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Waaargh - 17-20 December 2010
Dec. 21st, 2010 09:59 amGreetings to all of you, and joyous Yule and Midwinter to those who celebrate. I believe this post by the Velveteen Rabbi should be the prevalent attitude of everyone regarding any of the VEWPRFs they celebrate or that friends and family celebrate - helping someone else celebrate their ritual does not make you any less of a devotee of your own religion. In fact, I would think that joining in someone else's ritual as much as you are allowed would foster good will and happiness in all your relations. Now, if only those War On Christmas people would figure it out.
For those of you flying, enjoy the telegram sent to indicate the success of the Wright Brothers flight. Oh, and for those of you being forced to choose between a porno machine and a pat-down, remember that as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well, or in some cases, it turns out something relatively low-tech can defeat high-tech. Oh, and wearing a turban will get you searched. Even if you're the Indian envoy to the United Nations, and your Sikh turban has nothing to do with the terrorists.
In the "Body issues and unrealistic standards" department, some salient points about how people who are in great shape do not look like fitness models, nor should people who aspire to fitness make fitness model physique their goals. But the best part of that is the photo montage of Olympic athletes - everything from the under-5 foot, under 100-pound gymnasts to the tall basketball players and the stocky hammer tossers. Each of them in excellent fitness condition, and almost none of them looking like they're a model.
Something that should be no surprise to anyone - According to a study released by World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, the more you are exposed to Fox News programming, the more misinformed you are, regardless of what part of the political spectrum you sit on. Other networks did not fare well, either, but Fox was consistently the worst of the worst, and usually on issues that the Republican Party has a vested interest in making sure people stay misinformed on. This is why they say "Fair and Balanced" rather than "Honest and Truthful", which is what everyone should be striving for.
Finally, The Dead Pool required the services of Blake Edwards, director of many comedies including "The Pink Panther" and "Victor/Victoria", on 16 December, at 88 years of age.
Out in the world today, Bibery succeeds in getting bribery charge dropped, as Richard Cheney settles so as not to have to stand trial.
The suggestion that Europe will face rising austerity protests in the next year is tempered by the assumption that they, like all other protests, will eventually peter out and the government will be abl to do what it wanted anyway. Considering it's not the corporations that are protesting, I think that analysis will be unfortunately right. Even if you could show everyone how financial institutions were responsible for the domino collapse. (Although that one is not a complete picture by any means.)
Wikileaks is cleared of having done anything illegal under Australian law. Perhaps there's the next server safe haven?
Mr. Moore benefits from Wikileaks by pointing out that the State Department passes around things it knows are lies and marks them as secret, perhaps for them to be leaked later and have the mainstream media run it without reseraching.
The two Koreas continue to agitate each other, with the South conducting arms drills in the face of threatened retaliation.
The rules for night time raids in Afghanistan have been changed, mostly as an olive branch to Afghan President Karzai and the soreness that comes from civilians afflicted by night attacks.
Finally, The Roma people may be the last ghettoized minority of Europe, being pushed into substandard official settlements and then left there without sufficient maintenance or anything else to let them live well, while also being monitored.
Domestically, it's hits and misses for the government. The good bit - the Senate passed the stand alone Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal bill, sending it up to the President, who will sign it to spike the policy and allow people to be open about their sexual preferences. I hope that he also keeps a close eye on the Marine Corps and makes sure they abide, since their commandant is publcly on the record about how much he thinks gays are bad for good order.
So that's the good thing. The bad things follow, though - apparently, Republicans in the House think it is okay to stall a bill claiming child marriage is a human rights violation and giving some funding to combat it because...it gives money and would...increase abortions? And this one passed the Senate unanimously. Is this the preview of things to come? We haven't really resolved the clergy and children thing here - settlements instead of full-fledged trials may be the new order of things, but it does make you wonder if someone's hiding something they don't want to admit to in voting against the bill for such a flimsy reason.
Furthermore, cloture fails in the Senate on the DREAM Act, proving Republicans thoroughly intend to punish children for the sins of their parents. And that they don't care whether or not a bill was first proposed by a Republican in a Republican Congress - if it hurts Barack Obama, that's how they're going to vote.
