![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We begin today with Inspiration from Mr. Ray Bradbury, insisting that being yourself and loving what you love is the only way to live. Furthermore, a mural of the fantastic childrens' author and illustrator Maurice Sendak is being restored in a museum dedicated to his work. And finally, when you ask the American people, they mostly think that public broadcasting deserves government funding and support.
The Dead Pool claims Frank W. Buckles, the last known United States veteran of the First Great War, at 110 years of age.
The African continent continues to have protests, along with Asia and the Middle East. It's an explosion of unrest and demands for better government and conditions. Notable highlights include Tunisia's Prime Minister resigning amidst demands for his ouster, Iraq's PM giving his government an ultimatum - improve in 100 days or risk being fired, and an argument that might make Xunzi nod in approval - why the international community's best option for ending the atrocities in Libya is to provide Qadaffi with an exit from Libya, as opposed to more bloody and civilian-harming options being called for, like immediate no-fly zone enforcement. "When they are about to die, what can they not do? They will exert their full strength. When the troops are in desperate situations, they fear nothing;...When there are no other alternatives, they will fight." (Xunzi, Art of War, Chap 11) Thus, giving an out makes it possible for them to flee without standing and fighting to the last person. President Obama approves of the idea of getting Qaddafi out as soon as possible, and his government is starting to seize assets and deploy military might near the country.
It's inspiring in a lot of ways - in Egypt, men and women participated in the demonstrations, showing signs of equality in a society that was normaly heavily male-dominated. In El Salvador, women routinely take front-line roles as powerful speakers to advocate for conserving the environment and the natural resources.
Wisconsin update: the librarians joined in person, although their spirit has always been aligned with the protests, as this support statement from the president of the Wisconsin Library Association makes clear. The President of the Polish union organization Solidarity expressed his support for the Wisconsin protests as well, a significant move considering Solidarity was one of the things that helped to topple the Soviet Union. On Sunday, the Capitol building was to be closed down and all the protesters evicted for a moment, but sensing shenanigans, protesters stayed in and eventually won themselves the right to stay past the scheduled closing time. After the closing, the building re-opened, with newly-installed metal detectors, allowing persons back in, separated by purpose, and searching their bags. So at least the supposed shenanigans did not turn out to be a true effort to silence the protest voices. Or so we thought. Ms Maddow seemed to beleive that protesters were still being shut out of the building, and reports indicate that a judge has issued a restraining order against the re-opening of the Capitol Building to the protesters. In other words, the Law just told the People they could not as for a redress of grievances by peacefully occupying the place of business of their elected representatives. Someone else see a problem?
Thankfully, the police do not have as dim a view of the protesters as this commenter does, and is not resorting to petty things like requiring the Democratic staffers to have the Republican leader sign their timesheets and denying them access to the office copy machines or accusing the doctors providing sick notes to the protesters of defrauding the taxpayer for having done so, because they did not examine their patients first. They continue to be absolutely cool about the entire affair.
We still have plenty of people who think collective bargaining for unions is a hindrance to economic activity, causes budget crises everywhere with their ridiculous demands, and liken it to the forbidden Trusts because collective bargaining allows union people to "collude" on their wages and benefits.
After the fake Koch affair, one would think that our media outlets would smarten up and make sure everything they ran was true, but that's not the case - the New York Times either got punked or deliberately attempted to advance the agends of Governor Walker, by interviewing someone who's never been in a union and representing him as a union guy. At least Mr. Krugman, also writing in the Times, points out all the devastating consequences of such a bill, including the part that would have let the governor privatize the power system at sell it off in no-bid contracts. Finally, there's been serious misleading about what the compensation package fight is actually doing - the employees are having their salaries and total compensation cut, rather than some sort of extra gift being reduced in value. Through all of this, Governor Walker is convinced he's right and that he will win.
Elsewhere, the Republican Party advocated against removing tax breaks for the sport of NASCAR, and the Pentagon insisted that its sponsorship of a stock car vehicle helped military recruitment. Keep in mind, as well, that many of the largest corporations, including the ones that took taxpayer dollars in bailouts, continue to pay zero taxes on their income, profits, or anything else, and still get generous subsidies to boot.
And if anyone says word one about how public services can be run mostly by volunteers or as charitable organizations relying on the private sector's table scraps, I will remind you that not only has it been done before, once the organizations stopped having to beg for every scrap they could get just to stay afloat, they turned out to be very good at the job they were supposed to be doing in the first place. Furthermore, your share of taxes that funds most public services is negligible - the economy of scale is freakin' huge. Those of you complaining about having to pay taxes with your exorbitant incomes, you can afford to shoulder several other people's tax burdens, too, most likely, so that the people who really do need every dollar can use it.
