![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Up top, an update that I've failed to mention because it hasn't appeared on any other radar than the show I got it from - The Catherine Ferguson Academy is being sold off from Detroit Public Schools and will now operate as a charter school. Which is good for the students there - they will hopefully continue to get the same education and support they have been in the past. It now remains to see whether the new operators are fully committed to the Catherine Ferguson Academy methods and only want to improve them and make them better.
I need those with photography skillz to tell me whether the introduction of a small-sized point-and-shoot light-field-measuring camera will make taking pictures a bit easier or not. If it really can simply refocus the entire picture by choosing which object to center on, that will certainly make some things more interesting, like capturing action shotsor those kinds of pictures where you position yourself in the frame to make it ostensibly about you but you're actually taking the picture of something going on in the background.
Out in the world today, Brazil's new prime minister is two women short of her target of 30 percent women in the cabinet.
Domestically, The Securities and Exchange Commission lets us know that those who know what Congress is going to do and act on their portfolios accordingly are not engaging in insider trading. They're making plenty, while regular citizens will attempt to rob a bank, not to get the money, but to get the health care that prison provides...which is more than what the robber had themselves. That is a sincerely perverse incentive there, Congress. Maybe you could do something about it?
And speaking of perverse incentives, why are we continuing in the vein of Orwellian Endless War and expanding the National Security State when there are clear reasons to take most, if not all, of the money for our wars with Eurasia and put it into doemstic priorities and strengthen the economy? Even the President only suggests withdrawing 10,000 of the 100,000 fighting force in Afghanistan, a clear indication that he's okay with more fighting, treasure, and blood lost.
A standoff with police was followed in real-time, as the hostage-taker continued to update and receive updates from his Facebook page. Unfortunately, gunplay still involved, even as the hostage-taker kept up with his social media.
Republican governors brought into office in 2010 are suffering from severe buyer's remorse, as they go about their own social and union-busting agenda, attempt to get out of Medicare and Affordable Care, and generally ignore the mandate that the voters gae them whent hey put them in office - get us back to work. One governor is sufficiently hard-up that he's asking his supporters to astrotruf their local papers with pre-written letters of support for him.
In technology, The Pentagon now has guidelines on how they can use their cyber capabilities in warare, espionage, and other operations in peacetime and in war. By executive order, anyway.
Electronic Arts is planning on buying PopCap Games, makers of addictive time-wasters such as Bejewled and Plants Versus Zombies, for One Billion USD.
In opinions, Mr. Williams believes most people are not moral enough to say that nobody should be forced to pay for someone else's benefit, only to squabble over who deserves those benefits extracted by force. Althoguh we think Mr. Williams is misusing the word moral when he means free as in libre. In a free/libre society, he's right - nobody should be forced to pay for anyone else. In a moral society, however, it depends on whose morals we're talking about. In most moral systems, nobody should be forced, but everyone should be willing to help their fellows out, which alleviates the need for any sort of force, governmental or otherwise, to achieve the safety net. The free/libre Mr. Williams described might be Randian morality, but John Galt is not a moral exemplar by any other system than that one. Mr. Sowell suggests that young people be given the option to get out of Medicare and Social Security, before the programs bankrupt themselves and leave them with uncomfortable choices about tax revenues or decreased benefits. Bit of an SFP, as younger workers are the ones paying into the system, so if they opt-out, why the program mysteriously bankrupts itself. How convenient.
Mr. Hanson accuses the President of being a 1960s reactionary in the way that he develops policy, panders to racial groups, attempts to being unions back to power, and exercises "state socialism" in the way that he does things like bailouts and promises of federal money. Well, it's at least a step up from the rhetoric of "secret Muslim" and "not really a citizen"...but I somehow think that an actual lefty from the 60s would have done a lot more, well, lefty things, like stopping wars and closing down illegal prisons.
The folks at Heritage commit a major error in their first paragraph about the dangers of single parenting and hope you don't notice. All the statistics are about single parenthood, but they want you to substitute "single motherhood" because so many of those households are fatherless. Once you've made that substitution error in your mind, it becomes really easy to believe that marriage is totally the greatest anti-poverty weapon there is...when the truth might be a little less dramatic - it takes two incomes to survive in this country, and marriage provides a lot of property and tax incentives that can help stretch those two incomes into something resembling survival. And, if they're so concerned about children and single motherhood, they could push for something like widespread availability of contraceptives, real sex education, and family planning, but no - they just want two-parent heteronormal families with children, not thriving families.