And then, the failure of the bill to get medical care for first responders to the 11 September attacks indicates that Republicans also don't care about providing for people who are American heroes, over posturing on whether such bills add to the deficit. This, after the tax cut compromise that adds billions of deficit spending to make up for the tax cuts.
That's not the worst of it - thanks to Wikileaks, we now know what caused "colony collapse disoreder" - the use of clothianidin, a pesticide that kills honey bees that consume it from flowers and crops they attempt to pollinate. The EPA allowed Bayer to continue using the pesticide despite reports from its own scientists that it was highly toxic to honey bees.
And despite all of this, the [BLEEP] [HONK] [FOGHORN] [LEGHORN] in Washington are complaining that they're working through the holidays. If they hadn't decided their main tactic was to stall, delay, and obstruct, maybe they could have gone home for the break with all the necessary legislation passed. As it is, sucks to be you, buckoes. Work until you're done and no sooner. At least some of you have the decency to say the deal to make sure the rich get bonus tax breaks was morally troubling, even if you think it was necessary to get what you wanted, too.
A necessity when looking at the incoming Speaker - do his tears match his actions? Is he crying because he's genuinely concerned about things and is working to fix them, or is he doing it because he thinks it will stave off the angry hordes who will storm his castle when they find out his record is solidly against them?
The Justice Department is finally suing BP and other companies regarding the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill.
The current administration watns people to be aware of what to do in case of a nuclear detonation in the United States, even though the best way to avoid such things is if there were no nuclear devices to be detonated in such a manner.
Finally, despite there being no way to verify this information, CBS (and probably others) are trumpeting that captured insurgents said there were holiday plots to attack the United States. There's no way of knowing if its true, yet here we have the "news" telling us about it. Yet another way that this is "next verse, same as the first" on an important issue - scaring the people unncessarily with stories of phantoms that never were.
In technology, Yahoo! is letting go of its interest in services such as Dei.icio.us and Altavista as cost-cutting measures.
If you're going to be against book piracy, it helps to not have committed music or fashion piracy and be okay with that.
Ms. Levin is unimpressed with how Google's ads react to words in e-mail that you send, considering it a form of spying and intrusion on privacy. We do wonder what other parts of he digital life she hasn't noticed that she's been spied on for advertising purposes that she finds Gmail intrusive, but she does have a point. And if she wants an upped creep factor, Google released Body Browser, an interactive exhibit that lets you get under someone's skin.
Staying on the Google Train, however, some reserach that took some part of the Google books corpus came back with interesting metrics about language, grammer, word usage and more, using the computers and a giant data set to analyze large trends, ideas, and other interesting bits about the English language and published book culture over time.
Your e-mails are indeed private communication, rules the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and thus require warrants to be searched, rather than the lower standard of a court order.
The presence of wind turbines around crops may benefit them in several subtle ways, including allowing them to shed heat faster than normal.
Last out, Word Lens, an application that translates the words within images.
In opinions, Why "No Labels" will do nothing, because it's still lobbyists likely backed by corporations, isntead of actual populism. Which is a far better argument than Mr. Will's insistence that it won't work because bitter partisanship is a necessary part of politics and communication of information about oneself.
The necessity of making sure your feminist allies, especially your male feminist allies, are actually behaving as feminists, to prevent situations down the road where the supposed ally crosses boundaries or engages in sexual assault.
A Republican member of the FCC complains that the FCC will be reaching too far in attempting to determine rules to keep Internet access open, free, and mostly unregulated. Of course, as we're finding with Wikileaks, "free" is more of a sursanure than anything, as governments can and will direct their attacks toward making sure things they don't like disappear off the Internet or have DNS errors.
Ms. Strassel praises the Republicans for how their wall of NO stopped an omnibus spending bill from going through, calling it a victory for their promises of fiscal responsibility, and that they should continue to resist earmarks and any other sort of spending so that they can get their way in the political process. In other words, good job, party of NO! Keep doing that thing like you've been doing! Stall the government until you get your way!
