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G'morning, everyone. Let's get started on a happy note with Carol Spinney saying how much he loves to be a Muppeter, Jim Henson's ideas for Swedish chef sketches, and a letter claiming that Count von Count, as a representation of Dracula, is poisoning children's minds so that they won't run away from monsters in their lives. Or, perhaps, it turned them all into Twilight fans. But, that last letter shows that THINK OF THE CHILDRENS people have been around for some time, even before the Internet allowed us to see them and report on them in almost real-time, and that yes, even Sesame Street can be accused of promoting an immoral agenda. (We're waiting for the letter to Fred Rogers accusing him of something like that.)
Out in the world today, Canada's border patrol agency asserted that it will enter shelters and safe spaces for abused women and check and enforce documentation status on those women, making those women have to run the risk of being deported if they want to get away from abuse. The United Kingdom may order a woman with learning disabilities sterilized after she gives birth to another child, arguing that she's not competent enough to give consent to sexual activity or make decisions about birth control.
And then there are the issues that women doing jobs face, like the likelihood being higher that a female U.S. soldier will be raped by another soldier than killed by enemy fire. Or the open secret that women correspondents and reporters are routinely sexually assaulted in the course of their work or threatened with it. The most recent example of this is Lara Logan assaulted on the streets of Egypt while reporting from there. Now, the sane response to the news of such an attack would be to decry the perpretrators and make sure that other correspondents are able to protect themselves. What has happened, instead, is a frenzy of victim blaming because Lara Logan is attractive and may have had sexual partners in her private life, or decnouncing the Egyptian people or Islam as savagery and uncivilized, or concern trolling about what life would be like for women after the regime. For being a supposedly enlightened and progressive nation, we've got some really regressive commentary about women.
Of course, it's not just commentators that are taking regressive stances. Here in the United States, despite their promises that they really just want to work on jobs, the Republican Party is going full-bore with bills to restrict abortion services and coverage, in just about as many ways, bills, budgets, and legislative tricks as they can accomplish. And that's in addition to the direct threats of violence against those doctors who are willing to provide abortions to those who need them and the legislators that look to be trying to make it legal for relatives of a woman who got an abortion to kill the doctor that provided or tried to provide it.
Elsewhere, the chief witness claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has admitted he lief to the United States to get them to invade and get rid of Saddam Hussein. And those lies were exposed before the invasion happened. So all of Iraq is now George W. Bush's decision, and it was all based on provable lies. Eight years of lost blood and treasure, lives taken and money spent, all for lies. The results may end up being good, but the means to those ends were unacceptable.
Refugees from Tunisia are starting to strain the ability and capacity of European nations receiving them. Elsewhere, in response to the wave of protests engulfing the region, the leaders of several nations in the affected areas will meet in Baghdad, and protestors in Bahrain continued to call for their own regime change. This one could be another sticky wicket for the United States, as Bahrain has been the home to the 5th Fleet of the United States Navy, and a change in government there might have them seeking another haven to weigh anchor.
In Afghanistan, the slower track of training officers is hampering the ability of the Afghan army to assume control.
And finally, the question of whether US combat brigades, and how many, will remain in Europe remains unsolved.
Domestically, Mississippi may honor an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan on a commemorative license plate - continuing the tradition of being proud of one's Confederate heritage and its insistence that black people be slaves forever instead of learning from that history.
Speaking of not learning lessons, thirteen states are trying to follow in Oklahoma's lead and prohibit the use of international or Sharia law in United States courtrooms, buying into the mistaken belief that The Bloodthirsty Religion will trying to make their religious law part of US law and then eventually have it supercede US law, or that judges are using international decisions that have no US precedent when deciding cases of United States law.
And then, in the utter Facepalm department, A Kansas State legislator claimed that she could tell someone was an undocumented worker because they had darker skin, and Missouri wants to minimize child labor laws. Because the under-sixteen are an important economic resource and should be rushed into the workforce to work as long as they can without oversight. At least in Wisconsin they only try to kill the public sector by killing their ability to unionize, with a threat of the National Guard if necessary, while also extracting more money from them.
The American Civil Liberties Union highlights the practice by many schools to filter QUILTBAG-positive websites (with the threat that their activities are being monitored and reported) while allowing QUILTBAG-negative websites to go sailing through the filter. Viewpoint discrimination...how nice. Makes me think the filtering companies have those sites filtered as their defaults, and most school systems don't bother to check or change them, which they should.