That won't stop onservative publications from lauding the possibility that New Hampshire might become a right-to-work state so that they can use it against the other, more liberal, states in the region and try to convince us that such a conservative paradise is Inherently Superior.
Out in the world not currently in protest, India is looking to create a home-grown university system to rival the Ivy Leagues of the United States Northeast. Also looking to improve education is Azerbaijan, using their petrodollar wealth to improve the country's public schooling system. There's a long way to go, according to the voices on the ground, but they're glad for the help they've been getting so far.
A plan to rename a street in Berlin after The Great Saint Regan met with some opposition over where to place the honor and other opposition on whether to give it at all.
Domesically, In their zeal to ensure a Gay-Straight Alliance group cannot organize on their school campuses, the Flour Bluff Intermediate School District has instituted a policy that says only curriculum-related groups are allowed to meet on campus, effectively also banning the Fellowship of Christian Athletes from meeting. So long as they enforce that policy on both sides, they can at least claim to be fair. It's still not exactly brilliant, and it's certainly not forward-looking, but it's fair. (Also, we wonder why people stil persist in the delusion that The Gay is some sort of contagious disease.)
To do their part to aid the resurgence of a bill designed to criminalize miscarriage in Georgia, a letter and a recommendation for women to send their used menstruation products so that they can be properly charged in case they have broken the law by miscarrying. The Georgia law is the tip of the iceberg when it comes ot the GOP's anti-women attacks, of course, many of which are more likely to pass and be damaging. Those engaging or apologizing for such a war, of course, want you to not pay any attention at all to their actions in the name of their God and focus only on the actions of other people in other countries. Not that the plight of women in other lands is to be ignored.
Finally, Fox News nicely points out how the authoritarian strains in the government are given power and allowed to continue existing - they can incite an unlimited amount of fear and terror by fretting over "lone wolf" terrorists and then demand that all non-terrorist citizens give up their rights under the smokescreen of being able to detect those threats better. Here, have another story of a lone-wolf type plot.
In tech, the dangers of having all your information on the cloud - accidental deletes.
Bailed-out bank JPMorgan-Chase is seeking a minority stake in Twitter, which would make for lots of money, but also the fact that a corporation has a say in their business opportunities. Would that make Twitter the next Facebook? Maaaaaaybe.
A quick primer on how licenses of works actually work, and where they need to be applied to make both sense and to do what the people using them say they do, which also points out that there may not be an established license legalese for the thing that actaully wants to be done. Hello, hole that needs filling! And/or some sort of established ruling somewhere that defines the rights of fanworks' legality, as well as some manner in which original authors and fanwriters can avoid fractious legal battles should one or the other start accusing people of stealing ideas.
Scientists have managed to develop the theoretical model for a very tiny tractor beam, able to affect small objects moving slowly and start pulling them in toward the emitted beam.
Finally, AfriGadget, taking a look at how Africans use their technology (and a lot of the waste of other people) to create working solutions to their problems. It's very different than the pacemaker smaller than a penny or the methods for potentially detecting cancer using a smarthphone application and a little bit of equipment, or even teaching chess using augmented reality, but it's still technology at work.
Into opinions, where persons advocating for theocracy are advised to look at human nature and decide again whether leaving unchecked power in the hands of any fallible human or humans is a good idea. That idea extends well past political powers into data issues as well, where Danah Boyd convincingly demonstrates that we have accessibility settings with which to try and maintain privacy, and that most of our social tools are geared deliberately toward sharing our private items outside of their context, making public things we don't want public and then letting other persons mine that private-but-for-deceptive-settings information for their own purposes, nefarious or otherwise. It gives unchecked power to Big Data, and lets those who access that data use it indiscriminately. As an example (how convenient!), Facebook plans on passing addresses and telephone numbers to outside entities, so now not only can you get spammed and profiled, you'll get called and/or junk mailed and profiled.
A quick rant against using Ally to Other someone, as most of the things that one does as a trusted friend are what one does as an Ally, anyway. On the obverse of that coin, be careful not to delude yourself about what you will experience if you choose to express solidarity with groups and identities, especially if your solidarity is to wear the same clothes as them. But perhaps most importantly, if you really want to help, fight the media and the message that says different people are sinful, deviant, or evil because they are different - that negative message is saturated in the culture, and it has very real effects on people. Very real, very powerful, and almost uniformly very negative effects.
