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We begin today with The New York State Senate passing, and the governor signing, a bill that allows for LGBT marriage in New York. The Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill 33-29, making them the first state with a Republican-controlled house of legislature to pass such legislation. Having been dealt another blow, the prominent opponents of these measures announced campaigns to defeat the elected representatives responsible.
Continuing on, a memorandum from Roy Disney about what the Disney Corporation would do, and its direction, after the death of the founder, Walt Disney. In contrast, what modern corporations and employers are doing to their workers - making them work more hours, doing more things, making them take on the responsibilities of more than one job - and getting absolutely nothing in pay increase or other compensation for it. And in places like "right to work" states, if you copmlain about it, then you're unemployed and your corporate reference will be more than happy to badmouth you to the next potential employer as "not a team player" or something else. And it's not just you. Everyone's getting it...unless you're a politician or in the top 1 percent of earnings. Then things are just great. If you'd like an example of how this works, examine the Hormel corporation's pig product operation, where workers routinely get life-cripplingly sick, only to be ushered out the door and replaced with persons who have names and addresses that don't really exist.
And continue with an emperor penguin that ended up on the coast of New Zealand...who then had to be taken to hospital because of the large quantities of sand he ingested, thinking it would behave like snow.
Finally, a preschool that attempts to remove gender roles (and pronouns) from its area, and the difficulties that getting rid of gendered language and gender roles presents to the people inside and outside the shcool.
The Dead Pool Actors Company has signed Peter Falk, best known for his role in as "Columbo" at 83 years of age.
Out in the world today, Dutch politcian Geert Wilders was cleared of charges that he tried to incite hatred against Muslims through the use of his film "Fitna". The court in Amsterdam found the remarks "denigrating", but not illegal under any hate speech laws. For those whom Geert Wilders was a truth-teller and exposer of the great evil of The Bloodthirsty Religion, charged frivolously for speaking accurate things that happened to paint Muslims in their bloody light, the acquittal was not just a reinforcement of the right to speak things that are unpleasant, but a vindication of the truth of Mr. Wilders's movie and statements and a call for them to be repeated and diseminated far and wide. Quite a gap there, though - saying that Mr. Wilders was not guilty of incitement is much different than saying what he spoke was in any way true. Of course, people read whatever they want to into the world around them, so it's not surprising to see at least some people seeing it as total vindication.
The definition of what a terrorist is has become whatever it needs to be, whether there's a Republican or a Democrat in charge, whether someone is attacking civilians or not, and whether or not someone actually is making their own plans or having the FBI provide them with a trap to walk into. It's become the point that anyone fighting back against the United States doing what it wants in any way is considered terrorism...a definition that does not extend, of course, to any action that Team America takes to further its own interests. And if you don't like it, or the government believes you may be sympathetic to someone with a cousin who might be tenuously tied to someone who might be a terrorist, they can get your personal information and sift through it without requiring a warrant, notification that they asked for such data, and they can force anyone who gave them that data to be silent about it.
That is, when they're not harrassing photographers about taking perfectly legal pictures, arresting people who take video of police actions on public property and then ticketing her supporters for parking too far from the curb.
Or insisting that elderly women be strip-searched before they can be allowed to fly, in addition to children, and are expanding their reach to include buses, trains, and other forms of public transit, with the added bonus of checking immigration status.
Domestically, as expected, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a risky proposition. However, there's no real hard and fast on what happens during the withdrawal, so it should probably be treated more as a statement to get the monkeys off his back than any serious commitment.
In Florida, a convicted and registered rapist was allowed to return to practice as a doctor. This is one of those cases where you argue over whether someone convicted can be rehabilitated, whether that conviction should disqualify them from certain professions, and a lot of other grey zones with regard to professional lives and personal ones - although in this case, the conviction was for raping a co-worker while in the military.
Much less grey zones are the bending of laws that the anti-life brigade is up to, charging women with murder for miscarriage, stillbirth, or at any point when their unborn children die prematurely and the possibility of something a mother took as a drug or did as a person could be linked to it. And until there's a court or a Congress that will stand up for women and their rights, this erosion will continue.
Flood walls surrounding a Nebraska nuclear power plant have failed, exposing the workings of the plant to the water. One can hope the result is not a duplicate event of the Fukushima poewr plants.
And finally, the last statement of someone believed to have set himself on fire as a last protest against a broken system composed of rules, regulations, and procedures crafted that violate the laws they are supposed to be enforcing, as well as some guesses on how the system came about, who it benefits, and his recommended course of action (arson, referenda, and a general exorcism of the government).
