Jun. 21st, 2011

silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
Good morning, everyone, and take a look at a memo that explains a serious problem with a critical system in the Apollo project with grace and informality.

Next up, myths about the introverted side of the spectrum, which point out that one needs not be a hermit to be an introvert, but to most of the eyes around them, the Introverts don't appear to be all that much into the social space.

Out in the world today, the new Peruvian President has directed the justice ministers to investigate a mass sterilization campaign mounted against poor women twenty years ago. And in the Phillippines, a bill is working its way through that would give women the right to access reporductive health choices without interference from men or the Catholic Church.

In places where radicalization of children is a danger, the presence of educated and involved women and mothers can be a deterrrent - if they see the signs early enough and they get involved, sometimes they can rescue the children from the path of the radical. The example is Pakistan, but the rubric works everywhere there are radicalizing forces.

Evangelical Christian money is financing a project to uproot Bedouins in Israel and replace their land with a forest of trees.

The Czech Republic withdraws from a proposed missile defense and radar plan, indicating they're not happy with the role proposed to them.

The International Monetary Fund, far from being an organization meant to help the poor with the funds of the rich, is an organization ensuring the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, by usury and then demanding that countries strip themselves of their resources to pay the interest on that usury.

Not that there aren't other campaigns, even in rich countries, to exploit people and try to get them to be paid less than they deserve - an MP wanted to make it so that disabled people would be exempted from the minimum wage laws in he United Kingdom, kind of like how they can be exempted here in the United States. It's not the minimum wage that's contributing to unemployment, it's that companies aren't hiring anyone, preferring to sit on their profits, pay the executives, and dodge their tax burdens.

And it's not just governments, either - private corporations are more than willing to exploit the poor and poor nations for their own benefit.

And finally, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution recognizing the human rights of QUILTBAG people. - A fairly close vote, but one that shows a bit of life for the normally less-than-effective HRC. This will only give the conservative movement here more ammunition to declare the HRC useless, because of their anti-QUILTBAG stance, but it will be refreshing to not hear them talk about how all those serial human rights violators are just using the council to pass anti-Israel measures.

Domestically, the administration response to ultimatums about their involvement in Libya by indicating they believe the support role they're playing to NATO doesn't fit the criteria needed for the War Powers Resolution to apply.

Mr. Greenwald has a point to make about U.S. politics. Namely, you can do warrantless wiretapping, secret non-legal prisons, abuse your prisoners, and lie about how many you've killed, and It's Okay If You're A Republican, because the Democrats sure as hell won't grow a spine...but if you get caught sending pictures to someone over the Internet, and you're a Democrat, both political parties and the media will hound you until you resign. For which Ms. Maddow tears into the Democrats for not calling out the Republican double-standard on sex scandals, not ot mention lal the other things that have been done by Republicans, into the media for not calling out that double-standard and for going along with the Republicans, and concludes that the Dems have done damage to themselves for about a generation for this action paired with their inaction on issues they really should have been caring about.

Speaking of politics, Mr. Romney may sink himself in the Republican nomination, but earns sanity points, by not signing onto a pledge that would have locked him into a rabidly pro-life dogma for appointments.

If you've been convicted of a felony offense, even after you've served your time in jail, society, employers, and the governemnt all feel that it's appropriate to discriminate against you and build a situation where you're more likely to re-offend. Why not try a system where everyone feels that appropriate reparations have been made?

BP and Transocean avoid having to pay out a significant amount in lawsuits as a federal judge renders lawsuits against them for the spill of last year void because they fixed the spill.

Wal-Mart also wins out against a potential class-action lawsuit when the Supreme Court rules that pattens and statistical analysis do not a pattern of discrimination make.

A fire in a North Dakota nuclear power plant briefly interrupted power to a cooling pool of spent fuel, sparking fears of a Fukushima-like meltdown, despite the official length of the power outage a mere 90 minutes. Officials with the power district denied any serious meltdown and any toher allegations that the plant was somehow unsafe in the face of rising river waters near it.

