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Today, we begin with letters of note - a letter to a comic strip creator asking for something to decorate his wall with, from an author who would become famous in his own right, a letter from one already-established poet to one who had just self-published the work he would become famous for, expressing his admiration for the work he had just read as an advance copy, and a humorous letter accompanying advance copies of a television show to critics, in the style of Steve Martin, praising the benefits of merely owning such a show without having to actually review it.
Professionally speaking, libraries have pretty awesome purchasing power - now all we need to figure out is how to leverage out 900-pound gorilla selves to the best use of our money and to get the best services of our users.
If you want to get in on test-driving a notebook with Google's Chrome OS on it, they're looking for some pilots.
Out in the world today - another interesting WikiLeaks document, this time detailing just how much control Shell Oil has over the Nigerian government. I suspect that's the end result of globalization and unfettered capitalism - corporations using entire governments as their front companies.
Wikileaks may be the beginning of something much bigger than intended - World Wide Web War to determine what sort of Internet there is, and what sort of government we have, whether they get locked down in paranoia or decide that things should be more open than they are so as to avoid further embarrassing punishment by leaking. As Mr. Sullivan notes - "The Emperor still has clothes. He just has no control over whether and when they are removed." For some emperors, they will attempt to cover themselves again in fig leaves. For others, it may mean standing akimbo in the nude and saying, "Stare all you want."
Despite both continuing Land Wars in Asia, you don't hear nearly as much any more about how many soldiers are dying in the conflict, do you?
Finally, a look inside a sulfur mining operation that goes into a volcano to retrieve the material - the pictures are eerie and beautiful, but the working conditions described there resemble early industrial Dickensian nightmares.
Inside the United States, an economic threat from Mr. Summers, urging us to pass the bailout of rich people or else bad economic things will happen. One wonders how much worse things can get, with there still being more than three workers who want jobs for each one job that's available, and the truth that even if this deal passes, the people who are long-term unemployed will find themselves unceremoniously out of benefits when they pass the 99 week mark. There's still the possibility that the Democrats will do more than pass non-binding resolutions telling the deal to get bent, but until they actually show the spine, there are no guarantees.
The Defense Authorization bill does not pass The Tarantino, meaning Republicans have proven they would rather starve the Pentagon of all its funding then let gay and lesbian soldiers serve openly in the military, ignoring the results of the survey conducted. In some ways, gay and lesbian soldiers should feel a little flattered - Republicans think they're that big and scary that it's more important to stop them than to let all the other soldiers get paid, armed, or able to do their jobs.
Furthermore, a bill authorizing health care spending for those who helped in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks was also Tarantinoed, adding another black mark to the already soot-staiend record of the Republican Senate.
If your daughter punches another boy in the crotch for waving it in her face and saying "Talk to Mr. Weiner!", is she to be praised, given a talking-to, or a little of both?
Funny how my reaction to an arrest about a Muslim man alleged to be plotting to destroy an Army recruiting center is skepticism, based on the revelations about FBI agents egging their informants on to attacks. The credibility was strained (interesting how almost all of our terror catches say they're Muslims or are described as such...), but now it's starting to break down entirely. Furthermore, the apparently high recidivism rate of Guantanamo Bay residents only gives mroe ammunition to the permanent detention without rights crowd.
Governor Brewer's decision to kill people in order to save some money is predictably not setting well with people whose business is saving lives and the people who are going to be killed because of this decision.
The House of Representatives passes a version of the DREAM Act, which now heads to the Senate, likely to die by the Tarantino. To see how the bill is looked at, first see Mr. Carroll's accusation that the DREAM Act has so many loopholes as to basically be a blanket amnesty to anyone illegally in the country. He claims the Secretary of Defense has the power to enlist illegal immigrants in the military and then process their citizenship applications if he so chooses, neglecting to mention entirely the part about how citizenship could also be achieved through education. When you're convinced, however, that what the country needs is stricter enforcement of the laws to keep the Undesirables out, anything that might help them become productive citizens is going to look like amnesty. To see why that frame of mind is both exacerbating the problem and can be rooted in some sort of racism, the Slacktivist offers quotes and philosophy, thinking that Christians can contribute to the discussion by asking nation-states to think more like the body of Christ that transcends such things as nation-states and has us all as a We, insteaad of a We and a Them, The Undesirables.
