silveradept | The Home Stretch

We’ve made it to the weekend yet again. On some weeks, this feels like a grand accomplishment all by itself. I think it was because I had programs every day this week that I’m feeling a little overrun. At the same time, it's not really a job to me - it's still fun.

As anticipated, having given his last lecture some time ago, Randy Pausch died of cancer July 25 at 47 years of age.

The International Bureau is noticing the shift in coverage locales with interest. Apparently this time, Iraq really has been sealed up as a done deal, so now it’s time to get Pakistan to help out with Afghanistan by not being so lax with their borders. Although it’s not completely wine and roses - Iraq will not participate in the Olympic Games this summer unless some compromises can be reached, considering the government dissolved the National Olympic committee in the country, provoking the IOC’s decision.

Iran wants to help the IAEA and cooperate more - if the IAEA isn't going to go in as a watchdog looking for secret nuclear weapons. Which seems kind of counterproductive - part of ensuring atomic safety, no doubt, would be to find out whether there are weaponization processes going on... an accident there could end up making swaths of land uninhabitable.

Domestic news: fuel from waste is picking up steam as a viable alternative, mostly because gas prices have gotten to the point where alternative methods of production, even in their crude form, are price-competitive. If gas prices stay high, then refinement and innovation might drive their prices down to the point where it’s cheaper to get garbage gas instead of new petroleum from the ground. It would be great if we could use all the landfill garbage to make motor fuel with - reduce two environmental problems at once. Why not?

In candidate matters, Senator Obama decides not to visit wounded troops on a campaign visit, thinking it would be seen as trying to score cheap political points, for which the McCain campaign jumps on him because “it’s never inappropriate to visit the military” - well, considering that people are swinging around Senator McCain’s military experience to score political points, this is not an out-of-character statement for him. Odds are good, though, that if he had visited, he would have been accused of trying to score cheap political points and a photo-op, because “everyone knows” he’s a elitist pie-in-the-sky surrender monkey who hates the troops and is secretly a Muslim working with the terrorists. Of course, none of this gets coverage, they proclaim, not because, say, it isn’t fucking true, but because the media loves Senator Obama and would never do anything to hurt him, based on the amounts of money given to Democratic campaigns as opposed to Republican ones by those who work in journalism and newsrooms. Well, of those who can contribute and aren’t forbidden by employer policy from making indvidual contributions to political campaigns. Or based on the NYT's rejection of Senator McCain's response op-ed, and all the time that the media is devoting to Obama. Well, both of these campaigns are historic, in the ages and races of the people running - their politics may or may not be anything new, but th people certainly are. As Liberal Eagle notes, it's only bias when the liberl is getting good press. If it were a scandal-laden conservative, like it has been for the last eight years, then it’s just good news reporting to downplay the scandals, demand no accountability, and present them as the guardians of order and morality against the degenerate liberals (Thanks, Andrew Klavan, for this song of W praise, equating Mr. Bush to the Batman).

In the opinion columns, it’s beginning to become a bit clearer why energy independence has become a hot topic (well, past the point of really expensive gas prices, anyway) - it's a perfect opportunity to accuse the Democratic leadership of not taking on important matters and try to paint them as the party that’s stopping people from magically fixing the gas problem, or the party still stuck in the 60s, shouting loudly about what needs to be done while doing none of it.

Speaking of doing nothing, David Ranson suggests that nothing is exactly what we should do with the economy problems, because we’re exaggerating the impact of the collapses, and things will right themselves, assuming we don’t make stupid political decisions, like bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Dick Armey.

Taking care of some of the odd statements people make: John S. Wilkins on why monkeys are still here, even if other things evovled from them, with a quick digression into how the idea that “humans evolved from monkeys” really works, assuming you get your terms and definitions right to say “humans and monkeys evolved from a shared ancestor, who is aprt of a group that we would commonly call monkeys in this era, even thgouh they may not be part of what we scientifically call monkeys now”. As with a lot of things, the mixture of common definitions and scientific ones creates confusion and discord.

