Yar, and stuff - 14 December 2010

Jingle the bells, err, happy holidays. VEWPRF season is upon us, which means a steady diet of morons perpatuating a war that only they can see and then going out and attacking people who remind them that they're delusional.

These windmill-tilters also take to the opinion columns to shout from the rooftops there is only one religious holiday celebrated in December! Anyone trying to celebrate other ones, or a "Holiday" or "Winter" celebration is merely in denial and prejudiced against the obviously-inherently-superior majority culture! Apparently, the enemy in this war is practicing "toxic tolerance", a Vonnegutian "equality for everyone" practice, with all the coercion and lowered standards that entails, spending taxpayer money to denigrate Christmas while they prevent anyone from celebrating it, and apologizing for being the best damn country there is around, thanks to our Christian heritage. The problem with that kind of column is that ignores a really, really big elephant in the room - if you really wanted to celebrate Christmas in December, you'd have to give up a lot of your revelries, your commercialism, your traditions, and just about everything else that people associate with Christmas. It would be sober, religious, and mostly lacking in any sort of feasting or merriment, other than the simple joy of a savior being born. All the trappings are appropriated pagan festivals and practices (or Catholic, which is usually just as bad). The majority culture that is supposedly superior? Very pagan. Very secular. Not all that much about the Christ figure. Perhaps, instead of getting bent out of shape about the well-wishes of others, they could revel in a spirit of camraderie and celebration that the days are getting longer.

However, the season also nets us far more appropriate responses to persons calling someone who takes the time to make homemade cards "cheapskates" then Abigail was willing to offer.

In the Unintended Consequences Department, a mask maker is finding its ultra-real masks are being used by criminals to fool surveillance cameras and witnesses into describing someone else as the criminal.

And in the continuing Wikileaks saga, Bail was granted to founder Julian Assange, assuming the prosecutorial appeal doesn't stick and have that bail revoked.

Finally, the Dead Pool's Foreign Service Office recalls Richard Holbrooke, uber-diplomat, after 69 years of service abroad.

Out in the world today, first, the hostile interview with the wheelchair activist, Jody McIntyre at the student protests pulled from his chair and attacked by London police, of which the interviewer parrots the official line that the wheelchair rolling toward the police was a hostile act and then tries to paint the activist as someone throwing rocks or otherwise endangering police lives, a "revolutionary", when he's wheelchair-bound, has cerebral palsy, and was with his brother, who was pushing his chair, all the time he was there. When people complained that the interviewer was treating him like a revolutionary who deserved what he got and was trying to find any excuse to justify the police action, the Beeb responds by saying "No, we treat everyone like that. There wasn't any special hostility". And then a writer for The Daily Mail gets involved, making it sound like an inevitability that McIntyre would get hurt by the police by going there, and especially so by going to the front lines, and that he stubbornly chose to go anyway. [Scroll a ways, you'll find the bit] The Mail took it on the chin for that particular piece of drek, with at least five hundred complaints lodged to the Press Complaints Commission on the matter. What I would love to know is how the police people justified pulling a person out of their wheelchair and dragging them because they were peaceably protesting something. As for Mr. McIntyre himself, he defends his own actions, places the blame squarely where it should go, and advocates for the people who need to be heard and can't necessarily speak for themselves.

Oh, and the top United States military official thinks the Koreas are gearing up to resume the war they called a halt to several decades ago.

Domestically, once again, the President reveals himself to be a right-leaning centrist instead of a liberal, seeming quite happy to give Republicans the tools they need to continue dismantling the social safety net, even though the consequences are detrimental to the health of those who will be affected by them. No matter to the Senate, at least - they passed the negotiated deal and sent it to the House, despite the eloquent lecture delivered by Senator Sanders on why they shouldn't do it at all. Instead, perhaps Mr. Zakarai's suggestions on how to retool the American economy to survive in global competition would be a better starting point to discuss from.

A cabal of nine men from the most powerful of Wall Street banks are the driving force behind derivatives trading, a thing responsible for much of the meltdown, and a thing they want to keep in place and use again, in the same unregulated manner, despite how easily it took the wheels off before. And remember, the credit rating agencies were entirely complicit in this as well - they will tell their clients whatever it is they want to hear, even if it contradicts what they said just a week ago.

The judge who ruled against the individual mandate of the health care bill has a significant stake in a consulting firm that has been hired by several of the opposing forces, including the attorney general arguing against the mandate before him. Something should scream "conflict of interest!" here, really. And if you want the truly crass, said Attorney General is trying to raise funds for his re-election campaign off of the fact that liberals think he's wrong.

