Back to the news - 13-14 October 2010

Greetings to all of you, and cheer hard as the men trapped in the Chilean mine for more than two months have successfully been rescued and lifted out.

Additionally, the federal government had sixty days as of October 13 to decide whether to appeal yet another decision striking down the whole of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and mimediately injuncting against it. The Log Cabin Republicans score victory for themselves and other members of the military. (On that point, the Obama Justice Department is defending a challenge to DOMA, claiming that Justice traditionally defends acts of Congress, not because they like the law. We keep wondering why they keep defending it if they don't really want it to succeed. Shouldn't Justice resources be spent on things they do want to prosecute/defend?)

The school district accused of spying on its students by remotely accessing web cameras installed in school-issued laptops has settled their cases for $610,000 USD, including legal fees of almost $425,000 to the lawyers on all sides, and with federal charges dropped, it looks like the matter is resolved. Until the next time they turn the cameras on and spy on the students, that is... In this case, though, it looks like the lawyers are the real winners monetarily.

In the world today, The United States military says that the additional troops it has received in Afghanistan have begun to pay dividends. Not to discount them, but would you expect them to say otherwise? That they then back it up with examples helps to discount this, but really, even if they were in full flight, I'm fairly certain the military would say they were winning. Mrs. Laura Bush suggests there's still room for improvement, especially in womens' rights, but that's not entirely a matter that the military can fix.

Pakistan arrests seven in an alleged plot to kill the prime minister of the country.

Proposals to change the retirement age in France have been met with several days of worker strikes.

The increasingly belligerent tones of the United States and Chinese militaries toward each other has their top officials concerned that someone will touch off a powder keg. Considering that since the Soviet Union fell, the other major power player and "adversary" has been China, or the United States, it makes sense that the two nations would be concerned about someone in the middle levels doing something stupid or going big over something like Taiwan.

The Palestinian leaders, Mr. Abbas, says he expects the United States to put pressure on Israel to stop building settlements in exchange for resuming peace talks. As a counterpoint, at least one Jewish writer claims that Jews are being discriminated against and that a double-standard applies when talking about Jews building in Israel and Arabs building in Israel, on top of the apparent anti-Israel campaign being waged by the United Nations, because all those Arab countries are wielding disproprotionate amounts of power and influence to make speeches and draft resolutions condemning Insrael.

Inside the United States, we have an old twist on an old story - a Baptist Chuch plans on burning books and music for Halloween - including Bibles that aren't the King James Version. The list of authors and genres that will get the fire reads like any other Hell House - but it includes people like Billy Graham and Rick Warren, who have apparently made reference to versions not the KJV and deserve to be burnt, too. Dolly Parton gets a special mention on the church's website, as she will be filling in for the whore of Babylon for this particular year. Or something.

Joe Arpaio, anti-immigrant sheriff known for his zeal in pursuing the undocumented, had his immigration-checking authority stripped of him after thousands of complaints were made about his techniques. Not that this will stop him - he intends to drop off suspected illegal immigrants arrested by him at immigration and customs enforcement, or to take them back to the United States-Mexico border himself if the federal government doesn't take them from him. He will continue to be lionized as someone "tough" on immigration and crime from his supporters even without the authority to ask for someone's immigration status. Nevermind that in his quest to ensure that no illegal immigrant stays in his county, he's generating an environment that will make sure no immigrant at all will stay there, if not driving away the people who are already there. It seems so easy to believe that he has a secret desire to turn the entirety of Maricopa County white so that he can feel, in his mistaken belief, that he will have protected that county from the scourge of a tidal wave of illegal immigrants, but he hasn't voiced such a thing as far as we know.

Staying in the theme of moralists receiving less-than-warm welcomes on their latest plots, Newt Gingrich recycles his pay-for-recognition scam that he ran on businesses last year to try and ensnare doctors this year. Recalling how last year they sent such an award to a gentlemen's club in Texas and then rescinded their invitation after finding out it was a gentlemen's club, we can only rub our hands in anticipation for when they send this particular item out to a pro-choice doctor who would be more than happy to have a Newt Gingrich endorsement of their practices. When he does, I'm betting the Rachel Maddow show will be all over it.

Ah, and did we mention that Bill'O the Clown inspired a walkoff of two members of the View while he was there? He claimed that the will of the people is absolute, even when the Constitution says "Fuck off, you ass-haberdashers" to the people's opinion on the matter and then saying, without qualification, that Muslims were responsible for the death of Americans on 9/11. Bill did apologize for the latter statement, in the form of, "If you were offended, then I apologize" (not "I apologize for offending you"), but not for the former.

And finally, Christine O'donnell is relying on the fact that the Republican establishment, save Sean Hannity, thinks she should go away to try and raise money for her campaign. In a sense, their continued cold shoulder is what she uses to justify herself as the outsider that Washington desperately needs. It's a gamble, but then again, it's not like she's got a reputation to carefully manage so that things like her Junior Anti-Sex League membership don't come to light or anything.

