Back from a long weekend - 27 May 2008
May. 28th, 2008 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptWow, new monitor, and I can actually see things as they were intended to be seen, rather than through the lens of the broken flatscreen I was working with for a long time. It’s like design has come back into fashion. Oh, and I found out that my UPS works just fine, instead of having a bad battery - but now I have even more reasons to catch the landlady at an appropriate point in time and say that the apartment’s plugs need to be re-done. One of the ones near my computer desk is now dead, which is why the battery conked out - no juice flowing to recharge it with. Add on to this all the loose plugs, and I’m wondering how much effort and skill it takes to replace plugs with ones that slip less. Of course, I’ll have to figure out which circuits control what if there’s going to be any replacement. I like the idea of bugging the landlady about it more. Maybe I’ll also get actual gradients of heat, too, rather than “on” and “off”. Even though it’s getting into the warm season. I just wish that my work schedule actually permitted me to see said landlady during the times she’s in.
Good Godfrey, catching up on the weekend always has lots of material in it. Film director Sydney Pollack dies at 73, as does Robert Asprin, creator of Myth Adventures, at 61, a potentially-reproducible method of generating cold fusion, the possible dawn of oilpunk, a short history of the Steadicam, a way of getting the smoothness of the dolly shot while only requiring a little more than the space of the camera operator, and more, courtesy of the only news service that I can muster - myself.
International news to lead the program with - a scholar at a UK university was arrested and held for six days without charges for downloading an al-Qaeda training manual from a United States government website. Student, for academic purposes, downloads manual from government website, is arrested under Terrorism Act charges.
Canada's foreign minister has resigned his post after leaving a classified document in a non-secure area. No details were forthcoming about whether the information in the document had been spread around or not.
Some Russian communists are protesting the latest Indiana Jones movie, because it portrays them in a negative light. Which is does, but it’s also supposed to be 1950s America, where whispering the word Communist would make most people pull pitch, pitchforks, and torches out from hammerspace.
To show how much of a weird world Myanmar and its military junta is in, a Canadian group is asking women to gather underwear to send to pro-democracy advocates in the area , because of a local superstition that coming into contact or sight of women’s underwear saps men’s powers (does it also steal their sperm and virility?). In any case, women’s underwear en masse to the country.
In regards to Iraq, if our government wants to continue the policy of trying to shortchange veterans on proper diagnoses and help, then they should expect to see many more newspaper stories of soldiers committing suicide because they didn’t get the help they needed and keep getting redeployed to new horror zones. The Rolling Thunder veterans motorcycle group met with Mr. Bush to discuss those issues on Sunday, while elsewhere in the world, discussions were underway on whether to use larger-size ammunition for urban warfare. And after the New York Times Editorial page took Mr. Bush to task for threatening to veto an expansion of the G.I. Bill placed in an Iraq and Afghanistan spending bill, the White House released a statement accusing the Times of something just short of libel. Nice to know that things are going so well. Even John McCain is moderating some of his Iraq statements, causing some ThinkProgress commenters to wonder what his position really is.
A significantly clear piece of writing on how the mission in Iraq changes is Douglas Feith's piece on how he tried to steer Mr. Bush away from the quagmire of "freedom" that he is embroiled in, positing that had Mr. Bush listened to his advice, the “Mission Accomplished” declaration might have actually been true, and the matter of Iraq mostly resolved, considering that it would not longer have presented a security threat. Hrm. I wonder what the approval ratings and current Republican prospects would be like now if the Iraq War had been wrapped up in 2003. There would still have been much hammering-on about the lack of WMD in Iraq, and for all we know, we’d be protesting the Iran War now. So maybe not a whole lot would have changed. After all, the IAEA is still accusing Iran of being uncooperative, so I’m sure we’d still be hearing about the need to bomb Iran or invade it and raze the nuclear facilities.
Speaking of our government, they'd like to collect the fingerprints of everyone involved in real estate and mortgages. Isn’t it nice to know that your government wants to spy on you every way it can, and will try its hardest to make sure that it’s your neighbor doing the legally mandated spying? This is, of course, when they’re not funding shuttle buses that transport gamblers to casinos with Homeland Security monies.
