Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2008-05-30 12:13 am
silveradept) wrote2008-05-30 12:13 am
A whole lot of strange stuff - 29 May 2008
Well, got to give a school talk tomorrow, and possibly finish up a lot of the storage/weeding work I’ve been doing, so there’s still plenty to be had and done before it’s all finished. I suppose it’s a testament to my schooling and experience that I feel like I’ve fit in well and know most of what I have to do already. Now it’s just gaining lots of experience in doing it so that I can do it well.
Starting with interplanetary news, as has been mentioned before, the Phoenix lander has touched down on Mars, and most of the instruments appear to be in good working order.
Leading in with the international columns, Iraq's prime minister has asked creditor nations to absolve his country's debts incurred under Saddam, wanting to put the revenues for oil to other purposes. Which would kind of be like the fledgling United States federal government saying that they weren’t going to be responsible for all the debts incurred by the separate states. It’s probably not going to happen, not with oil prices being as high as they are.
Now that they've finally let the international community in, Myanmar is howling that they're not getting enough aid to their cyclone victims. Have to say perhaps if they had let aid workers in at the outset, rather than stalling and leaving lots of people to die, the response might have been more generous. I wonder what the junta accomplished by delaying as long as they did before letting aid workers in.
Going back to domestic matters,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wtf_inc puts on display some wedding photos of the founder of the FLDS church in the news recently. Likely obtained because they are submitted as evidence in the case, and would have probably had images made of them. Said founder is in prison.
Although, it my be in an unjust context, I also feel that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cmpriest has put forward an extremely nuanced view of the issues involved in the FLDS case (linking to LJ, because most of the commentary is there, even though the actual long form post is at the author's web site). Discussing the problems of children under the age of consent, an insular society where certain things are repeated because that’s tradition, even if it is illegal in the eyes of the law, where mothers who have their daughters married are at fault, and to what degree, and the grey area that exists between legal and accepted and illegal, Cherie Priest offers us more perspective than many of the knee-jerk reactions and shouting heads have given. Things could have been a lot worse, considering how much the FLDS branch was shaping up to be a place where armed standoffs might happen.
That got me to thinking a bit about the situation myself. In the beginning, things looked simple. Allegation of abuse, underage women being married off, slam dunk for the protective services. Now... now it’s complicated. As most botched actions turn out to be.
Analogue to other religion to follow. May require dandelions. I was raised Catholic, and while at the time, it didn’t seem weird, right now I’m looking back on the Confirmation ritual (where one becomes an “adult” in the church and swears fealty to Ceiling Cat) and thinking, WTF? Why does the Catholic Church think that 14-15 year-olds can make decisions like this, when the secular law won’t permit them to do many other adult things, like voting, until they are 18 or older? Secular law won’t let those young kids explore their sexuality at this point, most of them probably haven’t been exposed to the fullness of belief systems out there, and yet they’re supposed to be mature enough to decide to commit to their religion for the rest of their life.
So here in the FLDS, these young girls are being asked a similar sort of question, but one that also involves their sexuality (which they may not have explored all that much, if at all), and is a much bigger and more permanent commitment than just profession of faith. That’s a tough decision to make for someone that young without any additional pressure or expectation piled on.
I wonder if what galls most of us about the whole situation is that it looks like many of the young children in the compound had no idea of a larger world outside and would have received no chance at all to experience it and decide for themselves whether they wanted to return to the world they grew up in. That might be a driving sort of force, in addition to the revulsion at the exploitation of young girls, as to why we react so strongly to the idea of young girls being married off without their consent. If given an article, say, about Muslim men and women, all adults, who conduct polygamous lives, it doesn’t set off the “wrong!” meter nearly as much. Possibly because these adults know what they’re doing when they get into being a second or third or fourth wife, and have the ability to break off the marriage if it doesn’t work out.
In other domestic matters, a school bus driver attempted to cross railroad tracks while the warning lights were flashing, resulting in the gates landing on top of the bus. Depending on the account, either the bus driver thought he could beat the gates with a bus full of children, or the gates suddenly came down on the bus while it was driving over, and had been motioned to come across by a crossing guard. Either way, no injuries, but high potential for them.
Dunkin Donuts caved to the pressure of a lunatic fringe, pulling an advertisement featuring Rachel Ray that was decried by said lunatic fringe because her scarf was apparently too close to the kaffiyeh. So rather than point out how stupid and insane such a thing is, Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad, claiming that the misperception was detracting from their original goal of selling iced coffee. As a side effect, they also gave legitimacy to such stupidity and might actually encourage that lunatic fringe to try and get other things banned or pulled. Way to go, Dunkin Donuts. You certainly earned your Worst Person In the World from Mr. Olbermann yesterday.