A Public Service Announcment for those taking the iniatory role for sex: ways of avoiding accusations of rape, most of them of the general form of "don't have sex with someone if they haven't told you they want to have sex with you, you know they're of age to consent, and you're not in a situation where it could be seen as pressuring someone to have sex with you without their consent".
Issues with some of the cultures taking veg*anism as a precept and the fanaticism that it can inspire in its adherents.
As a musician, I can appreciate the difficulties of transcribing a musical performance such that an audience that cannot listen to it still gets and understanding of it.
And, on politics, Mr. Ahlert declares that President Obama has entirely abandoned his leadership in all stages of the world, because he didn't immediately glass Libya when Qaddafi attacked his people, because he isn't properly anti-unions, and because his budget believes that spending is stimulus, instead of going along with the Republican wishlist of cutting social programs while keeping tax breaks for corporations. On that first point, Mr. Klein enthusiastically agrees, claiming that the United States should have been acting in its Team America: World Police capacity, and Ms. Hungerford says the U.S. should have already stepped in at this point and done so at the first sign that Qadaffi was doing something to his civilians.
Oil billionaire Koch pens an op-ed about how much government needs to get out of every business and let The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) decide who succeeds and fails. Probably as a prelude to making it so that government can't regulate The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), either. And, of course, so that no upstart can dethrone him with something better than his cheap oil.
The Washington Times accuses rolling Stone magazine of printing wild allegations of psychological operations without proof or checking into the background of the person making the claims. I think they would like to use the word "libel" or "slander" excepting that those words uttered by them would have specific context and require proof. They also accuse the rest of us of being all too willing to lap up any half-brained, half-baked hot job and to spread it all around, while they waited for the truth to get its pants on.
Mr. Connor says that big spending cuts are needed to balance the budget and make us reesponsible, and that we have to stand up to the special interests to get it done. After, that is, he categorically rules out an increase in revenues as possible, because it's apparent political suicide. Or at least more suicidal than the spending cuts are.
Last out, Mr. Pendry accuses everyone who isn't his kind of Republican Jesus Christian of being an enemy of the United States and all that it holds dear.
Last for tonight - a challenge to make a story that will fit in the space for a Google Ad, the awarding of the Razzies for the worst movies of the year - the clusterfrak that was an attempt at "Avatar: The Last Airbender" won worst picture and four other Razzies.
Ah, and what happens after the Lorax lifted himself away, or at least, the optimistic version of it.
The Dead Pool claims Frank W. Buckles, the last known United States veteran of the First Great War, at 110 years of age.
The African continent continues to have protests, along with Asia and the Middle East. It's an explosion of unrest and demands for better government and conditions. Notable highlights include Tunisia's Prime Minister resigning amidst demands for his ouster, Iraq's PM giving his government an ultimatum - improve in 100 days or risk being fired, and an argument that might make Xunzi nod in approval - why the international community's best option for ending the atrocities in Libya is to provide Qadaffi with an exit from Libya, as opposed to more bloody and civilian-harming options being called for, like immediate no-fly zone enforcement. "When they are about to die, what can they not do? They will exert their full strength. When the troops are in desperate situations, they fear nothing;...When there are no other alternatives, they will fight." (Xunzi, Art of War, Chap 11) Thus, giving an out makes it possible for them to flee without standing and fighting to the last person. President Obama approves of the idea of getting Qaddafi out as soon as possible, and his government is starting to seize assets and deploy military might near the country.
It's inspiring in a lot of ways - in Egypt, men and women participated in the demonstrations, showing signs of equality in a society that was normaly heavily male-dominated. In El Salvador, women routinely take front-line roles as powerful speakers to advocate for conserving the environment and the natural resources.
Wisconsin update: the librarians joined in person, although their spirit has always been aligned with the protests, as this support statement from the president of the Wisconsin Library Association makes clear. The President of the Polish union organization Solidarity expressed his support for the Wisconsin protests as well, a significant move considering Solidarity was one of the things that helped to topple the Soviet Union. On Sunday, the Capitol building was to be closed down and all the protesters evicted for a moment, but sensing shenanigans, protesters stayed in and eventually won themselves the right to stay past the scheduled closing time. After the closing, the building re-opened, with newly-installed metal detectors, allowing persons back in, separated by purpose, and searching their bags. So at least the supposed shenanigans did not turn out to be a true effort to silence the protest voices. Or so we thought. Ms Maddow seemed to beleive that protesters were still being shut out of the building, and reports indicate that a judge has issued a restraining order against the re-opening of the Capitol Building to the protesters. In other words, the Law just told the People they could not as for a redress of grievances by peacefully occupying the place of business of their elected representatives. Someone else see a problem?