There will be an interesting precedent set, whichever way the courts rule, on whether a man declared an enemy combatant and being held inside a prison on United States soil has the rights of the Constitution. Were he in Gitmo, the article notes, it would be a problem, as there are no rights in Gitmo. I find is disturbing that the military was able to raid, arrest, and detain a person living in the United States. I thought there was at least one law on the books that prevents the military from taking police actions on United States soil, regardless of what Mr. Bush claims is within the purvey of his office.
A teacher held a vote on whether a five year-old child with disciplinary issues would be allowed to stay in class. By 14 to 2, the students voted out the kid. Ah, an the child has developmental disabilities. But we shouldn’t have to get to that point before the entirety of our “WRONG” alarms went off. No child, disabled or no, should be subjected to a situation like that. It may have been a bad day, and there may be lots of bad days, but learning to work and learn and help people who might not have it all together is an essential skill for these days, and will hopefully instill some needed compassion at an early age.
In our opinion columns, The Infamous Brad places Ayn Rand next to Ayn Rand to deconstruct Ayn Rand, selecting one book as being the inevitable outcome of another, even though the two aren’t together in any series, and the “later” book was written earlier. This point leads to a larger one, namely, that in America, the wealthy are the people who hold the power of "the consent of the governed", and they've been steadily withdrawing that consent by sending as much of their assets overseas as possible.
Liberal Eagle fires both barrels not too soon afterward, accusing the media and the Republican Party of engaging in gender-based smears against every Democratic candidate, whether he’s supposed to be a “girly man” or she’s supposed to be an “emasculating bitch”. In either case, it’s a sexist way of seeing the world, and not fair to anyone who is on the receiving end of it. Should the alternative press start talking about how much a “Testosterone-ruled bastard” the Republican candidate is, or whether he’s suffering from “roid rage” at any given time. Except... wasn’t one of the candidates in the last two elections a recovering cocaine addict? That certainly didn’t seem to impact his popularity, yet all the media has to do is comment on the fashion choices of the Democratic candidate, and people go “Oooh! Zing!” and take it seriously. What kind of country are we running here? To answer that, Liberal Eagle recounts that even though she would be a horrible president, she knows a bad president when she sees one, and that anyone who says we can’t criticize because we wouldn’t be any better is missing the point that the President being bad at his job is something that should be of interest to everyone.
Ellen Goodman, on Alternet, weighs in on the FLDS situation by saying sexual abuse in the name of religion is still sexual abuse, not a lifestyle decision. She can certainly understand the need to discern between lifestyle decisions that don’t harm children or engage in illegal acts and those that do, and that the line there often depends on the prevailing morality of the culture that appears. Still, if there is a reason to believe that the law has been violated, and there is evidence of that, then the state and the society does have an interest in ensuring that those who violate the law are prosecuted and that the situation where the law is violated is not repeated.
The Science department leads off with the successful touchdown of the Phoenix Mars explorer, and continues on to seven examples of Mother Nature's beauty (and a few of her fury), the biggest drawing in the world, thanks to GPS and very specific delivery instructions, and probably more than a bit of cash, the additional benefits of IUD contraceptives (use contraceptives! Practice safe sex! And use water-based lube, because some of the silicone-based one are flammable!), putting serious thought into keyboard design, A climbing wall that knows where all the climbers are, and a very tiny solid-state 256GB drive. Which could be really helpful when the Society of Robots is built and comes to power. Or it could be used to hold all the WiiWare games the Wii's internal memory device can't.
Pulled out for further examination is a lessening of standards for admitting new drugs into the country, which could get some new treatments to market faster, but also could get more dangerous things to market, even though they passed trials in other countries.
Also of interest is continuing research into whether Schedule I drugs in controlled circumstances may be able to cure obsessive-compulsive or other psychological disorders. The article notes the knee-jerk reaction to such studies is “If we approve it for medical use, then everyone will want to use it recreationally!” Like tobacco, maybe? Or alcohol? Or devices designed to cure female hysteria? Contraceptives? All of those things and more have had their medicinal benefits, and recreational use, and while here are always some who abuse, society as a whole hasn’t collapsed yet thanks to their introduction into the recreational sphere. There may be a bit of a rush of some sort when they first appear, and there’s always the “thrill” of doing drugs while under the age for their responsible use, but I don’t expect a large part of the populace to suddenly turn into junkies of one thing or another. I also don’t really expect many of those drugs to ever make it out of the “medicinal use only” classification, because of the potentially high risk of addiction. One lucky person in Japan will get the chance to do these tests themselves, as a test to find cannabis in a passenger bag failed, and the person doing the testing forgot which bag they put the stuff in.
