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silveradeptWelcome. You’ve got news. (And that joke will be obsolete soon enough.)
Ah, the international stage. Iraqi officials visit Walter Reed hospital to thank American troops for liberating them from Saddam, Israeli prime ministers tender their resignation, effective after the next primary, CIA officials travel to Pakistan to try and get the government to stop Pakistani intelligence people's ties to unsavory elements in the country, the air quality in China may differ from the official account,
Domestically, placing intelligence capacity into the hands of private corporations is just asking for security breaches, selling out to other interested parties, and private companies doing illegal things in the name of the United States government while lacking accountability to the same entity, according to Chalmers Johnson. Has the government sold you out to Blackwater or other private companies? And how can you find out, if it’s all cloaked under the “national security” sursanure? I mean, what if there was a combat division totally devoted to the development of a mass elation chemical? Or instead of fighting them with military might, the United States has been buying off insurgents? (Not to mention, they could buy off a lot of us for a simnilar price not to engage in our own vices...) And at the same time, is adding on more missile defense capability. (Oh, and apparently the current administrator desrves praise for withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, but needs to expand into outer space weapons and defense platforms...)
Additionally, we have at three examples of the “Tase first, ask questions later” mentality - a 16 year-oldwho fell off a bridge and broke his back was tasered 19 times for failing to comply with their orders to get up before the responding officers got a clue. As an excuse, the police said that the teenager was saying things like “kill cops, shoot cops”, despite obviously being unable to actually get up and do anything. “Refusal to comply” is quite the catchword now in justifying any sort of abuse by police officers, especially when tasers are deployed, an idea that suits the General well. (Source material for this example) Example two is tasering at a wedding reception, apparently after the party got too far out of hand for the owner of the gallery where it was being held. So the police came to break the party up, and according to witness accounts, started threatening to arrest people, which only incensed a probably intoxicated group further, and then the tasers came out and people were in squad cards. So I suppose it isn’t just rocking teenagers and colelge students that the police try to shut down. The last example - someone obviously impaired gets tasered repeatedly to "bring them under control" - except it kills him, and tasering someone doused in gasoline, giving them just the spark they needed to complete the job. And again, in all of these accounts, we see “resisting arrest” or the apparent need to use a stun gun to make someone docile and/or subdued. You know, despite the purpose of a taser being to disrupt soeone’s muscle movement skills, which will likely results in odd spasms.
The House of Representatives passed a formal apology for enslavement of Africans and Jim Crow laws designed to keep them down after they had won freedom. This is the first formal apology for the period.
Let the jokes commence - a person named Anthony Hopkins is under arrest for murdering his wife and then keeping her in the freezer. Oh, and he’s also got sexual abuse charges leveled against him, too.
Off in the opinion matters, Annie Shattuck finds Monsato's decision to raise their corn seed prices contributing to a potentially more fragile food supply while also squeezing more profit from small farmers.
Arthur C. Brooks says the country isn't really mad about high gas and dropping house values, using “outrage” as the standard for whether or not someone’s truly mad at their situation. Not everyone is constantly outraged at the way things are, he says, so we’re actually still very happy to live in America, and we should appreciate all the things America does right, like not spiking high unemployment or having public services shut off. The numbers will say anything you want them to, and if you’re asking about goods that are necessary, and that we have no real control on price over, then people may have passed beyond anger into resignation. They’re still mad, but they’re not outraged anymore because it doesn’t have a point. Walter E. Williams thinks we should all turn our aggravation against Democrats and environmentalists because they’re insisting on environmentally sound solutions, rather than going forward with drilling until we have enough domestic oil to satisfy our thirst.
The WSJ in Europe accuses Germany of letting business interests trump their proper political position of sanctions, which is fairly mild compared to the headline “Berlin [heart] Iran.” Could we get a little bit better accuracy in our headlines, please?
It must have been important - three opinions in the WSJ about the collapse of the Doha trade round, all of them saying “Protectionists are ruining our global economy!” and “The end of free trade may be near!” Thus, I wonder - just what actually happened? Is it that a bad deal was rejected for being a bad deal, or are we supposed to believe it’s the beginning of something significantly more sinister, like the collapse of the dollar, then America, ending in economic debt slavery to Europe and the Euro?