Mr. Bandow rants against jusicial activism as an end-around the process of amending the Constitution, legislators not forcing each other to find the Constitutional justification for their laws, and feels that the Constitution is a figurehead that the imperialists and the judicial activists hide behind, and all the stuff being done in this Administration is an example of how things have gone wrong. To fix the problem, he suggests that judges no longer receive lifetime tenure, which will nicely prevent them from just deciding all sorts of things that they think are right and make them actually the constitution. Mr. Williams tacks on some additional originalist matter, specifically on the case of the individual insurance mandate.
Colonel Isenhower paints a picture of democratic progress in Iraq, despite what people might believe about the venture itself. Which is nice and pleasant. Mr. Trzupek measures progress through the removal of sanctions, the return of control of oil to the Iraqi people and the official end of oil-for-food, one of the four reasons why the Bush Administration tried to justify going to Iraq. And here I thought Mr. Trzupek shunned and scorned international actions like this and considered them to have no weight. I was wrong.
And how. Throwing their hats into the Worst Persons Derby tonight, Mr. Ahlert constructs the Wikileaks cables in as negative a light as he can create so as to blame the current administration fully for how things are going in the Concept War and the Land Wars in Asia, consigning the previous administrator mostly to the Hagigoraphy Hole, because nobody officially is saying, "Why yes, al-Qaeda is right and we are fighting Islam, the Bloodthirsty Religion that seeks to conquer and kill us all."
Mr. Rove wins the silver medal for painting Barack Obama as a negative figure with divisive rhetoric and extreme partisanship, without ever mentioning at all how much the Republican Party has contributed to that negative rhetoric through intransigence and their own brand of negative rhetoric. Mr. Rove's insistence that the President's support from independents depends on his positive attitude might be better tempered by looking at the attitude of the American people. Oh, wait, it looks like the American people want the President to be a fighter and to break the wall of Republicans to get important stuff done.
But we have two winners tonight. Mr. Giles starts with offensive stereotypes about gay and lesbian people on why they would want to be in the military, as well as ascribing to all gay soldiers a desire to Kill the Bloodthirsty Religion that would kill them as their reason for joining up, and then gets to his column about how gay men and lesbians should not be open in the service because it will be a distraction to the straight troops and they'll all leave because they don't want to be around a fag. (Despite not actually writing the word, it's painted throughout the entire column. - As for using fag, well, I was trying to figure out what the current analogue of "nigger", applied to QUILTBAG people, was, and that was the best I could come up with. If you've got one that's better, let me know so that I can change it to get the proper impact.)
Sharing in the dishonor is Mr. Pendry, who starts on the slippery slope and makes sure it's greased well all the way down, claiming that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell will lead to gay-American heritage days, gays and lesbians becoming a protected minority class with special rights straight people don't have, the inclusion of orientation on government forms (and the inevitable inclusion of the pedophile option, because that's a sexual orientation, too), forcing straight soldiers to lie about whether they're okay with gay people in the military, and oh, by the way, those activist fags should shut up, because we dismiss more people for being overweight than we do for being gay, despite both of those conditions making someone unfit for service. It's a moral issue, he whines, and we're going to lose good servicepeople because they can't accept their morality being compromised by openly gay people being in the service. To which we say, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
Mr. Pendry and Mr. Giles both believe there will be some sort of mass exodus of soldiers once gay and lesbian soldiers can start serving openly. If that's the case, then perhaps one should wonder why we were accepting people who a) can't follow orders, and b) can't work together with other soldiers to accomplish necessary tasks. Seems to me that both of those qualities are necessary for a good and functioning army. If there are mass resignations, then we're getting rid of dead wood that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Furthermore, I don't know whose morals you're talking about, Mr. Pendry, but if you're assuming the rest of us share the same fundamentalist Christianity that you do, you're sorely mistaken. I know a lot of people whose morality says that forcing gay and lesbians soldiers to hide themselves because you don't want to admit they exist is immoral. That comparing gay and lesbian soldiers to pedophiles is demeaning, insulting, and untrue. Think, Mr. Pendry, about what the criteria laid out for you as to how the sheep and the goats will be separated at the judgement.
