening to in their films and games.

When seeing what people hold up as the idea of sex positive culture, and what images they choose to accentuate it, are they including everyone and being sex-inclusive as well as sex-positive? If they aren't, according to Madame thursday, they're reinforcing the idea that conventionally pretty cis white people are the positivity we want to see, instead of everyone. The Internet being a wide and bountiful place, there are feeds devoted to those things, but in the mainstream, you're probably seeing mostly conventionally attractive white women and men with occasional homoerotic subtext for spice.

A Duff McDuffee details where learning to control one's own emotional state can fall down a dark slide into controlling the emotions of the people around you to further your own personal gains, with the hinge likely happening at the point that the controller firmly believes that nobody's emotional state is actually real and that they are not responsible for negative emotions, dismissing them simply as people not having learned to control their own emotions as well.

Mr. North says that the country back home needs to get with the program of what the troops in Afghanistan think and talk and believe in victory, instead of letting their ambivalence be interpreted as a lack of support. This sounds familiar, much like the narrative of the last administration - always must talk of victory and support the actions of the military, regardless of whether one actually beleives in those activities, because otherwise you Hate The Troops and Want The Terrorists To Win.

Mr. Gurney thinks the Third Land War In Asia might still be a distinct possibility, because Pakistan continues to be both friend and enemy in the Afghanistan fight.

Ms. Cary commits the foul she accuses the President of doing in his Rolling Stone interview, by ignoring all the things he did talk about to focus on the one thing he didn't, and thus proving herself out of touch on the big picture as well. It's not just the economy, although perception of that is a big driver in terms of how people feel about how the Obama administration has run things, which is what the President is trying to point out. He understands that the economy is the focus, but all this other stuff has happened, too, and Democrats should be getting out to vote to make sure all of that doesn't get undone or stalled. To ignore what he said and say, "But he didn't talk about the economy, so he must not care about it." is pretty bad work. Better to take the Krauthammer tack and claim that the country is not happy with the policies that he did pass that did not have their intended effects and the things he didn't have come to his desk, like a budget. To refute that, Mr. Krugman points out there has been no actual big government spending increase - because nothing that's been passed has actually been a big government spending increase, like the stimulus was supposed to be. It's all been tax cuts and delayed mandates, with a tiny fraction of increased spending, so the assertion that government has been expanding out of control is well, not true, plus anyone saying the stimulus didn't work is right, because there wasn't one on the scale that would have been testable.

Mr. Trzupek believes the Administration response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, lowballing the worst case scenario, is another sign of their naivete and inability to do things in the real world, and what they should have done in this case is "inject common sense" by quelling comparisons between the Exxon Valdez spill and the Deepwater Horizon disaster and saying that nature would be able to eat up much of the damage and the cleanup would get the rest. In other words, lowballing the worst case scenario. Wait a minute... that sounds more like a group going for the first option he had, expressing the worst-case scenario in accurate terms. Maybe Mr. Trzupek made a mistake in his column?

Mr. Taranto gives some spotlight coverage to the opponent of Barney Frank in his Massachusettes senatorial race.

The WSJ accuses Democrats of making mountains out of molehills in protesting, suing, and calling for moratoria on foreclosures because the banks cannot legally establish ownership in those states that require them to do so. They claim the party that ran roughshod over transparency promises and customs to pass ARRA should not about-face and be shocked at sloppy paperwork. Excepting the part where it's required by law to establish ownership. the paper that routinely touts the supremacy of the rule of law is now saying the law should be ignored in favor of expediency? Shocking.

Last out, how trying to be supportve when someone runs into the Privilege Wall may be showing how much you're still privileged and benefiting from it. "I can't believe that still happens" is an admission of ignorance, and "I had my own and thumped them" is begging for a Good Job, Ally, according to the writer. Best solution? Treat people as people, and not as their categories. Solid advice for when you realize the radically pessimistic projections for the next ten years are spot-on.

As a post-script, Spielburg congratulates Lucas that Lucas's droids did better that Spielburg's fish. This is clearly because there are more people ready to make art cars than there are to go swimming in shark-infested waters.