In technology, take another look at who the promoted role models of civilization's advancement are, especially in technology, and then see whether or not you find people with dark skin color regularly there and acknowledged. Furthermore, look with fresh eyes about what causes the digital divide - it's certainly not laziness of defect of character in most cases, yet you'll find plenty of articles and writers saying, without real evidence to back it up and without taking into account what the prevailing narrative about progress as the domain of white people, that non-white people are lazy and shiftless and intellectually stunted compared to whites in sciences and technological development. It's the kind of narrative that produces pieces like MR. Sowell's hagiographic reading of Mr. Williams' autobiography, that hearken back to some time when life was more civilized and black people weren't participating in their own cultural demise, for example.
Theoretical work at the University of Michigan suggests that under the right conditions, the vaccuum can generate matter and antimatter particles.
Through the use of stem cells and surrogate motherhood, researchers were able to breed male and female mice that had the genetic characteristics of two males as their "fathers". Perhaps I'm underwhelmed by this point, but in reading the explanation, the headline "Scientists create mice from two fathers" is a bit stretching it, as there is still the surrogate process and later mating going on.
In opinions, more use of the Wikileaks cables - this time to apparently prove that Israeli settlements are being scapegoated as the reason for things going wrong in the Middle East region, because all the solidarity against Iran's program doesn't hinge on those settlements. (As well as the standard insistence that Iran be glassed for daring to have nuclear ambition.)
The WSJ reads complete Republican victory and vindication into the deal that Mr. Obama cut with the Republicans, claiming that Mr. Obama has come around to the right way of thinking and is making progress, even though if he really wanted their approval, he would have given the Republicans everything they wanted with no strings attached or demands made in return. As it is, they'll pat him on the head and maybe let him be seen with them somewhere, but he shouldn't expect any sort of positive anything from them unless he sells out all of his principles and becomes a complete Republican.
Truthfully, though, they betray the real reason the Republicans won - intransigence in the Senate and staying sufficiently united so as to prevent the majority from actually governing. It's only a sentence, right at the end, but it does show that thw WSJ recognizes the real reason this is happening.
Mr. Stossel has a panacea for all the world's poor - property rights! Once the government recognizes and says that someone owns something, be it house, business, or land, then prosperity is soon to follow, because those officially recognized people can then expand their business, get credit and loans, and bring forward The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) into existence. There's also a beautiful example of whitewashing history - those people staking claims and getting deeds were taking land from people who were already there, and then usually backing it up by bringing down the force of arms against the people they were evicting. It wasn't property rights at all there, Mr. Stossel, just guns. And what about all those people who can get their property rights and then find out just what sort of ruinous usury they will receive at the hands of the financial system for taking on a loan to expand the business?
Speaking of the private property arguments, Mr. Williams uses extraconstitutional texts and philosophies to justify his particular strict reading of the Constitution and what teh government can and cannot do. His opening point, that because people are not enslaved to another by law, that each person owns themselves, and thus has a right to private property, is a fairly nonstandard deinition of "private property". Considering his false dichotomy is that you either believe in private individual property or you believe that people are at least in part the property of the government or of some other entity, though, I can see where he needs to stretch the definition so that he can place the absurd on the other side and say, "This or that, no grey area."
I think he'd be on firmer ground if he went for "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." and went forward from there into his next point, about how crimes against the person, including theft, should be outlawed. After that, though, we run into another stretch, one predicated in the long tradition of using one meaning of a word to the exclusion of all other possible meanings - "taking the rightful property of someone and giving it to someone else" is his definition of theft. I suspect most people think of theft in terms of taking it for themselves, and not to then distribute to someone else. Anyway...
Having set up the idea that taking things from one and giving it to another, he says, "The government does this all the time - through taxes, they steal your money and then give it to that Undeserving Undesirable over there. They make you that Undesirable's slave and violate your private property. through regulations, they violate your private property of yourself." And rather disturbingly, he says that Congress should not regulate safety, claiming that everyone has the right to risk their own life if they so choose, deliberately stopping the train of logic before the next station - "What about someone else's life? Do your private property rights to risk your own life extend to risking someone else's life?"
Despite the lavish praise heaped on him by Mr. Sowell, it certainly seems like Mr. Williams levaes a few screws untightened in his framework, hoping nobody will notice how shaky it is.
