Dashing away - 17 September 2008
Sep. 16th, 2008 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptInternationally, The Bishop of Rome urged his followers to accept death "at the hour chosen by God", speaking out against euthanasia and acknowledging, if only indirectly, that those who die young, in pain, of easily preventable diseases, etc. are doing so because it is the hour appointed them by God. In a lot of ways, that would say God is quite a dick. With the explanation that everyone is a sinner and thus doomed to suffer through life, though, it probably makes a lot of people feel better about why the world hasn't put their foot down and helped everyone get to a point where they have the basic necessities.
Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, has died at 65. The cycle of time goes on, and all those who we used to listen to aren't around or available anymore...
The United States is selling bunker-buster bombs to Israel, possibly helping them arm themselves before fulfilling a promise to knock over Iranian nuclear facilities before they produced a weapon.
In politics, Cynicism is now one of the greatest threats to democracy, according to a new study by the London School of Economics. No mention made of the things that cause the cynicism, lke nepotism, cronyism, corruption, graft, trying to present the same thing as two different things, fraud, hypocrisy, scandal, and all of that. Of course cynicism is the real threat. It's not anything like PMCs that feed on the national budget, making more money and doing more services for war efforts than the soldiers and generals do.
In other domestic matters, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike is proving to be worse than the actual storm, as power is still out, food is spoiling, and people are stuck where they are, waiting for assistance and for services to be restored.
The Fed is bailing out AIG to the tune of several billions of dollars, so some will die and some will live, and hopefully, things don't collapse too poorly.
Candidate matters - After hearing about it on NPR and now seeing Liberal Seagull promote it, it may be time to link to The Living Room Candidate, a project from the Museum of the Moving Image that chronicles, catalogs, and archives television advertisements and their contexts for Presidential campaigns. After this current election cycle is over, it will join the project as well. They may have quite a few interesting things to add in, too, as during the debates, screened (for broadcast suitability) comments and Twitter messages will be available on the Current TV feed, which basically merges in real-time commentary on the debates as they unfold, rather than waiting for the end for the pundits to have a hack at them. It's an interesting and likable concept.
McCain freely admits that all the hubbub about the pig thing last week? Manufactured, even though he's trying to claim that Senator Obama really was up to something when he made the remark about lipstick on a pig.
The opinions come at us yet again - Austin Hill sswipes at Senator Obama, feeling that nobody has asked him whether he has the experience to be President, as Governor Palin gets grilled on the matter. (Um, where has he been the last few months? One of the main Republican lines of attack has been about the Senator's lack of experience in what they deem to be important matters.) The WSJ makes comparisons between Governor Palin and President Truman as a way of saying that experience doesn't really matter, (man, this is going to be a very DID-style line of attack, isn't it?), and a radio jockey got suspended for a week for giving out the actual numbers of women protesting Sarah Palin on the air. Just a week? That's really a long suspension-to-dismissal offense.
Serious (or at least, those who take themselves seriously) opinions include Theroux on Thoreau and politics, including a couple comments on moose-hunting. Additionally, fixing the housing panic through calm decision-making and letting the market do most of the heavy lifting and loss-taking, and hopefully taking the lesson that overextending on high-risk investments is nto sound strategy, claiming victory in Iraq because media outlets no longer use the term "civil war" to describe the conflict, perhaps because, well, the things that looked like a civil war, with members of one religious faction fighting another, have stopped (or are at least not being reported on).
In much more light-hearted matters, The General pokes fun at how many people fall all over themselves to say "It's not because he's black..." but have no good followup by providing them with a handy excuse wheel to secretly spin, so they don't sound like parrots quite as often.
Non-candidate opinions include Peter Watts thinking about whether we can truly be culpable for our actions, if we can change ourselves into someone completely different through the introduction of chemicals. If it's all biology and free will is an illusion, then we can trace it all back to some root in our systems somewhere. Perhaps if we unravel all the complexities of the human condition to their basics, we can take a stab at answering that question.
Web of Debt suggests the grand power brokers behind all things are toying with the markets to try and put the freefall of the markets into a controlled fall, where the worst of it can be hidden, and the rest can be swept under the rug through conflicts and surprises elswehere, at least until the next wave of credit crashes, at which point more drastic measures will need to be taken.
In science and technology - Darwin gets an apology from the Chruch of England over the whole evolution thing, a conviction in India obtained based on scanning the brain to see if someone has knowledge of the crime and is lying about it, a new, untested, unproven technology at work in a live situation, utilizing peers to review patents for obviousness and possible prior art/patents already granted by putting new patent applications on the Web for all to see, as an attempt to crowd out the people looking to litigate or to get patents on things that are, well, patently obvious, attempting to get electronics to play on the same rights manageent fields, under the idea of "buy once, play anywhere", assuming the device in question talks the right rights languages, the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, aiming to keep our tubes free and clear of corporate or political censorship and control, whether through blocking, banning, "shaping traffic", or bandiwdth caps. Last out of this section - Things That Look Like Flying Saucers.