Last for tonight, the cost of the 12 Days of Christmas, and the cost of items from an alternate and much happier song.
For those of you flying, enjoy the telegram sent to indicate the success of the Wright Brothers flight. Oh, and for those of you being forced to choose between a porno machine and a pat-down, remember that as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well, or in some cases, it turns out something relatively low-tech can defeat high-tech. Oh, and wearing a turban will get you searched. Even if you're the Indian envoy to the United Nations, and your Sikh turban has nothing to do with the terrorists.
In the "Body issues and unrealistic standards" department, some salient points about how people who are in great shape do not look like fitness models, nor should people who aspire to fitness make fitness model physique their goals. But the best part of that is the photo montage of Olympic athletes - everything from the under-5 foot, under 100-pound gymnasts to the tall basketball players and the stocky hammer tossers. Each of them in excellent fitness condition, and almost none of them looking like they're a model.
Something that should be no surprise to anyone - According to a study released by World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, the more you are exposed to Fox News programming, the more misinformed you are, regardless of what part of the political spectrum you sit on. Other networks did not fare well, either, but Fox was consistently the worst of the worst, and usually on issues that the Republican Party has a vested interest in making sure people stay misinformed on. This is why they say "Fair and Balanced" rather than "Honest and Truthful", which is what everyone should be striving for.
Finally, The Dead Pool required the services of Blake Edwards, director of many comedies including "The Pink Panther" and "Victor/Victoria", on 16 December, at 88 years of age.
Out in the world today, Bibery succeeds in getting bribery charge dropped, as Richard Cheney settles so as not to have to stand trial.
The suggestion that Europe will face rising austerity protests in the next year is tempered by the assumption that they, like all other protests, will eventually peter out and the government will be abl to do what it wanted anyway. Considering it's not the corporations that are protesting, I think that analysis will be unfortunately right. Even if you could show everyone how financial institutions were responsible for the domino collapse. (Although that one is not a complete picture by any means.)
Wikileaks is cleared of having done anything illegal under Australian law. Perhaps there's the next server safe haven?
Mr. Moore benefits from Wikileaks by pointing out that the State Department passes around things it knows are lies and marks them as secret, perhaps for them to be leaked later and have the mainstream media run it without reseraching.
The two Koreas continue to agitate each other, with the South conducting arms drills in the face of threatened retaliation.
The rules for night time raids in Afghanistan have been changed, mostly as an olive branch to Afghan President Karzai and the soreness that comes from civilians afflicted by night attacks.
Finally, The Roma people may be the last ghettoized minority of Europe, being pushed into substandard official settlements and then left there without sufficient maintenance or anything else to let them live well, while also being monitored.
Domestically, it's hits and misses for the government. The good bit - the Senate passed the stand alone Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal bill, sending it up to the President, who will sign it to spike the policy and allow people to be open about their sexual preferences. I hope that he also keeps a close eye on the Marine Corps and makes sure they abide, since their commandant is publcly on the record about how much he thinks gays are bad for good order.
So that's the good thing. The bad things follow, though - apparently, Republicans in the House think it is okay to stall a bill claiming child marriage is a human rights violation and giving some funding to combat it because...it gives money and would...increase abortions? And this one passed the Senate unanimously. Is this the preview of things to come? We haven't really resolved the clergy and children thing here - settlements instead of full-fledged trials may be the new order of things, but it does make you wonder if someone's hiding something they don't want to admit to in voting against the bill for such a flimsy reason.
Furthermore, cloture fails in the Senate on the DREAM Act, proving Republicans thoroughly intend to punish children for the sins of their parents. And that they don't care whether or not a bill was first proposed by a Republican in a Republican Congress - if it hurts Barack Obama, that's how they're going to vote.
And then, the failure of the bill to get medical care for first responders to the 11 September attacks indicates that Republicans also don't care about providing for people who are American heroes, over posturing on whether such bills add to the deficit. This, after the tax cut compromise that adds billions of deficit spending to make up for the tax cuts.