The Governor of New York has issued a directive stating that the state must recognize homosexual marriages performed elsewhere and accord them all the appropriate rights and benefits, even though the state itself does not permit homosexual marriage. The Governor uses legal rulings that say the state must recognize marriages elsewhere and extends it to a logical conclusion - that any legal marriage performed elsewhere will be recognized in the state. This would be an excellent way of getting things to start changing - if these grounds can be applied nationally, then it could be the leverage needed to get states to perform the marriages. Either that, or there will finally be all of those crushing amendments passed...
The giant headline in domestic news is Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's new tell-all book about his employed time, the systematic deceptions, advancement of partisan causes, and how the country was led and manipulated into approving of the Iraq War. The White House brushed off the accusations, and newsmedia and the blogosphere exploded. Karl Rove and others painted McClellan as a willing conspirator, going along with things without qualms while he was employed. Dan Bartlett doesn' believe the allegations made by Mr. McClellan have merit. Considering this administration’s policy toward those who disagree, it would be no wonder for Mr. McClellan to be silent. His job was probably going to be revoked if he spoke out. Condoleezza Rice claimed Mr. bush was clear about his war justifications, and that she is still convinced Saddam was a threat. Michael Reagan considers Mr. McClellan to have sold out his boss and turned traitor, and I suspect some significant number of the conservative segment agrees with this assessment. At least, the segment that thinks Mr. Bush has done a good job, acted correctly, and is still a good and decent man and administrator.
It’s not like Mr. McClellan would have a lot of information to work with, either. Witness a perfect example of the culture of secrecy our government engages in, by providing documents with so much redaction as to be less than useless.
Proving that there is no such thing as a statute of limitations when it comes to politics, in an attempt to discredit Al Franken's Minnesota state senate bid, his opponents have resurrected a satire column Franken wrote in Playboy Magazine eight years ago. This is apparently proof that Franken’s values and views are out of touch with Minnesota residents, and that he enjoys degrading women and making jokes at their expense. This happened eight years ago. I don’t have access to back issues of Playboy, so I can’t go and check out the column myself, but I think Franken’s opponents are reaching just a tad to try and find something to attack him with.
In candidate matters, CNS News and others speculate bobby Jindal would be a good VP for Senator McCain, citing a statement by the President of Americans for Tax reform that “He is great on guns, great on taxes, a Roman Catholic, a Southerner and an Indian-American. Bobby Jindal would be great for the GOP and perfect for McCain”. A uniter for a divided conservative base, although that litany of virtues reads like a potential list of faults and attackable points, depending on how far on the fringe Mr. Jindal is. David Limbaugh, borther of comedian Rush Limbaugh, thinks Senator McCain should continue to hammer on Senator Obama's Iraq position, claiming that things are working, that troops need to stay, if we leave, then we lose a battleground of the War on Concepts to the enemy, and that Senator McCain should leverage his experience in foreign policy to paint himself as the better candidate with regard to Iraq. Cal Thomas echoes this idea, deriding Senator Obama’s willingness to talk and see what hostile nations want as carrots to help then change as naive, expecting those hostile nations not to honor any promises they make. He also sidebars into how the nation trusts in itself, rather than God, and that Sex and the City is popular, rather than having all those women be labeled “sluts”, but the main point is that he would rather go to war with everyone than try diplomacy, because those hostile to the United States are clearly evil. Ben Shapiro goes further, accusing Senator Obama of being anti-military, and thus, unpatriotic and unfit for the job of being nominally in charge of the military.
Into the opinion columns - I wonder how much of Victor Davis Hanson's indictment of the 1960s generation is true. He certainly paints the people in power now as people who always want good stuff for “me” and all the blame and problems to be caused by “them”, whomever “they” are. Current problems, according to him, have their roots in how the boom has been handling the newfound prosperity they had, which makes Mr. Bush and his ilk more of a severe symptom than an outright cyst. Such an explanation would also neatly explain why Cal Thomas considers Democratic politicians "streetching the truth" on Iraq to be fraud - they promised us soemthing and didn’t deliver, and worse, they might have lied to us. Wait, isn’t that the hallmark of the current administration? Promises, lies, and not being able to deliver?
