What, more news? - 27-28 April 02011
Apr. 29th, 2011 09:20 amWe begin once again by noting that the long-running serial Doctor Who has once again returned, this time with a beginning set piece not in Cardiff, but Utah, USA.
For those of us on the Livejournal platform, it is possible to turn off the automatically-implemented spam-comment whitelist filter, should you feel comments are being inappropriately redirected to spam, or if you want to handle your own zorching. The problems with the new filter, especially in communities, is well documented in this comment thread to the post that announced the feature.
Snyder County's news service believes that a teacher with a second job as an erotic romance novel writer is a scandalous affair and needs to be reported. Precisely what business is it of anyone's what a teacher does in their off-desk time...or to pay the bills when their teaching salaries are inadequate to do so? And the tone of "For shame, this woman is clearly a pervert and is spreading her perverted ways to our children" is utterly inappropriate for an outlet claiming to be interested in news (unless it's on the opinion columns and marked as such. Even then...)
Out in the world today, The United States is beginning to lean hard toward bigger military intervention in Libya, with the Defense Secretary declaring that certain building would be legitimate targets for bombing campaigns.
Domestically, The Defense Secretary of the United States will be retiring, to be replaced by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who will in turn be replaced by General Petraeus. So we put a torture supervisor in charge of the military and a military general in charge of intelligence. How much clearer do we need to be to point out that President Obama was wiether never all that anti-war or has since decided that he must emulate his predecessor as much as possible?
the advocates of the now-struck-down Proposition 8 have just realized that the judge instrumental to the ban actually is gay and has a long-time partner, something that was not a secret at the time of the trial, and are demanding that he should have recused himself. Because they thought it would influence his ruling. If you want to go that route, then every judge who's ever been a part of a religion or moral philosophy that disapproves of QUILTBAG people should also have recused themselves from the issue, as that would bias their decisions, as well. Also, advocates, you're late.
The President spoke again on the issue of the Racism That Won't Die, i.e. the Birthers, to basically say that the American people and the news networks shouldn't get distracted by this [bleep] and should focus on the real issues. Perhaps in a move to finally shut them up, the President also released his long form birth certificate, which should pretty well kill the Birther movement dead. And in doing so, we are reminded that most people are sane on this issue, but the insane concentrate very heavily on the Republican side. Truthfully, though, all this means is the goalposts get moved until they can have something that isn't immediately disproven. And in doing so, one can see the -isms inherent in the birther position.
Volient storms with multiple torandoes and thunderstorms have battered the southeastern United States, with more than 250 dead and large amounts of property and land destroyed.
A most interesting question is before the Supreme Court - can a state limit the uses of publicly-available data for marketing and advertising purposes, in a case where Vermont stopped the ability of pharmaceutical companies to use doctor prescription records to target their representatives to doctors who were using lots of generics instead of name-brand items. While individual patient information is confidential, it is still possible to reconstruct patient data in the aggregate from the collected doctor data.
Mr. Ryan's budget is straight out of Ayn Rand, with plenty of punishment to the poor and rewards to the already rich and powerful. It's another reason to consider it unserious.
The state legislators of Nashville have passed a bill that would forbid the discussion of being gay in Tennessee classrooms, despite the law that already forbids educators from discussing anything outside the approved family life curriculum anyway. So the marginalized and ignored only got more marginalized and ignored. I'm betting their public libraries do a brisk business in Useful Information for Teenagers and Others.
Lousiana is ready to declare any abortion to be a feticide and imprison any doctor that commits such an act.
Mr. Snyder, of Michigan, continues his march toward making public schools more like businesses and redistributing funding for public schools to private and charter organizations, as well as saying several school districts will likely have their boards dissolved and replaced by an emergency financial manager.
In Massachusettes, Democrats spearheaded a charge to strip unions ability ot bargain over health care, which indicates to me that they're scared they're going to be steamrolled in 2012 and are now trying to get out ahead of the attack vectors that will be coming.
And finally, after the student senate of Texas A&M passed a bill (in which the speaker of the senate cast a tiebreaker) declaring that a Traditional Values Center be supported with half of the monies allocated to a GLBT resource and support center,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
plinko pens a letter to the editor wherein she sees the secret value of such a bill. That said, the student body president vetoed the bill, saying that construction of such a center would be a duplication of services and organizations already on campus.
