Made it to a weekend - 02 November 2007
Nov. 3rd, 2007 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptOf course, this is one of the weekends where I end up working, so mixed benefits. But still, Friday is a good day.
Yet again, the cooking bug has hit me an an appropriate time - Jeno's pizzas and Totiono's pizza rolls are on recall for potential E.coli infection. That’s twice I could have gotten into trouble for continuing my college habits. There are indeed advantages to cooking one’s own meals. Now, if I could just get the costs to go down, so that I don’t have to swallow hard when the credit card bills come due...
You know, I complain about my best attempts to fall asleep in meetings (didn’t happen today, as I got involved in the discussions, and that always keeps me awake), but I have to admit, if I don’t stay awake, only my job is at stake. For some pilots, there were lives potentially at stake. Air traffic control woke them up, luckily, trying to get their attention because they were coming in too fast.
I am highly suspicious of the following release - DEBKAfile says that they've discovered that al-Qaeda will begin attacking anti-Muslim web sites on 11 November. I wonder where such a dedicated attack would focus on.
Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, died at 92 years of age. The world is making some transitions, certainly. I wonder what kind of world we’d be in had atomic weaponry not been developed. Would civilian nuclear power still be popular? And would we have found out the bomb anyway if a terror organization exploded a reactor? Would the rest of history have continued on anyway, just with bigger conventional explosives? (Which is kind of depressing.)
Senators send the White House a letter expressing concern that the White House is giving Iran the finger. Considering more sanctions are being considered for Iran, I don’t think any of that advice will be taken. He also said that Mr. Mukasey would be the only candidate he put forth to the Congress for Attorney General and accused his opponents of denying the existence of the war. Also note the invocation of Hilter. I would like to apply Godwin’s Law to this real-life speech, if I may stretch the rules to do so. A signing statement, perhaps, of the same vein that Mr. Bush signed in January saying he had the authority to open private mail without the requirements of a warrant.
This also happens to be in conjunction with the White House speaking a little too soon about the trend of deaths in Iraq. And then AmSam and Ted Rall combine to offer a poignant thought - if any senator can put a personal hold on any bill, then theoretically, couldn't one Senator stop the Iraq war cold?
Providing something that might look like a balancing on this, Robert Novak notes that Ms. Pelosi prefers to assert her position as Speaker, rather than deferring to the committee chairs. So the Speaker is choosing to exercise her position as the chair of the House in trying to get the committees to pass legislation she likes. This sounds familiar. Who else has done such things?
In international news, protesters demonstrated against constitutional reforms that removed term limits for the office of President of Venezuela, permitting Hugo Chavez to remain Dictator-for-Life, should he be elected and the populace pass the reforms in a referendum. The police forces used nonlethal force to scatter the protesters, drawing criticism that the government wasn’t interested in such things as democracy or free speech. At least the Venezuelan government acted openly, unlike Quebec police, who admitted today they sent in undercover agents to attempt to provoke protesters into violence. The give-away? The boots on the "protesters" and the police are the same type, down to the markings. Oooops.
Regarding the general election in twelve months, it's possible unmarried women are the key demographic to victory. If you were running on a platform to convince them to vote for you, what would you promise them?
Overfishing, pollution, and dams have more than one third of European freshwater fish facing extinction. I realize that through bad chance or just being out-evolved, species die out, but is it really a wise idea to accelerate the process any?
Our quiche candidates start out with some bad math - claiming that it's better for the students, George Will wants to give out vouchers to Utah parents. The problem? The money that the vouchers are coming from aren’t being drawn from the regular public school funding unit. Thus, when he claims that he’s saving the taxpayers money, he’s actually having them pay the additional voucher dollars out of their taxes, because the original public school funding stays right where it is. Where is that savings? Some part of remedial math got failed there.
Slightly trickier math may be employed on Lawrence Kudlow’s insistence that the economy is improving, thanks to Mr. Bush's economic policy, despite the housing market. Mr. Kudlow uses Wall Street and growth figures to say that we’re doing quite well, thank you, and that nobody on the liberal side nor the media seems willing to say anything about it.
Even worse, that might be the beginning signs of a stupid epidemic. Richard Dawkins has a dim view of humanity as it is, and thinks that the few smart children that escape the public school system and do well are lucky. I don’t know whether things are as dire as he forecasts, but when gorwn men are charged with killing their neighbors over watering the lawn in a drought zone, then you might wonder how stupid we really are becoming. Especially with other countries still following the United States' ideas in passing terror legislation.
The quiche runner-up displays rampant ignorance, willful stupidity, and the inability to learn from mistakes, even those with legal consequences. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Westboro Baptist Church plans on continuing their rhetoric, even after being thrashed by the court system with a nearly $11 million dollar judgment, they’re still going to tell us that YHWH hates gays and kills American soldiers because we don’t kill gays.