In more familiar matters (at least, for the opinion columns) Leslie Sacks accuses the world, liberals, and some part of the United States as being appeasers who haven't learned anything about when to stand up and stomp someone into the ground, and Debroah Weiss believes that words have power, and thus all thsoe blunt and un-PC words should be used to describe al-Qaeda and their ideological allies, thinking it has greater accuracy, because the groups use those words themselves. Even if, say, they’re deliberately trying to make people think the majority of a certain religious group are in complete alignment and endorsement of their radicalized agenda? (By the way, it doesn’t help whem members of your own media group perpetuate this belief and look for statistics and other studies to confirm it.)
Last out of general opinions, Adbusters decries the rise of the "hipster" - the vampire that sucks on countercultures, trying to be like them, but draining them of their meaning and turning them into vapid shells of themselves. The prevalence of hipsters spells doom for civilzation, Adbusters says, because it means we’ve stopped innovating and creating and are just sucking other people dry.
Turd Blossom opens the candidate opinions repeating the fibs about Senator Obama's supposed missteps in Iraq, including the “Obama has to admit the surge worked, or he’s a liar” and “Obama blew off the troops for his own personal gain”. He’s a bit more generous to Senator McCain’s campaign and Iraq difficulties.
The other side does not escape scrutiny. Daniel Henninger wonders what Senator McCain's major malfunction is, because of the Senator’s turbine-spinning position changes on taxes and attitude that the Democrats will implode at the last moment.
The Science and Technology department produces another mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism solved - it's not only good for eclipses, but for determining when the Ancient Olympics were due up. Coooooool. Going from past to future, fundingand bandidth to develop the next generation of the Internet, the first tele-ultrasound, giving us at least a proof of concept of robotic examination-over-satellite. How’s the surgery-by-wire projects coming?
Plus, cheap fabrication in three dimensions, ways of chemically disconnecting the brain mechanism that associates trauma response with past bad experiences, a vaccine against the Black Plague (just in case of bioterror), and The cheesesteak egg roll? Huh. The future is a strange place, indeed.
Last for tonight, some stamps from the heights of runaway hyperinflation, with denominations in the millions and billions. Staying in the past, but potentially with viewpoints on the future, The Orwell Diaries will start on August 9th and run for four years. It will be a serialization of Orwell's daily diary entries, coinciding with a big anniversary of Orwell’s books about dystopian futures. Perhaps there will be some prophetic writing about the potential nightmare that movies based on the Foundation series will be.
At the very tail end, currently, the world's oldest joke - and yes, it's a fart joke.
Ah, the international stage. Iraqi officials visit Walter Reed hospital to thank American troops for liberating them from Saddam, Israeli prime ministers tender their resignation, effective after the next primary, CIA officials travel to Pakistan to try and get the government to stop Pakistani intelligence people's ties to unsavory elements in the country, the air quality in China may differ from the official account,
Domestically, placing intelligence capacity into the hands of private corporations is just asking for security breaches, selling out to other interested parties, and private companies doing illegal things in the name of the United States government while lacking accountability to the same entity, according to Chalmers Johnson. Has the government sold you out to Blackwater or other private companies? And how can you find out, if it’s all cloaked under the “national security” sursanure? I mean, what if there was a combat division totally devoted to the development of a mass elation chemical? Or instead of fighting them with military might, the United States has been buying off insurgents? (Not to mention, they could buy off a lot of us for a simnilar price not to engage in our own vices...) And at the same time, is adding on more missile defense capability. (Oh, and apparently the current administrator desrves praise for withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, but needs to expand into outer space weapons and defense platforms...)
Additionally, we have at three examples of the “Tase first, ask questions later” mentality - a 16 year-oldwho fell off a bridge and broke his back was tasered 19 times for failing to comply with their orders to get up before the responding officers got a clue. As an excuse, the police said that the teenager was saying things like “kill cops, shoot cops”, despite obviously being unable to actually get up and do anything. “Refusal to comply” is quite the catchword now in justifying any sort of abuse by police officers, especially when tasers are deployed, an idea that suits the General well. (Source material for this example) Example two is tasering at a wedding reception, apparently after the party got too far out of hand for the owner of the gallery where it was being held. So the police came to break the party up, and according to witness accounts, started threatening to arrest people, which only incensed a probably intoxicated group further, and then the tasers came out and people were in squad cards. So I suppose it isn’t just rocking teenagers and colelge students that the police try to shut down. The last example - someone obviously impaired gets tasered repeatedly to "bring them under control" - except it kills him, and tasering someone doused in gasoline, giving them just the spark they needed to complete the job. And again, in all of these accounts, we see “resisting arrest” or the apparent need to use a stun gun to make someone docile and/or subdued. You know, despite the purpose of a taser being to disrupt soeone’s muscle movement skills, which will likely results in odd spasms.