Maggie Gallagher highlights that China still has a one-child policy, and that the consequences of disobedience are still severe. She also wonders why activists and women’s rights groups aren’t more vocal about this matter. I don’t think they agree with the idea of one child per family, but the options seem to be a controlled-but-living populace and a possible population boom going unchecked, which might mean more and more severe problems than exist right now. The lack of an excellent alternative (or even the germ of such) is the biggest obstacle to really successful dismantling of the one-child policy. For all I know, the policy won’t be lifted until there’s another world to populate. The comments are impressive, with members of both spectrums calling China a paradise for the opposition.
Technology has created the world's smalles bowl of ramen. Cute, isn’t it? There’s also a wooden mirror, frogs with retractable claws, a possible design for a European manned spaceflight capsule, and a tiny and very fuel-efficient concept car.
What everyone seems to be buzzing about is monkeys have been trained to control a robotic arm using only their thoughts. Could have sworn that there were already products in development, if not released, that let humans do the same sort of thing, so a successful demo on a monkey doesn’t seem that odd to me. And, as it turns out, Octopi might also be tool-users, so now it’s a matter of training, rather than disposition, really.
Next to last for tonight - foul language and everything aside, the point being made is true - 11 September has been used to sell a lot of things and ideas, no matter what you believe about it. In perspective, the deaths and that are small compared to the amount of death that has happened since then. It’s just that 11 September invaded most people’s monkeyspheres.
On the very tail end, singled out for special merit, the Israeli governmment believes those who play Dungeons and Dragons are security risks, assigning players low clearance based on the assumption that “[t]hese people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment...They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality - elements which lower a person’s security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions.”, according to one official. So, to recap, army of a nation founded on the belief that they are the chosen people of Ceiling Cat tells people who make-believe and role-play that they’re weak-minded, actively pursues and persecutes those who LARP, and sends anyone who admits to playing the game to the psychologists for a head-shrinking. Sounds like the IDF believes, in a variant form, the same thing that fundie Christians believe about D&D’s corruptive influences.
Anyway, time for bed. School visits tomorrow means trying to get the apathetic to be enthusiastic. Wish us luck.
Starting with interplanetary news, as has been mentioned before, the Phoenix lander has touched down on Mars, and most of the instruments appear to be in good working order.
Leading in with the international columns, Iraq's prime minister has asked creditor nations to absolve his country's debts incurred under Saddam, wanting to put the revenues for oil to other purposes. Which would kind of be like the fledgling United States federal government saying that they weren’t going to be responsible for all the debts incurred by the separate states. It’s probably not going to happen, not with oil prices being as high as they are.
Now that they've finally let the international community in, Myanmar is howling that they're not getting enough aid to their cyclone victims. Have to say perhaps if they had let aid workers in at the outset, rather than stalling and leaving lots of people to die, the response might have been more generous. I wonder what the junta accomplished by delaying as long as they did before letting aid workers in.
Going back to domestic matters,
wtf_inc puts on display some wedding photos of the founder of the FLDS church in the news recently. Likely obtained because they are submitted as evidence in the case, and would have probably had images made of them. Said founder is in prison. Although, it my be in an unjust context, I also feel that
cmpriest has put forward an extremely nuanced view of the issues involved in the FLDS case (linking to LJ, because most of the commentary is there, even though the actual long form post is at the author's web site). Discussing the problems of children under the age of consent, an insular society where certain things are repeated because that’s tradition, even if it is illegal in the eyes of the law, where mothers who have their daughters married are at fault, and to what degree, and the grey area that exists between legal and accepted and illegal, Cherie Priest offers us more perspective than many of the knee-jerk reactions and shouting heads have given. Things could have been a lot worse, considering how much the FLDS branch was shaping up to be a place where armed standoffs might happen. That got me to thinking a bit about the situation myself. In the beginning, things looked simple. Allegation of abuse, underage women being married off, slam dunk for the protective services. Now... now it’s complicated. As most botched actions turn out to be.
Analogue to other religion to follow. May require dandelions. I was raised Catholic, and while at the time, it didn’t seem weird, right now I’m looking back on the Confirmation ritual (where one becomes an “adult” in the church and swears fealty to Ceiling Cat) and thinking, WTF? Why does the Catholic Church think that 14-15 year-olds can make decisions like this, when the secular law won’t permit them to do many other adult things, like voting, until they are 18 or older? Secular law won’t let those young kids explore their sexuality at this point, most of them probably haven’t been exposed to the fullness of belief systems out there, and yet they’re supposed to be mature enough to decide to commit to their religion for the rest of their life.