And then there’s A Spingaporean company that claims to have patented the method by which one uses an image as a hyperlink. They’re sending bills and retaining lawyers. Something in this tells me there will be some ugly legal repercussions for the company, and that their patent or claim is likely to be ignored in as many places as possible.
The arts department has found the right movie critic. In decrying the idea that moving pictures are best with brains off, I think our critic has found what plagues me about most movies and television shows these days. I watched Babylon Five for the story. I won’t watch most sitcoms because they don’t have one. So maybe, just maybe, could we get some movies with real plot, please? Or at least good characterization to go with the affects and explosions?
Looking at some interesting statistics, a nonscientific survey shows fans of Doctor Who and Star Trek have similar aspirations in life, even though their actual careers don't always turn out the way they want to. That said, for the Who fans, David Tennant is wearing a funny.
Another take on the Open Source Boobs Project, one that shows very good reasons why it took a serious backlash, and why it’s very tough in fandom and alternative communities to get around the somewhat repressive societal norms and be oneself. I see it in the anime communities, it’s obviously in the SF/F communities, the author talks about Ren Faire communities, and there’s also some mention of alternative sexuality communities, who have had the most experience with the dilemma presented, and usually have managed to devise a way of making it work.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
synecdochic talks about how the difference between "sex-positive" and "getting-laid-positive", the first of which is, “Yes, if you like, and have proven yourself not to be a skeevy unwashed Creepy Guy with Entitlement Issues, and you ask, you can touch, hug, look, give and get backrubs, and possibly even respectfully touch my breasts.” The other, however, is the “Well, I’m okay with you putting out so that I can get laid, and I assume that if you’re displaying, then you’re giving me implicit permission to do whatever I want to you.” problem that generates lots of problems for all communities where the sex-positive culture exists. OSBP used the language of the second in trying to describe an experience of the first, and that’s what skeeved a lot of people. Trying to impose one set of sexual rules on diversely sexual people encounters resistance and aggravation.
Those kinds of advice bits extend outside the fandom realms, too. Emily Gould writes about how being a little too open with everything while blogging eventually came back to bite her. Too much of letting the people in created a problem for her. I guess the Internet is a serious affair after all.
Last for tonight, a look behind the scenes at Disney, with the account of what happens when you're Jack Sparrow at Disneyland. Although I haven’t been dismissed form a job, the account in Terminated does sound a lot like how I was while I was trying to find a job, right down to being the person that complained constantly about the lack of job, probably to the annoyance of everyone else.
Oh, okay, one more thing. Inappropriately-named cereal. Have a laugh.
Good Godfrey, catching up on the weekend always has lots of material in it. Film director Sydney Pollack dies at 73, as does Robert Asprin, creator of Myth Adventures, at 61, a potentially-reproducible method of generating cold fusion, the possible dawn of oilpunk, a short history of the Steadicam, a way of getting the smoothness of the dolly shot while only requiring a little more than the space of the camera operator, and more, courtesy of the only news service that I can muster - myself.
International news to lead the program with - a scholar at a UK university was arrested and held for six days without charges for downloading an al-Qaeda training manual from a United States government website. Student, for academic purposes, downloads manual from government website, is arrested under Terrorism Act charges.
Canada's foreign minister has resigned his post after leaving a classified document in a non-secure area. No details were forthcoming about whether the information in the document had been spread around or not.
Some Russian communists are protesting the latest Indiana Jones movie, because it portrays them in a negative light. Which is does, but it’s also supposed to be 1950s America, where whispering the word Communist would make most people pull pitch, pitchforks, and torches out from hammerspace.
To show how much of a weird world Myanmar and its military junta is in, a Canadian group is asking women to gather underwear to send to pro-democracy advocates in the area , because of a local superstition that coming into contact or sight of women’s underwear saps men’s powers (does it also steal their sperm and virility?). In any case, women’s underwear en masse to the country.
In regards to Iraq, if our government wants to continue the policy of trying to shortchange veterans on proper diagnoses and help, then they should expect to see many more newspaper stories of soldiers committing suicide because they didn’t get the help they needed and keep getting redeployed to new horror zones. The Rolling Thunder veterans motorcycle group met with Mr. Bush to discuss those issues on Sunday, while elsewhere in the world, discussions were underway on whether to use larger-size ammunition for urban warfare. And after the New York Times Editorial page took Mr. Bush to task for threatening to veto an expansion of the G.I. Bill placed in an Iraq and Afghanistan spending bill, the White House released a statement accusing the Times of something just short of libel. Nice to know that things are going so well. Even John McCain is moderating some of his Iraq statements, causing some ThinkProgress commenters to wonder what his position really is.