Mr. Murchison praises the Supreme Court decision to dismiss a class-action suit against Wal-Mart, claiming that the people doing so were without actual evidence, which is the requirement, not analysis that indicates the pattern, even if there aren't many obvious anecdotes. He proceeds to say that there's an Unconcsious Prejudice Industry, dedicated to telling us that we're all discriminating against others without realizing it, a concept that he dismises because its existence cannot be proven. I think those people interested in teh structures of language and their usage would disagree, and point out that even if there's never any overt discrimination, if a manager uses diminutive nicknames around all the women he supervises, there's clearly something going on there, even if it never manifests.
Ms. Glick is nonplussed at trade embargoes and sanctions against Israeli companies trading with Iran, figuring that those companies were also working as intelligence assets for Mossad and other Israeli allies, and those public sanctions are yet another anti-Israel gesture by Barack Obama, who Hates Israel.
Mr. Roberts says that the average consumer should be proud his jobs are being replaced by machines, which make cheaper products to buy, and that said employee should be all in favor of Republican economiuc plans so that the rising tide can go back to lifting all boats. Excepting, of course, the part where it's pretty clear the rising tide only lifted a few boats and not everyone else, and that Republican economic plans are usually great about making the rich whole and the rest of us screwed.
Mr. Pendry loudly proclaims Christians as the Persecuted Majority, with the evul secularists using something written in the Constitution to infringe a Christian politician's free-exercise right, while denouncing Islam as The Bloodthirsty Religion, and thus an anti-American political movement that should have no right to exercise freely, and then proclaiming himself a vigilant member of the press exercising another freedom to tell the turth. Which leads nicely to...
Tonight's winner of the Speck-Plank Problem Clue-By-Four is The Anti-Jihadist's list of why Muslim Cultures will be perpetually behind the more advanced and civilized Western societies. He has clearly not thought this through, or he would realize how easily applicable all of his points against the Muslim World are to the West (and it's Christians). Let's take a tour:
Last for tonight, the purported study that finds an optimum cup of tea...if your tea has teabags and you put milk in it, that is.
I need those with photography skillz to tell me whether the introduction of a small-sized point-and-shoot light-field-measuring camera will make taking pictures a bit easier or not. If it really can simply refocus the entire picture by choosing which object to center on, that will certainly make some things more interesting, like capturing action shotsor those kinds of pictures where you position yourself in the frame to make it ostensibly about you but you're actually taking the picture of something going on in the background.
Out in the world today, Brazil's new prime minister is two women short of her target of 30 percent women in the cabinet.
Domestically, The Securities and Exchange Commission lets us know that those who know what Congress is going to do and act on their portfolios accordingly are not engaging in insider trading. They're making plenty, while regular citizens will attempt to rob a bank, not to get the money, but to get the health care that prison provides...which is more than what the robber had themselves. That is a sincerely perverse incentive there, Congress. Maybe you could do something about it?
And speaking of perverse incentives, why are we continuing in the vein of Orwellian Endless War and expanding the National Security State when there are clear reasons to take most, if not all, of the money for our wars with Eurasia and put it into doemstic priorities and strengthen the economy? Even the President only suggests withdrawing 10,000 of the 100,000 fighting force in Afghanistan, a clear indication that he's okay with more fighting, treasure, and blood lost.
A standoff with police was followed in real-time, as the hostage-taker continued to update and receive updates from his Facebook page. Unfortunately, gunplay still involved, even as the hostage-taker kept up with his social media.
Republican governors brought into office in 2010 are suffering from severe buyer's remorse, as they go about their own social and union-busting agenda, attempt to get out of Medicare and Affordable Care, and generally ignore the mandate that the voters gae them whent hey put them in office - get us back to work. One governor is sufficiently hard-up that he's asking his supporters to astrotruf their local papers with pre-written letters of support for him.
In technology, The Pentagon now has guidelines on how they can use their cyber capabilities in warare, espionage, and other operations in peacetime and in war. By executive order, anyway.
Electronic Arts is planning on buying PopCap Games, makers of addictive time-wasters such as Bejewled and Plants Versus Zombies, for One Billion USD.
In opinions, Mr. Williams believes most people are not moral enough to say that nobody should be forced to pay for someone else's benefit, only to squabble over who deserves those benefits extracted by force. Althoguh we think Mr. Williams is misusing the word moral when he means free as in libre. In a free/libre society, he's right - nobody should be forced to pay for anyone else. In a moral society, however, it depends on whose morals we're talking about. In most moral systems, nobody should be forced, but everyone should be willing to help their fellows out, which alleviates the need for any sort of force, governmental or otherwise, to achieve the safety net. The free/libre Mr. Williams described might be Randian morality, but John Galt is not a moral exemplar by any other system than that one. Mr. Sowell suggests that young people be given the option to get out of Medicare and Social Security, before the programs bankrupt themselves and leave them with uncomfortable choices about tax revenues or decreased benefits. Bit of an SFP, as younger workers are the ones paying into the system, so if they opt-out, why the program mysteriously bankrupts itself. How convenient.