So here in the FLDS, these young girls are being asked a similar sort of question, but one that also involves their sexuality (which they may not have explored all that much, if at all), and is a much bigger and more permanent commitment than just profession of faith. That’s a tough decision to make for someone that young without any additional pressure or expectation piled on.
I wonder if what galls most of us about the whole situation is that it looks like many of the young children in the compound had no idea of a larger world outside and would have received no chance at all to experience it and decide for themselves whether they wanted to return to the world they grew up in. That might be a driving sort of force, in addition to the revulsion at the exploitation of young girls, as to why we react so strongly to the idea of young girls being married off without their consent. If given an article, say, about Muslim men and women, all adults, who conduct polygamous lives, it doesn’t set off the “wrong!” meter nearly as much. Possibly because these adults know what they’re doing when they get into being a second or third or fourth wife, and have the ability to break off the marriage if it doesn’t work out.
In other domestic matters, a school bus driver attempted to cross railroad tracks while the warning lights were flashing, resulting in the gates landing on top of the bus. Depending on the account, either the bus driver thought he could beat the gates with a bus full of children, or the gates suddenly came down on the bus while it was driving over, and had been motioned to come across by a crossing guard. Either way, no injuries, but high potential for them.
Dunkin Donuts caved to the pressure of a lunatic fringe, pulling an advertisement featuring Rachel Ray that was decried by said lunatic fringe because her scarf was apparently too close to the kaffiyeh. So rather than point out how stupid and insane such a thing is, Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad, claiming that the misperception was detracting from their original goal of selling iced coffee. As a side effect, they also gave legitimacy to such stupidity and might actually encourage that lunatic fringe to try and get other things banned or pulled. Way to go, Dunkin Donuts. You certainly earned your Worst Person In the World from Mr. Olbermann yesterday.
The Governor of New York has issued a directive stating that the state must recognize homosexual marriages performed elsewhere and accord them all the appropriate rights and benefits, even though the state itself does not permit homosexual marriage. The Governor uses legal rulings that say the state must recognize marriages elsewhere and extends it to a logical conclusion - that any legal marriage performed elsewhere will be recognized in the state. This would be an excellent way of getting things to start changing - if these grounds can be applied nationally, then it could be the leverage needed to get states to perform the marriages. Either that, or there will finally be all of those crushing amendments passed...
The giant headline in domestic news is Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's new tell-all book about his employed time, the systematic deceptions, advancement of partisan causes, and how the country was led and manipulated into approving of the Iraq War. The White House brushed off the accusations, and newsmedia and the blogosphere exploded. Karl Rove and others painted McClellan as a willing conspirator, going along with things without qualms while he was employed. Dan Bartlett doesn' believe the allegations made by Mr. McClellan have merit. Considering this administration’s policy toward those who disagree, it would be no wonder for Mr. McClellan to be silent. His job was probably going to be revoked if he spoke out. Condoleezza Rice claimed Mr. bush was clear about his war justifications, and that she is still convinced Saddam was a threat. Michael Reagan considers Mr. McClellan to have sold out his boss and turned traitor, and I suspect some significant number of the conservative segment agrees with this assessment. At least, the segment that thinks Mr. Bush has done a good job, acted correctly, and is still a good and decent man and administrator.
It’s not like Mr. McClellan would have a lot of information to work with, either. Witness a perfect example of the culture of secrecy our government engages in, by providing documents with so much redaction as to be less than useless.
Proving that there is no such thing as a statute of limitations when it comes to politics, in an attempt to discredit Al Franken's Minnesota state senate bid, his opponents have resurrected a satire column Franken wrote in Playboy Magazine eight years ago. This is apparently proof that Franken’s values and views are out of touch with Minnesota residents, and that he enjoys degrading women and making jokes at their expense. This happened eight years ago. I don’t have access to back issues of Playboy, so I can’t go and check out the column myself, but I think Franken’s opponents are reaching just a tad to try and find something to attack him with.