Much seen, much not seen. - 12 October 2010

It's... the blogstuff! We begin by mentioning that famed graffiti artist Banksy was invited to storyboard the beginning of a Simpsons episode. The finished product subverts several of the opening tropes and then goes forth into a minute-long commentary on the practice of Korean outsourcing for animation. It's worth watching, assuming that all the copies don't eventually get DMCA'd into submission.

In other show business material, a 1976 letter from Leonard Nimoy to Gene Roddenberry asking him to stop showing a blooper reel of Star Trek to fans, because it showed him without his permission and, in his opinion, reflected poorly on the characters to show their outtakes.

And then in other important commentary, the United Nations, in July, affirmed the quote that the next war will likely be fought over water, by declaring access to safe and clean water is a universal human right.

Finally, we're getting the Worst Person in the World out of the way early tonight - Jennifer and Scott Petkov, who turned an irritation about insufficiently swift text replies into a taunting and bullying of the death of a mother and the dying of her girl, including several manipulated photos putting the dead and dying in an unflattering light. And then not really apologizing for it when the bright light was shone on them.

Out in the world today, having determined that their opponents are originating from university education, the government of Iran made the first step toward a state takeover of the largest currently-private university in the country by denying that its endowment was religiously legitimate.

The Yemen offshot of al-Qaida has make grand threats that it has an army sufficiently powerful to topple the president of the country. Not that you ever want to see someone prove it, but they're going to have to show something if they want to be taken legitimately.

Inside the United States, New York City's mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, took offense to New York State not sending out their overseas military ballots for the midterms, even after a waiver extended their deadline to the 1st of this month.

The AP points out that there's no evidence to prove organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are using foreign money to try and influence U.S. Elections, and then point out that it's damn near impossible to prove that they aren't, either, because many of those organizations don't have to disclose their donors, and there's nothing stopping foreign companies from setting up U.S. PACs that are funded supposedly through the donations of their U.S. employees. (At the end, they question the wisdom of the attack, because it doesn't work well in television ad soundbites, which as The Infamous Brad noted previously, are the real indicators of who will win an election.) If you support the candidates that benfit from the Citizens United decision, like, say, News Corp. does, then it makes sense to run editorials in News Corp.-owned papers claiming the Democrats don't really want disclosure, they just want to intimidate businesses into not giving by throwing prosecutors and the IRS at the places where that corporate money ends up and to get public lists of donators so they can intimidate them with their unions and their mainstream media. If you're Heritage, which benefits greatly in their support of the conservative movement and Republican Party, it makes sense to declare that liberals are desperate to silence their opponents because they haven't actually got any policy victories to run on. The example in the WSJ article, of the corporation that supported the anti-gay candidate because of his business views, is disclosure working correctly, not an intimidation campaign. If you're going to give corporations the right to outspend any one individual in advertisements and television time, then the people deserve the right to know which corporations are working with their political interests and which ones are not, so they know who to spend their money on. Disclosure is necessary, believe it or not, so that both customers and workers can know when the corporation speaks for them and whether they want to let the corporation continue speaking for them. Now, the exemption of unions and other groups seems odd, but I wonder if that's because they already have robust practices in place to disclose and to make sure that all their money is legitimately spent. If that's not the case, then all interest groups should be included in the requirement to disclose. If that has a chilling effect, then one should conclude that most people are unwilling to have their names associated with something they claim to believe in. In other words, they're cowards. If you believe in a political thing enough to donate money to it, then you should be willing to take the heat associated with having your name on a public disclosure list.

Pension funds are getting exceedingly unfunded, needing significant amounts of money to meet their obligations, which could be raised through taxes...or have a significant part of it captured, if, say, a significant part of the $144 billion dollars in total compensation that Wall Street executives are slated for this year were to be used instead to pay the pensions of those who have worked for those companies, and companies that those Wall Street people have loaned credit to.

