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News Avalanche! - 7-9 November 2010
Nov. 9th, 2010 11:28 pmGreetings, people who power the world through their love. If you ever run into a situation where someone claims that bullying is a phase, or that parents don't join in on it, or even that it doesn't start young, then point them to this account, from the mother of a 5 year-old boy, about how all the other mothers were horrified that her son might dress as a female character from Scooby-Doo. The kids were fine with it at that age - the mothers were apparently horrified.
Things are not good for children and families in this country - programs like the ones that send schoolchildren home with backpacks full of food for their families every week are increasingly used, and often relied upon, even as the parent works a 60 hour work week. If the governmental safety net frays out or is repealed, do people really expect that private charities, already strained as they are, will be able to pick up all the slack to help their homeless and hungry?
If you're planning on flying any time soon, remember that the TSA is offering you a choice - taking a picture of you naked using radiation, or sexually assaulting you - to let you fly on a plane.
Finally, A point from your professor - pay attention in class, but furthermore, do not expect us to hand you your degree on a silver platter. If you cannot be arsed to pay attention enough to note that the professor does not read rough drafts, but the TAs do hold office hours to help you, and that your peers are great checkers, then we cannot be arsed enough to spoon-feed you and will instead fail you.
Out in the world today, take a foreign perspective - several German newspapers weigh in on how they saw the U.S. elections. Several of them resemble the Beltway media narrative of a "wave of change" that voted against the current party and put the other one in power, but they all seem to miss out on the point that this wave depends entirely on believing several different untruths about how the first two years went.
Officials for the United States government indicate that they don't think Afghanistan will be ready to handle its own security until at least 2014, so any promises about winding down Afghanistan as well as Iraq should be treated with suspicion and hostility.
Rather than trying to do it properly as a way of getting people back to work, United Kingdom ministers have unveiled a plan that puts the out-of-work onto hard labor detail and threatens them with the loss of their jobless benefits if they refuse. But only people who they think are lazy unemployed will be put on the plan, because they need to "experience of the habits and routines of working life". They missed a great spin opportunity to model it more after the Works Progress Administration of the United States, instead of saying that they believe some people are just living on the dole and need to have the work spark beaten into them.
The Bishop of Rome visited Spain with an eye toward "defending" hetero-monogamous marriage and was greeted by a "kiss-in" of gays and lesbians in protest. Perhaps if he is interested in defending marriages and women, he will look into why women in Afghanistan set themselves on fire to escape their forced marriages and life situations and engage with the United Nations in figuring out how to stop mass rape in the Congo under the guise fo expelling immigrants.
Domestically, unintended consequences, meet the sate of Oklahoma, where the recent "We're afraid of Muslims!" ballot question may have also outlawed consideration of the bedrock that most Christians base their lives and laws on. Oklahoma is also the site of a passing ballot measure that declared English the official language of the state, and now I'm really beginning to wonder whether these kinds of stories would have made it higher on the national media ranking if we didn't have such interesting people as Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. As it is, now that they're gone, we can find out about the Colorado prosecutors that decided to allow one of our corporate overlords to plead to a deferred felony charge and two misdemeanors, plus restitution, for hitting a cyclist with his car and fleeing the scene, in case a conviction would cause him to have difficulty with his income stream. Somehow, I don't think Joe Average would be receiving such a deal.
More seriously, for as much as the media was hyping the idea that it was the Year of the Women for elections, the upcoming Congress will be the first in a generation that has either the same amount or less women in it than the last session. Not that voters were particualrly anti-women, just that they voted for the Party of Old White Dudes and spurned many of the high-profile anti-women Tea Partiers that won their primaries. For being, y'know, anti-women. At least, for those people who got out and voted - despite the laundry list of things the Dems did in their first two, people still found it difficult to vote in the midterms, because it seemed like a lot of the people who helped elect those majorities were being taken for granted. Not to mention that many people have figured out that the system of voting is both insufficient for real change and rigged against electing people who will create real change. What might have saved the system is if people had gone and explained to others why they needed to go out and vote for the people who disappointed them just to stop the people who want to do them harm and then galvanized them into an effecive political force that would then hold those disappointers' feet to the fire.