Graphs and Charts lets us know about an accusation that all of the reported quantitative easing that was supposed to help United States banks recapitalize was instead funneled back to the ome offices of many foreign banks to recapitalize them and stop the inevitable Eurocrash. Charts and Graphs, mostly, accopmanied by suggestions on why policies might have changed. Still, the Overlords of Finance operate mostly in secret these days, and need to be brought out somewhere more lit, even if they squirm and hiss.

In technology, Citibank allowed themselves to get hacked by being stupid with their URIs and by not actually checking, past the first check, whether someone was authorized to access account numbers.

Mr. Dvorak sees the current interest in hacker stories, and the uptick in certain events as possible false flag operations, designed to rally the public around letting the government take over th eInternet and regulate it within an inch of any sort of freedom.

Microsoft is given the green light to buy Skype, which likely means Windows-only at best, if not a quick consignment to the other toys Microsoft has bought just to break.

Japanese scientists have been able to construct a meat-like product using the proteins found in...fecal matter. Well, there's one way of recycling all things...

And finally, an update on the progress of the Clock of the Long Now, slowly being built in the desert, designed to keep time over the next ten thousand years, able to chime for those who make the pilgrimage to see it, and perhaps occasionally, all by itself.

In opinions, Mr. Shapiro opens with an accusation that the President demeans the office by raffling off a dinner with him, by appearing on pop culture programs and sporting events, and otherwise not behaving like Mr. Shaprio believes the President should. He also compares him with other Democrats who Mr. Shapiro believes disgraced the office Curiously absent are the Republicans, who have done quite a bit of disgracing with their actual policies and laws signed, actions taken, and lack of consequences thereof for many of them. It's Okay If You're a Republican, but not if you're a Democrat, and certainly not if you actually believe the office has room for informality.

The editors of the WSJ give a raspberry to a new set of regulations proposed by Health and Human Services, and most of the people who could be participating to see if it works say they won't. Back to the drawing board on that one, then.

Mr. Trzupek believes that the mere ending of susidies will not result in any relief for gas price pumps, simply because Congress has mandated demand, and so the prices will simply rise by the amount of subsidy dropped. Instead, Mr. Trzupek says we should declare corn ethanol to be a failed attempt and get rid of it entirely, but that would be politically inconvenient, so it won't happen.

Ms. Weiss praises the United Kingdom for changing the focus of its PREVENT programme to try and prevent radicalization and combat extremist ideologies, and believes the United States should do the same. Well, no argument here, so long as it doesn't turn into "round up all the Muslims and jail them because they're THE TERRISTS.", which there is still the disturbing possibility of. Pakistan is becoming a place of conern because of the way they aren't wholeheartedly in the corner of the United States on anti-terror operations.

Mr. Stossel believes the easy way to propserity is to fire government workers and privatize - everybody who does it experiences a great economic recovery. Mr. Reynolds says that higher taxes don't actually generate more government revenues - mostly because people stop doing things that can be taxed, not because higher taxes are Intrinsically Bad, no matter what Mr. Stossel will tell you. Mr. Prelutsky is far more concerned with the fact that stock market numbers are going up, despite unemployment and other bad indicators also going up, and he believes only government shenanigans can be the reason why this is so. (The idea that profits are going up through the mechanization of some jobs and the shedding of others is apparently foreign to him.)

Mr. Klein is not satisfied by the explanations given by the Obama Administration about why it has not sought Congressional approval in Libya, and continues to hold that they are in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Speaking of foreign policy, Mr. Thornton believes the United States should fully embrace the Team America paradigm and leave behind any guilt or other part of the past that might lead one to believe that the United States and the colonialism that it inherited and practiced might have had engative repercussions. Apparently, using that lens leads to Vietnam situations, or Iran (or anywhere else) being taken over by terrorists and Evil Men because the U.S. believes those actions might be legitimate revolutions.

And last for tonight, a memorandum about the foul language heard on the baseball field that was, ironically, too full of expletives to be delivered by mail, and thus had to be hand-delivered, and the statement made by a New York State Senator in favor of marriage equality, containing only one expletive, well-placed.

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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