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Yet another data dump.
May. 17th, 2011 10:38 amWe begin with Mr. Greenwald doing the unpopular - pointing out how much the United States has done in the last decade that violates the Nuremburg principles, and suggesting the bin Laden killing also does so. Even in the things you approve of, it is worthwhile to examine whether they stand up to the ethics you profess to be part of. Or the ones everyone but you professes. Mr. Clark, for example, beleives that the U.S. acted justly, according to the rules of international law, but would appreciate it if the U.S. released sufficient evidence for others to come to that conclusion. Having been linked to the Greenwald piece, he reiterates that claim, based on the idea that the law enforcement approach to handling terror does allow for special circumstances. He also says the people desperately trying to prove that the killing vindicates their War on Terror way are grasping at straws.
Finally, why the rules for newspaper writers that tell them to treat their audience as if they know nothing sometimes has a good effect - it corrects misstatements fairly quickly after they're quoted.
Out in the world today, European leaders panic over Muslim / darkie invasion from North Africa, rescind passport-free travel in the EU zone. Funny enough, even though the right wing got it through in Denmark, the people are unconvinced that it will actually stop the invasion. We wonder what the right win will have to come up with beyond this, either to make them feel safe or to agitate them more.
We think this take on the revelation of Osama bin Laden's pornography cache is the best one. Because, well, the Internet Is For, but also that porn is what we stash away in those place we don't let other people see. A place without porn probably has something wrong or very right going for it.
Observe some progpaganda that tries to make bin Laden less of a threat in the time that he was being pursued by this administration, considering how much he was built up by the last one. One should instead be paying attention to Pakistan's rumblings to cut NATO supply lines into Afghanistan if they don't stop tossing missiles at targets in Pakistan. Or perhaps to the amount of money the bin Laden wives will make eventually telling their tales. Especially if paired with the helmet-cam footage of the raid.
The Japanese government admits to a partial meltdown in the number one plant at Fukushima. Oh, the PR from that is going to be awful. But the damage is still not complete meltdowns, so some of the safeguards are still working.
A United States Senator argued for turning sea pirates into military targets, allowing them to be sunk and killed when they attack, rather than captured and turned over to authorities.
Domestically, The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided to close part of a budget gap by laying off all of its teacher-librarians. To keep their jobs, those librarians must prove they can be transferred into regular teaching jobs, which requires proving they have taught students in a class within the last five years. There's a judge, attorneys, and all the proceedings of a courtroom as the school district desperately tries to shoot itself in the foot long-term so as to close a budget deficit in the short term.
Elsewhere, in a poor neighborhood, researchers are putting in cameras to see what kids put on their plates for their lunches at school. The idea is to see what kind of calories are being earen at school, so that reports can be sent home to pressure parents into pressuring their children into changing their eating habits. Whether this study will do any good or not, and the fact that it's being done to poor and minority kids instead of richer white kids raises red flags, both about how the question is being framed and what kind of effects on eating (and eating disorders) such monitoring will have.
Indiana has just ruled that no citizen has the right to resist the police entering their home, whether legally or otherwise. The remedy is apparently to take the cop to court. Which I'm sure everyone has the time and know-how to do.
The state house of Texas passed a bill that would prevent the TSA from patting down anyone on their sensitive areas.
The Army's top officer believes that improvements are needed to squads so that they no longer have to engage in "too much of a fair fight" are instead just able to overwhelm their opponents. In another branch, Navy SEAL teams are glad they've been thanked for the bin Laden thing, but would prefer to melt back into the shadows now, thanks. And the Defense Secretary will fight cuts to the Marine Corps, likely with Republican support.
And finally, peer in as engineers tell people in various towns that they will be flooded to ease pressure on major rivers and seaways.
In technology, Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion USD. It's a bit of a headscratcher as to why, as Skype only really provides a user base - if Microsoft is simply buying them out so as to scuttle them and force everyone else over to Windows Live video, then, well...that pretty much sucks.
The United States Senate has a proposed bill that would allow the U.S. government to order U.S. ISPs not to allow DNS lookup on sites they considered to be promoting piracy. This would not block access to the sites, per se, but it would mean someone would have to know the specific IP address of the site to get there. Or to use a tunnel through a foreign proxy to get the DNS lookup and resolve from there.
