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silveradeptGot the bit with the credit union straightened out - after realizing it would be Monday before any direct deposit stuff appeared, I thought it would be good to let them know that so that they don’t change my account over. Tomorrow, most likely, there will be mailing of things, and hopefully, there will be some rebates arriving. At least, that’s the idea. And cooking meats in the broiler seems to be eluding me pretty well. I’ll just have to give it a little more before I start using it or consuming it, since I left this one a little too close to raw and bleeding for health and comfort. Argh.
Moving onward to things in the pursuit of Nollij, Tara Lohan at AlterNet is worried that the big crisis isn't going to be an oil shock, but a water shock, thanks to privatization of water services, the still-faddish bottled-water routine, and management and manufacturing processes that draw out more water than can be replenished. Wouldn’t that be a scary triple-punch - seas rising, drinkable water shrinking and oil reserves running out?
The RIAA might not be able to collect on insane awards, if a constitutional challenge to the penalties goes through. Working on the grounds that paying $222,000 for 24 tracks is a cruel and unusual punishment, being well over a 9-to-1 ratio set by the Supreme Court, if the cost of the track is iTunes $.99. While I still think that the jury should not have convicted, it would be good to see this objection taken to heart by the court and have the award reduced to something that can actually be paid by someone, rather than something that will bankrupt them.
The Slacktivist starts a series that promises to be interesting - he’s taking a look at the possible reasons why most people think of gay-bashing as the first thing in their minds regarding American Christianity. Potential reason number one is that they're "safe" to rail against without being subjected to the speck-plank problem. Which, depending on how much buggery’s been going on between ministers and their charges, probably falls down pretty hard. There aren’t sins in others that anyone points out that don’t possibly apply to the person pointing, and perhaps in larger degrees. We condemn what we’re familiar with ourselves, after all.
If you thought outlawing abortion would decrease its prevalence, you’d be wrong. Abortions are just as common in places where it's illegal as places where it's legal. Now, which set has ones where the women survive more often? Here’s a hint. It ain't where they're banned.
Technoccult puts up a two-part series about how the United States has transformed into a police state through the War on (Some) Drugs. (Part Two available at this link). As such, there’s no need to declare any sort of formal martial law, as it’s already here. And in fact, declaring it might end up causing the revolt or the courts to really have a look at things and declare the whole thing to be insane. Not that it would necessarily have effect, but it would probably touch off some very violent happenings.
I think the New York Times is having fun at Mr. Bush’s expense in covering his increasing reluctance to see crowds other than sycophants. The choice of cover images there can’t be accidental.
Even Mitt Romney must court the evangelical vote, appearing as a fellow Christian, just of a different stripe. Those who he’s courting, however, seem to find him as alien as the members of the opposition party. Considering that many of the people that Mr. Romney is going to try and get on his side are specialists in driving wedges between denominations, this may be quite the uphill slog. But Mr. Romney does have the dean of Bob Jones University on his side, so maybe it’ll be easier.
Twelve former Untied States Army captains say that after five years, Iraq is still a nightmare and that it is time to either institute a draft or leave. The draft is political suicide and will probably have many of the same problems as the last draft. Which would leave the option of leaving Iraq and letting it collapse.
The states are preparing to cut the S-CHIP rolls in case their funding should go into limbo. So if this showdown continues, there’s a chance that the ends that the Republicans are aiming for will be achieved through attrition, while wrangling goes on.
In an attempt to get them to return home, FEMA is offering a whopping... $4,000 incentive to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Weak carrot. But there’s also a stick, where rental aid starts getting reduced as an incentive to get people to move away, until it all goes away.
As our lead-in to our Quiche segments, rewards are available for low-income and poorer students across the country who do well on their AP tests. Dollars to build advanced test scores. Question is, can those schools actually manage to get and hold an AP program, or will it be out of the question because the funding is too tight? Beyond that, the Bush Administration has said that it isn't participating in international maths and science tests, because it can't find the $5-$10 million USD needed for it. That’s right - can spend billions per day fighting expensive wars. Can’t find a small amount to test the nation’s children against others. Probably because he knows what the results are likely to be - last, dead last, and close to last, and it would just be bad press and another way for people to declare him and his No Child Learns Bupkiss policies to be miserable failures. The childrens is not learning, not while you stiff them money they need and then tell them it’s their own fault for failing.
Even so, after you leave the realms of maths and sciences into equally useful liberal arts, the climate on university campuses is less "debate" and more "shut up", which is a profoundly disturbing sort of idea, because university is supposed to be the last bastion to hear alternate perspectives to the conformity mush thrown at you in public schooling. If public schooling teaches you how to get a job and be a cog, university is supposed to teach you how to think for yourself.
Getting progressively more stupid, there was a physical altercation between employees of rival soda companies. That’s right, a brawl over shelf space. That’s just fantastic. Stupid, but not dastardly, as far as I know.