In technology, a warrantless border search that turned up digital manga-style drawing resulted in the confiscation and arrest of an American coming back from Canada on the charges of possession and distribution of child pornography. Once again, over drawings. Which should be protected material, regardless of how icky that might make someone feel.
The British Library has partnered with Google to digitize their materials from 1700-1870, which are the materials out of copyright and not in the rare book rooms, I suspect.
On other parts of the Internet, the group LulzSec claimed responsibility for the release of documents form the Arizona Department of Public Safety - LulzSec said they targeted Arizona becauase of the Papers Please Law they passed earlier. And then, they doffed their caps and headed off into the sunset.
Media cabals are potentially within reach of a deal with major Internet Service Providers that would put repeated copyright infringers either with reduced bandwidth, an inability to visit unapproved websites, or required to attend a media cabal created class on copyright and the rights of creators. I can see why this deal might have appeared - NBC Universal also owns Comcast, if I recall rightly, allowing them to control both the distribution and the Internet access, and I'll bet others, like Verizon and AT&T, have similar parent company arrangements that make it in the ISP's best interest to do the dirty work for the other child, the media cabal company.
Last out, some of the most common unlock codes for iProducts or other keypad-related codes which follow certain patterns - defaults, easy-to-remembers, birth years, and love.
In opinions, Mr. Taibbi believes that Michelle Bachmann is a serious candidate for political office, and that while liberals and centrists might dismiss her as yet another insane religious zealot, it's that very dismissal that fuels her ability to gather followers and supporters in the conservative movement. She feeds on being not just an outsider, but an outside-the-boundaries person, and there's more than enough members of the conservative movement that will willingly follow a holy crusader into the political breach, regardless of whether she's sane or not, because to them, she makes perfect sense and everyone else is just out to bury her holy and necessary message (neatly coinciding with their own beliefs).
Mr. Hornik praisese Glenn Beck's pro-Israel rally in Jerusalem, saying that Bek is unique among many in his unabashed support for Israel and his enemeies can't mount any better arguments against his support than to name-call him and say that he's doing it to make a buck, rather than because he believes in it. Of course, to appreciate this column, it's explicitly said that you have to believe that Israel is a superior nation, chosen by G-d, and beseiged by Islamic hate on all sides, which restricts the available discussion space pretty severely. In that space, the closure of an institute studying anti-Semitism while studies abound about "Islamophobia" (obviously requiring scare quotes becaus it's the Bloodthirsty Religion and not deserving of a fair shake) is an outrage and only proves how persecuted Jews are. (And did we mention lately how George Soros and his puppets are totally in league with The Bloodthirsty Religion in their bid to destroy the Freedoms and Democracy that AMERICA holds dear?, just to make sure that all of our conspiratorial coverage is complete?)
Mr. Rove outlines his reasons why he believes President Obama will be defeated in the 2012 elections - the economy still sucks, he's not pandering to liberals enough, people don't like his policies, and he's engaging in politics, instead of being aloof and above them and letting his minions do the fighting. Numbers one and three qare probably good reasons - a bad economy drove a lot of the 2010 elections, although the buyer's remorse on that might retard a GOP President's popularity, and the policies that he's enacted, especially the GOP-inspired ones or the holdovers from the previous administrator, are definitely not sitting weill with the people. Barack Obama was never that much of a panderer to liberals - they did that to themselves, and there are a lot of people that would like to see the President and the Democrats in general grow a spine and start savaging the other side, so increased participation is probably not going to be seen as a bad thing.
Mr. Gaffney, Jr. is convinced that Barack Obama intends to lose the Two Land Wars In Asia, the First Land War in Africa, and will be supporting the Bloodthirsty Religion in their war against the Pure Jews. On the matter of Afghanistan, the WSJ is convinced that any troop drawdown is a premature declaration of victory and will only hurt the fighters there. Of course, when they're not claiming he's going to lose the wars he already has, commentators are urging him to start new ones, to protect the persecution of indigineous people and Christians in Sudan, and claiming that the Christian faith ad black-whtie worldview of the previous administrator made him an effective force for freedom there, while the current administrator's unwillingness to see in black and white, and see who the obvious evil people are, makes him ineffective.