In sciences, we need to keep a strong eye on the claim that a stem cell treatment of a man with HIV took and the virus was killed and removed from his body. If it's true, then there might be a rush to ensure that stem cell line stays active for a very long time.

And then technologies: the Voyager 1 spacecraft has passed into the heliosheath, the part of space where it no longer has Sol's star wind to keep it moving. Voyager still has plenty of speed, however, and will pass beyond the influence of Sol and out in the universe beyond assuming nothing unfortunate happens.

Into opinions, where Mr. Blackwell makes a vague pass at schadenfreude in reagard to Hillary Clinton and Wikileaks cables, before settling into a more standard bit about how the current administration is weak and incompetent, because their cables got leaked, and because they trust Russia more than they should, wanting to sign on to the new START treaty and not being properly torture-tastic toward the Russian spy ring discovered earlier on in the year.

Mr. McCullough accuses PFC Bradley manning of being a traitor and a Judas, of actively assisting "the enemy", and that no definition of patriot could ever apply to him, while complaining that the city council of Berkeley, California, must be insane to want to honor PFC Manning and call him a hero. He suggests that if PFC Manning were actually altruistic, he would have turned the information over to a newspaper reporter. Which could have easily buried it, fearing it was too hot to handle, or because they didn't want to anger anyone by publishing it. Furthermore, the quote reproduced from a commissioner is telling: "I think the war criminals should be prosecuted, not the whistle-blowers." What about the war criminals, Mr. McCullough? Why do they receive a pass while PFC Manning and Mr. Assange are to be hunted relentlessly and accused of various crimes?

And really, why are you assuming, with no proof, that the releases of these cables will cause giant amounts of harm? Assertions like that have to be backed up with proof - either hard incidents, or pointing at the places where the information let go is going to be used to identify people or disrupt networks. You cannot simply say it and assume that it is true - although from the looks of things, just saying it is enough for a significant amount of people to nod and believe you, despite having no supporting proof.

Let's stay on that point for a moment, and let Mr. Bageant wax poetic about how Huxley was right, Orwell was right, Judge was right (although he could have presented it a bit better), and Watterson was right about how the populace would become so dumb as to be unable to hold a cogent thought in their heads, mark their status by the kind and quantity of useless trinkets they have, and beleive that what's on television is the only culturally significant thing there is, while simultaneously calling for greater authoritarianism so they can feel safe from manufactured terrors and look on fondly as those authorities then mandhandle, humiliate, and intimidate regular people, often in violation of the laws they're supposed to know and uphold. The elite do control us, and while the faces change, the puppeteers remain the same. Of course, the question of red pill, blue pill is one left ultimately to each individual. What we need, though, is to be able for everyone to make that decision on their own. And that's going to take a lot of doing to dismantle the built-in ignorance and fear to the point where people can see it and evaluate it for what it is, and then decide how much they're going to participate in it.

That kind of problem produces complaints that signs next to an elementary school telling children to stop gay suicide, and for the schools and others to tell the truth that being gay is not a learned behavior that can be unlearned, are "too adult" for the children in the school. Impossible. Elementary-age students are old enough to understand these things, to learn about them, to discuss them, and to draw conclusions about them. Some of those students are already wrestling with whether or not they're QUILTBAG or not, some decided, some unsure. A regularly oppressive environment that doesn't give them space to talk and insists that people who are QUILTBAG are evil people condemned to eternal death results in suicides. That attitude is already being taught to elementary students, so clearly they must be mature enough to handle the other side and have meaningful discussions about it.

It's the kind of thing that asserts anti-QUILTBAG legislation is for "protecting our children from gay people recruiting them in schools", and does so repeatedly, without proof, and dodges providing that proof when pressed, [Scroll to the Bahati interview] banking on the misconception that QUILTBAG people are also all pedophiles, and the even more grievous misconception that children need to be protected from certain ideas. It calls for censorship instead of open discourse and insists that baldly false things are true, because they always happen away from where you happen to be observing at the time. Who will you believe, me or your lying eyes?

Most people are familiar with Mr. Barnum's assertion that a sucker is born every minute. Most people should also be familiar with the research that indicates an above-average number of people think they are above average in all things. The conclusion that produces, thanks to our cultural ignorance, is that everyone thinks everyone else is the sucker that's got an inflated opinion of themselves. And the people who are in charge play us beautifully on that assumption, appealing to our egoes to make us feel like we're part of the in-group, while stoking our fears that some other group is going to take over our position, get something they don't "deserve", or indoctrinate our children with foreign and destructive values. Really, the only question remaining is whether those in charge successfully strip the planet of its resources and escape before we wise up or Terra, Gaea, or G-d, whomever it may be, exacts their revenge on all of us.

Here's hoping we end up rolling a 20 instead of a 1.