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Welcome again. Read a piece about Danny Chen that shows how deep the rot in the Army had gone that resulted in his suicide...a lot of his tormentors were officers above him in rank. If there aren't Courts-Martial over this incident, there will be more than a few cries for heads to roll.
Instead, a general court-martial is recommended for PFC Bradley Manning, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to the Wikileaks organization.
And for those following the Republican nominations, several more reaons why Ron Paul is not the selection you should be going with. (Not that the others are doing that much better, but moneyed conservative interests certainly seem to be coalescing around Mitt Romney. And they've got quite a bti of money in the war chest to spend.)
Willard "Mitt" Romney wins the New Hampshire Republican primary. Even though some New Hampshire Republicans want lawmakers to cite the Magna Carta for the justifications for their laws. This seems like a clear case of trying to be more X-TREME than those Constitutional-Authority Tea Partiers.
Last for the beginning, a letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King threatening that they will ruin him. A reminder that Dr. King was considered dangerous for all of his views, not just the ones that people think he had because the textbooks choose not to show them.
Out in the world today, go vote for whom may be the worst multinational company of 2012 - a strong leader at this point is Tepco, the atomic power company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.
Ireland scraps voting machines purchased in 2002 and tested in 2004, because the things would not work for them at all and could not pass appropriate tests for usage. Yet here in the States, we have machines that are routinely found to be hackable and insecure and they get rolled out for each election, seemingly regardless of whether they pass the tests or not.
Canada's justice minister declares that all marriages performed in Canada are legal marraiges, having been alerted to the effects of some other laws interfering with the legality of those marriages.
A Catholic priest in Germany admitted to 280 counts of sexual abuse of young men in the past decade, claiming that he did not believe he was doing any harm to them when he abused them. Sorry, did someone say those were all things in the past that were being dredged up and that the Catholic Church was totally clean now? Try again.
Several conservative religious leaders put out a statement claiming that gay marriage must be stopped if the liberty of the United States is to continue, because recognizing such unions means we've abandoned our moral center, and you know what happens after that. Mr. Santorum articulated that position, I believe, and it earned him his un-Googleable status.
Belarus passes a law banning anyone in the country from visting web sites that originate in domains outside the country.
And finally, crap. India reports a strain of tuberculosis resistant to all current drug treatments, and Woo-hoo! Green light given to test a possible HIV vaccine in humans, and Eh? Exposure to young blood in mice allows old blood to reactivate its stem cells and fight damage from diseases like multiple sclerosis.
Domestically, Texas's requirements for invasive ultrasounds for women appear to have passed an appeals court challenge, making the state add insult to injury to most abortion seekers.
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld that religious organizations have the right to discriminate and fire their employees based on what would otherwise be protected classes under the law, and then granted those organizations very wide latitude to determine which of their employees are exempted from the protections.
The Montana State Supreme Court issued a ruling indicating that the Citizens United ruling of the United States Supreme Court does not apply in their state.
Elsewhere, it is permissible for a police department to not hire an applicant because they had too high of an IQ according to the tests. Perhaps because they would be flabbergasted at the sequence of events where in attempting to shoot a mouse with a gun, a house resident shot one of his roommates and exposed an affair another roommate was having with an underage girl.
In technology, the app iOnRoad, which uses the components in an Android phone to monitor the distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of it, with alarms visible and audible when the distance closes swiftly to dangerous levels.
Google (or a contractor thereof) is caught being quite evil - trawling a database, calling the clients in that database and then lying to them and trying to sell them services that would cost them significant amounts of money.
Also, five years of iPhone, and the beginning of the eighth year of the Spirit/Opprortunity mission to Mars, a mission that has outlasted its original run time by more than seven years. The engineering team that built those rovers should be enshrined and emulated in future projects.
For your handy reference, dogs acting out the various HTTP status codes, inspired by cats acting out the various HTTP status codes.
And last, some bath tissue boxes were mysteriously contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60 - thankfully, of sufficiently low doses that wouldn't be dangerous.
In the opinions, where we find how one can derive moral and ethical behavior without the need for G-d or any other gods.
From there, we look into the struggle of one woman to reconcile fantasies of non-consensual sex with the upbringing that demonized sex, a sexual assault, and the society that surrounds her regarding sex. If you are triggered by the description of sexual assault or of such fantasies, best to avoid the link and the comments, as they are likely to contain several descriptions thereof. If you wish to discuss how the culture affects male/male-identified sexual fantasies, there is a companion thread talking about how culture and upbringing affects male sexual fantasies, so as not to derail the original.
There's also why giving advice to victims about how not to be a victim goes over like a lead balloon, no matter how well-intentioned you might be in doing it.