A new poll from Public Policy indicates that a majority of people likely to vote in the Republican primaries of next year are Birthers or Birther-friendly. That changes the complexion of who they will be endorsing in such a primary - weirdly, it ends up being Mike Huckabee as the front-runner, with Mitt Romney in second. Although, among the Birthers, Sarah Palin has significant support. Among everyone else, however, she's not seen as Presidential material. The field of candidates for GOP 2012 is going to be very interesting - plus, with this new data, it's even less likely that elected Republicans and those who want to be elected Republicans will attempt to curb the Birther insanity - it's now become the way you shore up with your base. Along with being rabidly anti-women's rights, anti-QUILTBAG, and so far in a corporation's pocket that anyone can see the marionette strings.
Finally, A United States naval admiral dismissed the possibility of newly-developed Chinese missile technology as a threat to the carrier ships that are the backbone of the US navy.
In technology, IBM's Watson versus two very good humans in Jeopardy! - at the end of the first round, it appears that Watson is holding his own. Watson would go on to win the first game, although he did not answer the Final Jeopardy question correctly, proving that some questions that are easy for humans to parse can still be tricky to a machine that has certain assumptions about how the game works. That said, it did have the right answer as its number two choice, and the confidence was low, so the people in charge of Watson still consider it to be a positive development. Plus, Watson bet intelligently, so they're pleased with that.
A toy from Japanese company Tomi will create sounds and music when two-four people touch the device and then touch each other.
Finally, another possible decentralized Internet idea - with servers running FOSS that simply plug into a wall outlet and are otherwise forgotten about.
In opinions, Mr. McCullough fires an opening volley against libertarians at the CPAC conference, claiming their presence made the straw poll of contenders a laughingstock and that libertarians are responsible for social conservatives departing the scene. To the point of claiming that the libertarians were no better than animals and their ideas and ideals are anathema to True Conservatism, which defends marriage and conservatism against the inclusion of LGBT folk, considers the wars and authoritarian exercises started by the previous administrator to be entirely justified, and believes that The Bloodthirsty Religion is a threat that must be taken seriously and all people doing something that might be fighting that cause should be worshiped and not criticized.
Ms. Parker takes the social conservative theme and goes with it, claiming that there can be no such thing as a gay conservative, because gays reject God, his commandments, and the eternal truths that were imparted from God to all of us by being gay, making up a world that is different from reality, like liberals do, redefining things to suit their own purposes. There's the obvious and spiked pit of the True Scotsman fallacy Ms. Parker flings herself headlong into in a very Marcie-from-Peanuts sort of way as the first reason why Ms. Parker should be dismissed, but the second is that her counterexamples are right in front of her, every day of her life. There are gay Republicans utterly devoted to the cause of their own destruction and self-flagellating gay religious men and women who go to places like "ex-gay therapy" because they believe they shouldn't exist as they are, that their orientation is a curse or a demon or something else to be purged because God wills it. They are accepting that world you claim they reject and are doing all sorts of actions to try and bring themselves into the holy group instead of the sinners. There are gay conservatives, Ms. Parker. To claim they don't exist, or that they can't exist, is to insult them. It is also an insult to the very God and his immutable rules you claim to speak for - love and brotherhood are the greatest commandments of the Law in the Christian tradition, the rabbis are voluminous in their commentary on exactly what G-d meant when he spoke to the people, and there are extensive commentaries about the Prophet and the intent of what G-d said to him, as well. Take care of that plank before you talk about how specks should be banned from your sphere of the world.
For the same problem in a different context, the writers of Glee are taken to task for having one of their characters question whether or not bisexuality is real. It's not productive to try and deny the reality in front of you, and unless written remarkably well, the whole thing's probably going to crash and burn, whether musically or not.
Elsewhere, Mr. Turow explains yet again all the reasons why cutting public library funding in a recession is cutting off your face to spite your nose.
On a very different subject, Mr. Turow vigorously defends the idea of copyright against piracy.
The WSJ gives a raspberry to the proposed budget from the President, calling it unserious and hoping that the House Republicans can do a lot better with their own proposed budget. Well...maybe they will, or maybe they'll continue to insist that the Defense Department spend money on things the Pentagon has repeatedly said they don't want.
With myopic focus, Mr. Brown reduces all of the protests in the Middle East down to one thing - Iran. He's all for all the unrest if it destabilizes or makes Iran weaker and off-balance. Nothing at all about freedom and democracy except in how it relates to getting rid of the Iranian regime. We're glad you think that tree is particularly interesting, but there's a whole forest, Mr. Brown.
Fanmail to Richard Dawkins after a piece he published blaming Gerin Oil (a product of Nacirema and other places) for all the world's troubles and a response to a letter politely asking for behavioral changes at a sport stadium that claimed the writer should know his signature is being forged.