That's not the worst of it - thanks to Wikileaks, we now know what caused "colony collapse disoreder" - the use of clothianidin, a pesticide that kills honey bees that consume it from flowers and crops they attempt to pollinate. The EPA allowed Bayer to continue using the pesticide despite reports from its own scientists that it was highly toxic to honey bees.
And despite all of this, the [BLEEP] [HONK] [FOGHORN] [LEGHORN] in Washington are complaining that they're working through the holidays. If they hadn't decided their main tactic was to stall, delay, and obstruct, maybe they could have gone home for the break with all the necessary legislation passed. As it is, sucks to be you, buckoes. Work until you're done and no sooner. At least some of you have the decency to say the deal to make sure the rich get bonus tax breaks was morally troubling, even if you think it was necessary to get what you wanted, too.
A necessity when looking at the incoming Speaker - do his tears match his actions? Is he crying because he's genuinely concerned about things and is working to fix them, or is he doing it because he thinks it will stave off the angry hordes who will storm his castle when they find out his record is solidly against them?
The Justice Department is finally suing BP and other companies regarding the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill.
The current administration watns people to be aware of what to do in case of a nuclear detonation in the United States, even though the best way to avoid such things is if there were no nuclear devices to be detonated in such a manner.
Finally, despite there being no way to verify this information, CBS (and probably others) are trumpeting that captured insurgents said there were holiday plots to attack the United States. There's no way of knowing if its true, yet here we have the "news" telling us about it. Yet another way that this is "next verse, same as the first" on an important issue - scaring the people unncessarily with stories of phantoms that never were.
In technology, Yahoo! is letting go of its interest in services such as Dei.icio.us and Altavista as cost-cutting measures.
If you're going to be against book piracy, it helps to not have committed music or fashion piracy and be okay with that.
Ms. Levin is unimpressed with how Google's ads react to words in e-mail that you send, considering it a form of spying and intrusion on privacy. We do wonder what other parts of he digital life she hasn't noticed that she's been spied on for advertising purposes that she finds Gmail intrusive, but she does have a point. And if she wants an upped creep factor, Google released Body Browser, an interactive exhibit that lets you get under someone's skin.
Staying on the Google Train, however, some reserach that took some part of the Google books corpus came back with interesting metrics about language, grammer, word usage and more, using the computers and a giant data set to analyze large trends, ideas, and other interesting bits about the English language and published book culture over time.
Your e-mails are indeed private communication, rules the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and thus require warrants to be searched, rather than the lower standard of a court order.
The presence of wind turbines around crops may benefit them in several subtle ways, including allowing them to shed heat faster than normal.
Last out, Word Lens, an application that translates the words within images.
In opinions, Why "No Labels" will do nothing, because it's still lobbyists likely backed by corporations, isntead of actual populism. Which is a far better argument than Mr. Will's insistence that it won't work because bitter partisanship is a necessary part of politics and communication of information about oneself.
The necessity of making sure your feminist allies, especially your male feminist allies, are actually behaving as feminists, to prevent situations down the road where the supposed ally crosses boundaries or engages in sexual assault.
A Republican member of the FCC complains that the FCC will be reaching too far in attempting to determine rules to keep Internet access open, free, and mostly unregulated. Of course, as we're finding with Wikileaks, "free" is more of a sursanure than anything, as governments can and will direct their attacks toward making sure things they don't like disappear off the Internet or have DNS errors.
Ms. Strassel praises the Republicans for how their wall of NO stopped an omnibus spending bill from going through, calling it a victory for their promises of fiscal responsibility, and that they should continue to resist earmarks and any other sort of spending so that they can get their way in the political process. In other words, good job, party of NO! Keep doing that thing like you've been doing! Stall the government until you get your way!