When you have to pay your debts off, you have to pay them off. California is selling several state buildings to private investors, netting about $1.2 billion USD for the state's general fund after the bonds on the buildings are paid. Of course, then the state plans on renting space in the newly private buildings, which could end up costing them more in the long run.

Speaking of debts, I think I need additional parsing help on this, but if I read it right, Mr. Rosner suggests that because of bad paperwork with regard to mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, the actual ownership of the home may not have ever left the originating banks, which may mean that none of the actual securitization could have happened legally, and all those dollars invested in MBS were on things that the trusts taking the investment money didn't actually own, with likely scary legal and financial consequences if the chain unravels in such a manner. But I'm not sure that's what is being said here. Help?

The moratrioum on offshore drilling is lifted. Proponents of "drill, baby, drill" are still skeptical about whether the moratorium has truly been lifted, declaring that only after oil and gas permits are issued can you call the ban over. Lest we take our eyes off the big ball of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, apparently BP feels that it can now safely get rid of cleanup workers now that the scrutiny isn't on them to finish the job.

A court opinion recalled for insufficient redaction has been replaced by an entirely new opinion, one that alters the narrative and provides a different version of reality than had initially been put forth. Since it involves Guantanamo Bay and those held there, the opinion is working in the Constitution-free zone again, even as it decides a case about habeas corpus. All of this is disturbing, icnluding the covering-up of the mistake and taking such an opportunity to retune the details to better fit a certain narrative. This verse has been the same as the last one.

Here's a potentially more informative survey about sexuality than the academic one, although the sample selection is probably not as random. If you want to know whether people live up to stereotype on sexuality, this is worth reading.

And finally, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics documents an attempt to compare apples to oranges and says President Bush created more jobs per month in his eight years than President Obama is doing now in his two. That is, having taken the brunt of the slide, it's totally okay to blame Obama for not having corrected all of it by now. Which means that articles about the bleak picture that most people will be facing for the next several years should all be laid at this President's feet for not managing to fix everything by now. Not that anyone in Congress really cares that much about the unemployed - after all, they didn't make enough money while they were employed to influence politicians into saving their jobs.

Into technology, where a computer has defeated a high-ranking player of Shogi, marking another game at which a computer has gotten powerful enough to be able to win. We'll be impressed when they start winning Go, though.

A robot has been tasked with violating the Asimovian First Law so that robots can be taught how not to violate the Asimovian First Law.

The Good News, Bad News Department says the United States electrical distribution system is unlikely to be taken down by a terrorist attack...because it's far too patchwork and duct-tape-and-twine for anyone to be able to take the whole thing down from killing or infiltrating a single node. Paired with the insistence that nations are already using cyber-warfare against each other (um, duh?), maybe when we get around to building it, we can remember to build it properly and securely. If we really want to get ambitious, maybe we can transform some cities into those running the Urban OS so as to make them more efficient, but still provide all the services city residents need and want.

Last out, the Pope does not want you to mistake reality for virtual reality, expresing his alarm at the pace of technological progress. We wonder whether he'll be a fan of dinimished reality interfaces that remove objects that are there from the view of the wearer.

Welcome to opinions, where a flowchart that ends in several one-dimensional character tropes demonstrates the Twin Truisms of Tropes - Tropes Are Not Good and Tropes Are Not Bad. Tropes Are Not Bad is represented mostly in the disclaimers of the original post, as a "Don't worry if you have some flat characters, they're a backbone of fiction! Honest!" Tropes Are Not Good, however, has a much larger force arrayed on its side - and it points out reducing complex characters to tropes does them serious disservice, not to mention that male characters probably will not get such a flowchart, because they're Characters, not men (although there's some Tropes Are Not Bad there, too, in the context of a good character working their tropes to tell a story well), leading to an example - how the stated reasons for hatred of Gwen Cooper and River Song helps to reinforce these negative and misogynist tropings, (not that it's just them, after all, plenty of complex females have been maligned and dismissed as bad writing or because they happen to be associated with The Doctor), and that there's no reason at all why Yoko Ono should be caricatured as a trope herself. Because, if you go look in the literature and the history, you find that women have been awesome throughout time, even if those with penises writing about them have made efforts to malign them and present them as something less. Or that fandom and fan-dumb tries to make into something different than where they are.