Research newly minted suggests that abortions do not increase risk for depression or have guilt about their decision, but that "informed consent" laws that mandate those coming in for the procedure be told they'll feel guilt or depressed, give their parents time to work on them, constrain their options, and tell them that that they' doing a horrible thing YOU MURDERER YOU might be the real culprits in anxiety and depression over abortion. People might need actual informed consent and support in their decision-making, but what supposedly passes for that now is not anything helpful. It achieves the desired effect of the people who put such things into place - fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and social shame. Way to go.

In technology, an attempt at a robot census, which then requires questions such as what constitutes a proper robot and then estimations of just how many robots there are already in the world.

Also, a 19 year-old was handed a jail sentence for refusing to give police his password after they made a formal request for it in relation to trying to track illegal activity. Well, so long as it had the appropriate accompanying court order or equivalent, then they're covered. That said, requests like those continue to presume that anyone with a password-protected computer is hiding illegal activity of some sort - perhaps in this case, it would be justified, but in many lesser cases, it could easily be abused.

And opinions, where Mr. Pendry opines that today's youth are too stupid to understand the dangers of communism and will vote for it again in the midterms by re-electing Democrats, having been drawn out to vote with initiatives like California marijuana legalization. Mr. Pendry is undercut severely by his own inability to parse that the various forms of communism he speaks of are quite different than the Marxism they originate from and the socialism that is their cousin, and that the free markets that he claims bring wealth and prosperity do so only when regulated, sometimes heavily, lest they end up in the same situation that he claims Communism ends up in - an elite that controls most of the wealth, and an underclass that fights over scraps. The very things that communism and socialism were supposed to fight, Mr. Pendry. I still believe that we will not know whether socialism and communism can truly work until we have a planet with sufficient life-supporting resources to give to them and run the experiment on a proper minimum scale.

An interview with the writer of a book that steps back through the history of the Coca-Cola company and brings to light all the bad, bad things they have done and continue to do today. It's a small chunk of the dark side of corporatism, one that can show up in how pineapples are produced and exported to the developed world as easily as soft drink wars and skullduggery. Not that the government is blameless, either - the "isolated incidents" of the past that inflict death and destruction in the name of liberty and freedom are not necessarily isolated, but part of a pattern intended to inflict terror on those deemed enemies of the state. It only shows up in spots, here and there, or when someone gets the courage to seriously ask about why the people Over There are doing what they do.

Even in the academics, there are certain classes, like those who understand poverty first-hand, that never seem to make it to the tenure track or to the prestigious positions. I'm more inclined to believe that than someone else spewing about how all the stuff coming out of academic presses is uniformly anti-American and Hates America, and is completely liberally-biased, but that may be because I have, in my usual experience, found that people making the claims that Academics and Liberals Hate America take very little time to provide examples that don't require you to already believe the premise and their underlying foundations, like Unions Are Evil, for them to make sense. (Tellingly, he also admits that those presses don't necessarily have a duty to be fair and balanced at the very end, but only after he's gone on for some length about this conspiracy of academics to make your students hate their country.) For someone to say, "Hey, look, there's not a whole lot of people who have poor upbringings or are still poor in their academic work on the tenure track or in positions about adjunct faculty", it's easy to prove/disprove that and it requires no specialized political leanings.

The account of an encounter with subtextual and overt racism, now popular again, thanks to the rise of the Tea Party and conservatism that is re-embracing the roots it was trying to distance itself from for the last few years in a desperate attempt to muster enough people to bring them back to power. Whether you consider it Frankenstein's monster, turned out in the world without having been instructed in humanity, or finally coming out and displaying the dark side overtly once again, the issue that was supposedly over and gone shows just how much it's like a variella infection.

And finally, the word "gay" has become shorthand slang for "insufficiently masculine" and as such is being slung about far and wide, used by the bullies and the teachers and administrators that don't quell those bullies at all. It also recognizes that High School is Hell for anyone who doesn't gender-conform, and that with the way things are right now, any nonconforming male can expect a constant barrage of homophobic comments about himself, if not physical violence because of his nonconformity. Because it's been reduced to either being a guy or being gay, with no middle ground anywhere. That's what the guys are learning in school, and unless we fix that problem, nothing in their lessons is going to sink in.

Last for tonight, a little snarkiness about how to be a successful lifestyle designer.