Much more easily filed is Bill Donahue equating the "desecration" of the Catholic wafer with the burning of crosses and the display of swastikas...excepting the last two actually were done by groups with the intention of intimidating, whereas the first is, well, kind of laughable, because the people reputed to have done it never did, according to

theweaselking.

And we get into the candidate opinion section with a real whammy. Ben Stein says that using an open-air stadium to accept a nomination in front of 75,000 screaming fans is something Hitler would have done, as opposed to what? The convention center and a dignified speech in front of 75,000 cheering fans and a few spectators applauding politely? Or that the prpemise of compaigning in this country is based precisely on appeals to those 75,000 screaming fans to go out and vote for the shiny candidate? If Stein wants a more dignified atmosphere, then he’s going to have to change the way we do politics in the country. He might fidn help in the WSJ's portrayal of Barack Obama as someone who lacks statesmanship, because he refuses to accept that he was and still is wrong about being a surrender-advocating cheesemonkey in Iraq and still insists that we move ahead with troop withdrawals, endangering the chances we have to “win” in Iraq. Cal Thomas agrees that the Seantor's position is just so wrong that it makes him unelectable. Janice Shaw Crouse gives the 60s another run, painting the later half of the decade as the point when it all started unraveling, with the riots and the Roe decisions and how we can’t vote for the Democrat who wants to take us further down the road of the 60s, rather than voting for the person who was a POW during the 60s and understands the need to resist and stay a stringently family-values guy. Larry Elder believes he has great questions for media people to ask Senator Obama, the last one being, of course, “Is it possible that all these spending just might have prevented another terrorist attack?”

And then there’s the peach of the whole thing, where Ken Blackwell says that schools can't instill the things children need to succeed, only married two-parent families who regularly go to church with their children can. The basis of his point? Research by the Family Research Council, who have a significantly vested interest in promoting both the heteronuclear married family and making one’s faith the single most important thing in one’s life, sufficient that children who don’t adopt or conform will be shunned. While I agree that schools often reflect the community around them, because the tax bases fund the schools, and certain demographic groups tend to get shunted into certain property-value areas, schools should be able to help overcome family deficiencies. Churches assisting in this totally depends on your faith and whether your government firmly believes that churches are the key to getting social assistance in the right places (and can be trusted not to push their faith as a prerequisite of getting social aid), but schools really should be able to provide high-quality education and teachers, even if the state and federal government need to chip in high amounts of that cost because the property values in the area aren’t able to do that support themselves until the neighborhood gets renewed.

Science moves on apace, and creates robot fish that look and swim a lot like the real thing, and thus could get up close and personal when it came to studying stuff. Just so long as they weren’t predators of that particular type of fish. In addition to that, other signs we’re living in “The Fuuuuuuturrrrrre” is androids starring in sunscreen commercials, more efficient and faster-timed LCD monitors, figuring out why the phrase "licking your wounds" isn't just "Whistlin' Dixie", learning some of the for the aurorae in the night sky, old horse viruses back for another round, with worries we may have a human-infectable strain, along with the resurgence of an old ebola-type virus. (Why old diseases back again? Well, viruses mutate and evolve, and one of those things of the future is that the bugs get better... technologically or biologically)

Of course, we’re still stuck in some proprietary hells here and there. Take, for example, an accusation that a motherboard manufacturer is deliberately pointing its BIOS to places that will make Linux-based OS choke, while giving Windows Vista and others a free pass and the correct tables. While the conspiracy theory doesn’t really interest most of the comment crew on Slashdot, they are very interested in the manufacturer's claim to be compliant with a standard, even though they are faced with a counterexample, and the attitude of the support personnel amounting to “use Vista, which is what we’re certified for”, rather than “Thanks, we’ll pass that information along and try to roll out a truly standards-compliant version in a later release.”

Last for tonight, Oh, the irony. Thank heaven for things that will get you there faster, indeed.