In technology, Greenpeace notes that for all its benefits, cloud computing uses a lot of energy, usually coal-fired power, so our cloud obsessions may be additing pollutants to the actual clouds.
Apple promises a patch that will fix the generation of an unencrypted file on iPhones that contained the data of nearby towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, potentially useful for tracking persons. The file will now be encrypted on the phone, making it more difficult for someone to simply swipe the data in cleartext from a phone using commercially available tools.
Sony admits to the extent of damage and personal information that may have been stolen in a hacking attack against the PlayStation Network service, which has been down for several days now.
In opinions, The ADF, a pro-heterosexual-norm legal defense fund attempts to smear QUILTBAG supporters and allies as being intolerant of the majority position, but can't actually muster a point to make on their argument, instead relying on the fallacies of "if it's the majority, then it must be right." and "How intolerant of these people to express their opinion of a person willing to defend a law that we believe is right." When they have an actual argument to stand on, then we should pay attention to them.
Mr. Stossel believes the reason the First Nations of the United States are poor and living in poor conditions is because they've been the recipients of government help for so long - if they just kicked the government teat, they'd become suddenly successful through the magic of capitalism. Mr. Sotssel is right that the traditional treatment of First Nations people has been abysmal, but extrapolating that into the best path being rejection of government help requires injecting his own ideas about what government does for help - at best, he should be advocating for a qualitative change in the way that the government treats First Nations people. There's plenty of fruitful ground, I suspect, if he only scratches the surface of th eBureau of Indian Affairs.
A quick primer on the idea of enlightenment and meditation in Buddhism, compared to the form that's been received and bent by American mystic sources.
Out of opinions, why the economic calculus of the Death Star ultimately doesn't work out - it's a cheap solution. Then again, the economy of the Empire wasn't really very efficient at all in the first place...
Last for tonight, free books left in public places to deliberately get people to read by serendipity, and yet another article saying that libraries are a public place, where people can watch things publically that social shame would demand they do in private, and won't you THINK OF THE CHILDRENS who could be scarred by it.
For those of us on the Livejournal platform, it is possible to turn off the automatically-implemented spam-comment whitelist filter, should you feel comments are being inappropriately redirected to spam, or if you want to handle your own zorching. The problems with the new filter, especially in communities, is well documented in this comment thread to the post that announced the feature.
Snyder County's news service believes that a teacher with a second job as an erotic romance novel writer is a scandalous affair and needs to be reported. Precisely what business is it of anyone's what a teacher does in their off-desk time...or to pay the bills when their teaching salaries are inadequate to do so? And the tone of "For shame, this woman is clearly a pervert and is spreading her perverted ways to our children" is utterly inappropriate for an outlet claiming to be interested in news (unless it's on the opinion columns and marked as such. Even then...)
Out in the world today, The United States is beginning to lean hard toward bigger military intervention in Libya, with the Defense Secretary declaring that certain building would be legitimate targets for bombing campaigns.
Domestically, The Defense Secretary of the United States will be retiring, to be replaced by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who will in turn be replaced by General Petraeus. So we put a torture supervisor in charge of the military and a military general in charge of intelligence. How much clearer do we need to be to point out that President Obama was wiether never all that anti-war or has since decided that he must emulate his predecessor as much as possible?
the advocates of the now-struck-down Proposition 8 have just realized that the judge instrumental to the ban actually is gay and has a long-time partner, something that was not a secret at the time of the trial, and are demanding that he should have recused himself. Because they thought it would influence his ruling. If you want to go that route, then every judge who's ever been a part of a religion or moral philosophy that disapproves of QUILTBAG people should also have recused themselves from the issue, as that would bias their decisions, as well. Also, advocates, you're late.
The President spoke again on the issue of the Racism That Won't Die, i.e. the Birthers, to basically say that the American people and the news networks shouldn't get distracted by this [bleep] and should focus on the real issues. Perhaps in a move to finally shut them up, the President also released his long form birth certificate, which should pretty well kill the Birther movement dead. And in doing so, we are reminded that most people are sane on this issue, but the insane concentrate very heavily on the Republican side. Truthfully, though, all this means is the goalposts get moved until they can have something that isn't immediately disproven. And in doing so, one can see the -isms inherent in the birther position.