A significantly clear piece of writing on how the mission in Iraq changes is Douglas Feith's piece on how he tried to steer Mr. Bush away from the quagmire of "freedom" that he is embroiled in, positing that had Mr. Bush listened to his advice, the “Mission Accomplished” declaration might have actually been true, and the matter of Iraq mostly resolved, considering that it would not longer have presented a security threat. Hrm. I wonder what the approval ratings and current Republican prospects would be like now if the Iraq War had been wrapped up in 2003. There would still have been much hammering-on about the lack of WMD in Iraq, and for all we know, we’d be protesting the Iran War now. So maybe not a whole lot would have changed. After all, the IAEA is still accusing Iran of being uncooperative, so I’m sure we’d still be hearing about the need to bomb Iran or invade it and raze the nuclear facilities.
Speaking of our government, they'd like to collect the fingerprints of everyone involved in real estate and mortgages. Isn’t it nice to know that your government wants to spy on you every way it can, and will try its hardest to make sure that it’s your neighbor doing the legally mandated spying? This is, of course, when they’re not funding shuttle buses that transport gamblers to casinos with Homeland Security monies.
There will be an interesting precedent set, whichever way the courts rule, on whether a man declared an enemy combatant and being held inside a prison on United States soil has the rights of the Constitution. Were he in Gitmo, the article notes, it would be a problem, as there are no rights in Gitmo. I find is disturbing that the military was able to raid, arrest, and detain a person living in the United States. I thought there was at least one law on the books that prevents the military from taking police actions on United States soil, regardless of what Mr. Bush claims is within the purvey of his office.
A teacher held a vote on whether a five year-old child with disciplinary issues would be allowed to stay in class. By 14 to 2, the students voted out the kid. Ah, an the child has developmental disabilities. But we shouldn’t have to get to that point before the entirety of our “WRONG” alarms went off. No child, disabled or no, should be subjected to a situation like that. It may have been a bad day, and there may be lots of bad days, but learning to work and learn and help people who might not have it all together is an essential skill for these days, and will hopefully instill some needed compassion at an early age.
In our opinion columns, The Infamous Brad places Ayn Rand next to Ayn Rand to deconstruct Ayn Rand, selecting one book as being the inevitable outcome of another, even though the two aren’t together in any series, and the “later” book was written earlier. This point leads to a larger one, namely, that in America, the wealthy are the people who hold the power of "the consent of the governed", and they've been steadily withdrawing that consent by sending as much of their assets overseas as possible.
Liberal Eagle fires both barrels not too soon afterward, accusing the media and the Republican Party of engaging in gender-based smears against every Democratic candidate, whether he’s supposed to be a “girly man” or she’s supposed to be an “emasculating bitch”. In either case, it’s a sexist way of seeing the world, and not fair to anyone who is on the receiving end of it. Should the alternative press start talking about how much a “Testosterone-ruled bastard” the Republican candidate is, or whether he’s suffering from “roid rage” at any given time. Except... wasn’t one of the candidates in the last two elections a recovering cocaine addict? That certainly didn’t seem to impact his popularity, yet all the media has to do is comment on the fashion choices of the Democratic candidate, and people go “Oooh! Zing!” and take it seriously. What kind of country are we running here? To answer that, Liberal Eagle recounts that even though she would be a horrible president, she knows a bad president when she sees one, and that anyone who says we can’t criticize because we wouldn’t be any better is missing the point that the President being bad at his job is something that should be of interest to everyone.
Ellen Goodman, on Alternet, weighs in on the FLDS situation by saying sexual abuse in the name of religion is still sexual abuse, not a lifestyle decision. She can certainly understand the need to discern between lifestyle decisions that don’t harm children or engage in illegal acts and those that do, and that the line there often depends on the prevailing morality of the culture that appears. Still, if there is a reason to believe that the law has been violated, and there is evidence of that, then the state and the society does have an interest in ensuring that those who violate the law are prosecuted and that the situation where the law is violated is not repeated.