It appears that some of the attacks against Sony's Playstation Network were originated in rented Amazon server cluster space, proving that perhaps one day, hackers won't need zombies, just enough cloud computing to do their work. That said, PSN should be back up and running - everyone gets an update to change their password, and there's also a set of games and items available as an apology for the downtime.
Audible has launched ACX, a service that will allow authors to narrate their own books to become audiobooks, or hire an actor from a registered pool of talent.
And finally, an iris-reading device to log into computers. Ah, biometrics.
In opinions, a look at where many evangelicals(at least, the ones that get press) seem to be turning, toward Rush and Sarah and Team Hell, rather than paying attention to the writings of the person they claim to follow. Then again, many of them are in the business of rebranding everything as sinful and wrong, and also want to attack the segments of government largesse that receive comparatively tiny amounts, while letting the bigger offenders go unscathed, so perhaps we can sort of point out there's something not tick-tocking in the head quite right. Perhaps it's in the belly of a nearby alligator?
From one of the foremost writers of speculative fiction, a request to kindly tone down the use of the F-bomb as a catch-all for various parts of speech. And from someone whose Twilight deconstruction is wonderful, when writing characters that aren't you, it's always a good idea to get the opinion of someone who is what you're writing to see whether you've written something that is believable.
A reminder that as more states join on in civil unions or QUILTBAG marriage, it becomes harder to have support for the position that such things will destroy the country. Given the track record of the peoplpe most likely to be complaining, it may have been dubious at best, but when the people continuing the fight seem to be doing so for less than honorable reasons, it's time to take a long look at the preferred position.
Mr. Krugman lays out the potential problems associated with a debt ceiling vote, and one imperative to the President - don't give in to blackmail. Gaius Publius seizes on the blackmail angle to add his own imperative - if wingnuts are willing to default the country on ideology, let 'em, and make sure everybody knows who is responsible for it.
Mr. Clark on why socialism probably isn't a viable system right now - too many Americans will behave as freeloaders, and probably consider it a positive thing that they're beating the system. And then there's also the possibility that the next Commerce Secretary is a graduate of the Koch Brothers School of Economics and beholden to their ideas.
Mr. Hanson inscribes the arc of history as the United States doing no wrong in bringing down al-Qaeda, with airport security measures and the willingness of U.S. Leaders to say "screw morals and rules, we want results" as the important parts of why we succeeded at our task.
Messrs. Laffer and Moore contextualize Boeing and the NRLB complaint as Washington and other union shop states trying to stop the inexorable march of progress and economic growth in right-to-work states. The two gentlemen believe that the current trends will continue and right-to-work states will be better than union states in terms of economic output, and that sane governments will quickly devise ways to become right-to-work states if they want to keep their corporations and jobs inside the state. The workers get screwed, of course, but who cares about them?
George Soros, conservative bogeyman, and perhaps one of the few liberals trying to respond to how Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporate and billionaire money to tilt the balance to conservative causes. Of course, he can't be acting alone, there has to be an army of "czars" already in the administration doing the bidding of Soros and Obama to make the bogeyman-ness really stick.
Speaking of conservative perception of liberals, unfunny comedian David Limbaugh accuses the administration of having rhetoric at odds with action, and making it sound like the current President's entire list of accomplishments is in this contradiction. Mr. Krauthammer is a bit more blunt, accusing the President of demagoguery and making big villains out of conservatives who want to get serious on issues like immigration. Nevermind that many of those serious conservatives are putting forward unserious proposals, or proposals that can only hope to be satisfied through massive increases in the police and offense budgets.
Heritage goes to bat for the oil companies by claiming the right fiscal move is to end all fuel subsidies, renewable and non-renewable alike, but liberals just want to hurt the already overtaxed oil billions. They also filed an amicus brief against the individual mandate of the health care bill.
Ms. Charen believes that the American people can handle the truth of their history, instead of a sanitized, multicultural version. Is she just as in favor of the actual truth, instead of a sanitized, jingoistic view that generally permeates the textbooks of the country? Considering that her column appears to be about how much that jingoism is important, we doubt it.