In candidate matters, CNS News and others speculate bobby Jindal would be a good VP for Senator McCain, citing a statement by the President of Americans for Tax reform that “He is great on guns, great on taxes, a Roman Catholic, a Southerner and an Indian-American. Bobby Jindal would be great for the GOP and perfect for McCain”. A uniter for a divided conservative base, although that litany of virtues reads like a potential list of faults and attackable points, depending on how far on the fringe Mr. Jindal is. David Limbaugh, borther of comedian Rush Limbaugh, thinks Senator McCain should continue to hammer on Senator Obama's Iraq position, claiming that things are working, that troops need to stay, if we leave, then we lose a battleground of the War on Concepts to the enemy, and that Senator McCain should leverage his experience in foreign policy to paint himself as the better candidate with regard to Iraq. Cal Thomas echoes this idea, deriding Senator Obama’s willingness to talk and see what hostile nations want as carrots to help then change as naive, expecting those hostile nations not to honor any promises they make. He also sidebars into how the nation trusts in itself, rather than God, and that Sex and the City is popular, rather than having all those women be labeled “sluts”, but the main point is that he would rather go to war with everyone than try diplomacy, because those hostile to the United States are clearly evil. Ben Shapiro goes further, accusing Senator Obama of being anti-military, and thus, unpatriotic and unfit for the job of being nominally in charge of the military.
Into the opinion columns - I wonder how much of Victor Davis Hanson's indictment of the 1960s generation is true. He certainly paints the people in power now as people who always want good stuff for “me” and all the blame and problems to be caused by “them”, whomever “they” are. Current problems, according to him, have their roots in how the boom has been handling the newfound prosperity they had, which makes Mr. Bush and his ilk more of a severe symptom than an outright cyst. Such an explanation would also neatly explain why Cal Thomas considers Democratic politicians "streetching the truth" on Iraq to be fraud - they promised us soemthing and didn’t deliver, and worse, they might have lied to us. Wait, isn’t that the hallmark of the current administration? Promises, lies, and not being able to deliver?
Maggie Gallagher highlights that China still has a one-child policy, and that the consequences of disobedience are still severe. She also wonders why activists and women’s rights groups aren’t more vocal about this matter. I don’t think they agree with the idea of one child per family, but the options seem to be a controlled-but-living populace and a possible population boom going unchecked, which might mean more and more severe problems than exist right now. The lack of an excellent alternative (or even the germ of such) is the biggest obstacle to really successful dismantling of the one-child policy. For all I know, the policy won’t be lifted until there’s another world to populate. The comments are impressive, with members of both spectrums calling China a paradise for the opposition.
Technology has created the world's smalles bowl of ramen. Cute, isn’t it? There’s also a wooden mirror, frogs with retractable claws, a possible design for a European manned spaceflight capsule, and a tiny and very fuel-efficient concept car.
What everyone seems to be buzzing about is monkeys have been trained to control a robotic arm using only their thoughts. Could have sworn that there were already products in development, if not released, that let humans do the same sort of thing, so a successful demo on a monkey doesn’t seem that odd to me. And, as it turns out, Octopi might also be tool-users, so now it’s a matter of training, rather than disposition, really.
Next to last for tonight - foul language and everything aside, the point being made is true - 11 September has been used to sell a lot of things and ideas, no matter what you believe about it. In perspective, the deaths and that are small compared to the amount of death that has happened since then. It’s just that 11 September invaded most people’s monkeyspheres.
On the very tail end, singled out for special merit, the Israeli governmment believes those who play Dungeons and Dragons are security risks, assigning players low clearance based on the assumption that “[t]hese people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment...They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality - elements which lower a person’s security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions.”, according to one official. So, to recap, army of a nation founded on the belief that they are the chosen people of Ceiling Cat tells people who make-believe and role-play that they’re weak-minded, actively pursues and persecutes those who LARP, and sends anyone who admits to playing the game to the psychologists for a head-shrinking. Sounds like the IDF believes, in a variant form, the same thing that fundie Christians believe about D&D’s corruptive influences.
Anyway, time for bed. School visits tomorrow means trying to get the apathetic to be enthusiastic. Wish us luck.
no subject
This is, again, one of those places where I say that if conservatives were as smart as they claim to be, they would see these things coming and just accept it.
no subject
On the September 11 thing...it really drives me nuts. I met a woman at the Lancaster train station when I was going to Paoli the other week, and we wound up sitting together on the train because she recognized my accent (how weird is that? I don't even HAVE a distinct NY/NJ accent, but someone else from the area knew I was, too) and she was from Long Island. Practically one of the first things she asked me was if I had been affected by the September 11 thing and then we spent about 15 minutes talking about it. It just...drives me mad. Okay, it was tragic, now move on.
Oh, and I forgot to mention this to you the other day, but on Memorial day on the news they were talking about these kids who went to welcome back injured (as in lost limbs) soldiers from Iraq and the one kid interviewed said he was "glad the soldiers went and were willing to lose their arms and legs for my freedom". What does the Iraq war have to do with his freedom? NOTHING. More proof of the brainwashing starting early.