Getting special mention, because I really want to stick a Worst Person In The World on the end of all of this, there was a confluence of stuff about the right to choose whether or not to have a child. It all started innocuously enough - complaints about a Royal Mail stamp that honors one of the pioneering women of birth control, because the woman herself held currently-unacceptable views on eugenics. We honor lots of people who have vies that we consider inappropriate now - after all, there are a lot of Presidents who owned slaves - one of the founding discoverers of the continent (for Spain) probably had dim views of the natives there, and so forth. Plus, we still have Silly Putty and Tang, both of which were dismal failures at their intended purposes, but have found new life. It would be a short list, indeed, if we were only allowed to honor historical figures who coincided perfectly with modern beliefs.
Besides, considering the history of contraceptives, there have been a lot of attempts that haven't worked, despite many claims of their efficacy. Seriously. So we should be honoring those who have made progress toward effective birth control, even as we say the reasons they were doing so are suspect. So far, so good.
Things do take a turn into the political, where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bluesgirly has what she thinks is the perfect solution to the problem of women having an option to choose not to ahve a child. It's a very Modest Proposal and tells us why we should vote for the Palin/McCain ticket, too. We'll just force every wom^H^H uterus to have any child that might get into it, no matter how it got there, and we'll force all the men to be responsible for any uterus they might impregnate, allowing the government to track them down, garnish them, jail them, force them to have vasectomies if the government deems it necessary, and enforce that responsibility. If we're going to legislate that all uteruses have to have any children that are there, no matter what circumstances they arrived there by, we have to legislate that all men will be held accountable, even to the point of having their ability to reproduce taken away, for any children that they impregnate, accidentally or not. If that means there are suddenly a lot of school dropouts, fantastic. Then we can take away all those sub minimum-wage jobs from the immigrants and give them to our new fathers and mothers. It'll solve two problems at once. (That last benefit is one I thought of and isn't in the actual proposal itself.)
And then, some very interesting material from Phil Harris. Phil would probably take the proposal above to be serious and work toward its implementation. His column today about the potential First Ladies of the next election is not really about the candidates (he characterizes Senator Obama as someone who has not actually said anything about his positions, based on his voting record, and proclaims Senator McCain as a "true American War Hero"), or the first ladies, excepting really about their positions on abortions. Potential First Lady McCain, whose "views on abortion are not perfect in my [Harris's] opinion, but at least she limits her tolerance to cases of rape and incest." And on potential First Lady Obama, "Although she has mothered two children, her affection for children ends apparently at the birth canal." Harris's own opinion on the matter? "I hope that she [McCain] and others will see that rape and incest are not crimes that should condemn an innocent child to death." So children conceived in what are, for the grand majority, non-consensual acts (rape by definition, and many cases of incest are rapacious and abusive) should grow to term as reminders to a mother about what happened to her, with the genetic material of the person who violated her, possibly resulting in a child who looks like that person in some way? It would take someone of good fortitude to come through all of that, birth the child and possibly raise it, possibly as a single mother whose life was derailed by such an event, and not have problems. So perhaps he's complimenting women, saying that they're strong enough to go through that and come out on top. If that's the case, thuogh, he should also be thinking they're smart enough to make decisions like that on their own, without interference. So that's already Worst Person-worthy, but there's more.
Using Mrs. Obama as a segue back to the candidate, Harris spends time on Senator Obama's opposition to the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act before a paragraph that cements his dishonor as today's Worst Person In The World by far.
This isn't even at the level of "It's because he's black." This stoops so far below that it would make a genocidal dictator proud. The implication that at his core, Barack Obama is a primitive savage who hasn't made it into the civilized era is so low that the sewer rats are wondering what's rumbling under their feet. That kind of allegation would be more suited to the 1800s than our current times. Because there's so much volume around, and he has a right to speak freely, I don't expect Harris to be called on it, or to apologize for it, but the disservice he has done to Senator Obama and his wife is almost slanderous. Congratulations, Phil Harris, Worst Person In The World.
Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, has died at 65. The cycle of time goes on, and all those who we used to listen to aren't around or available anymore...
The United States is selling bunker-buster bombs to Israel, possibly helping them arm themselves before fulfilling a promise to knock over Iranian nuclear facilities before they produced a weapon.
