News is news - 13 Nov 2008

[silveradept]

Greetings, beings of high intelligence! We humbly offer to you our finest compilation of the random events of today, including look, ma! Those are most definitely planets orbiting hot stars! - another step forward. Soon, we’ll be able to pinpoint planets at the right distances, and then possibly, possibly find planets like our own and maybe find carbon-based life aboard. If nothing else, it will give our cryonics people more impetus in case we send a freeze mission, and our engine people serious drive to figure out how to warp past the lightspeed barrier, or at least get really close.

We are pleased to note that in building a search engine that is designed to produce more credible results than Google, the creators actively solicited librarians and their organizations to provide the credible results and then rank what the librarians use most often as most credible. Of course, we, like anyone else, can be fooled if someone perpetrates a hoax on us and we don't fact-check.

greenhornline, tsutsujigirl, torakiyoshi, and for everyone else in the teaching profession, guess what? If your school gets e-rate, you'll have to instruct kids about safe on-line behavior, including chat room behavior and cyberbullying. Um... okay? But if they’ve been getting it from parents, librarians, and experience on-line, is having the teachers do it overkill? And is it going to be the media specialist who has to do this? If they have a media specialist, that is.

Unfortunately, the drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience has passed away.

Internationally, a pretty dumb move by some pirates - firing at a naval warship's commandos. Suffice to say, the pirates lost. A pretty strange move - the mayor of the town of Batman is threatening to sue Warner Brothers for using their name without permission in the latest film, "the Dark Knight". And then there’s the mind-control lawsuit getting a hearing.

Also, more seriously, a Castro visiting Russia.

On the domestic front, a blogger who claims the current administrator is a polished and error-free speaker, for which the General cries out there is a need for other skills of the current administration to be learned, a pastor caught with a male prostitute saying he was preyed upon as a child, the current administrator's continued attempts to do as much dmage as possible before leaving office, although he did take time to do he Veterans Day thanks thign. In addition, Either someone trying to cash in on Joe the Plumber, or Joe the Plumber trying to cash in, and in either case, doing a horrible job with the web design, and the possibility of some oil reserves in the Dakotas.

We’ve got our own bizarre, too, as some members of the family decided to keep the bodies of the dead siblings at home, in the house, and some enterprising chap is selling a fetus cookie cutter.

Yet another reason for government to get out of the business of religion entirely - accepting the display of one monument means headaches about other religious monuments. Done properly, something like the Ten Commandments might be a display of law rather than religion, but by itself, these problems develop.

Cheap lobster, yo. Enjoy your delicacies on the cheap in these economically depressed times. Assuming you can afford the cake, that is, instead of having to only worry about bread.

In the opinions, Mark Steyn feels the country is moving leftward into the arms of a Nanny State that will kill us all, even if supposedly we’re a “center-right” nation based on our voting on social issues. John Stossel agrees, calling it the road to serfdom. I dunno - maybe we should be more worried about the bailout that isn't getting a whole hell of a lot of oversight? Maybe even to the point of public demonstrations and riots to get people to pay attention?

Michelle Malkin, according to her sources, says that deportation was suspended from Nov. 1 to the election so as to avoid deporting President-elect Obama's aunt and sparking negative publicity. And then asserts that terrorists use similar laxity and overwork of the immigration authorities to appeal, disappear and then plan their attacks. Almost, but not quite, saying that Obama’s aunt should be put in the same categoty as terrorists. Austin Bay thinks that the hope and change message will fall apart right about the time a conflict re-rears its head in Sudan. Or when the President doesn't immediately roll back marijuana criminalization. Although, if the President-elect is of character something like this dramatization where he threatens the testicles of Joe Lieberman, then even with setbacks, he may still get great approval.

Walter E. Williams moves back to a familiar refrain - that the problems of African Americans are not because of institutional discrimination or racism, but because African-Americans don't have nucelar families, don't take their education seriously, and commit crimes by the dozen. And then exploit guilty white people to bring standards down to their level or use affirmative action to put unqualified students into universities and colleges, and possibly jobs.

Summing a lot of this up, Dennis Prager comments why he's not panicking, and why this election is going to be good for America, because it lets conservatives show how decent they are, forces liberals to abandon the idea that whites discriminate against blacks, and because victory is already assured in Iraq, where it would not have been has Kerry won in 2004. (Praise Blackwater, KBR/Haliburton, and all the other privateers here?)

Oh, and did we mention that the media is apparently unquestionably biased against the passage of Proposition 8, based on the coverage they have been giving to all the protests that have sprung up around the issue?

In technology, creating a world where the dinosaurs survived to the Civil War, with animatronics, weapons-grade ginger beer, Google Earth's Ancient Rome layer, robot faces that are much better at human expression mimicry, DNA strands repurposed to be fiber-optic cables, and Little Big Planet levels being moderated out of existence over copyright concerns. Expect alternate sharing methods to appear soon that will prevent levels from being destroyed.

On the very end of this section, want to help someone create some SCIENCE!? - then help someone turn their artificial eye into a web camera and eventually, perhaps, a camera that can assist her real vision.

And then, using science to generate art... by staging pictures for the Google Street View camera to capture.

Last for tonight, the wrong way to go about expressing your displeasure at Proposition 8 or any other anti-homosexual measure. Now, I see the virtue in, say, protesting the churches like they protest the abortion clinics, albeit without the psychos with weapons or explosives - lots of people, but not interfering. Perhaps getting people to think about how they’ve treated their brothers and sisters before going into a place where one is supposed to be saved from an evil fate through one’s faith and to be an example to the world of one’s faith through the life one leads. I wonder how long it would take before the police arrived to arrest all the demonstrators for having exercised a right to assemble.

Comments

[urbankotq.livejournal.com]

I wonder why it has to do that the instant you mess up an HTML tag.

[silveradept]

To warn me that I've done it... except that it never sends me any notification thereof. Obviously, since it knows what to do when it hits a parser error, it shouldn't be too much more difficult to inform the writer that their entry hit problems even before it posts. That way, not a lot of e-mails get sent and I don't have to rely on my audience to point out when I've messed something up.