Thankfully, the police do not have as dim a view of the protesters as this commenter does, and is not resorting to petty things like requiring the Democratic staffers to have the Republican leader sign their timesheets and denying them access to the office copy machines or accusing the doctors providing sick notes to the protesters of defrauding the taxpayer for having done so, because they did not examine their patients first. They continue to be absolutely cool about the entire affair.
We still have plenty of people who think collective bargaining for unions is a hindrance to economic activity, causes budget crises everywhere with their ridiculous demands, and liken it to the forbidden Trusts because collective bargaining allows union people to "collude" on their wages and benefits.
After the fake Koch affair, one would think that our media outlets would smarten up and make sure everything they ran was true, but that's not the case - the New York Times either got punked or deliberately attempted to advance the agends of Governor Walker, by interviewing someone who's never been in a union and representing him as a union guy. At least Mr. Krugman, also writing in the Times, points out all the devastating consequences of such a bill, including the part that would have let the governor privatize the power system at sell it off in no-bid contracts. Finally, there's been serious misleading about what the compensation package fight is actually doing - the employees are having their salaries and total compensation cut, rather than some sort of extra gift being reduced in value. Through all of this, Governor Walker is convinced he's right and that he will win.
Elsewhere, the Republican Party advocated against removing tax breaks for the sport of NASCAR, and the Pentagon insisted that its sponsorship of a stock car vehicle helped military recruitment. Keep in mind, as well, that many of the largest corporations, including the ones that took taxpayer dollars in bailouts, continue to pay zero taxes on their income, profits, or anything else, and still get generous subsidies to boot.
And if anyone says word one about how public services can be run mostly by volunteers or as charitable organizations relying on the private sector's table scraps, I will remind you that not only has it been done before, once the organizations stopped having to beg for every scrap they could get just to stay afloat, they turned out to be very good at the job they were supposed to be doing in the first place. Furthermore, your share of taxes that funds most public services is negligible - the economy of scale is freakin' huge. Those of you complaining about having to pay taxes with your exorbitant incomes, you can afford to shoulder several other people's tax burdens, too, most likely, so that the people who really do need every dollar can use it.
That won't stop onservative publications from lauding the possibility that New Hampshire might become a right-to-work state so that they can use it against the other, more liberal, states in the region and try to convince us that such a conservative paradise is Inherently Superior.
Out in the world not currently in protest, India is looking to create a home-grown university system to rival the Ivy Leagues of the United States Northeast. Also looking to improve education is Azerbaijan, using their petrodollar wealth to improve the country's public schooling system. There's a long way to go, according to the voices on the ground, but they're glad for the help they've been getting so far.
A plan to rename a street in Berlin after The Great Saint Regan met with some opposition over where to place the honor and other opposition on whether to give it at all.
Domesically, In their zeal to ensure a Gay-Straight Alliance group cannot organize on their school campuses, the Flour Bluff Intermediate School District has instituted a policy that says only curriculum-related groups are allowed to meet on campus, effectively also banning the Fellowship of Christian Athletes from meeting. So long as they enforce that policy on both sides, they can at least claim to be fair. It's still not exactly brilliant, and it's certainly not forward-looking, but it's fair. (Also, we wonder why people stil persist in the delusion that The Gay is some sort of contagious disease.)
To do their part to aid the resurgence of a bill designed to criminalize miscarriage in Georgia, a letter and a recommendation for women to send their used menstruation products so that they can be properly charged in case they have broken the law by miscarrying. The Georgia law is the tip of the iceberg when it comes ot the GOP's anti-women attacks, of course, many of which are more likely to pass and be damaging. Those engaging or apologizing for such a war, of course, want you to not pay any attention at all to their actions in the name of their God and focus only on the actions of other people in other countries. Not that the plight of women in other lands is to be ignored.
Finally, Fox News nicely points out how the authoritarian strains in the government are given power and allowed to continue existing - they can incite an unlimited amount of fear and terror by fretting over "lone wolf" terrorists and then demand that all non-terrorist citizens give up their rights under the smokescreen of being able to detect those threats better. Here, have another story of a lone-wolf type plot.
In tech, the dangers of having all your information on the cloud - accidental deletes.
Bailed-out bank JPMorgan-Chase is seeking a minority stake in Twitter, which would make for lots of money, but also the fact that a corporation has a say in their business opportunities. Would that make Twitter the next Facebook? Maaaaaaybe.