Last for tonight, one more letter of note - one of the first pieces of mail to be carried on the first successful non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, and then the successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon, which orbited Terra twice after liftoff before re-entering and landing in the ocean on the other coast.
Professionally speaking, libraries have pretty awesome purchasing power - now all we need to figure out is how to leverage out 900-pound gorilla selves to the best use of our money and to get the best services of our users.
If you want to get in on test-driving a notebook with Google's Chrome OS on it, they're looking for some pilots.
Out in the world today - another interesting WikiLeaks document, this time detailing just how much control Shell Oil has over the Nigerian government. I suspect that's the end result of globalization and unfettered capitalism - corporations using entire governments as their front companies.
Wikileaks may be the beginning of something much bigger than intended - World Wide Web War to determine what sort of Internet there is, and what sort of government we have, whether they get locked down in paranoia or decide that things should be more open than they are so as to avoid further embarrassing punishment by leaking. As Mr. Sullivan notes - "The Emperor still has clothes. He just has no control over whether and when they are removed." For some emperors, they will attempt to cover themselves again in fig leaves. For others, it may mean standing akimbo in the nude and saying, "Stare all you want."
Despite both continuing Land Wars in Asia, you don't hear nearly as much any more about how many soldiers are dying in the conflict, do you?
Finally, a look inside a sulfur mining operation that goes into a volcano to retrieve the material - the pictures are eerie and beautiful, but the working conditions described there resemble early industrial Dickensian nightmares.
Inside the United States, an economic threat from Mr. Summers, urging us to pass the bailout of rich people or else bad economic things will happen. One wonders how much worse things can get, with there still being more than three workers who want jobs for each one job that's available, and the truth that even if this deal passes, the people who are long-term unemployed will find themselves unceremoniously out of benefits when they pass the 99 week mark. There's still the possibility that the Democrats will do more than pass non-binding resolutions telling the deal to get bent, but until they actually show the spine, there are no guarantees.
The Defense Authorization bill does not pass The Tarantino, meaning Republicans have proven they would rather starve the Pentagon of all its funding then let gay and lesbian soldiers serve openly in the military, ignoring the results of the survey conducted. In some ways, gay and lesbian soldiers should feel a little flattered - Republicans think they're that big and scary that it's more important to stop them than to let all the other soldiers get paid, armed, or able to do their jobs.
Furthermore, a bill authorizing health care spending for those who helped in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks was also Tarantinoed, adding another black mark to the already soot-staiend record of the Republican Senate.
If your daughter punches another boy in the crotch for waving it in her face and saying "Talk to Mr. Weiner!", is she to be praised, given a talking-to, or a little of both?
Funny how my reaction to an arrest about a Muslim man alleged to be plotting to destroy an Army recruiting center is skepticism, based on the revelations about FBI agents egging their informants on to attacks. The credibility was strained (interesting how almost all of our terror catches say they're Muslims or are described as such...), but now it's starting to break down entirely. Furthermore, the apparently high recidivism rate of Guantanamo Bay residents only gives mroe ammunition to the permanent detention without rights crowd.
Governor Brewer's decision to kill people in order to save some money is predictably not setting well with people whose business is saving lives and the people who are going to be killed because of this decision.
The House of Representatives passes a version of the DREAM Act, which now heads to the Senate, likely to die by the Tarantino. To see how the bill is looked at, first see Mr. Carroll's accusation that the DREAM Act has so many loopholes as to basically be a blanket amnesty to anyone illegally in the country. He claims the Secretary of Defense has the power to enlist illegal immigrants in the military and then process their citizenship applications if he so chooses, neglecting to mention entirely the part about how citizenship could also be achieved through education. When you're convinced, however, that what the country needs is stricter enforcement of the laws to keep the Undesirables out, anything that might help them become productive citizens is going to look like amnesty. To see why that frame of mind is both exacerbating the problem and can be rooted in some sort of racism, the Slacktivist offers quotes and philosophy, thinking that Christians can contribute to the discussion by asking nation-states to think more like the body of Christ that transcends such things as nation-states and has us all as a We, insteaad of a We and a Them, The Undesirables.
