Finding one's own way - 20 August 2008
Aug. 20th, 2008 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptBig headline for tonight. Candidate-wise, John McCain agrees that we'll need to re-enact the draft to catch bin Laden. Which, to someone right on the cusp of Selective Service eligibility, is (yet another) big freaking reason to reject the Republican candidate - no draft surprises, thanks, and especially not for unpopular land wars in Asia.
Internationally, it's official: Poland will host missiles, Russia will threaten to blow them up. And then they are apparently needed because Iran is testing long-range missiles intended to send up satellites. All the more reason for Alan Caruba to speculate that it's a matter of when, not if, Iran gets hit with someone else's missiles. According to Daniel Schwemmenthal, Russia's not going to do anything about it, which makes sense, considering Russia’s probably not going to be targeted first in any (utterly MAD) decision to launch nukes.
A 16 year-old awaits sentencing after being convicted as a terrorist, currently the youngest to be so convicted.
Proving that the presence of dishonesty and nuttery is (unfortunately) not contained to the United States, Christopher Bird reviews a complaint made about the participation of a justice in the awarding of the Order of Canada to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, pointing out inflation of groups objecting, reading “required” where it suggests, taking tradition as ironclad law, and defending the judge from a smear by the group implying that the non-voting chair had a predetermined conclusion to get to, and by extension, the Supreme Court of Canada is biased in its decision-making in favor of abortion. The justice also spoke publicly about the allegations, noting the chair's ole as facilitator, and not as advocate for one side or another. The complaint was dismissed after being reviewed like any other complaint.
Domestically, a doctor tried to get out of an indecent exposure case by claiming that his own unit was too small to see. The appeals court didn't buy it at all, and probably thought rather small of him for that defense.
More seriously, the state of Ohio has forbidden poll workers from taking the voting machines home with them the night before an election, as a way of showing that the process is going to be transparent, and there aren’t going to be opportunities for shenanigans by the poll workers themselves. With the beating Ohio’s credibility has taken over the last two elections, one would think they would have banned the practice before now.
And, PETA's at it again, this time with a proposal to put advertisements on the border fence telling incoming illegal Mexican immigrants that they're leaving a healthier lifestyle for burgers and fried chicken, which will kill them if the Border Patrol doesn't. Percent sign ampersand dollar sigh.... if you’ve got the cash to propose something like this, why not put it forward toward goals like making it possible for people to live healthier lifestyles on lower incomes, or ethically treating animals that happen to come into their care. Couldn’t hurt their image any more than it already is.
Of the few states where corporal punishment by teachers is still permitted, more than 200,000 students were reported to have been spanked, swatted, or otherwise disciplined through corporal means. To![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greyweirdo, however, corporal punishment amounts basically to adults bullying children up to the point where the children start being able to fight back.
In a country of darker-skinned people, products claiming to make them paler are in high demand. This comes from a tradition where someone with pale skin is a good match, because it means they haven’t had to do hard labor in the fields, and thus, they must have wealth? As opposed to us pale-skins, who are looking for someone who has had time and wealth to bronze themselves into a more Mediterranean style all over, rather than getting burnt in a couple places by our sun labor.
In our opinion section, candidate opinions come first, because of the big Rick Warren hosting Senator Obama and Senator McCain thing (link goes to computerized transcript) that will no doubt, buzz around until it is swatted by someone. Kevin McCullough puts his opinion out on the table and calls Senator Obama a manipulative liar in the pocket of the abortion lobby, by not giving as unambiguous a response to the “Human Rights (and thus, Life) Begins at Conception, Right?” question as Seantor McCain did, instead saying that decisions about where life begins is something “above his pay grade”, implying that the people with the best qualifications to say so on the matter are the people that should be saying so (McCullough implies that as a father, the Senator “knows” the answer really is “at conception”, and that he’s lying every time he doesn’t say that), by saying that abortion rates had gone up... although the statistical summary linked to as counter-evidence notes that while total abortions have been going down, there was a trend of increasing medical abortions over some years. Not to mention the fundamental trickiness of statistics in general - depending on who you include and exclude, numbers will say whatever you want them to, and apparently by defending himself against accusations that he voted to deny life-saving care to those who are born live even after an abortion, pointing out the bill proposed was not the bill presented, not that a distinction like that matters to someone convinced he’s a liar and immoral.