Mr. Bovard believes that fraud and abuse are rampant in the food stamp program, with his examples of people hawking their benefits, governments not doing investigations and relaxing their rules, and someone like a lottery winner still being able to receive food stamps. Oh, and food stamps are being used for junk food instead of nutritious stuff, so it's not only encouraging government dependency, but obesity. Well, what's the cheapest food you can get in this country? Junk food. So, for those who have to be more concerned about volume than nutrition, junk food it is. On some of the other matters, I'm sure there are ways of fixing the holes there, but that last shot was unnecessary.
Out of opinions, Mr. Pendry believes he understands how economies work better than economists and Ivy-Leaguers - Randian unfettered capitalism makes economies stronger, all persons should pay [income] taxes to make them more conservative about government spending, but corporations should not pay any taxes at all, trickle-down economics totally works, government cannot create wealth, and so should be given as little money as possible, and foreign aid is wasted money when the rich/corporations here at home need tax breaks. It's not couched in such plain language, of course, starting with an appeal to the Declaration of Independence ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") and then adding on something totally not written there ("the individual pursuit of wealth") - apparently, there's a supplemental declaration of inalienable rights that I missed out on. After that, then we're squarely in Republican territory - government cannot create wealth, only transfer it, trickle-down economics enriches everyone, instead of just the rich, and people who don't pay taxes are just whiners who HATE people that actually produce wealth, looking for a free lunch provided by the non-producing government who cruelly enslaves the producing people to redistribute their created wealth past the necessary functions of defense, police, fire services, and infrastructure. Taxes are evil things for our corporate friends, who should have all the profits they earn to invest in their companies (or their CEOs' paychecks) instead of having to give up profits for taxes. Excepting, really that taxes are expenses, and thus profits would be money earned after paying taxes...anyway, Randian capitalism, unfettered excepting in perhaps some very little and necessary ways, for all! Let the rich get richer and everyone else fight each other for the scraps.
Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that California cannot ban display or marketing of violent video games to young children. And here I thought we'd gone over all of that in Night Trap some time ago...
And as a postscript, the Electronic Frontier Foundation releases some useful cheat sheets about what your rights are regarding your digital devices and police requests to search your computer. For the moment, anyway, unless you're at the border, you can require the presence of a search warrant before the police can look at or take any of your devices, at least in your house. For traffic stops or other arrests, they may be able to search you without a warrant. And, of course, if they claim that you would destroy needed evidence if they went and got a warrant, they can search you without getting one. It seems like the equivalent of "That thing's coming right for us! Shoot it in 'self-defense'!", but they will probably have to justify it to a judge later on. (Not that it means a whole lot.)
Continuing on, a memorandum from Roy Disney about what the Disney Corporation would do, and its direction, after the death of the founder, Walt Disney. In contrast, what modern corporations and employers are doing to their workers - making them work more hours, doing more things, making them take on the responsibilities of more than one job - and getting absolutely nothing in pay increase or other compensation for it. And in places like "right to work" states, if you copmlain about it, then you're unemployed and your corporate reference will be more than happy to badmouth you to the next potential employer as "not a team player" or something else. And it's not just you. Everyone's getting it...unless you're a politician or in the top 1 percent of earnings. Then things are just great. If you'd like an example of how this works, examine the Hormel corporation's pig product operation, where workers routinely get life-cripplingly sick, only to be ushered out the door and replaced with persons who have names and addresses that don't really exist.
And continue with an emperor penguin that ended up on the coast of New Zealand...who then had to be taken to hospital because of the large quantities of sand he ingested, thinking it would behave like snow.
Finally, a preschool that attempts to remove gender roles (and pronouns) from its area, and the difficulties that getting rid of gendered language and gender roles presents to the people inside and outside the shcool.
The Dead Pool Actors Company has signed Peter Falk, best known for his role in as "Columbo" at 83 years of age.
Out in the world today, Dutch politcian Geert Wilders was cleared of charges that he tried to incite hatred against Muslims through the use of his film "Fitna". The court in Amsterdam found the remarks "denigrating", but not illegal under any hate speech laws. For those whom Geert Wilders was a truth-teller and exposer of the great evil of The Bloodthirsty Religion, charged frivolously for speaking accurate things that happened to paint Muslims in their bloody light, the acquittal was not just a reinforcement of the right to speak things that are unpleasant, but a vindication of the truth of Mr. Wilders's movie and statements and a call for them to be repeated and diseminated far and wide. Quite a gap there, though - saying that Mr. Wilders was not guilty of incitement is much different than saying what he spoke was in any way true. Of course, people read whatever they want to into the world around them, so it's not surprising to see at least some people seeing it as total vindication.
