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Greetings, everyone. Be reminded that this world will sometimes forget about important things, like the race-motivated bombing of a church that killed innocent children, in their desire to believe that all is well and equal. They will argue for the arming of every citizen as a crime deterrent, even though that would really result in more guns in the hands of criminals. (That would be the commenters in this entry, not The Infamous Brad himself.) And sometimes, they think that juxtaposing legends and the people behind those legends is worthy of news columns, when all that we really need is to remember that legends have flaws, despite their stories.
Elsewhere, in the United States, the proposed bills to ban user content on the Internet move toward votes. One will be snarled by Senate processes and a Presidential veto threat, the other is still up for its vote. Let's recall - the bills are impossible to enforce fairly, and will be used partisanly and at the behest of media cabals. And the bills give the power to completely isolate and destroy a website and prevent anyone from interacting with them. If we want an example, then we can look at The United States federal government shutting down a website of a company based in Hong Kong, with a CEO who has no citizenship in the United States, because the media cabals said that it engaged in massive copyright violation. Their jurisdiction claim was over servers that Megaupload leased in the United States, despite the grand majority-to-everything about the company not being in the United States. We note that this also provides a convenient distraction from some of the real problems involving how big corporations crashed the economy and got away without prosecutions.
On this point, we should be reminded: the Law is a club, not a scalpel, and should be thought of as such when someone wants to wield it. In this case, it's more like a carpet bomb than a club.
Oh, and in case anyone was wondering - there's no putting the jinn back in the bottle about remixing and repurposing - one can embrace, or one can die the death of bad PR and thousands of paper cuts.
So maybe we should be happy that the public opinion voiced on this matter was sufficient to derail the current incarnations of the bill and prevent them from arriving for a vote. Which only means they will return later, and hopefully they will be met with the same outrage then. (We're ambivalent about the Anonymous-claimed response: a DDoS against the major players that support SOPA and PIPA.)
At the same time, The Supreme Court of the United States said that works could be removed from the public domain and re-copyrighted, a gigantic "fuck you" to the idea of copyright as the limited monopoly, to the purpose of copyright, and to anyone who wants to use older material for their own projects.
Then, there are the people who protest against a legal requirement for sterilization to accompany gender reassignment surgery in Sweden, who censor websites about Wicca and then report anyone who wants to access them to the police, and who take revenge against a sexual harrassment report against them by claiming the reporter is a terrorist...and the FBI investigates, because she's a Muslim.
Wouldn't it be better just to be able to accept everyone, big, little, QUILTBAG or no, and just treat people as people? And to take criticism as such and strive to improve, rather than trying to turn criticism into something that can be dismissed as "oversensitivity" or some sort of trolling to find offense.
After all, words do hurt, especially thrown in childhood. And actions hurt just as much if not more. It's not a question of degree, really - they all need to be stopped. And we've been warned, repeatedly, about what the consequences are for indulging both Ignorance and Want.
Thankfully, they're not ignoring the fact that soldiers coming back from battles these days are disproportionataely committing suicide.
Elsewhere in the world, India marks twelve months since the last reported new polio case, which is a great sign. Hopefully, the numbers of active cases start going down.
Coptic Christians in Egypt fear that a majority-Muslim government will not respect their right to worship, with extremists already starting to try and blame them for attacks that require reprisals. In Uganda, a preacher demanded the government go after men who threw acid in his face because of his evangelism. The quotes about The Bloodthirsty Religion are just what an audience in the States that believes themselves oppressed or under siege want to hear. The Times didn't need to print such material.
They could focus, instead, on how the majority Shiite set of Iraqi ministers responded to a boycott by the Sunni minister block by declaring them suspended and their decisions voided, and draw some parallels to how other majorities have responded to a protesting minority elsewhere in the world.
Just outside the United States, officials are tightening their mail review and interception procedures after they announced that a magazine from an al-Qaeda branch was discovered in an inmate's cell at Guantanamo Bay.