Mr. Hanson accuses the President of being a 1960s reactionary in the way that he develops policy, panders to racial groups, attempts to being unions back to power, and exercises "state socialism" in the way that he does things like bailouts and promises of federal money. Well, it's at least a step up from the rhetoric of "secret Muslim" and "not really a citizen"...but I somehow think that an actual lefty from the 60s would have done a lot more, well, lefty things, like stopping wars and closing down illegal prisons.
The folks at Heritage commit a major error in their first paragraph about the dangers of single parenting and hope you don't notice. All the statistics are about single parenthood, but they want you to substitute "single motherhood" because so many of those households are fatherless. Once you've made that substitution error in your mind, it becomes really easy to believe that marriage is totally the greatest anti-poverty weapon there is...when the truth might be a little less dramatic - it takes two incomes to survive in this country, and marriage provides a lot of property and tax incentives that can help stretch those two incomes into something resembling survival. And, if they're so concerned about children and single motherhood, they could push for something like widespread availability of contraceptives, real sex education, and family planning, but no - they just want two-parent heteronormal families with children, not thriving families.
Mr. Murchison praises the Supreme Court decision to dismiss a class-action suit against Wal-Mart, claiming that the people doing so were without actual evidence, which is the requirement, not analysis that indicates the pattern, even if there aren't many obvious anecdotes. He proceeds to say that there's an Unconcsious Prejudice Industry, dedicated to telling us that we're all discriminating against others without realizing it, a concept that he dismises because its existence cannot be proven. I think those people interested in teh structures of language and their usage would disagree, and point out that even if there's never any overt discrimination, if a manager uses diminutive nicknames around all the women he supervises, there's clearly something going on there, even if it never manifests.
Ms. Glick is nonplussed at trade embargoes and sanctions against Israeli companies trading with Iran, figuring that those companies were also working as intelligence assets for Mossad and other Israeli allies, and those public sanctions are yet another anti-Israel gesture by Barack Obama, who Hates Israel.
Mr. Roberts says that the average consumer should be proud his jobs are being replaced by machines, which make cheaper products to buy, and that said employee should be all in favor of Republican economiuc plans so that the rising tide can go back to lifting all boats. Excepting, of course, the part where it's pretty clear the rising tide only lifted a few boats and not everyone else, and that Republican economic plans are usually great about making the rich whole and the rest of us screwed.
Mr. Pendry loudly proclaims Christians as the Persecuted Majority, with the evul secularists using something written in the Constitution to infringe a Christian politician's free-exercise right, while denouncing Islam as The Bloodthirsty Religion, and thus an anti-American political movement that should have no right to exercise freely, and then proclaiming himself a vigilant member of the press exercising another freedom to tell the turth. Which leads nicely to...
Tonight's winner of the Speck-Plank Problem Clue-By-Four is The Anti-Jihadist's list of why Muslim Cultures will be perpetually behind the more advanced and civilized Western societies. He has clearly not thought this through, or he would realize how easily applicable all of his points against the Muslim World are to the West (and it's Christians). Let's take a tour:
- Belief in magic. The Satanic Panic. The Prosperity Gospel. The Secret. The "Power of Positive Thinking". Hell, belief in the efficacy of prayer could be consider a belief in magic, considering many believe that only a certain sequence of magic words will get one into Heaven. And, of course, there are the hysterias about witches, pagans, and the supposed conversion powers of The Gay. I think we can safely say there's a belief in magic quite prevalent in this Western, nominally Christian nation. So, "A culture that is eager to embrace the supernatural takes a giant step away from rationality and deceives itself fundamentally. Self-deception is always, sooner or later, the path to failure."
- Belief in conspiracies. The Jewish Banking Conspiracy. The Secret Muslim Conspiracy, known as the Birthers. The Tea Partiers. The KKK. That all unions are there simply to protect bad people instead of rewarding good people. The New World Order. The One World Government. Nicolae Carpathia and the Anti-Christ. Mormons, among other things. When presented with rebuttals, those deeply involved will usually just shrug it off and carry on with their nonsensical conspiracy theories. A lack of evidence is often treated as something that makes the conspiracy truer rather than disproven.
- Lack of innovation. The tape produced by the abuse of copyright and patent, the pursuit of profit, the use of the monopoly, the way the media cabals zealously pursue anyone who might be doing something with what they think is theirs. Innovation can be bought out or sued into oblivion if someone wishes it so. The heresy, then, is with the corporations, instead of the imagined heresy in the religion the Anti-Jihadist thinks is the case.