The definition of what a terrorist is has become whatever it needs to be, whether there's a Republican or a Democrat in charge, whether someone is attacking civilians or not, and whether or not someone actually is making their own plans or having the FBI provide them with a trap to walk into. It's become the point that anyone fighting back against the United States doing what it wants in any way is considered terrorism...a definition that does not extend, of course, to any action that Team America takes to further its own interests. And if you don't like it, or the government believes you may be sympathetic to someone with a cousin who might be tenuously tied to someone who might be a terrorist, they can get your personal information and sift through it without requiring a warrant, notification that they asked for such data, and they can force anyone who gave them that data to be silent about it.
That is, when they're not harrassing photographers about taking perfectly legal pictures, arresting people who take video of police actions on public property and then ticketing her supporters for parking too far from the curb.
Or insisting that elderly women be strip-searched before they can be allowed to fly, in addition to children, and are expanding their reach to include buses, trains, and other forms of public transit, with the added bonus of checking immigration status.
Domestically, as expected, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a risky proposition. However, there's no real hard and fast on what happens during the withdrawal, so it should probably be treated more as a statement to get the monkeys off his back than any serious commitment.
In Florida, a convicted and registered rapist was allowed to return to practice as a doctor. This is one of those cases where you argue over whether someone convicted can be rehabilitated, whether that conviction should disqualify them from certain professions, and a lot of other grey zones with regard to professional lives and personal ones - although in this case, the conviction was for raping a co-worker while in the military.
Much less grey zones are the bending of laws that the anti-life brigade is up to, charging women with murder for miscarriage, stillbirth, or at any point when their unborn children die prematurely and the possibility of something a mother took as a drug or did as a person could be linked to it. And until there's a court or a Congress that will stand up for women and their rights, this erosion will continue.
Flood walls surrounding a Nebraska nuclear power plant have failed, exposing the workings of the plant to the water. One can hope the result is not a duplicate event of the Fukushima poewr plants.
And finally, the last statement of someone believed to have set himself on fire as a last protest against a broken system composed of rules, regulations, and procedures crafted that violate the laws they are supposed to be enforcing, as well as some guesses on how the system came about, who it benefits, and his recommended course of action (arson, referenda, and a general exorcism of the government).
In technology, a warrantless border search that turned up digital manga-style drawing resulted in the confiscation and arrest of an American coming back from Canada on the charges of possession and distribution of child pornography. Once again, over drawings. Which should be protected material, regardless of how icky that might make someone feel.
The British Library has partnered with Google to digitize their materials from 1700-1870, which are the materials out of copyright and not in the rare book rooms, I suspect.
On other parts of the Internet, the group LulzSec claimed responsibility for the release of documents form the Arizona Department of Public Safety - LulzSec said they targeted Arizona becauase of the Papers Please Law they passed earlier. And then, they doffed their caps and headed off into the sunset.
Media cabals are potentially within reach of a deal with major Internet Service Providers that would put repeated copyright infringers either with reduced bandwidth, an inability to visit unapproved websites, or required to attend a media cabal created class on copyright and the rights of creators. I can see why this deal might have appeared - NBC Universal also owns Comcast, if I recall rightly, allowing them to control both the distribution and the Internet access, and I'll bet others, like Verizon and AT&T, have similar parent company arrangements that make it in the ISP's best interest to do the dirty work for the other child, the media cabal company.
Last out, some of the most common unlock codes for iProducts or other keypad-related codes which follow certain patterns - defaults, easy-to-remembers, birth years, and love.
In opinions, Mr. Taibbi believes that Michelle Bachmann is a serious candidate for political office, and that while liberals and centrists might dismiss her as yet another insane religious zealot, it's that very dismissal that fuels her ability to gather followers and supporters in the conservative movement. She feeds on being not just an outsider, but an outside-the-boundaries person, and there's more than enough members of the conservative movement that will willingly follow a holy crusader into the political breach, regardless of whether she's sane or not, because to them, she makes perfect sense and everyone else is just out to bury her holy and necessary message (neatly coinciding with their own beliefs).
Mr. Hornik praisese Glenn Beck's pro-Israel rally in Jerusalem, saying that Bek is unique among many in his unabashed support for Israel and his enemeies can't mount any better arguments against his support than to name-call him and say that he's doing it to make a buck, rather than because he believes in it. Of course, to appreciate this column, it's explicitly said that you have to believe that Israel is a superior nation, chosen by G-d, and beseiged by Islamic hate on all sides, which restricts the available discussion space pretty severely. In that space, the closure of an institute studying anti-Semitism while studies abound about "Islamophobia" (obviously requiring scare quotes becaus it's the Bloodthirsty Religion and not deserving of a fair shake) is an outrage and only proves how persecuted Jews are. (And did we mention lately how George Soros and his puppets are totally in league with The Bloodthirsty Religion in their bid to destroy the Freedoms and Democracy that AMERICA holds dear?, just to make sure that all of our conspiratorial coverage is complete?)