As it is, Nancy Pelosi will still be running to be House Minority Leader, opposite Representative Schuler, who believes that the way out for Democrats is for them to run as far to the right as they can go and be Republicans-Lite. This, despite the drubbing the Republicans-Lite took in their various races. The conservative and Republican wings seem to think that it would benefit them greatly to have her stay in a leadership position, so they can keep declaring that Democrats didn't get the message against their big government, tax-and-spend ways, even after the voters roared it at them at the polls. This, while they work to cut back state government budgets, usually through the curtailing of public services and safety net expenditures, as well as advancing their anti-women, anti-poor, pro-corporation social agendas.
Business Insider is not completely okay with the story behind the Olbermann suspension, suggesting it raises bigger questions like "Whose donations are okay?" based on the policy that permission must be sought to donate, instead of a blanket ban and whether that policy is actually better than the Fox policy of "donate however much you want to whomever you want". Common Dreams notes that GE does quite the business in political contributions, and so the NBC standards seem out of character for the parent company's unabashed political lobbying.
Finally, a locally produced PSA for Washington encourages employers to hire war veterans, so that we don't have large amounts of people who served in active duty without work and possibly without housing as a glaring testament to the idea that we don't take care of our soldiers after they've served.
It's a slow news day in technology when the genome sequencing of Ozzy Osbourne makes it up to visibility. As well as more science indicating that a regular meditation practice is good for your long-term health.
However, the recommendation from the American Academy of Neurology that any sport player suspected of having a concussion should be removed from play until properly evaluated is worthwhile, and also a thing that we should be following.
And really, when the LHC creates what scientists believe is a miniature version of the Big Bang, and we're still here to witness it, that's big news, indeed.
Plus, color possibilites in e-ink means that we might have a winner in the tech wars on e-readers, assuming they can eventually bring it up to the crispness of LCD. Dunno whether full-motion video capabilities will also be needed or not, because readers like text, but definitely will need to make the colors pop as easily as they do on LCD.
A pair of useful items - piezoelectric small-scale power generators, which if combined properly, could power the next wave of small, powerful, and hands-free cameras so that people can document their lives and use the video as memory aides. With a blanket broadband connection, one could stream life live to the web. Although, it might be nice if you could have a little bit of processing done and layer in some augmented reality on top, to protect privacy and the like.
Looking at the tapes, the Milgram experiment was not as universally lemming-like as we are told to believe, which would produce a rather interesting feedback loop about scientists telling us something about an experiment designed to see how far people would go if scientists told them to...
The recent resurgence of the idea that intelligent people are more likely to use psychoactive drugs also brings back the idea that sub-tripping doses of those psychoactives may have helped out creativity. Too much and you're lost, just enough and you're exploring new pathways of evolution and ideas. Worth a toke, ya?
Finally, several prominent persons argued before the FCC of a need to have an open Internet, clearly separated and delineated away from various specialized services that might be offered by providers and that would be subject to their network management and throttling practices.
Into opinions, where Ms. Noonan believes the voting populace was able to simultaneously tell the Democrats that they hated them and wanted them gone and the Republicans that they hate them and want them gone, too, so the Republicans had better be willing to pucker up to the Tea Party if they want to stay in power, and the Tea Partiers should be willingly co-opted by the Republicans if they want to grasp any of that power, so that they can present as electable and then throw off their disguises.
On the other side of the equation, Heritage insists that the Republicans have a lot of conservative/Tea Party work to do if they want to survive - starting with the requirement to repeal and delay the health care bill from coming into being.
All of it, though, feeds into the flawed notion that the markets should rule us all and that corporations are the only citizens that matter, instead of making sure our government takes care of its people. Those notions create situations where people feel that the only way to right the wrong is to dismantle the police system as it stands now and replace it with something that actually cares equally about all people, instead of only about protecting the property of the moneyed elite. Those people, even as they work to change, are trying to follow the precepts of great men who accomplished much without having to resort to violence, opposing both the methods of the ones they wish to defeat and the system that makes those opposing methods acceptable and desirable.
Last out of opinions, Ms. Bayefsky cherry-picks her speakers and their comments in her attempt to persuade us that anything coming out of the United Nations about human rights in the United States is so fundamentally flawed as to be useless, reprinting the comments of Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba and other countries that American citizens would normally bristle at, while ignoring the rest of the docket of speakers, and simply dismissing the truth that Guantanamo Bay cannot merely be closed through executive order as "blaming others".
