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Output - 4-5 March 2011
Mar. 5th, 2011 12:50 pmGreetings, everyone - we start with an account of what the public library and its free access has done in ten years to a rural town in Appalachia. That's the value of libraries. Support yours.
In the continuing saga of the American Middle Class versus the Oligarchs and their puppets, Ohio continues along the deadly path toward removing collective bargaining rights. Because of the construction of their legislative house, however, there's no stop-it-in-its-tracks option for the Democrats. There's also almost no major uprising, perhaps because of the likelihood of a foregone conclusion. It's still part of the bigger plan to dismantle the safety net by going after all the well-funded ways to keep people out of penury. (For details, Gaius Publius summarizes Rachel Maddow, who points out that most Americans are opposed to Republicans, based on their stated policy ideas.) And lest you think they'll show up somewhere to hear the bipartisan opinion against them, South Carolina Governor Haley decided to skip out on the National Governor's Association meeting to attend one financed with private dollars that only invited conservatives.
In Wisconsin, the Republicans there have ordered the arrest of the missing legislators, a dubiously legal proposition at best, and one that still may not extend outside the state, unless bounty hunters are employed. This is after they continue to beleive the restraining order against closing the Capitol building to protesters is just a piece of paper. All of this contributes to the likelihood that Scott Walker is helping the Democratic Party's election chances and galvanizing their allies the longer that he insists on an all-or-nothing approach. Either that, or he's betting the moneyed interests that helped him get elected will ride to his rescue and make the protests go awat by drowning them in counter-protests and ad buys.
In Missouri, state senators agitated for the refusal of federal dollars to extend unemployment benfits, using every debunked argument about the unemployed as their reasons why the Missouri Senate should tell those people to get frakked and starve. In response, Lisa Golden offers her pledge to whichever employer will take her, starting from scrubbing her resume of any executive experience she might have, being delighted at a salary that will be much less than waht she used to make, and promising to be utterly devoted to the employer no matter how badly they screw her over. If only, y'know, they were hiring unemployed people or those without the most stellar of credit for their menial jobs. Because many of them are clearly bright enough to apply appropriate Internet memes to the situations around them.
Once again, just so you are reminded, Fox News lies. It is a propaganda department, and while Americans continue to treat it as if it were real media, Canada prefers their news organizations to not be demonstrably proven to lie, at the very least.
And finally out of the headlines, a program that puts books in the hands of families at critical times for literacy developmment is being axed. This while $1.2 trillion USD is being allocated to various national security agencies and the Defense Department, money that could probably be mostly better spent getting the domestic economy back into shape.
Out in the world today, a sixth Nile nation signed on to an agreement that would create a commission to oversee the developmeny of projects using the Nile River's waters, effectively preventing Egypt from nixing projects upstream.
Domestically, the shooter of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and other members of her staff wass indicted today on 49 charges by federal prosecutors.
In opinions, Slacktivist mentions the Supreme Court of the United States just struck a major blow against the opponents of gay and lesbian marriage by affirming that Fred Phelps still has the right to say his most vile and heateful things wherever he damn well pleases. The Court confirms that even if lesbians and gays were allowed to marry, their conservative opponents would still be able to say how wrong it is without any coercion from the government to shut them up. If the government or the law were inclined to that, Fred Phelps would have been shut up a long time ago.
Truthfully, though, wouldn't it just be better if all the respectable clerics got together and asked the gods to bless us and forgive us from now unto eternity, so that we can all feel saved and less inclined to say that others are going to our hell dimension because they don't do what we do?
Until that point, however, we really should be looking at the holy books and grappling with the discussions and questions that they present to us, instead of insisting single-mindedly that the book is both consistent and unified in its opinion. (There's also a really neat passage in there about how, because written Hebrew requires the reader to supply the vowel sounds, the same passage can be constructed to mean two very opposite things. Had I seen this earlier on, I would have asked Professor Williams if he could provide a demonstration on how such could be done. Alas, I am out of university, and so is he. Anyone else know the langauge well enough to take a swing at it and tell me if it's true?)
Ms. Marcotte demonstrates three approaches to take when dissecting a possible urban legend to see whether or not it's credible or the conclusions being drawn from it are logical and follow from the anecdote.