And last for tonight, Mr. Bryan Fischer, homophobe, explains that the reason the members of Pochantas's nation were cruelly slaughtered was because they chose not to become White Christians and abandon their culture and religion entirely in favor of the conqueror's culture and religion, after having been proven savages that stole without any regard for private property.
Out in the world today, Canada's border patrol agency asserted that it will enter shelters and safe spaces for abused women and check and enforce documentation status on those women, making those women have to run the risk of being deported if they want to get away from abuse. The United Kingdom may order a woman with learning disabilities sterilized after she gives birth to another child, arguing that she's not competent enough to give consent to sexual activity or make decisions about birth control.
And then there are the issues that women doing jobs face, like the likelihood being higher that a female U.S. soldier will be raped by another soldier than killed by enemy fire. Or the open secret that women correspondents and reporters are routinely sexually assaulted in the course of their work or threatened with it. The most recent example of this is Lara Logan assaulted on the streets of Egypt while reporting from there. Now, the sane response to the news of such an attack would be to decry the perpretrators and make sure that other correspondents are able to protect themselves. What has happened, instead, is a frenzy of victim blaming because Lara Logan is attractive and may have had sexual partners in her private life, or decnouncing the Egyptian people or Islam as savagery and uncivilized, or concern trolling about what life would be like for women after the regime. For being a supposedly enlightened and progressive nation, we've got some really regressive commentary about women.
Of course, it's not just commentators that are taking regressive stances. Here in the United States, despite their promises that they really just want to work on jobs, the Republican Party is going full-bore with bills to restrict abortion services and coverage, in just about as many ways, bills, budgets, and legislative tricks as they can accomplish. And that's in addition to the direct threats of violence against those doctors who are willing to provide abortions to those who need them and the legislators that look to be trying to make it legal for relatives of a woman who got an abortion to kill the doctor that provided or tried to provide it.
Elsewhere, the chief witness claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has admitted he lief to the United States to get them to invade and get rid of Saddam Hussein. And those lies were exposed before the invasion happened. So all of Iraq is now George W. Bush's decision, and it was all based on provable lies. Eight years of lost blood and treasure, lives taken and money spent, all for lies. The results may end up being good, but the means to those ends were unacceptable.
Refugees from Tunisia are starting to strain the ability and capacity of European nations receiving them. Elsewhere, in response to the wave of protests engulfing the region, the leaders of several nations in the affected areas will meet in Baghdad, and protestors in Bahrain continued to call for their own regime change. This one could be another sticky wicket for the United States, as Bahrain has been the home to the 5th Fleet of the United States Navy, and a change in government there might have them seeking another haven to weigh anchor.
In Afghanistan, the slower track of training officers is hampering the ability of the Afghan army to assume control.
And finally, the question of whether US combat brigades, and how many, will remain in Europe remains unsolved.
Domestically, Mississippi may honor an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan on a commemorative license plate - continuing the tradition of being proud of one's Confederate heritage and its insistence that black people be slaves forever instead of learning from that history.
Speaking of not learning lessons, thirteen states are trying to follow in Oklahoma's lead and prohibit the use of international or Sharia law in United States courtrooms, buying into the mistaken belief that The Bloodthirsty Religion will trying to make their religious law part of US law and then eventually have it supercede US law, or that judges are using international decisions that have no US precedent when deciding cases of United States law.
And then, in the utter Facepalm department, A Kansas State legislator claimed that she could tell someone was an undocumented worker because they had darker skin, and Missouri wants to minimize child labor laws. Because the under-sixteen are an important economic resource and should be rushed into the workforce to work as long as they can without oversight. At least in Wisconsin they only try to kill the public sector by killing their ability to unionize, with a threat of the National Guard if necessary, while also extracting more money from them.
The American Civil Liberties Union highlights the practice by many schools to filter QUILTBAG-positive websites (with the threat that their activities are being monitored and reported) while allowing QUILTBAG-negative websites to go sailing through the filter. Viewpoint discrimination...how nice. Makes me think the filtering companies have those sites filtered as their defaults, and most school systems don't bother to check or change them, which they should.
A new poll from Public Policy indicates that a majority of people likely to vote in the Republican primaries of next year are Birthers or Birther-friendly. That changes the complexion of who they will be endorsing in such a primary - weirdly, it ends up being Mike Huckabee as the front-runner, with Mitt Romney in second. Although, among the Birthers, Sarah Palin has significant support. Among everyone else, however, she's not seen as Presidential material. The field of candidates for GOP 2012 is going to be very interesting - plus, with this new data, it's even less likely that elected Republicans and those who want to be elected Republicans will attempt to curb the Birther insanity - it's now become the way you shore up with your base. Along with being rabidly anti-women's rights, anti-QUILTBAG, and so far in a corporation's pocket that anyone can see the marionette strings.