Last for tonight, the value of a good skirt when one is an explorer - it apparently prevents impaling, and a piece about various ways of looking at procrastination and ways of beating it...that I'm sure you'll read eventually.
Things are not good for children and families in this country - programs like the ones that send schoolchildren home with backpacks full of food for their families every week are increasingly used, and often relied upon, even as the parent works a 60 hour work week. If the governmental safety net frays out or is repealed, do people really expect that private charities, already strained as they are, will be able to pick up all the slack to help their homeless and hungry?
If you're planning on flying any time soon, remember that the TSA is offering you a choice - taking a picture of you naked using radiation, or sexually assaulting you - to let you fly on a plane.
Finally, A point from your professor - pay attention in class, but furthermore, do not expect us to hand you your degree on a silver platter. If you cannot be arsed to pay attention enough to note that the professor does not read rough drafts, but the TAs do hold office hours to help you, and that your peers are great checkers, then we cannot be arsed enough to spoon-feed you and will instead fail you.
Out in the world today, take a foreign perspective - several German newspapers weigh in on how they saw the U.S. elections. Several of them resemble the Beltway media narrative of a "wave of change" that voted against the current party and put the other one in power, but they all seem to miss out on the point that this wave depends entirely on believing several different untruths about how the first two years went.
Officials for the United States government indicate that they don't think Afghanistan will be ready to handle its own security until at least 2014, so any promises about winding down Afghanistan as well as Iraq should be treated with suspicion and hostility.
Rather than trying to do it properly as a way of getting people back to work, United Kingdom ministers have unveiled a plan that puts the out-of-work onto hard labor detail and threatens them with the loss of their jobless benefits if they refuse. But only people who they think are lazy unemployed will be put on the plan, because they need to "experience of the habits and routines of working life". They missed a great spin opportunity to model it more after the Works Progress Administration of the United States, instead of saying that they believe some people are just living on the dole and need to have the work spark beaten into them.
The Bishop of Rome visited Spain with an eye toward "defending" hetero-monogamous marriage and was greeted by a "kiss-in" of gays and lesbians in protest. Perhaps if he is interested in defending marriages and women, he will look into why women in Afghanistan set themselves on fire to escape their forced marriages and life situations and engage with the United Nations in figuring out how to stop mass rape in the Congo under the guise fo expelling immigrants.
Domestically, unintended consequences, meet the sate of Oklahoma, where the recent "We're afraid of Muslims!" ballot question may have also outlawed consideration of the bedrock that most Christians base their lives and laws on. Oklahoma is also the site of a passing ballot measure that declared English the official language of the state, and now I'm really beginning to wonder whether these kinds of stories would have made it higher on the national media ranking if we didn't have such interesting people as Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. As it is, now that they're gone, we can find out about the Colorado prosecutors that decided to allow one of our corporate overlords to plead to a deferred felony charge and two misdemeanors, plus restitution, for hitting a cyclist with his car and fleeing the scene, in case a conviction would cause him to have difficulty with his income stream. Somehow, I don't think Joe Average would be receiving such a deal.
More seriously, for as much as the media was hyping the idea that it was the Year of the Women for elections, the upcoming Congress will be the first in a generation that has either the same amount or less women in it than the last session. Not that voters were particualrly anti-women, just that they voted for the Party of Old White Dudes and spurned many of the high-profile anti-women Tea Partiers that won their primaries. For being, y'know, anti-women. At least, for those people who got out and voted - despite the laundry list of things the Dems did in their first two, people still found it difficult to vote in the midterms, because it seemed like a lot of the people who helped elect those majorities were being taken for granted. Not to mention that many people have figured out that the system of voting is both insufficient for real change and rigged against electing people who will create real change. What might have saved the system is if people had gone and explained to others why they needed to go out and vote for the people who disappointed them just to stop the people who want to do them harm and then galvanized them into an effecive political force that would then hold those disappointers' feet to the fire.
As it is, Nancy Pelosi will still be running to be House Minority Leader, opposite Representative Schuler, who believes that the way out for Democrats is for them to run as far to the right as they can go and be Republicans-Lite. This, despite the drubbing the Republicans-Lite took in their various races. The conservative and Republican wings seem to think that it would benefit them greatly to have her stay in a leadership position, so they can keep declaring that Democrats didn't get the message against their big government, tax-and-spend ways, even after the voters roared it at them at the polls. This, while they work to cut back state government budgets, usually through the curtailing of public services and safety net expenditures, as well as advancing their anti-women, anti-poor, pro-corporation social agendas.