In the realm of the biblios, an excellent question - with the availability of information, rumor, speculation, and old grudges and bad behavior available through the World Wide Web, at what point does a reader or reviewer know too much about the author for them to be able to enjoy the work or review it impartially? Ona different side of the writer's profession, Mr. Scalzi points out that the schedule of the average writer leaves tehm insufficient time to crush the dreams of young upstarts, and besides, doing that kind of stuff takes hard work, focus, and a willingness to basically fling away every bit of good will earned and burn every bridge to get that matter accomplished...and most writers are too lazy and too fond of their own success to toss it away on someone else.
Additionally, Is your library talking to you in ways you plan on listening to? If not, gently or firmly suggesting that the diversify their methods would be good for you and for them.
Last out of opinions, and coincidentally, winner of the Worst Person In The World tonight, Mr. de Silva thinks he's found the way to fix the economy - stop letting any immigrants in on work visas, and all the jobs they do, and the slots in universities they open up, will be filled up by Americans doing American work. Of course, he couldn't be called anti-immigrant on that, because he's an immigrant, too, and so he feels he has n-word privileges in this matter. And we're supposed to believe, of course, that there are more than 200,000 engineers and programmers who are out of work and arranged in such a geographic distribution that they could take over for all the H1B workers, for example, and that the other visa categories have similar pockets of Americans properly distributed that they could take over those jobs and be happy with those wages. And then, of course, all those green cards for permanent residence and work is just importing competition into our economy. Immigrants Need Not Apply, according to Mr. de Silva, for at least as long as Americans are still unemployed. The horrible truth? Even if the borders were shut and sealed properly, most of those unemployed Americans would stay unemployed, because not only were they laid off, their position was deleted. There are still too many people chasing an increasingly shrinking pool of jobs as the corporations he tries to append a little blame to continue to operate as they ware intended - maximal profit, minimal expenses. Mr. de Silva needs to look at his history, too - when the immigrants and foreigners start getting blamed, Bad Things happen. I don't think he wants that.
Last for tonight, how Hollywood stopped making movies that most people want to go see, most people stopped seeing movies, and how that all collapsed down into the screens being dominated by PWP films, animation, and comics/merchandise properties. Sounds like they could use some lessons from Hidetaka Suehiro, whose game, Deadly Premonition, was the sleeper hit of last year, and was built with several good design rules in mind.
In the continuing saga of the American Middle Class versus the Oligarchs and their puppets, Ohio continues along the deadly path toward removing collective bargaining rights. Because of the construction of their legislative house, however, there's no stop-it-in-its-tracks option for the Democrats. There's also almost no major uprising, perhaps because of the likelihood of a foregone conclusion. It's still part of the bigger plan to dismantle the safety net by going after all the well-funded ways to keep people out of penury. (For details, Gaius Publius summarizes Rachel Maddow, who points out that most Americans are opposed to Republicans, based on their stated policy ideas.) And lest you think they'll show up somewhere to hear the bipartisan opinion against them, South Carolina Governor Haley decided to skip out on the National Governor's Association meeting to attend one financed with private dollars that only invited conservatives.
In Wisconsin, the Republicans there have ordered the arrest of the missing legislators, a dubiously legal proposition at best, and one that still may not extend outside the state, unless bounty hunters are employed. This is after they continue to beleive the restraining order against closing the Capitol building to protesters is just a piece of paper. All of this contributes to the likelihood that Scott Walker is helping the Democratic Party's election chances and galvanizing their allies the longer that he insists on an all-or-nothing approach. Either that, or he's betting the moneyed interests that helped him get elected will ride to his rescue and make the protests go awat by drowning them in counter-protests and ad buys.
In Missouri, state senators agitated for the refusal of federal dollars to extend unemployment benfits, using every debunked argument about the unemployed as their reasons why the Missouri Senate should tell those people to get frakked and starve. In response, Lisa Golden offers her pledge to whichever employer will take her, starting from scrubbing her resume of any executive experience she might have, being delighted at a salary that will be much less than waht she used to make, and promising to be utterly devoted to the employer no matter how badly they screw her over. If only, y'know, they were hiring unemployed people or those without the most stellar of credit for their menial jobs. Because many of them are clearly bright enough to apply appropriate Internet memes to the situations around them.
Once again, just so you are reminded, Fox News lies. It is a propaganda department, and while Americans continue to treat it as if it were real media, Canada prefers their news organizations to not be demonstrably proven to lie, at the very least.