Mr. Bandow rants against jusicial activism as an end-around the process of amending the Constitution, legislators not forcing each other to find the Constitutional justification for their laws, and feels that the Constitution is a figurehead that the imperialists and the judicial activists hide behind, and all the stuff being done in this Administration is an example of how things have gone wrong. To fix the problem, he suggests that judges no longer receive lifetime tenure, which will nicely prevent them from just deciding all sorts of things that they think are right and make them actually the constitution. Mr. Williams tacks on some additional originalist matter, specifically on the case of the individual insurance mandate.
Colonel Isenhower paints a picture of democratic progress in Iraq, despite what people might believe about the venture itself. Which is nice and pleasant. Mr. Trzupek measures progress through the removal of sanctions, the return of control of oil to the Iraqi people and the official end of oil-for-food, one of the four reasons why the Bush Administration tried to justify going to Iraq. And here I thought Mr. Trzupek shunned and scorned international actions like this and considered them to have no weight. I was wrong.
And how. Throwing their hats into the Worst Persons Derby tonight, Mr. Ahlert constructs the Wikileaks cables in as negative a light as he can create so as to blame the current administration fully for how things are going in the Concept War and the Land Wars in Asia, consigning the previous administrator mostly to the Hagigoraphy Hole, because nobody officially is saying, "Why yes, al-Qaeda is right and we are fighting Islam, the Bloodthirsty Religion that seeks to conquer and kill us all."
Mr. Rove wins the silver medal for painting Barack Obama as a negative figure with divisive rhetoric and extreme partisanship, without ever mentioning at all how much the Republican Party has contributed to that negative rhetoric through intransigence and their own brand of negative rhetoric. Mr. Rove's insistence that the President's support from independents depends on his positive attitude might be better tempered by looking at the attitude of the American people. Oh, wait, it looks like the American people want the President to be a fighter and to break the wall of Republicans to get important stuff done.
But we have two winners tonight. Mr. Giles starts with offensive stereotypes about gay and lesbian people on why they would want to be in the military, as well as ascribing to all gay soldiers a desire to Kill the Bloodthirsty Religion that would kill them as their reason for joining up, and then gets to his column about how gay men and lesbians should not be open in the service because it will be a distraction to the straight troops and they'll all leave because they don't want to be around a fag. (Despite not actually writing the word, it's painted throughout the entire column. - As for using fag, well, I was trying to figure out what the current analogue of "nigger", applied to QUILTBAG people, was, and that was the best I could come up with. If you've got one that's better, let me know so that I can change it to get the proper impact.)
Sharing in the dishonor is Mr. Pendry, who starts on the slippery slope and makes sure it's greased well all the way down, claiming that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell will lead to gay-American heritage days, gays and lesbians becoming a protected minority class with special rights straight people don't have, the inclusion of orientation on government forms (and the inevitable inclusion of the pedophile option, because that's a sexual orientation, too), forcing straight soldiers to lie about whether they're okay with gay people in the military, and oh, by the way, those activist fags should shut up, because we dismiss more people for being overweight than we do for being gay, despite both of those conditions making someone unfit for service. It's a moral issue, he whines, and we're going to lose good servicepeople because they can't accept their morality being compromised by openly gay people being in the service. To which we say, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
Mr. Pendry and Mr. Giles both believe there will be some sort of mass exodus of soldiers once gay and lesbian soldiers can start serving openly. If that's the case, then perhaps one should wonder why we were accepting people who a) can't follow orders, and b) can't work together with other soldiers to accomplish necessary tasks. Seems to me that both of those qualities are necessary for a good and functioning army. If there are mass resignations, then we're getting rid of dead wood that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Furthermore, I don't know whose morals you're talking about, Mr. Pendry, but if you're assuming the rest of us share the same fundamentalist Christianity that you do, you're sorely mistaken. I know a lot of people whose morality says that forcing gay and lesbians soldiers to hide themselves because you don't want to admit they exist is immoral. That comparing gay and lesbian soldiers to pedophiles is demeaning, insulting, and untrue. Think, Mr. Pendry, about what the criteria laid out for you as to how the sheep and the goats will be separated at the judgement.
Last for tonight, the cost of the 12 Days of Christmas, and the cost of items from an alternate and much happier song.