In the United States, having been forced into making a decision, the Obama administration rejected the building of a large pipeline from Canadian tar sands. Cue complaints that the decision could have been made at any time previous to this, were it not for those damned environmentalists and their anti-energy, anti-jobs agenda and the unwillingness of the President to tell those left-wing nutjobs to shut up and go away.
The same technology that TSA agents use to take naked pictures of you at the airport is now up for usage as a hand-held device to scan you for weapons you may or may not be concealing. The ACLU is arguing about the nature of the Law as a club, no matter how much law enforcement claims its a scalpel, and that "the right of persons to be secure in their persons" actually does apply when the police start scanning your body without a warrant.
And finally, thanks to the Citizens United decision, there are a lot of multinational advertising firms that are salivating at the opportunity of dumping billions of dollars into campaigns, advertisements, and television spots.
In technology, the first science fictino movie made in space, using some astronauts and a cosmonaut. It's all of about eight minutes, but NASA's not interested in giving permission for it to be seen.
The LHC reported they discovered a new particle, composed of the beauty quarks. And have known this for about a month now.
And in the sciences, the transition from unicellular to multicellular life at the beginning of the evolutionary process may not have takes as long as previously theoreized, based on an experiment with yeast cells that took only 60 days to start behaving like multicellular organisms that are individuals.
Welcome to politics and opinions, where a Murdoch-owned paper would like you to believe that the strategies employed by Baen Capital and other hostile takeovers in the 1980s stopped the United States from having weak economic foundations in modern days. And then want Mr. Romney to defend private economics against the Obama narrative of rapacious capitalists destroying jobs and pocketing the profits, claiming that nobody should ever feel entitled to a job in the world of global capitalism, and that trimming the fat is a necessary part of staying in business.
That selfsame paper also wants you to believe that the record numbers of persons on food assistance is solely because the government wants to turn it into an entitlement, instead of the program to help the desperate that it was intended to be, rather than because of the economic downturn and the continued refusal of the private sector to hire any workers, preferring to line their own pockets and proclaim they don't want to hire because they're "uncertain" about the future.
Mr. McGurn, after some smugness about how the current administration has adopted and expanded the excesses of the last, opines about how much Mr. Obama has driven ordinary people to read and interpret the Constitution for themselves, sparking a populist revolution against his own excesses. Neglecting, of course, to mention the other populist uprisings against the Republican governors, the corporate speechifiers, Wall Street, and other excesses that impoverish the already poor and make the rich richer, more powerful, and more able to ignore populism. I wonder if he also believes some form of the widespread belief that the mainstream media are really just the propaganada arm of the liberal side of politics.
Mr. Knight accuses liberals of wanting to perpetuate voter fraud through the ACLU suing to stop laws put in place that require specific forms of identification to vote, the kind of identification that not all people can get, or that lack the documentation or mobility to be able to get - but it's liberals who want to corrupt your vote, go after them.
Mr. Shapiro paints a different picture - the narcissist who cries too much and feels limited by his office, grasping for unlimited power and brooking no criticism. Would love to know which Obama they're going to go after in the campaign - the autocrat who wants to use government to control all aspects of your life (to the point where the commentators consider any suggestion from the President about reforming the government a laugh line), or the man who can't get anything done and blames everyone else but himself for it.
Mr. Sowell wants you to believe that if there are any disparities in your life, or your child's life, then it's entirely your/their fault and there are no other circumstances that contribute to your success or failure. Anyone saying otherwise, he says, is trying to make you feel and act like a victim and be dependent on someone else, rather than bootstrapping yourself up and making your own disparity between yourself and everyone else.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Helprin calls for the immediate destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, including any ones the United States thinks might be used in a launch, bassed on his opinion that Iran will never act rationally with regard to the use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the U.S. should act unilaterally to protect itself from the possibility that at some time in the future Iran might have the capability to acquire nuclear weapons.
Last for tonight, the cost of books, in today's dollars, hasn't changed in fifty years, which is why it's great to grab free stories from P.K. Dick and free material from Neil Gaiman.