- Lack of devotion to non-family/non tribal/non-clan organizations. How many people will willingly screw the next person over to get ahead themselves? How many people believe that the role of government is to kill and imprison people, not to help them get ahead? How many people cheat the law when nobody's looking, or work for corporations that do so as a part of their business plan? Although, I suppose, this is a question of too much devotion to those non-family, non-tribal, non-clan organizations, if we're talking strictly about blood relations. But for those clans that people willingly take onto themselves, they show far too much loyalty to them and not enough to other of their fellow humans. The patriotism that the Anti-Jihadist believes is ubiquitous in the West is not necessarily to the country, but usually to something else entirely.
- Lack of empowerment of women. "The future, no matter what form it may take, is almost certainly going to involve more technology, not less. How well equipped is a society for this future if half of its members are only (at best) grudgingly given their rights? In many [Christian] countries, women...often have no rights in essential critical life decisions, such as those involving child-rearing, marriage or education. And why should they? Various [Biblical] verses, age-old [Christian] traditions, and core [Christian] teachings render women as nothing more than chattel and the property of their male relatives—never the equal of men." The only difference between those two is that most women here are literate, and that there is the chance that some of those traditions will be reformed. Not in all traditions - the Catholic Church continues to be rather obstinate about the role of women in making decisions, refusing to ordain them, refusing to let them make decisions about child-rearing (or choice not to get pregnant or birth a child) or marriage. Several other Christian traditions strongly stress that the man is the head of the household, and that all the women and children must obey him, love him, and never leave him, no matter what he has become or what he does to them. There are some places with progressive leanings, certainly, but as a whole, Christianity is not particularly woman-empowering.
- Lack of personal responsibility. I guess my screed about corporations robbing the people blind, the politicians that allow themselves to be bought so the corporations can continue their robbery, the persons on Wall Street who can ruin lives with a flick of their fingers, and the general idea enshrined in capitalism that if you can steal something from another person, the corporation, or the government, then you should, and the fool them for not protecting their property. The prophet of libretarianism, Ayn Rand, advocated this and more. And speaking of scapegoats, isn't that what "identity politics" is all about? Pointing fingers at someone else so as to deflect suspicion and blame from those who should have it to those who do not?
- Lack of skilled labour. "As there are never enough people willing or able to work within their own borders, [Western] nations are forced to outsource their labour needs. In [Europe] and most [of the United States], for instance, cleaners and maids come from India or the Philippines [and Mexico], while engineers and others in the technical trades come from...Europe, and increasingly east Asia." Don't we have plenty of conservatives up in arms about how all those "furrnurs" are taking position in American colleges, to get educated, and then they go home with that knowledge, instead of staying in America? Don't a lot of Americans have suspicions about hotel cleaning staff because they all speak a language associated with low-wage, sometimes-undocumented migrants? Seems like there are jobs there if Americans want to take them there, but many of them think such work and wages are beneath them or not enough to be able to survive. It's our trades and manufacturing capacity conservatives claim is disappearing and needs to be reasserted (except where there are unions - it has to come back without unions involved or it doesn't count) - so aren't we having the same situation? And this folds into the next point...
- Lack of meritocracy. The Anti-Jihadist laughably ignores the Peter Principle and believes that the West is based entirely on a meritocracy. The West has the concept of "networking", which is all about using one's personal connections to get jobs, promotions, bonuses, and the like. Plus, there's enough of a disconnect between the rich and those leading the corporations and those working at the base levels that it really doesn't matter about competence in a lot of cases - CEOs that drive their corporations into the ground still get golden parachutes and hired on at some other company that they can do the same thing to. Those that are liked by the management are eventually promoted into management. And there are the complaints about unions. In a completely meritorious society, of course, the weak would be culled, the strong promoted, but the complaint about unions is that they prevent this from happening. Being part of the union tribe makes it impossible.
In conclusion, then, "If you’ve read up to this point, no doubt that you could add a few more things to this list. But remember, political correctness dictates that all cultures are somehow 'equal,' and [Westerners] are convinced their cultures are somehow superior, never mind the reams of evidence to the contrary. So while I want to be optimistic, the smart money is not riding on the would-be reformers of the under-performing societies of the [Western] world. At least not yet." And we do not believe their propagandists when they have clearly not thought through the implications of their commentaries.
The common arguments against Islam as a bloodthirsty religion fail to take into account the shared ancestry and the rather large history of both religions steeped in bloodshed, abuse, and death. Both have the same goal - worldwide conversion, and both have used the sword to try and achieve those foals. That one is to be protected from their history and seen as peace-loving and one seen as hateful and bloodthirsty is merely an exercise in PR and dominant culture.
Last for tonight, the purported study that finds an optimum cup of tea...if your tea has teabags and you put milk in it, that is.
