All finished - 19 June 2008
Jun. 20th, 2008 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThey’re here, they’re here! But they got in late, local time, which translates to later, regular time. So not too much for late-night gossiping, I’m sure. But they’ll be here for the weekend, and we’ll do all sorts of fabulous, fantastic stuff before they go back to their regular lives. It’ll be lots of fun to catch up with them about their lives.
Starting internationally, France is considering rejoining NATO, after more than forty years independent of the alliance.
China braces for more difficulties as heavy rains start to move into earthquake-affected regions. Landslides and washouts are chief concerns for the Chinese government, who have been busily evacuating residents from the potentially dangerous zones.
Domestically, doing what has been expected of him for a while now, Mr. Bush requested the Congressional ban on offshore drilling be lifted, heeding the cries and calls from many sources around to start drilling offshore, in wildlife reserves, and other federal lands, with the assumption that technology will keep the pollution down and that developing these areas, adding more refineries, and increasing production will drop gas prices and free Americans from the control of OPEC and Middle Eastern countries that supply us with energy while plotting our downfall. Really, all OPEC has to do to hurt the populace is to divert their supplies to China and stop selling to the U.S. If they were so ideologically committed, it wouldn’t be too hard. Of course, now that several large oil companies are preparing to sign no-bid contracts for Iraqi's oil reserves, maybe there won’t be so much need for drilling, will there?
CNS, for whom our trust is about as good as our throwing arm, reports on the State Department working with the Islamic Saudi Academy to make sure that the Islam taught in the textbooks is moderate and non-inflammatory. Again, Saudi Arabia, a close ally, seems to have more trouble with radicalism than some other places that the U.S. is not so allied with. If people truly believed that radical Islam is a "convert or die" mindset, wouldn’t most people want to train their eyes on the places where radicalism seems to be flourishing most?
More reasons to dislike or charge Alberto Gonzalez with crimes - while not explicitly firing a lawyer in the Justice Department after he wrote a legal opinion condemning torture, he is alleged to have asked the dissenting lawyer to leave the Justice Department and moved him to a lesser job, and then eventually, the lawyer left for private practice voluntarily.
A quick candidate note - Officially, Senator Obama will not be using public funding for his general election campaign, drawing criticism from the McCain campaign of hypocrisy and self-serving interests. The general look from this appears to be that it will be a money war for the campaign.
After a spate of hydrogen sulfide suicides that then started spreading to other areas and causing harm, a mask designed for the office or the apartment is being marketed by Rescuenow, inc to Japanese customers. Temporary use, up to 20 minutes, which should be enough time to escape the fumes.
Not that nuttery is confined to other countries... a couple has been charged with first-degree murder and felony child abuse after their son died while tied to a tree. The son was out there and tied as a disciplinary issue, apparently, and had spent several nights out there. Guessing from the schools the teenager had attended, this is a case of “Christian domestic discipline” that resulted, again, in a child’s death.
In the opinion columns, Tony Blankley laments the decline of democracy, while cheering the Irish people on for their no vote on the Lisbon Treaty, remarking that people in non-democratic governments seem okay with letting the non-elected rule, so long as the economy goes strong, or wanting a strong government with a powerful president who will reshape the laws to suit his own whims. I wonder if he realizes how close to describing his own country he is.
Bernard Goldberg eulogizes Time Russert, and praises his willingness to address the question of media bias, whether “liberal” or the more subtle bias of having all journalists come from the same background and schools.
Dick Armey thinks the federal government's bill to let private mortgage lenders dump their highest-risk loans on the Federal Housing Agency is a way bad idea, a way of bailing out a lender that has obviously made very bad decisions and will be suffering from them soon.
Paul Greenberg extols the virtues of rednecks and the word redneck as part of a greater campaign to keep using words like it as part of the English language to describe people who would take the term with pride.
In technology, cloned cancer-fighting cells for the victory. A gent had good immune cells taken from his body, cloned, and then reinjected back into his body. After eight weeks, no more tumors. Similarly, diaphragm stimulation for better breathing without the use of a ventilator. Electrodes ahoy.
Also, have your wedding on a microgravity space flight. All for the small cost of $2.2 million or so. Hey, it encourages private development of spacecraft, right?
There’s also the side effects of widespread broadband accessibility.
The Bad Ideas for tonight start with the existence of Lego block fruit snacks, which basically undoes years of parental insistence that the hard plstic toys are not edible. Bad idea.
An even worse idea is a pact made between several high school girls to get themselves pregnant. In a highly Catholic area in Massachusetts, seventeen girls have become pregnant, potentially on any man they could find, as one of the fathers mentioned is a homeless man in his twenties. Looks like the federally funded and mandated abstinence program, which doesn’t deter experimentation, talk about contraception, nor adequately talk about all the expenses and decisions that motherhood entails, combined with the prevailing Catholic attitude about contraception (“Don’t, or be damned”) and about motherhood and childrearing (“The best thing that any good Catholic woman can do is be a mother and raise her children in God’s way”) produced the idea in some likely-intelligent high schoolers that they should be trying to get pregnant and be mothers so they can be praised for becoming the kinds of people that the town and their peers would be proud of. Anyone else want to argue that a program that teaches solely abstinence to teenagers, whether religious or nominally secular, is an effective deterrent to pregnancy and sexual behavior?
Perhaps the worst idea of the lot, though, is the marketing ad for a new phone that aims for sexy, but instead ends up squarely in stalker territory. The touch and tilt functions on the phone manipulate the woman sleeping in her nightgown, and the whole thing comes off as something out of a horror movie. Feministing also finds the advert creepy and stalker-like, as did our Unabashed Feminism Bureau Chief,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ldragoon.
