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Right before the weekend - 10 March 2011
Mar. 12th, 2011 10:02 amWow. We lead tonight with an 8.9 magnitude earthquake relatively close to the islands of Japan, resulting in a massive tsunami, the third earthquake that has struck the islands, each of significant magnitude. Hundreds have died, others have been evacuated on the danger of a nuclear power plant losing containment of its radioactive elements, and the islands have been devastated. We now have pictures of the aftermath of the event and the destruction it caused.
In a non-flippant manner, the characteristics of tsunami waves that prevent them from being surfed.
In the escalated case of The People versus The Corporations and their Republican Lackeys, The IWW calls for a general strike across union members to defeat Governor Walker and similar bills being considered in other states. The people held emergency rallies to protest the subversion of the democratic process and republican government, not just in Wisconsin, but in other states that are facing or have passed similar bills.
When they are actually talking about the budget, librarians and public sector workers have the facts and the experience on their side when it comes to trying to drive into their elected representatives' heads why robbing the poor to feed the rich is bad on every level possible. Libraries understand well how people can be impoverished if the wrong srvices are axed or zeroed out. And if you look at the numbers, the cuts to the poorest often mirror the tax breaks for the corporations and the richest, if they're not explicitly being arranged that way.
Thing is, it's rarely about the budget - there's an assumption on the conservative side that unions in public sectors are diametrically opposed to the mission of those public sectors - to provide excellent service to everyone on a shoestring budget, and that demanding actual livable wages and benefits for those people is a smokescreen to amassing real political power to make the government do what unions, not the people, want. Thus, they argue that stripping collective bargaining and other anti-union measures are "common sense" that will allow government to become more efficient and responsive, while also accusing the protesters in Wisconsin of mob violence, physical intimidation, and death threats to the people of Wisconsin. When I hear of those reports from someone credible, I'll start believing it. Besides, weren't these people claiming from just last year about an organized smear campaign against the totally-not-racists-Birthers-Birchers-or-Corporate-Puppets Tea Party and how they were entirely peaceful demonstrators just concerned about government, pay no attention to all the people conspicuously displaying their guns and putting racist rhetoric on their signs?
In any case, Koch Lackey Walker accuses union rules of preventing good teachers from staying hired, while also costing taxpayers far too much money, and then claims that the unions weren't willing to budge on anything at all that was fiscal, despite having been offered everything he wanted fiscally as a concession. In other words, Koch Lackey Walker is a liar, and he's not even any good at it - he's still claiming it's a budget matter long after that was destroyed.
When all is said and done, the Smithsonian Museum of American History will have it chronicled, artifacts, accounts, and all.
Elsewhere in the world, a rabbi has begun to marry gay men to lesbian women, many of them getting it done so that they are less stigmatized in Israeli society or they feel a greater duty, socially or religiously, to hide that and act as if they were straight than to express their real sexuality. Suffice to say, there are a loty of problems with this practice, many of which relate to using this as a way of trying to claim that all the gay people are somehow abnormal and should deny who they are.
The New York Times falls flat on its duty as a newspaper by publishing an article about the gang rape of an 11 year-old girl that attempts to engender sympathy for the rapists, exonerate the young ones asw not knowing what they were doing, paints the rapists as three-dimensional people, and also makes sure to get a victim-blaming paragraph in as well. There's almost no way that this story could have been constructed as to make it worse.
Finally, out of the headlines, a missive for parents and adults - no matter what you think, nor how you might feel like the problems are comparatively easy to adult ones, childhood and teenagerdom sucks to those who are in it. By being nostalgic about childhood, or by telling them that their problems don't matter compared ot the ones that are coming down the pike, you are doing them precisely zero favors. Their problems are different, but they are no less valid, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
Out in the world today, Pro-Gaddafi forces continued their attacks on rebel forces, retaking certain towns in the country, at one point staging a mock execution of BBC journalists attempting to get into a town in the western part of the country.
a biofuel company project that was going to lease land in Tanzania ended up with the land that was to be leased permanently bought from the small farmers and by the government through potential duplicity.
Afghanistan forces are set to start taking charge of security operations, a move that they hope will let the United States leave...by 2014. Another three years, assuming another crisis doesn't happen.
Mr. Geithner asked the United States government not to cut any of the programs abroad that the United States funds that give large loans to developing countries.
Domestically, some of the unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act are causing headaches for consumers that want to use their tax-free accounts to purchase over-the-counter drugs, a process that was disallowed by the reforms of the law. Cue, once again, the repeating complaint that government cannot do health care effectively or cheaply, and that people on government plans are always worse off than if they had no insurance at all (having been priced out of the private sector by such things as pre-existing conditions), because politicians starve the program of funding, forcing them to lower reimbursement rates, lessenging the number of doctors who will accept it (and mostly zeroing out specialists), which results in people on Medicaid having poor care or no care at all.