Last for tonight, a strategy for the Republicans - associate Barack Obama with Nancy Pelosi as much as possible...which might have worked had Pelosi stayed Speaker in the midterms. Now? There's not enough to make the association with. There's more gunning for John Boehner than Nancy Pelosi.
Finally, why the rules for newspaper writers that tell them to treat their audience as if they know nothing sometimes has a good effect - it corrects misstatements fairly quickly after they're quoted.
Out in the world today, European leaders panic over Muslim / darkie invasion from North Africa, rescind passport-free travel in the EU zone. Funny enough, even though the right wing got it through in Denmark, the people are unconvinced that it will actually stop the invasion. We wonder what the right win will have to come up with beyond this, either to make them feel safe or to agitate them more.
We think this take on the revelation of Osama bin Laden's pornography cache is the best one. Because, well, the Internet Is For, but also that porn is what we stash away in those place we don't let other people see. A place without porn probably has something wrong or very right going for it.
Observe some progpaganda that tries to make bin Laden less of a threat in the time that he was being pursued by this administration, considering how much he was built up by the last one. One should instead be paying attention to Pakistan's rumblings to cut NATO supply lines into Afghanistan if they don't stop tossing missiles at targets in Pakistan. Or perhaps to the amount of money the bin Laden wives will make eventually telling their tales. Especially if paired with the helmet-cam footage of the raid.
The Japanese government admits to a partial meltdown in the number one plant at Fukushima. Oh, the PR from that is going to be awful. But the damage is still not complete meltdowns, so some of the safeguards are still working.
A United States Senator argued for turning sea pirates into military targets, allowing them to be sunk and killed when they attack, rather than captured and turned over to authorities.
Domestically, The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided to close part of a budget gap by laying off all of its teacher-librarians. To keep their jobs, those librarians must prove they can be transferred into regular teaching jobs, which requires proving they have taught students in a class within the last five years. There's a judge, attorneys, and all the proceedings of a courtroom as the school district desperately tries to shoot itself in the foot long-term so as to close a budget deficit in the short term.
Elsewhere, in a poor neighborhood, researchers are putting in cameras to see what kids put on their plates for their lunches at school. The idea is to see what kind of calories are being earen at school, so that reports can be sent home to pressure parents into pressuring their children into changing their eating habits. Whether this study will do any good or not, and the fact that it's being done to poor and minority kids instead of richer white kids raises red flags, both about how the question is being framed and what kind of effects on eating (and eating disorders) such monitoring will have.
Indiana has just ruled that no citizen has the right to resist the police entering their home, whether legally or otherwise. The remedy is apparently to take the cop to court. Which I'm sure everyone has the time and know-how to do.
The state house of Texas passed a bill that would prevent the TSA from patting down anyone on their sensitive areas.
The Army's top officer believes that improvements are needed to squads so that they no longer have to engage in "too much of a fair fight" are instead just able to overwhelm their opponents. In another branch, Navy SEAL teams are glad they've been thanked for the bin Laden thing, but would prefer to melt back into the shadows now, thanks. And the Defense Secretary will fight cuts to the Marine Corps, likely with Republican support.
And finally, peer in as engineers tell people in various towns that they will be flooded to ease pressure on major rivers and seaways.
In technology, Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion USD. It's a bit of a headscratcher as to why, as Skype only really provides a user base - if Microsoft is simply buying them out so as to scuttle them and force everyone else over to Windows Live video, then, well...that pretty much sucks.
The United States Senate has a proposed bill that would allow the U.S. government to order U.S. ISPs not to allow DNS lookup on sites they considered to be promoting piracy. This would not block access to the sites, per se, but it would mean someone would have to know the specific IP address of the site to get there. Or to use a tunnel through a foreign proxy to get the DNS lookup and resolve from there.
It appears that some of the attacks against Sony's Playstation Network were originated in rented Amazon server cluster space, proving that perhaps one day, hackers won't need zombies, just enough cloud computing to do their work. That said, PSN should be back up and running - everyone gets an update to change their password, and there's also a set of games and items available as an apology for the downtime.