Business Insider is not completely okay with the story behind the Olbermann suspension, suggesting it raises bigger questions like "Whose donations are okay?" based on the policy that permission must be sought to donate, instead of a blanket ban and whether that policy is actually better than the Fox policy of "donate however much you want to whomever you want". Common Dreams notes that GE does quite the business in political contributions, and so the NBC standards seem out of character for the parent company's unabashed political lobbying.
Finally, a locally produced PSA for Washington encourages employers to hire war veterans, so that we don't have large amounts of people who served in active duty without work and possibly without housing as a glaring testament to the idea that we don't take care of our soldiers after they've served.
It's a slow news day in technology when the genome sequencing of Ozzy Osbourne makes it up to visibility. As well as more science indicating that a regular meditation practice is good for your long-term health.
However, the recommendation from the American Academy of Neurology that any sport player suspected of having a concussion should be removed from play until properly evaluated is worthwhile, and also a thing that we should be following.
And really, when the LHC creates what scientists believe is a miniature version of the Big Bang, and we're still here to witness it, that's big news, indeed.
Plus, color possibilites in e-ink means that we might have a winner in the tech wars on e-readers, assuming they can eventually bring it up to the crispness of LCD. Dunno whether full-motion video capabilities will also be needed or not, because readers like text, but definitely will need to make the colors pop as easily as they do on LCD.
A pair of useful items - piezoelectric small-scale power generators, which if combined properly, could power the next wave of small, powerful, and hands-free cameras so that people can document their lives and use the video as memory aides. With a blanket broadband connection, one could stream life live to the web. Although, it might be nice if you could have a little bit of processing done and layer in some augmented reality on top, to protect privacy and the like.
Looking at the tapes, the Milgram experiment was not as universally lemming-like as we are told to believe, which would produce a rather interesting feedback loop about scientists telling us something about an experiment designed to see how far people would go if scientists told them to...
The recent resurgence of the idea that intelligent people are more likely to use psychoactive drugs also brings back the idea that sub-tripping doses of those psychoactives may have helped out creativity. Too much and you're lost, just enough and you're exploring new pathways of evolution and ideas. Worth a toke, ya?
Finally, several prominent persons argued before the FCC of a need to have an open Internet, clearly separated and delineated away from various specialized services that might be offered by providers and that would be subject to their network management and throttling practices.
Into opinions, where Ms. Noonan believes the voting populace was able to simultaneously tell the Democrats that they hated them and wanted them gone and the Republicans that they hate them and want them gone, too, so the Republicans had better be willing to pucker up to the Tea Party if they want to stay in power, and the Tea Partiers should be willingly co-opted by the Republicans if they want to grasp any of that power, so that they can present as electable and then throw off their disguises.
On the other side of the equation, Heritage insists that the Republicans have a lot of conservative/Tea Party work to do if they want to survive - starting with the requirement to repeal and delay the health care bill from coming into being.
All of it, though, feeds into the flawed notion that the markets should rule us all and that corporations are the only citizens that matter, instead of making sure our government takes care of its people. Those notions create situations where people feel that the only way to right the wrong is to dismantle the police system as it stands now and replace it with something that actually cares equally about all people, instead of only about protecting the property of the moneyed elite. Those people, even as they work to change, are trying to follow the precepts of great men who accomplished much without having to resort to violence, opposing both the methods of the ones they wish to defeat and the system that makes those opposing methods acceptable and desirable.
Last out of opinions, Ms. Bayefsky cherry-picks her speakers and their comments in her attempt to persuade us that anything coming out of the United Nations about human rights in the United States is so fundamentally flawed as to be useless, reprinting the comments of Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba and other countries that American citizens would normally bristle at, while ignoring the rest of the docket of speakers, and simply dismissing the truth that Guantanamo Bay cannot merely be closed through executive order as "blaming others".
Last for tonight, the value of a good skirt when one is an explorer - it apparently prevents impaling, and a piece about various ways of looking at procrastination and ways of beating it...that I'm sure you'll read eventually.