Much more reasonably, The WSJ asks what Senator Obama considers to be fair for the rich and the corporations to pay so that everyone is putting in "their fair share", making Senator Obama into an incompetent Robin Hood, who has the “rob from the rich” part down, but has very little on “give to the poor”, which, as a Democrat, and supposedly the liberal of liberals/socialist, would be very strange, indeed. This line of reasoning has been asking for the Senator to start giving numbers for what he considers rich and fair taxation rates for those that are rich, probbaly so they can say that it’s too high and continue saying that the rich (when they do pay taxes) pay most of the taxes anyway.
advice on what to do is the taxpayers end up bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the WSJ, including firing everybody who let this mess happen. Brian Wesbury thinks we should fear the spectre of inflation and work to kill it now, rather than staying in denial about it.
Leslie Hook peers behind the Potemkin villages of the Olymic Games to talk about landowners being forcibly evicted by the government because developers want the land their houses are on. And because of the Olympics, the normal channels of redress are apparently shut down, resulting in rejection of claims and detention of those that make them.
And people wonder why the villains of our movies seem lame in comparison.
Science and technology has generated a lot of biology today, including a chameleon with a lifespan of barely a full year, a msising turtle with two heads, a found fish with two mouths, a cat with four ears, and markers of biological age in humans.
There’s other stuff, though, too, like a site that generates headlines and ranks news stories based on a credibility algorithm.
Winding down, nine tips for sticking with your exercise plan. Or, for an injection of happiness in a quicker release, toy robots from the 1950s. For those looking for a challenge, try guessing forty-six movies from a single letter or punctuation mark in their posters/logos. And then grab some famous fonts afterward.
At the end, a few things that deserve attention. And derision. First, the vibrator that contains a razor. For the shower, I guess? Still, anything that can cut is probably not going to go near anywhere where the vibrating function should be used. For similar doses of WTF, if two female athletes kiss, it's because they're lesbians, apparently. Shakespeare’s Sister takes up the relevant educational post about what, exactly, entails a lesbian kiss. Like, say, the presence of actual lesbians.
Internationally, it's official: Poland will host missiles, Russia will threaten to blow them up. And then they are apparently needed because Iran is testing long-range missiles intended to send up satellites. All the more reason for Alan Caruba to speculate that it's a matter of when, not if, Iran gets hit with someone else's missiles. According to Daniel Schwemmenthal, Russia's not going to do anything about it, which makes sense, considering Russia’s probably not going to be targeted first in any (utterly MAD) decision to launch nukes.
A 16 year-old awaits sentencing after being convicted as a terrorist, currently the youngest to be so convicted.
Proving that the presence of dishonesty and nuttery is (unfortunately) not contained to the United States, Christopher Bird reviews a complaint made about the participation of a justice in the awarding of the Order of Canada to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, pointing out inflation of groups objecting, reading “required” where it suggests, taking tradition as ironclad law, and defending the judge from a smear by the group implying that the non-voting chair had a predetermined conclusion to get to, and by extension, the Supreme Court of Canada is biased in its decision-making in favor of abortion. The justice also spoke publicly about the allegations, noting the chair's ole as facilitator, and not as advocate for one side or another. The complaint was dismissed after being reviewed like any other complaint.
Domestically, a doctor tried to get out of an indecent exposure case by claiming that his own unit was too small to see. The appeals court didn't buy it at all, and probably thought rather small of him for that defense.
More seriously, the state of Ohio has forbidden poll workers from taking the voting machines home with them the night before an election, as a way of showing that the process is going to be transparent, and there aren’t going to be opportunities for shenanigans by the poll workers themselves. With the beating Ohio’s credibility has taken over the last two elections, one would think they would have banned the practice before now.