Our winner tonight has all the previous stuff, and then adds on willful destruction of property - Animal rights extremists flooded the basement of a scientist's house, after the scientist said that she uses animals for her research on drug addiction. The group claiming responsibility supposedly said they debated between merely flooding the house and setting it on fire. You want stupid, stupid rat creatures? Here you go. Here’s some quiche.
Our Cool Things department offers more Japanese engineering - if your race ticket is a goat, feed it to the goat.
Sticking it to the record companies, a composer is suing EMI for illegally offering their work for download without an agreement. Yes, a copyright violation against EMI, pirating the music and making a profit off it. Will we get to see the same amounts of ridiculous judgments leveled against the company under the DMCA? If not, then will we at least get a precedent that can be used when the RIAA goes after individuals?
To encourage literacy, and the reading of a great poem (okay, maybe only the first book is good), visit Danteworlds, a project from the University of Texas. Multimedia and all. We encourage having a copy of the text available for reference, or for reading alongside while you explore Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
But last for tonight is rare Bill Watterson art, some scans of things he did when he wasn’t drawing Calvin and Hobbes, and the like. I still miss that six year-old and his tiger, and they’ve been done for nearly, what, ten years now?
(For the record, this particular musical piece has “Accelerando” written at the beginning of it, and in several other places throughout, which makes for quite the enjoyment when you predicted it to do so right at the beginning on your first listening of it. It’s pretty close to a constant acceleration through the whole piece.)
Yet again, the cooking bug has hit me an an appropriate time - Jeno's pizzas and Totiono's pizza rolls are on recall for potential E.coli infection. That’s twice I could have gotten into trouble for continuing my college habits. There are indeed advantages to cooking one’s own meals. Now, if I could just get the costs to go down, so that I don’t have to swallow hard when the credit card bills come due...
You know, I complain about my best attempts to fall asleep in meetings (didn’t happen today, as I got involved in the discussions, and that always keeps me awake), but I have to admit, if I don’t stay awake, only my job is at stake. For some pilots, there were lives potentially at stake. Air traffic control woke them up, luckily, trying to get their attention because they were coming in too fast.
I am highly suspicious of the following release - DEBKAfile says that they've discovered that al-Qaeda will begin attacking anti-Muslim web sites on 11 November. I wonder where such a dedicated attack would focus on.
Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, died at 92 years of age. The world is making some transitions, certainly. I wonder what kind of world we’d be in had atomic weaponry not been developed. Would civilian nuclear power still be popular? And would we have found out the bomb anyway if a terror organization exploded a reactor? Would the rest of history have continued on anyway, just with bigger conventional explosives? (Which is kind of depressing.)
Senators send the White House a letter expressing concern that the White House is giving Iran the finger. Considering more sanctions are being considered for Iran, I don’t think any of that advice will be taken. He also said that Mr. Mukasey would be the only candidate he put forth to the Congress for Attorney General and accused his opponents of denying the existence of the war. Also note the invocation of Hilter. I would like to apply Godwin’s Law to this real-life speech, if I may stretch the rules to do so. A signing statement, perhaps, of the same vein that Mr. Bush signed in January saying he had the authority to open private mail without the requirements of a warrant.
This also happens to be in conjunction with the White House speaking a little too soon about the trend of deaths in Iraq. And then AmSam and Ted Rall combine to offer a poignant thought - if any senator can put a personal hold on any bill, then theoretically, couldn't one Senator stop the Iraq war cold?
Providing something that might look like a balancing on this, Robert Novak notes that Ms. Pelosi prefers to assert her position as Speaker, rather than deferring to the committee chairs. So the Speaker is choosing to exercise her position as the chair of the House in trying to get the committees to pass legislation she likes. This sounds familiar. Who else has done such things?
In international news, protesters demonstrated against constitutional reforms that removed term limits for the office of President of Venezuela, permitting Hugo Chavez to remain Dictator-for-Life, should he be elected and the populace pass the reforms in a referendum. The police forces used nonlethal force to scatter the protesters, drawing criticism that the government wasn’t interested in such things as democracy or free speech. At least the Venezuelan government acted openly, unlike Quebec police, who admitted today they sent in undercover agents to attempt to provoke protesters into violence. The give-away? The boots on the "protesters" and the police are the same type, down to the markings. Oooops.
Regarding the general election in twelve months, it's possible unmarried women are the key demographic to victory. If you were running on a platform to convince them to vote for you, what would you promise them?
Overfishing, pollution, and dams have more than one third of European freshwater fish facing extinction. I realize that through bad chance or just being out-evolved, species die out, but is it really a wise idea to accelerate the process any?