Audible has launched ACX, a service that will allow authors to narrate their own books to become audiobooks, or hire an actor from a registered pool of talent.
And finally, an iris-reading device to log into computers. Ah, biometrics.
In opinions, a look at where many evangelicals(at least, the ones that get press) seem to be turning, toward Rush and Sarah and Team Hell, rather than paying attention to the writings of the person they claim to follow. Then again, many of them are in the business of rebranding everything as sinful and wrong, and also want to attack the segments of government largesse that receive comparatively tiny amounts, while letting the bigger offenders go unscathed, so perhaps we can sort of point out there's something not tick-tocking in the head quite right. Perhaps it's in the belly of a nearby alligator?
From one of the foremost writers of speculative fiction, a request to kindly tone down the use of the F-bomb as a catch-all for various parts of speech. And from someone whose Twilight deconstruction is wonderful, when writing characters that aren't you, it's always a good idea to get the opinion of someone who is what you're writing to see whether you've written something that is believable.
A reminder that as more states join on in civil unions or QUILTBAG marriage, it becomes harder to have support for the position that such things will destroy the country. Given the track record of the peoplpe most likely to be complaining, it may have been dubious at best, but when the people continuing the fight seem to be doing so for less than honorable reasons, it's time to take a long look at the preferred position.
Mr. Krugman lays out the potential problems associated with a debt ceiling vote, and one imperative to the President - don't give in to blackmail. Gaius Publius seizes on the blackmail angle to add his own imperative - if wingnuts are willing to default the country on ideology, let 'em, and make sure everybody knows who is responsible for it.
Mr. Clark on why socialism probably isn't a viable system right now - too many Americans will behave as freeloaders, and probably consider it a positive thing that they're beating the system. And then there's also the possibility that the next Commerce Secretary is a graduate of the Koch Brothers School of Economics and beholden to their ideas.
Mr. Hanson inscribes the arc of history as the United States doing no wrong in bringing down al-Qaeda, with airport security measures and the willingness of U.S. Leaders to say "screw morals and rules, we want results" as the important parts of why we succeeded at our task.
Messrs. Laffer and Moore contextualize Boeing and the NRLB complaint as Washington and other union shop states trying to stop the inexorable march of progress and economic growth in right-to-work states. The two gentlemen believe that the current trends will continue and right-to-work states will be better than union states in terms of economic output, and that sane governments will quickly devise ways to become right-to-work states if they want to keep their corporations and jobs inside the state. The workers get screwed, of course, but who cares about them?
George Soros, conservative bogeyman, and perhaps one of the few liberals trying to respond to how Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporate and billionaire money to tilt the balance to conservative causes. Of course, he can't be acting alone, there has to be an army of "czars" already in the administration doing the bidding of Soros and Obama to make the bogeyman-ness really stick.
Speaking of conservative perception of liberals, unfunny comedian David Limbaugh accuses the administration of having rhetoric at odds with action, and making it sound like the current President's entire list of accomplishments is in this contradiction. Mr. Krauthammer is a bit more blunt, accusing the President of demagoguery and making big villains out of conservatives who want to get serious on issues like immigration. Nevermind that many of those serious conservatives are putting forward unserious proposals, or proposals that can only hope to be satisfied through massive increases in the police and offense budgets.
Heritage goes to bat for the oil companies by claiming the right fiscal move is to end all fuel subsidies, renewable and non-renewable alike, but liberals just want to hurt the already overtaxed oil billions. They also filed an amicus brief against the individual mandate of the health care bill.
Ms. Charen believes that the American people can handle the truth of their history, instead of a sanitized, multicultural version. Is she just as in favor of the actual truth, instead of a sanitized, jingoistic view that generally permeates the textbooks of the country? Considering that her column appears to be about how much that jingoism is important, we doubt it.
Last for tonight, a strategy for the Republicans - associate Barack Obama with Nancy Pelosi as much as possible...which might have worked had Pelosi stayed Speaker in the midterms. Now? There's not enough to make the association with. There's more gunning for John Boehner than Nancy Pelosi.