And, PETA's at it again, this time with a proposal to put advertisements on the border fence telling incoming illegal Mexican immigrants that they're leaving a healthier lifestyle for burgers and fried chicken, which will kill them if the Border Patrol doesn't. Percent sign ampersand dollar sigh.... if you’ve got the cash to propose something like this, why not put it forward toward goals like making it possible for people to live healthier lifestyles on lower incomes, or ethically treating animals that happen to come into their care. Couldn’t hurt their image any more than it already is.
Of the few states where corporal punishment by teachers is still permitted, more than 200,000 students were reported to have been spanked, swatted, or otherwise disciplined through corporal means. To
greyweirdo, however, corporal punishment amounts basically to adults bullying children up to the point where the children start being able to fight back.In a country of darker-skinned people, products claiming to make them paler are in high demand. This comes from a tradition where someone with pale skin is a good match, because it means they haven’t had to do hard labor in the fields, and thus, they must have wealth? As opposed to us pale-skins, who are looking for someone who has had time and wealth to bronze themselves into a more Mediterranean style all over, rather than getting burnt in a couple places by our sun labor.
In our opinion section, candidate opinions come first, because of the big Rick Warren hosting Senator Obama and Senator McCain thing (link goes to computerized transcript) that will no doubt, buzz around until it is swatted by someone. Kevin McCullough puts his opinion out on the table and calls Senator Obama a manipulative liar in the pocket of the abortion lobby, by not giving as unambiguous a response to the “Human Rights (and thus, Life) Begins at Conception, Right?” question as Seantor McCain did, instead saying that decisions about where life begins is something “above his pay grade”, implying that the people with the best qualifications to say so on the matter are the people that should be saying so (McCullough implies that as a father, the Senator “knows” the answer really is “at conception”, and that he’s lying every time he doesn’t say that), by saying that abortion rates had gone up... although the statistical summary linked to as counter-evidence notes that while total abortions have been going down, there was a trend of increasing medical abortions over some years. Not to mention the fundamental trickiness of statistics in general - depending on who you include and exclude, numbers will say whatever you want them to, and apparently by defending himself against accusations that he voted to deny life-saving care to those who are born live even after an abortion, pointing out the bill proposed was not the bill presented, not that a distinction like that matters to someone convinced he’s a liar and immoral.
Much more reasonably, The WSJ asks what Senator Obama considers to be fair for the rich and the corporations to pay so that everyone is putting in "their fair share", making Senator Obama into an incompetent Robin Hood, who has the “rob from the rich” part down, but has very little on “give to the poor”, which, as a Democrat, and supposedly the liberal of liberals/socialist, would be very strange, indeed. This line of reasoning has been asking for the Senator to start giving numbers for what he considers rich and fair taxation rates for those that are rich, probbaly so they can say that it’s too high and continue saying that the rich (when they do pay taxes) pay most of the taxes anyway.
advice on what to do is the taxpayers end up bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the WSJ, including firing everybody who let this mess happen. Brian Wesbury thinks we should fear the spectre of inflation and work to kill it now, rather than staying in denial about it.
Leslie Hook peers behind the Potemkin villages of the Olymic Games to talk about landowners being forcibly evicted by the government because developers want the land their houses are on. And because of the Olympics, the normal channels of redress are apparently shut down, resulting in rejection of claims and detention of those that make them.
And people wonder why the villains of our movies seem lame in comparison.
Science and technology has generated a lot of biology today, including a chameleon with a lifespan of barely a full year, a msising turtle with two heads, a found fish with two mouths, a cat with four ears, and markers of biological age in humans.
There’s other stuff, though, too, like a site that generates headlines and ranks news stories based on a credibility algorithm.
Winding down, nine tips for sticking with your exercise plan. Or, for an injection of happiness in a quicker release, toy robots from the 1950s. For those looking for a challenge, try guessing forty-six movies from a single letter or punctuation mark in their posters/logos. And then grab some famous fonts afterward.
At the end, a few things that deserve attention. And derision. First, the vibrator that contains a razor. For the shower, I guess? Still, anything that can cut is probably not going to go near anywhere where the vibrating function should be used. For similar doses of WTF, if two female athletes kiss, it's because they're lesbians, apparently. Shakespeare’s Sister takes up the relevant educational post about what, exactly, entails a lesbian kiss. Like, say, the presence of actual lesbians.
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