Our quiche candidates start out with some bad math - claiming that it's better for the students, George Will wants to give out vouchers to Utah parents. The problem? The money that the vouchers are coming from aren’t being drawn from the regular public school funding unit. Thus, when he claims that he’s saving the taxpayers money, he’s actually having them pay the additional voucher dollars out of their taxes, because the original public school funding stays right where it is. Where is that savings? Some part of remedial math got failed there.
Slightly trickier math may be employed on Lawrence Kudlow’s insistence that the economy is improving, thanks to Mr. Bush's economic policy, despite the housing market. Mr. Kudlow uses Wall Street and growth figures to say that we’re doing quite well, thank you, and that nobody on the liberal side nor the media seems willing to say anything about it.
Even worse, that might be the beginning signs of a stupid epidemic. Richard Dawkins has a dim view of humanity as it is, and thinks that the few smart children that escape the public school system and do well are lucky. I don’t know whether things are as dire as he forecasts, but when gorwn men are charged with killing their neighbors over watering the lawn in a drought zone, then you might wonder how stupid we really are becoming. Especially with other countries still following the United States' ideas in passing terror legislation.
The quiche runner-up displays rampant ignorance, willful stupidity, and the inability to learn from mistakes, even those with legal consequences. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Westboro Baptist Church plans on continuing their rhetoric, even after being thrashed by the court system with a nearly $11 million dollar judgment, they’re still going to tell us that YHWH hates gays and kills American soldiers because we don’t kill gays.
Our winner tonight has all the previous stuff, and then adds on willful destruction of property - Animal rights extremists flooded the basement of a scientist's house, after the scientist said that she uses animals for her research on drug addiction. The group claiming responsibility supposedly said they debated between merely flooding the house and setting it on fire. You want stupid, stupid rat creatures? Here you go. Here’s some quiche.
Our Cool Things department offers more Japanese engineering - if your race ticket is a goat, feed it to the goat.
Sticking it to the record companies, a composer is suing EMI for illegally offering their work for download without an agreement. Yes, a copyright violation against EMI, pirating the music and making a profit off it. Will we get to see the same amounts of ridiculous judgments leveled against the company under the DMCA? If not, then will we at least get a precedent that can be used when the RIAA goes after individuals?
To encourage literacy, and the reading of a great poem (okay, maybe only the first book is good), visit Danteworlds, a project from the University of Texas. Multimedia and all. We encourage having a copy of the text available for reference, or for reading alongside while you explore Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
But last for tonight is rare Bill Watterson art, some scans of things he did when he wasn’t drawing Calvin and Hobbes, and the like. I still miss that six year-old and his tiger, and they’ve been done for nearly, what, ten years now?
(For the record, this particular musical piece has “Accelerando” written at the beginning of it, and in several other places throughout, which makes for quite the enjoyment when you predicted it to do so right at the beginning on your first listening of it. It’s pretty close to a constant acceleration through the whole piece.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 01:10 pm (UTC)And it's somewhat noteworthy that the police have arrested people not on the terrorism laws, but on other crimes already present - it was an excuse to start it, not to keep them locked up.
At the same time, I'm not saying that the anti-terrorism excuse was justified. It's just... not quite being abused. It really should have been better worded, though. And I suspect the police will regret this before too long, when they get slapped on the wrist. It's just a shame we have to wait for the courts to get the sanity check; though I'm glad we'll have the sanity check. >.>
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 01:33 pm (UTC)(The last comic was printed Sunday December 31, 1995.)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 04:23 pm (UTC)Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the Republicans want to take away our reproductive rights?
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 06:30 pm (UTC)If they can use existing criminal law to arrest people, then there's really no need for supercharged "anti-terror" laws, right?
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 06:49 pm (UTC)In fact the cynic within suggests the police wanted to do a sweep of these troublemakers, and so have done now that they have a handy excuse for getting in the front door.
I guess it's not totally dissimilar to knowing a mobster is a crim, and then eventually nailing the bastard on tax evasion so he's nailed on something.
Oh, and for what it's worth - this is front-page-news stuff, here. The folks getting arrested aren't part of a media blackout nor dissapearing off to foreign coastlines, they're getting a fuss kicked up over it all. Which doesn't make it right, but is why they're more likely to get off in the end, too - we're watching. NZers are a suspicious pack of bastards like that. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 06:55 pm (UTC)Which is partly why pilots can accidentally fall asleep in a flight at all - it's boring. It's not like they were doing anything for seven and a half hours of an eight hour flight... if they'd set an alarm clock for waking up before the final approach, they wouldn't even have gotten caught. :P
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 02:43 am (UTC)I figure if nuclear weapons are allowed to have their pilots nap, so should mere passengers. ¬¬
no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 03:10 am (UTC)