We can (and do) get worse than this, and in here we find our winner - Verizon confirms that it handed over telephone records or IP addresses in at least 720 cases since 2005, all without the required court orders. Their justification is that actually figuring out whether it’s a legal request would slow down efforts to save lives in investigations. Not only did the feds want all the people their target had called, but also all the people that those contacts had called. Oh, and additionally, there were 94,000 requests accompanied by a court order. That’s a lot of crime going on. That any part of it happened without the requisite court order should carry stiff fines for privacy violations. How many of us have now just been put on watch and listen lists, because we’re part of someone’s call record? For giving up and continuing to give up records without insisting on the rule of law, you truly are stupid, stupid rat creatures.
After that kind of stuff from the dredges, Our Cool Things Department follows a man trying to break the Cannonball Run speed record, outfitted with as much information and technology as possible to avoid and not be detected by police officers, so as to achieve maximal speed and speeding. Known for some other outlaw driving events, the run finally works for him... and they beat a previous record by at least an hour with some serious outlaw driving. After all that speed, the department then notes that a car-crushing, fire-breathing robot is for sale, just in case you wanted your own for an appropriate post-apocalyptic movie. OR as something to do with your demolition derby. After the car work, the department then turns to just how much lighting affects a photograph. And finally, we have to give Richard Branson some credit for trying to zip all the way down the face of a hotel in promotion of his airline. That all he lost were a few bits of his trousers means that this is probably a successful venture for him.
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las found something in her brain - a way of living on the career of writing short fiction. The conclusion is that you have to live like a college student and a starved artist, and even then, you’re still probably going to have to write a novel or two before you can even think about upgrading off the 10 cent ramen for every day of the week.
For tonight’s last things, some money matters. The question of what financial security entails is a difficult one to answer, but Get Rich Slowly offers their take on what financial security is - no debts, good savings, control of your expenses, and working a job you love, not one that pays the bills. All things that are very good ideas. And as someone just out of university, at his first job, and staring loans in the face, I’m freaking terrified that I’m one misstep away from ruin. And that’s before any decisions like marriages or mortgages or vehicles. Even though I have a support network, I don’t want to have to rely on it regularly, because that means things are going pear-shaped. I think it’s just that more people have confidence in me than I have confidence in myself. I don’t like being in this position, and would rather get out of it sooner than later, if that’s at all possible. It may not be. Perhaps financial security is the ability to buy oneself brothel tokens (credit even in those days), of various imprints and denominations without having to worry that the fling will break the bank.
Anyway, I’m tired, and I’m going to go to bed. Getting up in the morning to tell stories is a great thing. Having to pay all sorts of bills isn’t so great, but it’s part of life.
Moving onward to things in the pursuit of Nollij, Tara Lohan at AlterNet is worried that the big crisis isn't going to be an oil shock, but a water shock, thanks to privatization of water services, the still-faddish bottled-water routine, and management and manufacturing processes that draw out more water than can be replenished. Wouldn’t that be a scary triple-punch - seas rising, drinkable water shrinking and oil reserves running out?
The RIAA might not be able to collect on insane awards, if a constitutional challenge to the penalties goes through. Working on the grounds that paying $222,000 for 24 tracks is a cruel and unusual punishment, being well over a 9-to-1 ratio set by the Supreme Court, if the cost of the track is iTunes $.99. While I still think that the jury should not have convicted, it would be good to see this objection taken to heart by the court and have the award reduced to something that can actually be paid by someone, rather than something that will bankrupt them.
The Slacktivist starts a series that promises to be interesting - he’s taking a look at the possible reasons why most people think of gay-bashing as the first thing in their minds regarding American Christianity. Potential reason number one is that they're "safe" to rail against without being subjected to the speck-plank problem. Which, depending on how much buggery’s been going on between ministers and their charges, probably falls down pretty hard. There aren’t sins in others that anyone points out that don’t possibly apply to the person pointing, and perhaps in larger degrees. We condemn what we’re familiar with ourselves, after all.
If you thought outlawing abortion would decrease its prevalence, you’d be wrong. Abortions are just as common in places where it's illegal as places where it's legal. Now, which set has ones where the women survive more often? Here’s a hint. It ain't where they're banned.
Technoccult puts up a two-part series about how the United States has transformed into a police state through the War on (Some) Drugs. (Part Two available at this link). As such, there’s no need to declare any sort of formal martial law, as it’s already here. And in fact, declaring it might end up causing the revolt or the courts to really have a look at things and declare the whole thing to be insane. Not that it would necessarily have effect, but it would probably touch off some very violent happenings.
I think the New York Times is having fun at Mr. Bush’s expense in covering his increasing reluctance to see crowds other than sycophants. The choice of cover images there can’t be accidental.