In politics, Cynicism is now one of the greatest threats to democracy, according to a new study by the London School of Economics. No mention made of the things that cause the cynicism, lke nepotism, cronyism, corruption, graft, trying to present the same thing as two different things, fraud, hypocrisy, scandal, and all of that. Of course cynicism is the real threat. It's not anything like PMCs that feed on the national budget, making more money and doing more services for war efforts than the soldiers and generals do.
In other domestic matters, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike is proving to be worse than the actual storm, as power is still out, food is spoiling, and people are stuck where they are, waiting for assistance and for services to be restored.
The Fed is bailing out AIG to the tune of several billions of dollars, so some will die and some will live, and hopefully, things don't collapse too poorly.
Candidate matters - After hearing about it on NPR and now seeing Liberal Seagull promote it, it may be time to link to The Living Room Candidate, a project from the Museum of the Moving Image that chronicles, catalogs, and archives television advertisements and their contexts for Presidential campaigns. After this current election cycle is over, it will join the project as well. They may have quite a few interesting things to add in, too, as during the debates, screened (for broadcast suitability) comments and Twitter messages will be available on the Current TV feed, which basically merges in real-time commentary on the debates as they unfold, rather than waiting for the end for the pundits to have a hack at them. It's an interesting and likable concept.
McCain freely admits that all the hubbub about the pig thing last week? Manufactured, even though he's trying to claim that Senator Obama really was up to something when he made the remark about lipstick on a pig.
The opinions come at us yet again - Austin Hill sswipes at Senator Obama, feeling that nobody has asked him whether he has the experience to be President, as Governor Palin gets grilled on the matter. (Um, where has he been the last few months? One of the main Republican lines of attack has been about the Senator's lack of experience in what they deem to be important matters.) The WSJ makes comparisons between Governor Palin and President Truman as a way of saying that experience doesn't really matter, (man, this is going to be a very DID-style line of attack, isn't it?), and a radio jockey got suspended for a week for giving out the actual numbers of women protesting Sarah Palin on the air. Just a week? That's really a long suspension-to-dismissal offense.
Serious (or at least, those who take themselves seriously) opinions include Theroux on Thoreau and politics, including a couple comments on moose-hunting. Additionally, fixing the housing panic through calm decision-making and letting the market do most of the heavy lifting and loss-taking, and hopefully taking the lesson that overextending on high-risk investments is nto sound strategy, claiming victory in Iraq because media outlets no longer use the term "civil war" to describe the conflict, perhaps because, well, the things that looked like a civil war, with members of one religious faction fighting another, have stopped (or are at least not being reported on).
In much more light-hearted matters, The General pokes fun at how many people fall all over themselves to say "It's not because he's black..." but have no good followup by providing them with a handy excuse wheel to secretly spin, so they don't sound like parrots quite as often.
Non-candidate opinions include Peter Watts thinking about whether we can truly be culpable for our actions, if we can change ourselves into someone completely different through the introduction of chemicals. If it's all biology and free will is an illusion, then we can trace it all back to some root in our systems somewhere. Perhaps if we unravel all the complexities of the human condition to their basics, we can take a stab at answering that question.
Web of Debt suggests the grand power brokers behind all things are toying with the markets to try and put the freefall of the markets into a controlled fall, where the worst of it can be hidden, and the rest can be swept under the rug through conflicts and surprises elswehere, at least until the next wave of credit crashes, at which point more drastic measures will need to be taken.
In science and technology - Darwin gets an apology from the Chruch of England over the whole evolution thing, a conviction in India obtained based on scanning the brain to see if someone has knowledge of the crime and is lying about it, a new, untested, unproven technology at work in a live situation, utilizing peers to review patents for obviousness and possible prior art/patents already granted by putting new patent applications on the Web for all to see, as an attempt to crowd out the people looking to litigate or to get patents on things that are, well, patently obvious, attempting to get electronics to play on the same rights manageent fields, under the idea of "buy once, play anywhere", assuming the device in question talks the right rights languages, the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, aiming to keep our tubes free and clear of corporate or political censorship and control, whether through blocking, banning, "shaping traffic", or bandiwdth caps. Last out of this section - Things That Look Like Flying Saucers.
Getting special mention, because I really want to stick a Worst Person In The World on the end of all of this, there was a confluence of stuff about the right to choose whether or not to have a child. It all started innocuously enough - complaints about a Royal Mail stamp that honors one of the pioneering women of birth control, because the woman herself held currently-unacceptable views on eugenics. We honor lots of people who have vies that we consider inappropriate now - after all, there are a lot of Presidents who owned slaves - one of the founding discoverers of the continent (for Spain) probably had dim views of the natives there, and so forth. Plus, we still have Silly Putty and Tang, both of which were dismal failures at their intended purposes, but have found new life. It would be a short list, indeed, if we were only allowed to honor historical figures who coincided perfectly with modern beliefs.