Finally, A United States naval admiral dismissed the possibility of newly-developed Chinese missile technology as a threat to the carrier ships that are the backbone of the US navy.
In technology, IBM's Watson versus two very good humans in Jeopardy! - at the end of the first round, it appears that Watson is holding his own. Watson would go on to win the first game, although he did not answer the Final Jeopardy question correctly, proving that some questions that are easy for humans to parse can still be tricky to a machine that has certain assumptions about how the game works. That said, it did have the right answer as its number two choice, and the confidence was low, so the people in charge of Watson still consider it to be a positive development. Plus, Watson bet intelligently, so they're pleased with that.
A toy from Japanese company Tomi will create sounds and music when two-four people touch the device and then touch each other.
Finally, another possible decentralized Internet idea - with servers running FOSS that simply plug into a wall outlet and are otherwise forgotten about.
In opinions, Mr. McCullough fires an opening volley against libertarians at the CPAC conference, claiming their presence made the straw poll of contenders a laughingstock and that libertarians are responsible for social conservatives departing the scene. To the point of claiming that the libertarians were no better than animals and their ideas and ideals are anathema to True Conservatism, which defends marriage and conservatism against the inclusion of LGBT folk, considers the wars and authoritarian exercises started by the previous administrator to be entirely justified, and believes that The Bloodthirsty Religion is a threat that must be taken seriously and all people doing something that might be fighting that cause should be worshiped and not criticized.
Ms. Parker takes the social conservative theme and goes with it, claiming that there can be no such thing as a gay conservative, because gays reject God, his commandments, and the eternal truths that were imparted from God to all of us by being gay, making up a world that is different from reality, like liberals do, redefining things to suit their own purposes. There's the obvious and spiked pit of the True Scotsman fallacy Ms. Parker flings herself headlong into in a very Marcie-from-Peanuts sort of way as the first reason why Ms. Parker should be dismissed, but the second is that her counterexamples are right in front of her, every day of her life. There are gay Republicans utterly devoted to the cause of their own destruction and self-flagellating gay religious men and women who go to places like "ex-gay therapy" because they believe they shouldn't exist as they are, that their orientation is a curse or a demon or something else to be purged because God wills it. They are accepting that world you claim they reject and are doing all sorts of actions to try and bring themselves into the holy group instead of the sinners. There are gay conservatives, Ms. Parker. To claim they don't exist, or that they can't exist, is to insult them. It is also an insult to the very God and his immutable rules you claim to speak for - love and brotherhood are the greatest commandments of the Law in the Christian tradition, the rabbis are voluminous in their commentary on exactly what G-d meant when he spoke to the people, and there are extensive commentaries about the Prophet and the intent of what G-d said to him, as well. Take care of that plank before you talk about how specks should be banned from your sphere of the world.
For the same problem in a different context, the writers of Glee are taken to task for having one of their characters question whether or not bisexuality is real. It's not productive to try and deny the reality in front of you, and unless written remarkably well, the whole thing's probably going to crash and burn, whether musically or not.
Elsewhere, Mr. Turow explains yet again all the reasons why cutting public library funding in a recession is cutting off your face to spite your nose.
On a very different subject, Mr. Turow vigorously defends the idea of copyright against piracy.
The WSJ gives a raspberry to the proposed budget from the President, calling it unserious and hoping that the House Republicans can do a lot better with their own proposed budget. Well...maybe they will, or maybe they'll continue to insist that the Defense Department spend money on things the Pentagon has repeatedly said they don't want.
With myopic focus, Mr. Brown reduces all of the protests in the Middle East down to one thing - Iran. He's all for all the unrest if it destabilizes or makes Iran weaker and off-balance. Nothing at all about freedom and democracy except in how it relates to getting rid of the Iranian regime. We're glad you think that tree is particularly interesting, but there's a whole forest, Mr. Brown.
Fanmail to Richard Dawkins after a piece he published blaming Gerin Oil (a product of Nacirema and other places) for all the world's troubles and a response to a letter politely asking for behavioral changes at a sport stadium that claimed the writer should know his signature is being forged.
And last for tonight, Mr. Bryan Fischer, homophobe, explains that the reason the members of Pochantas's nation were cruelly slaughtered was because they chose not to become White Christians and abandon their culture and religion entirely in favor of the conqueror's culture and religion, after having been proven savages that stole without any regard for private property.