The House of Representatives passed a formal apology for enslavement of Africans and Jim Crow laws designed to keep them down after they had won freedom. This is the first formal apology for the period.
Let the jokes commence - a person named Anthony Hopkins is under arrest for murdering his wife and then keeping her in the freezer. Oh, and he’s also got sexual abuse charges leveled against him, too.
Off in the opinion matters, Annie Shattuck finds Monsato's decision to raise their corn seed prices contributing to a potentially more fragile food supply while also squeezing more profit from small farmers.
Arthur C. Brooks says the country isn't really mad about high gas and dropping house values, using “outrage” as the standard for whether or not someone’s truly mad at their situation. Not everyone is constantly outraged at the way things are, he says, so we’re actually still very happy to live in America, and we should appreciate all the things America does right, like not spiking high unemployment or having public services shut off. The numbers will say anything you want them to, and if you’re asking about goods that are necessary, and that we have no real control on price over, then people may have passed beyond anger into resignation. They’re still mad, but they’re not outraged anymore because it doesn’t have a point. Walter E. Williams thinks we should all turn our aggravation against Democrats and environmentalists because they’re insisting on environmentally sound solutions, rather than going forward with drilling until we have enough domestic oil to satisfy our thirst.
The WSJ in Europe accuses Germany of letting business interests trump their proper political position of sanctions, which is fairly mild compared to the headline “Berlin [heart] Iran.” Could we get a little bit better accuracy in our headlines, please?
It must have been important - three opinions in the WSJ about the collapse of the Doha trade round, all of them saying “Protectionists are ruining our global economy!” and “The end of free trade may be near!” Thus, I wonder - just what actually happened? Is it that a bad deal was rejected for being a bad deal, or are we supposed to believe it’s the beginning of something significantly more sinister, like the collapse of the dollar, then America, ending in economic debt slavery to Europe and the Euro?
In more familiar matters (at least, for the opinion columns) Leslie Sacks accuses the world, liberals, and some part of the United States as being appeasers who haven't learned anything about when to stand up and stomp someone into the ground, and Debroah Weiss believes that words have power, and thus all thsoe blunt and un-PC words should be used to describe al-Qaeda and their ideological allies, thinking it has greater accuracy, because the groups use those words themselves. Even if, say, they’re deliberately trying to make people think the majority of a certain religious group are in complete alignment and endorsement of their radicalized agenda? (By the way, it doesn’t help whem members of your own media group perpetuate this belief and look for statistics and other studies to confirm it.)
Last out of general opinions, Adbusters decries the rise of the "hipster" - the vampire that sucks on countercultures, trying to be like them, but draining them of their meaning and turning them into vapid shells of themselves. The prevalence of hipsters spells doom for civilzation, Adbusters says, because it means we’ve stopped innovating and creating and are just sucking other people dry.
Turd Blossom opens the candidate opinions repeating the fibs about Senator Obama's supposed missteps in Iraq, including the “Obama has to admit the surge worked, or he’s a liar” and “Obama blew off the troops for his own personal gain”. He’s a bit more generous to Senator McCain’s campaign and Iraq difficulties.
The other side does not escape scrutiny. Daniel Henninger wonders what Senator McCain's major malfunction is, because of the Senator’s turbine-spinning position changes on taxes and attitude that the Democrats will implode at the last moment.
The Science and Technology department produces another mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism solved - it's not only good for eclipses, but for determining when the Ancient Olympics were due up. Coooooool. Going from past to future, fundingand bandidth to develop the next generation of the Internet, the first tele-ultrasound, giving us at least a proof of concept of robotic examination-over-satellite. How’s the surgery-by-wire projects coming?
Plus, cheap fabrication in three dimensions, ways of chemically disconnecting the brain mechanism that associates trauma response with past bad experiences, a vaccine against the Black Plague (just in case of bioterror), and The cheesesteak egg roll? Huh. The future is a strange place, indeed.
Last for tonight, some stamps from the heights of runaway hyperinflation, with denominations in the millions and billions. Staying in the past, but potentially with viewpoints on the future, The Orwell Diaries will start on August 9th and run for four years. It will be a serialization of Orwell's daily diary entries, coinciding with a big anniversary of Orwell’s books about dystopian futures. Perhaps there will be some prophetic writing about the potential nightmare that movies based on the Foundation series will be.
At the very tail end, currently, the world's oldest joke - and yes, it's a fart joke.