The Science department leads off with the successful touchdown of the Phoenix Mars explorer, and continues on to seven examples of Mother Nature's beauty (and a few of her fury), the biggest drawing in the world, thanks to GPS and very specific delivery instructions, and probably more than a bit of cash, the additional benefits of IUD contraceptives (use contraceptives! Practice safe sex! And use water-based lube, because some of the silicone-based one are flammable!), putting serious thought into keyboard design, A climbing wall that knows where all the climbers are, and a very tiny solid-state 256GB drive. Which could be really helpful when the Society of Robots is built and comes to power. Or it could be used to hold all the WiiWare games the Wii's internal memory device can't.
Pulled out for further examination is a lessening of standards for admitting new drugs into the country, which could get some new treatments to market faster, but also could get more dangerous things to market, even though they passed trials in other countries.
Also of interest is continuing research into whether Schedule I drugs in controlled circumstances may be able to cure obsessive-compulsive or other psychological disorders. The article notes the knee-jerk reaction to such studies is “If we approve it for medical use, then everyone will want to use it recreationally!” Like tobacco, maybe? Or alcohol? Or devices designed to cure female hysteria? Contraceptives? All of those things and more have had their medicinal benefits, and recreational use, and while here are always some who abuse, society as a whole hasn’t collapsed yet thanks to their introduction into the recreational sphere. There may be a bit of a rush of some sort when they first appear, and there’s always the “thrill” of doing drugs while under the age for their responsible use, but I don’t expect a large part of the populace to suddenly turn into junkies of one thing or another. I also don’t really expect many of those drugs to ever make it out of the “medicinal use only” classification, because of the potentially high risk of addiction. One lucky person in Japan will get the chance to do these tests themselves, as a test to find cannabis in a passenger bag failed, and the person doing the testing forgot which bag they put the stuff in.
And then there’s A Spingaporean company that claims to have patented the method by which one uses an image as a hyperlink. They’re sending bills and retaining lawyers. Something in this tells me there will be some ugly legal repercussions for the company, and that their patent or claim is likely to be ignored in as many places as possible.
The arts department has found the right movie critic. In decrying the idea that moving pictures are best with brains off, I think our critic has found what plagues me about most movies and television shows these days. I watched Babylon Five for the story. I won’t watch most sitcoms because they don’t have one. So maybe, just maybe, could we get some movies with real plot, please? Or at least good characterization to go with the affects and explosions?
Looking at some interesting statistics, a nonscientific survey shows fans of Doctor Who and Star Trek have similar aspirations in life, even though their actual careers don't always turn out the way they want to. That said, for the Who fans, David Tennant is wearing a funny.
Another take on the Open Source Boobs Project, one that shows very good reasons why it took a serious backlash, and why it’s very tough in fandom and alternative communities to get around the somewhat repressive societal norms and be oneself. I see it in the anime communities, it’s obviously in the SF/F communities, the author talks about Ren Faire communities, and there’s also some mention of alternative sexuality communities, who have had the most experience with the dilemma presented, and usually have managed to devise a way of making it work.
synecdochic talks about how the difference between "sex-positive" and "getting-laid-positive", the first of which is, “Yes, if you like, and have proven yourself not to be a skeevy unwashed Creepy Guy with Entitlement Issues, and you ask, you can touch, hug, look, give and get backrubs, and possibly even respectfully touch my breasts.” The other, however, is the “Well, I’m okay with you putting out so that I can get laid, and I assume that if you’re displaying, then you’re giving me implicit permission to do whatever I want to you.” problem that generates lots of problems for all communities where the sex-positive culture exists. OSBP used the language of the second in trying to describe an experience of the first, and that’s what skeeved a lot of people. Trying to impose one set of sexual rules on diversely sexual people encounters resistance and aggravation. Those kinds of advice bits extend outside the fandom realms, too. Emily Gould writes about how being a little too open with everything while blogging eventually came back to bite her. Too much of letting the people in created a problem for her. I guess the Internet is a serious affair after all.
Last for tonight, a look behind the scenes at Disney, with the account of what happens when you're Jack Sparrow at Disneyland. Although I haven’t been dismissed form a job, the account in Terminated does sound a lot like how I was while I was trying to find a job, right down to being the person that complained constantly about the lack of job, probably to the annoyance of everyone else.
Oh, okay, one more thing. Inappropriately-named cereal. Have a laugh.