And finally out of the headlines, a program that puts books in the hands of families at critical times for literacy developmment is being axed. This while $1.2 trillion USD is being allocated to various national security agencies and the Defense Department, money that could probably be mostly better spent getting the domestic economy back into shape.
Out in the world today, a sixth Nile nation signed on to an agreement that would create a commission to oversee the developmeny of projects using the Nile River's waters, effectively preventing Egypt from nixing projects upstream.
Domestically, the shooter of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and other members of her staff wass indicted today on 49 charges by federal prosecutors.
In opinions, Slacktivist mentions the Supreme Court of the United States just struck a major blow against the opponents of gay and lesbian marriage by affirming that Fred Phelps still has the right to say his most vile and heateful things wherever he damn well pleases. The Court confirms that even if lesbians and gays were allowed to marry, their conservative opponents would still be able to say how wrong it is without any coercion from the government to shut them up. If the government or the law were inclined to that, Fred Phelps would have been shut up a long time ago.
Truthfully, though, wouldn't it just be better if all the respectable clerics got together and asked the gods to bless us and forgive us from now unto eternity, so that we can all feel saved and less inclined to say that others are going to our hell dimension because they don't do what we do?
Until that point, however, we really should be looking at the holy books and grappling with the discussions and questions that they present to us, instead of insisting single-mindedly that the book is both consistent and unified in its opinion. (There's also a really neat passage in there about how, because written Hebrew requires the reader to supply the vowel sounds, the same passage can be constructed to mean two very opposite things. Had I seen this earlier on, I would have asked Professor Williams if he could provide a demonstration on how such could be done. Alas, I am out of university, and so is he. Anyone else know the langauge well enough to take a swing at it and tell me if it's true?)
Ms. Marcotte demonstrates three approaches to take when dissecting a possible urban legend to see whether or not it's credible or the conclusions being drawn from it are logical and follow from the anecdote.
In the realm of the biblios, an excellent question - with the availability of information, rumor, speculation, and old grudges and bad behavior available through the World Wide Web, at what point does a reader or reviewer know too much about the author for them to be able to enjoy the work or review it impartially? Ona different side of the writer's profession, Mr. Scalzi points out that the schedule of the average writer leaves tehm insufficient time to crush the dreams of young upstarts, and besides, doing that kind of stuff takes hard work, focus, and a willingness to basically fling away every bit of good will earned and burn every bridge to get that matter accomplished...and most writers are too lazy and too fond of their own success to toss it away on someone else.
Additionally, Is your library talking to you in ways you plan on listening to? If not, gently or firmly suggesting that the diversify their methods would be good for you and for them.
Last out of opinions, and coincidentally, winner of the Worst Person In The World tonight, Mr. de Silva thinks he's found the way to fix the economy - stop letting any immigrants in on work visas, and all the jobs they do, and the slots in universities they open up, will be filled up by Americans doing American work. Of course, he couldn't be called anti-immigrant on that, because he's an immigrant, too, and so he feels he has n-word privileges in this matter. And we're supposed to believe, of course, that there are more than 200,000 engineers and programmers who are out of work and arranged in such a geographic distribution that they could take over for all the H1B workers, for example, and that the other visa categories have similar pockets of Americans properly distributed that they could take over those jobs and be happy with those wages. And then, of course, all those green cards for permanent residence and work is just importing competition into our economy. Immigrants Need Not Apply, according to Mr. de Silva, for at least as long as Americans are still unemployed. The horrible truth? Even if the borders were shut and sealed properly, most of those unemployed Americans would stay unemployed, because not only were they laid off, their position was deleted. There are still too many people chasing an increasingly shrinking pool of jobs as the corporations he tries to append a little blame to continue to operate as they ware intended - maximal profit, minimal expenses. Mr. de Silva needs to look at his history, too - when the immigrants and foreigners start getting blamed, Bad Things happen. I don't think he wants that.
Last for tonight, how Hollywood stopped making movies that most people want to go see, most people stopped seeing movies, and how that all collapsed down into the screens being dominated by PWP films, animation, and comics/merchandise properties. Sounds like they could use some lessons from Hidetaka Suehiro, whose game, Deadly Premonition, was the sleeper hit of last year, and was built with several good design rules in mind.