Even Mitt Romney must court the evangelical vote, appearing as a fellow Christian, just of a different stripe. Those who he’s courting, however, seem to find him as alien as the members of the opposition party. Considering that many of the people that Mr. Romney is going to try and get on his side are specialists in driving wedges between denominations, this may be quite the uphill slog. But Mr. Romney does have the dean of Bob Jones University on his side, so maybe it’ll be easier.
Twelve former Untied States Army captains say that after five years, Iraq is still a nightmare and that it is time to either institute a draft or leave. The draft is political suicide and will probably have many of the same problems as the last draft. Which would leave the option of leaving Iraq and letting it collapse.
The states are preparing to cut the S-CHIP rolls in case their funding should go into limbo. So if this showdown continues, there’s a chance that the ends that the Republicans are aiming for will be achieved through attrition, while wrangling goes on.
In an attempt to get them to return home, FEMA is offering a whopping... $4,000 incentive to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Weak carrot. But there’s also a stick, where rental aid starts getting reduced as an incentive to get people to move away, until it all goes away.
As our lead-in to our Quiche segments, rewards are available for low-income and poorer students across the country who do well on their AP tests. Dollars to build advanced test scores. Question is, can those schools actually manage to get and hold an AP program, or will it be out of the question because the funding is too tight? Beyond that, the Bush Administration has said that it isn't participating in international maths and science tests, because it can't find the $5-$10 million USD needed for it. That’s right - can spend billions per day fighting expensive wars. Can’t find a small amount to test the nation’s children against others. Probably because he knows what the results are likely to be - last, dead last, and close to last, and it would just be bad press and another way for people to declare him and his No Child Learns Bupkiss policies to be miserable failures. The childrens is not learning, not while you stiff them money they need and then tell them it’s their own fault for failing.
Even so, after you leave the realms of maths and sciences into equally useful liberal arts, the climate on university campuses is less "debate" and more "shut up", which is a profoundly disturbing sort of idea, because university is supposed to be the last bastion to hear alternate perspectives to the conformity mush thrown at you in public schooling. If public schooling teaches you how to get a job and be a cog, university is supposed to teach you how to think for yourself.
Getting progressively more stupid, there was a physical altercation between employees of rival soda companies. That’s right, a brawl over shelf space. That’s just fantastic. Stupid, but not dastardly, as far as I know.
We can (and do) get worse than this, and in here we find our winner - Verizon confirms that it handed over telephone records or IP addresses in at least 720 cases since 2005, all without the required court orders. Their justification is that actually figuring out whether it’s a legal request would slow down efforts to save lives in investigations. Not only did the feds want all the people their target had called, but also all the people that those contacts had called. Oh, and additionally, there were 94,000 requests accompanied by a court order. That’s a lot of crime going on. That any part of it happened without the requisite court order should carry stiff fines for privacy violations. How many of us have now just been put on watch and listen lists, because we’re part of someone’s call record? For giving up and continuing to give up records without insisting on the rule of law, you truly are stupid, stupid rat creatures.
After that kind of stuff from the dredges, Our Cool Things Department follows a man trying to break the Cannonball Run speed record, outfitted with as much information and technology as possible to avoid and not be detected by police officers, so as to achieve maximal speed and speeding. Known for some other outlaw driving events, the run finally works for him... and they beat a previous record by at least an hour with some serious outlaw driving. After all that speed, the department then notes that a car-crushing, fire-breathing robot is for sale, just in case you wanted your own for an appropriate post-apocalyptic movie. OR as something to do with your demolition derby. After the car work, the department then turns to just how much lighting affects a photograph. And finally, we have to give Richard Branson some credit for trying to zip all the way down the face of a hotel in promotion of his airline. That all he lost were a few bits of his trousers means that this is probably a successful venture for him.
las found something in her brain - a way of living on the career of writing short fiction. The conclusion is that you have to live like a college student and a starved artist, and even then, you’re still probably going to have to write a novel or two before you can even think about upgrading off the 10 cent ramen for every day of the week.For tonight’s last things, some money matters. The question of what financial security entails is a difficult one to answer, but Get Rich Slowly offers their take on what financial security is - no debts, good savings, control of your expenses, and working a job you love, not one that pays the bills. All things that are very good ideas. And as someone just out of university, at his first job, and staring loans in the face, I’m freaking terrified that I’m one misstep away from ruin. And that’s before any decisions like marriages or mortgages or vehicles. Even though I have a support network, I don’t want to have to rely on it regularly, because that means things are going pear-shaped. I think it’s just that more people have confidence in me than I have confidence in myself. I don’t like being in this position, and would rather get out of it sooner than later, if that’s at all possible. It may not be. Perhaps financial security is the ability to buy oneself brothel tokens (credit even in those days), of various imprints and denominations without having to worry that the fling will break the bank.
Anyway, I’m tired, and I’m going to go to bed. Getting up in the morning to tell stories is a great thing. Having to pay all sorts of bills isn’t so great, but it’s part of life.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 06:21 pm (UTC)