In sciences, Economists find that older people tend to be happier, even after they controlled for some obvious factors that would affect joviality, scientists say that a certain amount of solitude is healthy for people, and a discussion on how human DNA discarded a switch that would have made male penises develop with a bone structure somewhere along the evolutionary track.
In technology, why you're never going to be able to monopolize control of the screen with your program - everyone else can use whatever trick you used to get to the top to put themselves to the top. The only way to win that game is not to play.
Into opinions, where if you're going to try and stop people from doing something You Don't Like, you could actually try to help them have options, instead of going all Father Knows Best on them.
Mr. Hashemi says that the West should assume that whatever comes of protests, there will always be a strong mixing of Islam and government, so don't get your hopes up that those uncivilized barbarians will be able to replucate our perfect Western society - unless they do manage it, and then we'll claim we never doubted they could do it.
Mr. Hanson says the current generation of lawmakers has a duty to fix all the problems with deficits, Social Security, high gas prices, and high food prices...and instead, the current administration is making things worse by burying their heads in the sand on the matter. It's always only the current administration's fault, because they want to tap the strategic petroleum reserve while they continue to say no to domestic drilling, because they keep believing in teh value of alternatives to petroleum enough to support them, when if they would just let The Market (A.P.T.I.N.0 take over, any actually profitable green energy would immediately come to the fore, and because they won't just roll over and let the budgets cut every social program while giving subsidies and tax breaks to rich persons and corporations, which will somehow magically fix both the jobs problem and the deficits through the magic of reduced revenues. Because they support the United Nations, instead of deciding that all funding given to that body would be better placed elsewhere to more directly erve the interests of the country. Never a mention of the previous administrator's two land wars in Asia, his cut taxes everywhere policy about revenue, and his national-insecurity apparatus that continues to drain money for not gain but that of pricate contractors. The solutions proposed are not always helpful, either - cut out of the budget anything that I Don't Like and think is not consitutional, like all the social programs and most of the executive branch's agencies, for example.
Last out of opinions, Still-discredited propagandist L. Brent Bozell III is outraged that the murder of two soldiers by someone he clearly believes is an Islamic terrorist didn't warrant more coverage on the major news network nightly shows.
Last for tonight, legendary animator Chuck Jones encourages kids to crack a book and read something. For the next best thing, we suppose, try poems written by cats, part one, with accompanying pictures, and poems written by cats, part two, also with accompanying pictures.
In a non-flippant manner, the characteristics of tsunami waves that prevent them from being surfed.
In the escalated case of The People versus The Corporations and their Republican Lackeys, The IWW calls for a general strike across union members to defeat Governor Walker and similar bills being considered in other states. The people held emergency rallies to protest the subversion of the democratic process and republican government, not just in Wisconsin, but in other states that are facing or have passed similar bills.
When they are actually talking about the budget, librarians and public sector workers have the facts and the experience on their side when it comes to trying to drive into their elected representatives' heads why robbing the poor to feed the rich is bad on every level possible. Libraries understand well how people can be impoverished if the wrong srvices are axed or zeroed out. And if you look at the numbers, the cuts to the poorest often mirror the tax breaks for the corporations and the richest, if they're not explicitly being arranged that way.
Thing is, it's rarely about the budget - there's an assumption on the conservative side that unions in public sectors are diametrically opposed to the mission of those public sectors - to provide excellent service to everyone on a shoestring budget, and that demanding actual livable wages and benefits for those people is a smokescreen to amassing real political power to make the government do what unions, not the people, want. Thus, they argue that stripping collective bargaining and other anti-union measures are "common sense" that will allow government to become more efficient and responsive, while also accusing the protesters in Wisconsin of mob violence, physical intimidation, and death threats to the people of Wisconsin. When I hear of those reports from someone credible, I'll start believing it. Besides, weren't these people claiming from just last year about an organized smear campaign against the totally-not-racists-Birthers-Birchers-or-Corporate-Puppets Tea Party and how they were entirely peaceful demonstrators just concerned about government, pay no attention to all the people conspicuously displaying their guns and putting racist rhetoric on their signs?
In any case, Koch Lackey Walker accuses union rules of preventing good teachers from staying hired, while also costing taxpayers far too much money, and then claims that the unions weren't willing to budge on anything at all that was fiscal, despite having been offered everything he wanted fiscally as a concession. In other words, Koch Lackey Walker is a liar, and he's not even any good at it - he's still claiming it's a budget matter long after that was destroyed.
When all is said and done, the Smithsonian Museum of American History will have it chronicled, artifacts, accounts, and all.