Mr. Rove outlines his reasons why he believes President Obama will be defeated in the 2012 elections - the economy still sucks, he's not pandering to liberals enough, people don't like his policies, and he's engaging in politics, instead of being aloof and above them and letting his minions do the fighting. Numbers one and three qare probably good reasons - a bad economy drove a lot of the 2010 elections, although the buyer's remorse on that might retard a GOP President's popularity, and the policies that he's enacted, especially the GOP-inspired ones or the holdovers from the previous administrator, are definitely not sitting weill with the people. Barack Obama was never that much of a panderer to liberals - they did that to themselves, and there are a lot of people that would like to see the President and the Democrats in general grow a spine and start savaging the other side, so increased participation is probably not going to be seen as a bad thing.
Mr. Gaffney, Jr. is convinced that Barack Obama intends to lose the Two Land Wars In Asia, the First Land War in Africa, and will be supporting the Bloodthirsty Religion in their war against the Pure Jews. On the matter of Afghanistan, the WSJ is convinced that any troop drawdown is a premature declaration of victory and will only hurt the fighters there. Of course, when they're not claiming he's going to lose the wars he already has, commentators are urging him to start new ones, to protect the persecution of indigineous people and Christians in Sudan, and claiming that the Christian faith ad black-whtie worldview of the previous administrator made him an effective force for freedom there, while the current administrator's unwillingness to see in black and white, and see who the obvious evil people are, makes him ineffective.
Mr. Bovard believes that fraud and abuse are rampant in the food stamp program, with his examples of people hawking their benefits, governments not doing investigations and relaxing their rules, and someone like a lottery winner still being able to receive food stamps. Oh, and food stamps are being used for junk food instead of nutritious stuff, so it's not only encouraging government dependency, but obesity. Well, what's the cheapest food you can get in this country? Junk food. So, for those who have to be more concerned about volume than nutrition, junk food it is. On some of the other matters, I'm sure there are ways of fixing the holes there, but that last shot was unnecessary.
Out of opinions, Mr. Pendry believes he understands how economies work better than economists and Ivy-Leaguers - Randian unfettered capitalism makes economies stronger, all persons should pay [income] taxes to make them more conservative about government spending, but corporations should not pay any taxes at all, trickle-down economics totally works, government cannot create wealth, and so should be given as little money as possible, and foreign aid is wasted money when the rich/corporations here at home need tax breaks. It's not couched in such plain language, of course, starting with an appeal to the Declaration of Independence ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") and then adding on something totally not written there ("the individual pursuit of wealth") - apparently, there's a supplemental declaration of inalienable rights that I missed out on. After that, then we're squarely in Republican territory - government cannot create wealth, only transfer it, trickle-down economics enriches everyone, instead of just the rich, and people who don't pay taxes are just whiners who HATE people that actually produce wealth, looking for a free lunch provided by the non-producing government who cruelly enslaves the producing people to redistribute their created wealth past the necessary functions of defense, police, fire services, and infrastructure. Taxes are evil things for our corporate friends, who should have all the profits they earn to invest in their companies (or their CEOs' paychecks) instead of having to give up profits for taxes. Excepting, really that taxes are expenses, and thus profits would be money earned after paying taxes...anyway, Randian capitalism, unfettered excepting in perhaps some very little and necessary ways, for all! Let the rich get richer and everyone else fight each other for the scraps.
Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that California cannot ban display or marketing of violent video games to young children. And here I thought we'd gone over all of that in Night Trap some time ago...
And as a postscript, the Electronic Frontier Foundation releases some useful cheat sheets about what your rights are regarding your digital devices and police requests to search your computer. For the moment, anyway, unless you're at the border, you can require the presence of a search warrant before the police can look at or take any of your devices, at least in your house. For traffic stops or other arrests, they may be able to search you without a warrant. And, of course, if they claim that you would destroy needed evidence if they went and got a warrant, they can search you without getting one. It seems like the equivalent of "That thing's coming right for us! Shoot it in 'self-defense'!", but they will probably have to justify it to a judge later on. (Not that it means a whole lot.)