Volient storms with multiple torandoes and thunderstorms have battered the southeastern United States, with more than 250 dead and large amounts of property and land destroyed.
A most interesting question is before the Supreme Court - can a state limit the uses of publicly-available data for marketing and advertising purposes, in a case where Vermont stopped the ability of pharmaceutical companies to use doctor prescription records to target their representatives to doctors who were using lots of generics instead of name-brand items. While individual patient information is confidential, it is still possible to reconstruct patient data in the aggregate from the collected doctor data.
Mr. Ryan's budget is straight out of Ayn Rand, with plenty of punishment to the poor and rewards to the already rich and powerful. It's another reason to consider it unserious.
The state legislators of Nashville have passed a bill that would forbid the discussion of being gay in Tennessee classrooms, despite the law that already forbids educators from discussing anything outside the approved family life curriculum anyway. So the marginalized and ignored only got more marginalized and ignored. I'm betting their public libraries do a brisk business in Useful Information for Teenagers and Others.
Lousiana is ready to declare any abortion to be a feticide and imprison any doctor that commits such an act.
Mr. Snyder, of Michigan, continues his march toward making public schools more like businesses and redistributing funding for public schools to private and charter organizations, as well as saying several school districts will likely have their boards dissolved and replaced by an emergency financial manager.
In Massachusettes, Democrats spearheaded a charge to strip unions ability ot bargain over health care, which indicates to me that they're scared they're going to be steamrolled in 2012 and are now trying to get out ahead of the attack vectors that will be coming.
And finally, after the student senate of Texas A&M passed a bill (in which the speaker of the senate cast a tiebreaker) declaring that a Traditional Values Center be supported with half of the monies allocated to a GLBT resource and support center,
plinko pens a letter to the editor wherein she sees the secret value of such a bill. That said, the student body president vetoed the bill, saying that construction of such a center would be a duplication of services and organizations already on campus.In technology, Greenpeace notes that for all its benefits, cloud computing uses a lot of energy, usually coal-fired power, so our cloud obsessions may be additing pollutants to the actual clouds.
Apple promises a patch that will fix the generation of an unencrypted file on iPhones that contained the data of nearby towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, potentially useful for tracking persons. The file will now be encrypted on the phone, making it more difficult for someone to simply swipe the data in cleartext from a phone using commercially available tools.
Sony admits to the extent of damage and personal information that may have been stolen in a hacking attack against the PlayStation Network service, which has been down for several days now.
In opinions, The ADF, a pro-heterosexual-norm legal defense fund attempts to smear QUILTBAG supporters and allies as being intolerant of the majority position, but can't actually muster a point to make on their argument, instead relying on the fallacies of "if it's the majority, then it must be right." and "How intolerant of these people to express their opinion of a person willing to defend a law that we believe is right." When they have an actual argument to stand on, then we should pay attention to them.
Mr. Stossel believes the reason the First Nations of the United States are poor and living in poor conditions is because they've been the recipients of government help for so long - if they just kicked the government teat, they'd become suddenly successful through the magic of capitalism. Mr. Sotssel is right that the traditional treatment of First Nations people has been abysmal, but extrapolating that into the best path being rejection of government help requires injecting his own ideas about what government does for help - at best, he should be advocating for a qualitative change in the way that the government treats First Nations people. There's plenty of fruitful ground, I suspect, if he only scratches the surface of th eBureau of Indian Affairs.
A quick primer on the idea of enlightenment and meditation in Buddhism, compared to the form that's been received and bent by American mystic sources.
Out of opinions, why the economic calculus of the Death Star ultimately doesn't work out - it's a cheap solution. Then again, the economy of the Empire wasn't really very efficient at all in the first place...
Last for tonight, free books left in public places to deliberately get people to read by serendipity, and yet another article saying that libraries are a public place, where people can watch things publically that social shame would demand they do in private, and won't you THINK OF THE CHILDRENS who could be scarred by it.