And the differences in narratves between doing thing for the paycheck and doing things you like, and happening to get paid for them. If you're doing it for the extrinsic rewards, the motivation is particularly difficult. If you're doing it for the intrinsic rewards, so long as you get enough payment to handle the problems, you're good.
Elsewhere, in the United States, the proposed bills to ban user content on the Internet move toward votes. One will be snarled by Senate processes and a Presidential veto threat, the other is still up for its vote. Let's recall - the bills are impossible to enforce fairly, and will be used partisanly and at the behest of media cabals. And the bills give the power to completely isolate and destroy a website and prevent anyone from interacting with them. If we want an example, then we can look at The United States federal government shutting down a website of a company based in Hong Kong, with a CEO who has no citizenship in the United States, because the media cabals said that it engaged in massive copyright violation. Their jurisdiction claim was over servers that Megaupload leased in the United States, despite the grand majority-to-everything about the company not being in the United States. We note that this also provides a convenient distraction from some of the real problems involving how big corporations crashed the economy and got away without prosecutions.
On this point, we should be reminded: the Law is a club, not a scalpel, and should be thought of as such when someone wants to wield it. In this case, it's more like a carpet bomb than a club.
Oh, and in case anyone was wondering - there's no putting the jinn back in the bottle about remixing and repurposing - one can embrace, or one can die the death of bad PR and thousands of paper cuts.
So maybe we should be happy that the public opinion voiced on this matter was sufficient to derail the current incarnations of the bill and prevent them from arriving for a vote. Which only means they will return later, and hopefully they will be met with the same outrage then. (We're ambivalent about the Anonymous-claimed response: a DDoS against the major players that support SOPA and PIPA.)
At the same time, The Supreme Court of the United States said that works could be removed from the public domain and re-copyrighted, a gigantic "fuck you" to the idea of copyright as the limited monopoly, to the purpose of copyright, and to anyone who wants to use older material for their own projects.
Then, there are the people who protest against a legal requirement for sterilization to accompany gender reassignment surgery in Sweden, who censor websites about Wicca and then report anyone who wants to access them to the police, and who take revenge against a sexual harrassment report against them by claiming the reporter is a terrorist...and the FBI investigates, because she's a Muslim.
Wouldn't it be better just to be able to accept everyone, big, little, QUILTBAG or no, and just treat people as people? And to take criticism as such and strive to improve, rather than trying to turn criticism into something that can be dismissed as "oversensitivity" or some sort of trolling to find offense.
After all, words do hurt, especially thrown in childhood. And actions hurt just as much if not more. It's not a question of degree, really - they all need to be stopped. And we've been warned, repeatedly, about what the consequences are for indulging both Ignorance and Want.
Thankfully, they're not ignoring the fact that soldiers coming back from battles these days are disproportionataely committing suicide.
Elsewhere in the world, India marks twelve months since the last reported new polio case, which is a great sign. Hopefully, the numbers of active cases start going down.
Coptic Christians in Egypt fear that a majority-Muslim government will not respect their right to worship, with extremists already starting to try and blame them for attacks that require reprisals. In Uganda, a preacher demanded the government go after men who threw acid in his face because of his evangelism. The quotes about The Bloodthirsty Religion are just what an audience in the States that believes themselves oppressed or under siege want to hear. The Times didn't need to print such material.
They could focus, instead, on how the majority Shiite set of Iraqi ministers responded to a boycott by the Sunni minister block by declaring them suspended and their decisions voided, and draw some parallels to how other majorities have responded to a protesting minority elsewhere in the world.
Just outside the United States, officials are tightening their mail review and interception procedures after they announced that a magazine from an al-Qaeda branch was discovered in an inmate's cell at Guantanamo Bay.
In the United States, having been forced into making a decision, the Obama administration rejected the building of a large pipeline from Canadian tar sands. Cue complaints that the decision could have been made at any time previous to this, were it not for those damned environmentalists and their anti-energy, anti-jobs agenda and the unwillingness of the President to tell those left-wing nutjobs to shut up and go away.