As the last for tonight, Sesame Street characters in famous art pieces. Something much more appealing than Famous people punching Steve. Which, uh, probably is something that the people shown were okay with, pose-wise. Probably after some explanation of what was going on. I, however, will be sleeping, as I have work in the morning.
Starting internationally, France is considering rejoining NATO, after more than forty years independent of the alliance.
China braces for more difficulties as heavy rains start to move into earthquake-affected regions. Landslides and washouts are chief concerns for the Chinese government, who have been busily evacuating residents from the potentially dangerous zones.
Domestically, doing what has been expected of him for a while now, Mr. Bush requested the Congressional ban on offshore drilling be lifted, heeding the cries and calls from many sources around to start drilling offshore, in wildlife reserves, and other federal lands, with the assumption that technology will keep the pollution down and that developing these areas, adding more refineries, and increasing production will drop gas prices and free Americans from the control of OPEC and Middle Eastern countries that supply us with energy while plotting our downfall. Really, all OPEC has to do to hurt the populace is to divert their supplies to China and stop selling to the U.S. If they were so ideologically committed, it wouldn’t be too hard. Of course, now that several large oil companies are preparing to sign no-bid contracts for Iraqi's oil reserves, maybe there won’t be so much need for drilling, will there?
CNS, for whom our trust is about as good as our throwing arm, reports on the State Department working with the Islamic Saudi Academy to make sure that the Islam taught in the textbooks is moderate and non-inflammatory. Again, Saudi Arabia, a close ally, seems to have more trouble with radicalism than some other places that the U.S. is not so allied with. If people truly believed that radical Islam is a "convert or die" mindset, wouldn’t most people want to train their eyes on the places where radicalism seems to be flourishing most?
More reasons to dislike or charge Alberto Gonzalez with crimes - while not explicitly firing a lawyer in the Justice Department after he wrote a legal opinion condemning torture, he is alleged to have asked the dissenting lawyer to leave the Justice Department and moved him to a lesser job, and then eventually, the lawyer left for private practice voluntarily.
A quick candidate note - Officially, Senator Obama will not be using public funding for his general election campaign, drawing criticism from the McCain campaign of hypocrisy and self-serving interests. The general look from this appears to be that it will be a money war for the campaign.
After a spate of hydrogen sulfide suicides that then started spreading to other areas and causing harm, a mask designed for the office or the apartment is being marketed by Rescuenow, inc to Japanese customers. Temporary use, up to 20 minutes, which should be enough time to escape the fumes.
Not that nuttery is confined to other countries... a couple has been charged with first-degree murder and felony child abuse after their son died while tied to a tree. The son was out there and tied as a disciplinary issue, apparently, and had spent several nights out there. Guessing from the schools the teenager had attended, this is a case of “Christian domestic discipline” that resulted, again, in a child’s death.
In the opinion columns, Tony Blankley laments the decline of democracy, while cheering the Irish people on for their no vote on the Lisbon Treaty, remarking that people in non-democratic governments seem okay with letting the non-elected rule, so long as the economy goes strong, or wanting a strong government with a powerful president who will reshape the laws to suit his own whims. I wonder if he realizes how close to describing his own country he is.
Bernard Goldberg eulogizes Time Russert, and praises his willingness to address the question of media bias, whether “liberal” or the more subtle bias of having all journalists come from the same background and schools.
Dick Armey thinks the federal government's bill to let private mortgage lenders dump their highest-risk loans on the Federal Housing Agency is a way bad idea, a way of bailing out a lender that has obviously made very bad decisions and will be suffering from them soon.
Paul Greenberg extols the virtues of rednecks and the word redneck as part of a greater campaign to keep using words like it as part of the English language to describe people who would take the term with pride.
In technology, cloned cancer-fighting cells for the victory. A gent had good immune cells taken from his body, cloned, and then reinjected back into his body. After eight weeks, no more tumors. Similarly, diaphragm stimulation for better breathing without the use of a ventilator. Electrodes ahoy.
Also, have your wedding on a microgravity space flight. All for the small cost of $2.2 million or so. Hey, it encourages private development of spacecraft, right?
There’s also the side effects of widespread broadband accessibility.
The Bad Ideas for tonight start with the existence of Lego block fruit snacks, which basically undoes years of parental insistence that the hard plstic toys are not edible. Bad idea.
An even worse idea is a pact made between several high school girls to get themselves pregnant. In a highly Catholic area in Massachusetts, seventeen girls have become pregnant, potentially on any man they could find, as one of the fathers mentioned is a homeless man in his twenties. Looks like the federally funded and mandated abstinence program, which doesn’t deter experimentation, talk about contraception, nor adequately talk about all the expenses and decisions that motherhood entails, combined with the prevailing Catholic attitude about contraception (“Don’t, or be damned”) and about motherhood and childrearing (“The best thing that any good Catholic woman can do is be a mother and raise her children in God’s way”) produced the idea in some likely-intelligent high schoolers that they should be trying to get pregnant and be mothers so they can be praised for becoming the kinds of people that the town and their peers would be proud of. Anyone else want to argue that a program that teaches solely abstinence to teenagers, whether religious or nominally secular, is an effective deterrent to pregnancy and sexual behavior?
Perhaps the worst idea of the lot, though, is the marketing ad for a new phone that aims for sexy, but instead ends up squarely in stalker territory. The touch and tilt functions on the phone manipulate the woman sleeping in her nightgown, and the whole thing comes off as something out of a horror movie. Feministing also finds the advert creepy and stalker-like, as did our Unabashed Feminism Bureau Chief,
ldragoon. As the last for tonight, Sesame Street characters in famous art pieces. Something much more appealing than Famous people punching Steve. Which, uh, probably is something that the people shown were okay with, pose-wise. Probably after some explanation of what was going on. I, however, will be sleeping, as I have work in the morning.