On more political matters, Mr. Sowell accuses Mr. Feingold of leveraging his flash against Mr. Johnson's actual knowledge and issues, which is a good enough column, so long as you believe the same viewpoint that Mr. Sowell does - that the stock market always performs well enough over time, even if you end up retiring in the middle of a shock, and that Social Security is going to go insolvent because there isn't enough money in it now, or even if the trust had actually remained a trust. Furhtermore, you have to believe that government is greedy because they tax rich people heavily, tax estates of very rich people, and use eminent domain laws in ways that ruin poorer neighborhoods to the benefit of private developers, never turning their eyes toward the richer neighborhoods. Wait, that's government greed? To say that those with more can afford to support the things they use more, that people who die leaving a lot can afford to pay some to help support the things that helped them get and stay rich in life, and to acquiesce to the ruining of lives and homes so that private enterprise can build what they want on the space? The first two make sense, the third is corruption. Greed doesn't seem to factor into it anywhere. But this is all on the contimuum that ends in Stossel territory where any sort of government regulation is bad and the private market should be free to do whatever it wants to you, where falling to "Sixth-most free country" in the world is something that is unacceptable and must be remedied through the immediate cutting of large swaths of government regulation. Regardless of whether doing so would actually benefit the majority of the people in the country or just enrich the already rich to become richer. Government bad, austerity good.

An associate of the discraged propagandist Brietbart accuses MTV of strongarming its employees into going to attend the Comedy Central twin rallies, painting it as Beck envy and an attempt by Viacom to inflate the numbers of Obama supporters in attendance at a rally that nobody would otherwise go to (because liberalism is dead, don'cha know, Long Live the Teabaggers.)

The WSJ also wants you to believe that the rate of increased government spending is solely the fault of the Democrats for this year, giving a token paragraph to the still-increased military spending fighting two wars in Asia before launching into the tirade against entitlement programs and other government spending that produced such disappointing results for growth and unemployment, the ones that were cut down before they began and then cut further and replaced by tax breaks, the things that the WSJ is touting as what needs to happen to get the economy going again. It's the longer-form, with charts-and-graphs version of this letter to the editor claiming that the President isn't doing his job of bringing the economy back up to full strength, isntead concentrating on socialist programs and discouraging banks from lending and the private sector from borrowing.

Mr. Blankley makes a saving throw for sanity before we go too far, though, choosing to talk about how things could be bad for the White House based on promoting staffers to primary positions, especially if all the people outside start saying how much the White House needs to bring in outside support. Insularity is a danger to effectiveness, if the groupthink gets too group-y.

Mr. Fund claims that people are getting nostalgic for the Bush years thank in part to the twin messages of "look forward, not back&Quot; and "Don't forget who got you into this mess" from the OBama administration, neither of which apparently works. Fragged if you do, fragged if you don't - always a nice position to make people believe your opponent is in. And if you can tack on a lizard-brain attack about how the President thinks he's better than you, with a ego to rival the size of a hot air balloon, all the better.

And finally, A News Corp.-owned paper, whose parent company donated to the Republican Governor's association under the rules relaxation created by the Citizens United decision, accuses Democrats and liberals of attempting to silence corporations, using "disclosure" as a smokescreen and citing the Target/MN Forward flap as the example of what will follow. In mischaracterizing the attacks as breaking good faith, the WSJ distorts the real reason why people were so outraged - it was because of Target's excellent reputation with regard to QUILTBAG people that people flipped out when the corporation donated to an anti-gay candidate and then said that his pro-business stance was more important to them than his anti-gay stance. In essence, Target said they prefered a candidate who would help their bottom line over a candidate who would fight for the rights of their workers. They made a decision that the corporation was more important than the people in it. That's not illogical, really, but it's awful PR. And the Minnesota disclosure laws made it so that the public knew what Target had decided. It's not about only giving to liberal causes - how many boycotts of various retailers have been generated over the "War on Christmas" and the mere practice of what holiday greeting customers receive, for example?

News Corp. apparently did not think that they could withstand whatever flak they take for donating to the Republican Governor's Association, and so sought to do so anonymously. Despite, y'know, owning the Wall Street Journal and Fox, which would give them more than enough media clout to push back against those allegations. Or, alternately, News Corp. wanted to try and maintain their illusion of impartiality while influenceing political elections, and so chose to donate anonymously. In either case, the public has a right to know what kind of influence is being peddled here, whether by corporations or unions, so they can make decisions about whether or not Fox really is "Fair and Balanced" or whether Target deserves their business for sacrificing workers for profits. If it's a matter of intimidation, which the article says it's about, then everyone has an equal swing at intimidating or boycotting a business and making them a "political piñata" and convincing them that the cost of donating to any group is too high. Unless the WSJ is admitting that liberals are far better-organized and better at deploying their points of view and protests than conservatives are, which would be pretty ballsy for News Corp and seemingly suicidal, considering how much Fox invests in trying to make sure that Tea Partiers and Republicans are organized and look united.

(Also, the hypothetical posed about how Obama and Biden should be considered far-right candidates because they're also anti-gay marriage? Not as ridiculous as you think. Democrats are center-rightists at their most liberal, so it would not be unfair to characterize them as far-right on their views.)

Last for tonight, why we should sink time, effort, and resources into developing a National Digital Library that will be free for all to access and use.