In technology, take another look at who the promoted role models of civilization's advancement are, especially in technology, and then see whether or not you find people with dark skin color regularly there and acknowledged. Furthermore, look with fresh eyes about what causes the digital divide - it's certainly not laziness of defect of character in most cases, yet you'll find plenty of articles and writers saying, without real evidence to back it up and without taking into account what the prevailing narrative about progress as the domain of white people, that non-white people are lazy and shiftless and intellectually stunted compared to whites in sciences and technological development. It's the kind of narrative that produces pieces like MR. Sowell's hagiographic reading of Mr. Williams' autobiography, that hearken back to some time when life was more civilized and black people weren't participating in their own cultural demise, for example.
Theoretical work at the University of Michigan suggests that under the right conditions, the vaccuum can generate matter and antimatter particles.
Through the use of stem cells and surrogate motherhood, researchers were able to breed male and female mice that had the genetic characteristics of two males as their "fathers". Perhaps I'm underwhelmed by this point, but in reading the explanation, the headline "Scientists create mice from two fathers" is a bit stretching it, as there is still the surrogate process and later mating going on.
In opinions, more use of the Wikileaks cables - this time to apparently prove that Israeli settlements are being scapegoated as the reason for things going wrong in the Middle East region, because all the solidarity against Iran's program doesn't hinge on those settlements. (As well as the standard insistence that Iran be glassed for daring to have nuclear ambition.)
The WSJ reads complete Republican victory and vindication into the deal that Mr. Obama cut with the Republicans, claiming that Mr. Obama has come around to the right way of thinking and is making progress, even though if he really wanted their approval, he would have given the Republicans everything they wanted with no strings attached or demands made in return. As it is, they'll pat him on the head and maybe let him be seen with them somewhere, but he shouldn't expect any sort of positive anything from them unless he sells out all of his principles and becomes a complete Republican.
Truthfully, though, they betray the real reason the Republicans won - intransigence in the Senate and staying sufficiently united so as to prevent the majority from actually governing. It's only a sentence, right at the end, but it does show that thw WSJ recognizes the real reason this is happening.
Mr. Stossel has a panacea for all the world's poor - property rights! Once the government recognizes and says that someone owns something, be it house, business, or land, then prosperity is soon to follow, because those officially recognized people can then expand their business, get credit and loans, and bring forward The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) into existence. There's also a beautiful example of whitewashing history - those people staking claims and getting deeds were taking land from people who were already there, and then usually backing it up by bringing down the force of arms against the people they were evicting. It wasn't property rights at all there, Mr. Stossel, just guns. And what about all those people who can get their property rights and then find out just what sort of ruinous usury they will receive at the hands of the financial system for taking on a loan to expand the business?
Speaking of the private property arguments, Mr. Williams uses extraconstitutional texts and philosophies to justify his particular strict reading of the Constitution and what teh government can and cannot do. His opening point, that because people are not enslaved to another by law, that each person owns themselves, and thus has a right to private property, is a fairly nonstandard deinition of "private property". Considering his false dichotomy is that you either believe in private individual property or you believe that people are at least in part the property of the government or of some other entity, though, I can see where he needs to stretch the definition so that he can place the absurd on the other side and say, "This or that, no grey area."
I think he'd be on firmer ground if he went for "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." and went forward from there into his next point, about how crimes against the person, including theft, should be outlawed. After that, though, we run into another stretch, one predicated in the long tradition of using one meaning of a word to the exclusion of all other possible meanings - "taking the rightful property of someone and giving it to someone else" is his definition of theft. I suspect most people think of theft in terms of taking it for themselves, and not to then distribute to someone else. Anyway...
Having set up the idea that taking things from one and giving it to another, he says, "The government does this all the time - through taxes, they steal your money and then give it to that Undeserving Undesirable over there. They make you that Undesirable's slave and violate your private property. through regulations, they violate your private property of yourself." And rather disturbingly, he says that Congress should not regulate safety, claiming that everyone has the right to risk their own life if they so choose, deliberately stopping the train of logic before the next station - "What about someone else's life? Do your private property rights to risk your own life extend to risking someone else's life?"
Despite the lavish praise heaped on him by Mr. Sowell, it certainly seems like Mr. Williams levaes a few screws untightened in his framework, hoping nobody will notice how shaky it is.
Last for tonight, one more letter of note - one of the first pieces of mail to be carried on the first successful non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, and then the successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon, which orbited Terra twice after liftoff before re-entering and landing in the ocean on the other coast.