Besides, considering the history of contraceptives, there have been a lot of attempts that haven't worked, despite many claims of their efficacy. Seriously. So we should be honoring those who have made progress toward effective birth control, even as we say the reasons they were doing so are suspect. So far, so good.
Things do take a turn into the political, where
bluesgirly has what she thinks is the perfect solution to the problem of women having an option to choose not to ahve a child. It's a very Modest Proposal and tells us why we should vote for the Palin/McCain ticket, too. We'll just force every wom^H^H uterus to have any child that might get into it, no matter how it got there, and we'll force all the men to be responsible for any uterus they might impregnate, allowing the government to track them down, garnish them, jail them, force them to have vasectomies if the government deems it necessary, and enforce that responsibility. If we're going to legislate that all uteruses have to have any children that are there, no matter what circumstances they arrived there by, we have to legislate that all men will be held accountable, even to the point of having their ability to reproduce taken away, for any children that they impregnate, accidentally or not. If that means there are suddenly a lot of school dropouts, fantastic. Then we can take away all those sub minimum-wage jobs from the immigrants and give them to our new fathers and mothers. It'll solve two problems at once. (That last benefit is one I thought of and isn't in the actual proposal itself.)And then, some very interesting material from Phil Harris. Phil would probably take the proposal above to be serious and work toward its implementation. His column today about the potential First Ladies of the next election is not really about the candidates (he characterizes Senator Obama as someone who has not actually said anything about his positions, based on his voting record, and proclaims Senator McCain as a "true American War Hero"), or the first ladies, excepting really about their positions on abortions. Potential First Lady McCain, whose "views on abortion are not perfect in my [Harris's] opinion, but at least she limits her tolerance to cases of rape and incest." And on potential First Lady Obama, "Although she has mothered two children, her affection for children ends apparently at the birth canal." Harris's own opinion on the matter? "I hope that she [McCain] and others will see that rape and incest are not crimes that should condemn an innocent child to death." So children conceived in what are, for the grand majority, non-consensual acts (rape by definition, and many cases of incest are rapacious and abusive) should grow to term as reminders to a mother about what happened to her, with the genetic material of the person who violated her, possibly resulting in a child who looks like that person in some way? It would take someone of good fortitude to come through all of that, birth the child and possibly raise it, possibly as a single mother whose life was derailed by such an event, and not have problems. So perhaps he's complimenting women, saying that they're strong enough to go through that and come out on top. If that's the case, thuogh, he should also be thinking they're smart enough to make decisions like that on their own, without interference. So that's already Worst Person-worthy, but there's more.
Using Mrs. Obama as a segue back to the candidate, Harris spends time on Senator Obama's opposition to the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act before a paragraph that cements his dishonor as today's Worst Person In The World by far.
I am not certain why Barack Obama has such a callous view of infant death. Perhaps, it is a genetic holdover from the culture of his father’s Kenyan goat-herding legacy. I suppose defective baby goats were routinely cast onto the rocks and left to die. That way, only the best qualified would grow to become members of the goat-herd community.
This isn't even at the level of "It's because he's black." This stoops so far below that it would make a genocidal dictator proud. The implication that at his core, Barack Obama is a primitive savage who hasn't made it into the civilized era is so low that the sewer rats are wondering what's rumbling under their feet. That kind of allegation would be more suited to the 1800s than our current times. Because there's so much volume around, and he has a right to speak freely, I don't expect Harris to be called on it, or to apologize for it, but the disservice he has done to Senator Obama and his wife is almost slanderous. Congratulations, Phil Harris, Worst Person In The World.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 03:28 am (UTC)Uh... sorry, I looked around but I failed to find this.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 03:21 pm (UTC)Sucks to be Catholic, apparently.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:37 am (UTC)Oh and it's also pretty cool to just dig around in. I like Ike cartoons crack me up.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 11:57 pm (UTC)* I'm a catholic.
* I fully support the idea of euthanasia and contraconceptives. Or for that matter, the death penalty. There's a LOT of catholic ideas I don't agree with.
Still, this extrapolation is a common mistake. The Catholic church supports and encourages people looking for/finding medical help. If this wasn't true there wouldn't be any catholic hospitals.
What the church means is, in the case of people suffering an incurable or terminal disease, it's a) a fault of faith to not hold any hope for a miraculous cure if it's God's Will, and b) a mortal sin since it's killing.
The Catholic Church doesn't force people to resucitate their dying or keep them alive through machines. What it frowns upon is to administer them a beautiful cocktail to end their suffering permanently.
The thing is, I *understand* this position. It's just that I don't agree with it.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 12:30 am (UTC)