The same technology that TSA agents use to take naked pictures of you at the airport is now up for usage as a hand-held device to scan you for weapons you may or may not be concealing. The ACLU is arguing about the nature of the Law as a club, no matter how much law enforcement claims its a scalpel, and that "the right of persons to be secure in their persons" actually does apply when the police start scanning your body without a warrant.
And finally, thanks to the Citizens United decision, there are a lot of multinational advertising firms that are salivating at the opportunity of dumping billions of dollars into campaigns, advertisements, and television spots.
In technology, the first science fictino movie made in space, using some astronauts and a cosmonaut. It's all of about eight minutes, but NASA's not interested in giving permission for it to be seen.
The LHC reported they discovered a new particle, composed of the beauty quarks. And have known this for about a month now.
And in the sciences, the transition from unicellular to multicellular life at the beginning of the evolutionary process may not have takes as long as previously theoreized, based on an experiment with yeast cells that took only 60 days to start behaving like multicellular organisms that are individuals.
Welcome to politics and opinions, where a Murdoch-owned paper would like you to believe that the strategies employed by Baen Capital and other hostile takeovers in the 1980s stopped the United States from having weak economic foundations in modern days. And then want Mr. Romney to defend private economics against the Obama narrative of rapacious capitalists destroying jobs and pocketing the profits, claiming that nobody should ever feel entitled to a job in the world of global capitalism, and that trimming the fat is a necessary part of staying in business.
That selfsame paper also wants you to believe that the record numbers of persons on food assistance is solely because the government wants to turn it into an entitlement, instead of the program to help the desperate that it was intended to be, rather than because of the economic downturn and the continued refusal of the private sector to hire any workers, preferring to line their own pockets and proclaim they don't want to hire because they're "uncertain" about the future.
Mr. McGurn, after some smugness about how the current administration has adopted and expanded the excesses of the last, opines about how much Mr. Obama has driven ordinary people to read and interpret the Constitution for themselves, sparking a populist revolution against his own excesses. Neglecting, of course, to mention the other populist uprisings against the Republican governors, the corporate speechifiers, Wall Street, and other excesses that impoverish the already poor and make the rich richer, more powerful, and more able to ignore populism. I wonder if he also believes some form of the widespread belief that the mainstream media are really just the propaganada arm of the liberal side of politics.
Mr. Knight accuses liberals of wanting to perpetuate voter fraud through the ACLU suing to stop laws put in place that require specific forms of identification to vote, the kind of identification that not all people can get, or that lack the documentation or mobility to be able to get - but it's liberals who want to corrupt your vote, go after them.
Mr. Shapiro paints a different picture - the narcissist who cries too much and feels limited by his office, grasping for unlimited power and brooking no criticism. Would love to know which Obama they're going to go after in the campaign - the autocrat who wants to use government to control all aspects of your life (to the point where the commentators consider any suggestion from the President about reforming the government a laugh line), or the man who can't get anything done and blames everyone else but himself for it.
Mr. Sowell wants you to believe that if there are any disparities in your life, or your child's life, then it's entirely your/their fault and there are no other circumstances that contribute to your success or failure. Anyone saying otherwise, he says, is trying to make you feel and act like a victim and be dependent on someone else, rather than bootstrapping yourself up and making your own disparity between yourself and everyone else.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Helprin calls for the immediate destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, including any ones the United States thinks might be used in a launch, bassed on his opinion that Iran will never act rationally with regard to the use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the U.S. should act unilaterally to protect itself from the possibility that at some time in the future Iran might have the capability to acquire nuclear weapons.
Last for tonight, the cost of books, in today's dollars, hasn't changed in fifty years, which is why it's great to grab free stories from P.K. Dick and free material from Neil Gaiman.
And the differences in narratves between doing thing for the paycheck and doing things you like, and happening to get paid for them. If you're doing it for the extrinsic rewards, the motivation is particularly difficult. If you're doing it for the intrinsic rewards, so long as you get enough payment to handle the problems, you're good.