Elsewhere in the world, a rabbi has begun to marry gay men to lesbian women, many of them getting it done so that they are less stigmatized in Israeli society or they feel a greater duty, socially or religiously, to hide that and act as if they were straight than to express their real sexuality. Suffice to say, there are a loty of problems with this practice, many of which relate to using this as a way of trying to claim that all the gay people are somehow abnormal and should deny who they are.
The New York Times falls flat on its duty as a newspaper by publishing an article about the gang rape of an 11 year-old girl that attempts to engender sympathy for the rapists, exonerate the young ones asw not knowing what they were doing, paints the rapists as three-dimensional people, and also makes sure to get a victim-blaming paragraph in as well. There's almost no way that this story could have been constructed as to make it worse.
Finally, out of the headlines, a missive for parents and adults - no matter what you think, nor how you might feel like the problems are comparatively easy to adult ones, childhood and teenagerdom sucks to those who are in it. By being nostalgic about childhood, or by telling them that their problems don't matter compared ot the ones that are coming down the pike, you are doing them precisely zero favors. Their problems are different, but they are no less valid, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
Out in the world today, Pro-Gaddafi forces continued their attacks on rebel forces, retaking certain towns in the country, at one point staging a mock execution of BBC journalists attempting to get into a town in the western part of the country.
a biofuel company project that was going to lease land in Tanzania ended up with the land that was to be leased permanently bought from the small farmers and by the government through potential duplicity.
Afghanistan forces are set to start taking charge of security operations, a move that they hope will let the United States leave...by 2014. Another three years, assuming another crisis doesn't happen.
Mr. Geithner asked the United States government not to cut any of the programs abroad that the United States funds that give large loans to developing countries.
Domestically, some of the unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act are causing headaches for consumers that want to use their tax-free accounts to purchase over-the-counter drugs, a process that was disallowed by the reforms of the law. Cue, once again, the repeating complaint that government cannot do health care effectively or cheaply, and that people on government plans are always worse off than if they had no insurance at all (having been priced out of the private sector by such things as pre-existing conditions), because politicians starve the program of funding, forcing them to lower reimbursement rates, lessenging the number of doctors who will accept it (and mostly zeroing out specialists), which results in people on Medicaid having poor care or no care at all.
In sciences, Economists find that older people tend to be happier, even after they controlled for some obvious factors that would affect joviality, scientists say that a certain amount of solitude is healthy for people, and a discussion on how human DNA discarded a switch that would have made male penises develop with a bone structure somewhere along the evolutionary track.
In technology, why you're never going to be able to monopolize control of the screen with your program - everyone else can use whatever trick you used to get to the top to put themselves to the top. The only way to win that game is not to play.
Into opinions, where if you're going to try and stop people from doing something You Don't Like, you could actually try to help them have options, instead of going all Father Knows Best on them.
Mr. Hashemi says that the West should assume that whatever comes of protests, there will always be a strong mixing of Islam and government, so don't get your hopes up that those uncivilized barbarians will be able to replucate our perfect Western society - unless they do manage it, and then we'll claim we never doubted they could do it.
Mr. Hanson says the current generation of lawmakers has a duty to fix all the problems with deficits, Social Security, high gas prices, and high food prices...and instead, the current administration is making things worse by burying their heads in the sand on the matter. It's always only the current administration's fault, because they want to tap the strategic petroleum reserve while they continue to say no to domestic drilling, because they keep believing in teh value of alternatives to petroleum enough to support them, when if they would just let The Market (A.P.T.I.N.0 take over, any actually profitable green energy would immediately come to the fore, and because they won't just roll over and let the budgets cut every social program while giving subsidies and tax breaks to rich persons and corporations, which will somehow magically fix both the jobs problem and the deficits through the magic of reduced revenues. Because they support the United Nations, instead of deciding that all funding given to that body would be better placed elsewhere to more directly erve the interests of the country. Never a mention of the previous administrator's two land wars in Asia, his cut taxes everywhere policy about revenue, and his national-insecurity apparatus that continues to drain money for not gain but that of pricate contractors. The solutions proposed are not always helpful, either - cut out of the budget anything that I Don't Like and think is not consitutional, like all the social programs and most of the executive branch's agencies, for example.
Last out of opinions, Still-discredited propagandist L. Brent Bozell III is outraged that the murder of two soldiers by someone he clearly believes is an Islamic terrorist didn't warrant more coverage on the major news network nightly shows.
Last for tonight, legendary animator Chuck Jones encourages kids to crack a book and read something. For the next best thing, we suppose, try poems written by cats, part one, with accompanying pictures, and poems written by cats, part two, also with accompanying pictures.