For something both light-hearted and serious, an author attempts to match the poses for the female characters gracing the covers of various fantasy and paranormal romance novels. The results: Holy [BLEEP]ing back cramps, Batman! And if you thought it was just because that author wasn't flexible enough - a martial artist and contortionist can't match those poses, either. Furthermore, those kinds of poses are really kind of unnecessary to show off the sexiness of female characters.
And then there's politics as usual, where conservative commentators claim George Stephanopolous had trouble being fair to the Republican candidates in a debate he moderated, but they use disgraced propagandist L. Brent Bozell III as corroboration and defend both Newt Gingrich's claim that Catholics are victims of secular bigotry because they refuse to allow adoptions by gay couples and Mitt Romney's assertion that no state wants to ban contraception, despite the demonstrable consequences of such things as personhood amendments. Mr. McGurn attempts to find more positive spin in this, claiming it a lesson on how to refute media bias against conservatives, pointing out how artful dodges of questions are really great ways of making your interlocutors look foolish, rather than, say, answering the questions that are on the minds of the people.
Mr. Tankerton gently chides people who are concerned about the overt Christianity in football players, pointing out that G-d doesn't really care about who wins the game, and that we should instead be glad that there's a high-profile quarterback who is living up to being a role model instead of getting in trouble with the law. I suspect there are a lot of unspoken assumptions in there about race, class, and religion issues in the way this is framed, but I'm not nearly good enough to pick them apart without committing some stumbles or fails myself. And I'd probably reference how Rush Limbaugh repeatedly talked about the NFL wanted Michael Vick to succeed, because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed, and how it seems like the players always getting in the news for being bad seem to always be black...
Director George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, says that major Hollywood studios are not willing to release his film about the Tuskegee Airmen because there are not white people in any major roles - a decision that would be rather flagrantly ahistorical, as the Airmen were an all-black unit.
Ms. Coulter wants you to believe that the worst of the worst of government employees will never be fired from their jobs, and that those worst of the worst are in jobs where they hold power over you, hard-working normal person.
Last out of the section, Heritage wants you to think that government spending and regulation is the reason why you're less economically free, and so you should get rid of government to get the ability to spend your money the way you want back.
And last for tonight, several letters or note, including Groucho Marx saluting the troops, Mr. McLaren saluting his animators, one Mr. H.L. Mencken warning someone away from joining the ranks of editors and E.B. White saying that there is always hope in the world.
And there is snow. Glorious, wonderful snow. A white winter - finally.
Instead, a general court-martial is recommended for PFC Bradley Manning, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to the Wikileaks organization.
And for those following the Republican nominations, several more reaons why Ron Paul is not the selection you should be going with. (Not that the others are doing that much better, but moneyed conservative interests certainly seem to be coalescing around Mitt Romney. And they've got quite a bti of money in the war chest to spend.)
Willard "Mitt" Romney wins the New Hampshire Republican primary. Even though some New Hampshire Republicans want lawmakers to cite the Magna Carta for the justifications for their laws. This seems like a clear case of trying to be more X-TREME than those Constitutional-Authority Tea Partiers.
Last for the beginning, a letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King threatening that they will ruin him. A reminder that Dr. King was considered dangerous for all of his views, not just the ones that people think he had because the textbooks choose not to show them.
Out in the world today, go vote for whom may be the worst multinational company of 2012 - a strong leader at this point is Tepco, the atomic power company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.
Ireland scraps voting machines purchased in 2002 and tested in 2004, because the things would not work for them at all and could not pass appropriate tests for usage. Yet here in the States, we have machines that are routinely found to be hackable and insecure and they get rolled out for each election, seemingly regardless of whether they pass the tests or not.
Canada's justice minister declares that all marriages performed in Canada are legal marraiges, having been alerted to the effects of some other laws interfering with the legality of those marriages.
A Catholic priest in Germany admitted to 280 counts of sexual abuse of young men in the past decade, claiming that he did not believe he was doing any harm to them when he abused them. Sorry, did someone say those were all things in the past that were being dredged up and that the Catholic Church was totally clean now? Try again.
Several conservative religious leaders put out a statement claiming that gay marriage must be stopped if the liberty of the United States is to continue, because recognizing such unions means we've abandoned our moral center, and you know what happens after that. Mr. Santorum articulated that position, I believe, and it earned him his un-Googleable status.
Belarus passes a law banning anyone in the country from visting web sites that originate in domains outside the country.
And finally, crap. India reports a strain of tuberculosis resistant to all current drug treatments, and Woo-hoo! Green light given to test a possible HIV vaccine in humans, and Eh? Exposure to young blood in mice allows old blood to reactivate its stem cells and fight damage from diseases like multiple sclerosis.