A quick primer on how licenses of works actually work, and where they need to be applied to make both sense and to do what the people using them say they do, which also points out that there may not be an established license legalese for the thing that actaully wants to be done. Hello, hole that needs filling! And/or some sort of established ruling somewhere that defines the rights of fanworks' legality, as well as some manner in which original authors and fanwriters can avoid fractious legal battles should one or the other start accusing people of stealing ideas.
Scientists have managed to develop the theoretical model for a very tiny tractor beam, able to affect small objects moving slowly and start pulling them in toward the emitted beam.
Finally, AfriGadget, taking a look at how Africans use their technology (and a lot of the waste of other people) to create working solutions to their problems. It's very different than the pacemaker smaller than a penny or the methods for potentially detecting cancer using a smarthphone application and a little bit of equipment, or even teaching chess using augmented reality, but it's still technology at work.
Into opinions, where persons advocating for theocracy are advised to look at human nature and decide again whether leaving unchecked power in the hands of any fallible human or humans is a good idea. That idea extends well past political powers into data issues as well, where Danah Boyd convincingly demonstrates that we have accessibility settings with which to try and maintain privacy, and that most of our social tools are geared deliberately toward sharing our private items outside of their context, making public things we don't want public and then letting other persons mine that private-but-for-deceptive-settings information for their own purposes, nefarious or otherwise. It gives unchecked power to Big Data, and lets those who access that data use it indiscriminately. As an example (how convenient!), Facebook plans on passing addresses and telephone numbers to outside entities, so now not only can you get spammed and profiled, you'll get called and/or junk mailed and profiled.
A quick rant against using Ally to Other someone, as most of the things that one does as a trusted friend are what one does as an Ally, anyway. On the obverse of that coin, be careful not to delude yourself about what you will experience if you choose to express solidarity with groups and identities, especially if your solidarity is to wear the same clothes as them. But perhaps most importantly, if you really want to help, fight the media and the message that says different people are sinful, deviant, or evil because they are different - that negative message is saturated in the culture, and it has very real effects on people. Very real, very powerful, and almost uniformly very negative effects.
A Public Service Announcment for those taking the iniatory role for sex: ways of avoiding accusations of rape, most of them of the general form of "don't have sex with someone if they haven't told you they want to have sex with you, you know they're of age to consent, and you're not in a situation where it could be seen as pressuring someone to have sex with you without their consent".
Issues with some of the cultures taking veg*anism as a precept and the fanaticism that it can inspire in its adherents.
As a musician, I can appreciate the difficulties of transcribing a musical performance such that an audience that cannot listen to it still gets and understanding of it.
And, on politics, Mr. Ahlert declares that President Obama has entirely abandoned his leadership in all stages of the world, because he didn't immediately glass Libya when Qaddafi attacked his people, because he isn't properly anti-unions, and because his budget believes that spending is stimulus, instead of going along with the Republican wishlist of cutting social programs while keeping tax breaks for corporations. On that first point, Mr. Klein enthusiastically agrees, claiming that the United States should have been acting in its Team America: World Police capacity, and Ms. Hungerford says the U.S. should have already stepped in at this point and done so at the first sign that Qadaffi was doing something to his civilians.
Oil billionaire Koch pens an op-ed about how much government needs to get out of every business and let The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) decide who succeeds and fails. Probably as a prelude to making it so that government can't regulate The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), either. And, of course, so that no upstart can dethrone him with something better than his cheap oil.
The Washington Times accuses rolling Stone magazine of printing wild allegations of psychological operations without proof or checking into the background of the person making the claims. I think they would like to use the word "libel" or "slander" excepting that those words uttered by them would have specific context and require proof. They also accuse the rest of us of being all too willing to lap up any half-brained, half-baked hot job and to spread it all around, while they waited for the truth to get its pants on.
Mr. Connor says that big spending cuts are needed to balance the budget and make us reesponsible, and that we have to stand up to the special interests to get it done. After, that is, he categorically rules out an increase in revenues as possible, because it's apparent political suicide. Or at least more suicidal than the spending cuts are.
Last out, Mr. Pendry accuses everyone who isn't his kind of Republican Jesus Christian of being an enemy of the United States and all that it holds dear.
Last for tonight - a challenge to make a story that will fit in the space for a Google Ad, the awarding of the Razzies for the worst movies of the year - the clusterfrak that was an attempt at "Avatar: The Last Airbender" won worst picture and four other Razzies.
Ah, and what happens after the Lorax lifted himself away, or at least, the optimistic version of it.