Domestically, Texas's requirements for invasive ultrasounds for women appear to have passed an appeals court challenge, making the state add insult to injury to most abortion seekers.
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld that religious organizations have the right to discriminate and fire their employees based on what would otherwise be protected classes under the law, and then granted those organizations very wide latitude to determine which of their employees are exempted from the protections.
The Montana State Supreme Court issued a ruling indicating that the Citizens United ruling of the United States Supreme Court does not apply in their state.
Elsewhere, it is permissible for a police department to not hire an applicant because they had too high of an IQ according to the tests. Perhaps because they would be flabbergasted at the sequence of events where in attempting to shoot a mouse with a gun, a house resident shot one of his roommates and exposed an affair another roommate was having with an underage girl.
In technology, the app iOnRoad, which uses the components in an Android phone to monitor the distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of it, with alarms visible and audible when the distance closes swiftly to dangerous levels.
Google (or a contractor thereof) is caught being quite evil - trawling a database, calling the clients in that database and then lying to them and trying to sell them services that would cost them significant amounts of money.
Also, five years of iPhone, and the beginning of the eighth year of the Spirit/Opprortunity mission to Mars, a mission that has outlasted its original run time by more than seven years. The engineering team that built those rovers should be enshrined and emulated in future projects.
For your handy reference, dogs acting out the various HTTP status codes, inspired by cats acting out the various HTTP status codes.
And last, some bath tissue boxes were mysteriously contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60 - thankfully, of sufficiently low doses that wouldn't be dangerous.
In the opinions, where we find how one can derive moral and ethical behavior without the need for G-d or any other gods.
From there, we look into the struggle of one woman to reconcile fantasies of non-consensual sex with the upbringing that demonized sex, a sexual assault, and the society that surrounds her regarding sex. If you are triggered by the description of sexual assault or of such fantasies, best to avoid the link and the comments, as they are likely to contain several descriptions thereof. If you wish to discuss how the culture affects male/male-identified sexual fantasies, there is a companion thread talking about how culture and upbringing affects male sexual fantasies, so as not to derail the original.
There's also why giving advice to victims about how not to be a victim goes over like a lead balloon, no matter how well-intentioned you might be in doing it.
For something both light-hearted and serious, an author attempts to match the poses for the female characters gracing the covers of various fantasy and paranormal romance novels. The results: Holy [BLEEP]ing back cramps, Batman! And if you thought it was just because that author wasn't flexible enough - a martial artist and contortionist can't match those poses, either. Furthermore, those kinds of poses are really kind of unnecessary to show off the sexiness of female characters.
And then there's politics as usual, where conservative commentators claim George Stephanopolous had trouble being fair to the Republican candidates in a debate he moderated, but they use disgraced propagandist L. Brent Bozell III as corroboration and defend both Newt Gingrich's claim that Catholics are victims of secular bigotry because they refuse to allow adoptions by gay couples and Mitt Romney's assertion that no state wants to ban contraception, despite the demonstrable consequences of such things as personhood amendments. Mr. McGurn attempts to find more positive spin in this, claiming it a lesson on how to refute media bias against conservatives, pointing out how artful dodges of questions are really great ways of making your interlocutors look foolish, rather than, say, answering the questions that are on the minds of the people.
Mr. Tankerton gently chides people who are concerned about the overt Christianity in football players, pointing out that G-d doesn't really care about who wins the game, and that we should instead be glad that there's a high-profile quarterback who is living up to being a role model instead of getting in trouble with the law. I suspect there are a lot of unspoken assumptions in there about race, class, and religion issues in the way this is framed, but I'm not nearly good enough to pick them apart without committing some stumbles or fails myself. And I'd probably reference how Rush Limbaugh repeatedly talked about the NFL wanted Michael Vick to succeed, because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed, and how it seems like the players always getting in the news for being bad seem to always be black...
Director George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, says that major Hollywood studios are not willing to release his film about the Tuskegee Airmen because there are not white people in any major roles - a decision that would be rather flagrantly ahistorical, as the Airmen were an all-black unit.
Ms. Coulter wants you to believe that the worst of the worst of government employees will never be fired from their jobs, and that those worst of the worst are in jobs where they hold power over you, hard-working normal person.
Last out of the section, Heritage wants you to think that government spending and regulation is the reason why you're less economically free, and so you should get rid of government to get the ability to spend your money the way you want back.
And last for tonight, several letters or note, including Groucho Marx saluting the troops, Mr. McLaren saluting his animators, one Mr. H.L. Mencken warning someone away from joining the ranks of editors and E.B. White saying that there is always hope in the world.
And there is snow. Glorious, wonderful snow. A white winter - finally.
