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silveradeptProfessional self gets an opening lead line, namely - more people are using libraries because the economy sucks. Truism, we know, and of course, the worser part of it is because we get more use, we could use more funds, but in bad economic times, nobody likes taxes or tax increases.
Oh, and I’ve become a Twitterhead. Follow Silver_Adept at your own peril, and/or decloak yourself and reveal your name so that I may join in. I’ve already started following many of you that broadcast yourselves, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
2dlife, d’you think it would be feasible/possible to think about borrowing/using your script for my own Twitterverse stuff?
Because I can’t resist, and because I think it’s actually a healthy sign that the President is not a Ned Fladers clone, the raw fodder for many a remix and/or soundboard to come - clips of Barack Obama reading his own book, cuss words and all, because a faithful reading means all the words, not just the ones you like. And since it’s audiobook and not broadcast, there’s no reason to censor them, either. Besides, we know what censorship is and does. I wonder whether this isn’t a follow-on of some sort from the Christian Bale outburst.
If books is what you want, though, Google and Amazon are putting a lot of them in a mobile phone readable format. Be careful, though - a pocket-sized translation of the Qu'ran in Afghanistan that lacked the Arabic originals has two men facing the death penalty for modifying the book, trying to set themselves up as prophets, and possibly warping the Word of God itself. We don’t have nuts like that in our country, do we?
Internationally, reversing a trend of his predecessor, President Obama intends to embark on serious diplomatic negotations and treaties to further reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the possession of the United States and Russia. Good start. Let’s see if the number reductions still let us destroy our world many times over or not.
Hamas walked away from negotiations for long-term ceasefires in Egypt, leaving them and Israel without a plan to move forward, but with talks resuming at a later date. This is mixed in with a story about suitcases of cash that were stopped by Egyptian authorities from entering Gaza. Elsewhere, Israel's ambassador in Sweden took a shoe to the leg. It’s like hitting Bill Gates with a cream pie, I suspect - once seen, it plants an idea for others to try it, too.
On the domestic desk, the source of a sweet, maple syrup type of smell wafting through New York City is in, unsurprisingly to those who like to make jokes about such, New Jersey.
More seriously, charges were dropped against an accused participant in the USS Cole bombing, bringing the military tribunal system into line with the President's order to freeze trials regarding Guantanamo Bay residents. Those charges can be re-brought after the review period the Obama administration wants. Furthermore, the new CIA director insists that there will be no "extraordinary rendition", unlike the previous administration, continuing to cement the possibility that the President will succeed in his planned policy rollbacks. Rendition for prosecution is still on the table, and it looks like only those who were doing things they knew were illegal at the time will be prosecuted - the Nuremberg defense might work here.
The President re-mandated an office of faith-based initiatives, spreading it out to all sorts of assistance organizations, regardless of faith, (and even whether they have any) or politics. I think what he wanted to call it was the office of Communnity Organizers and Helpers, really. There’s still possible problems with religious hiring qualifications on orgs that receive federal funsd, and to what purpose that money can be put to. So, uh, is it just somethign to try and get the churches on board? Seriously, this could all be done secularly, without nearly as much fuss or muss.
The Interior Secretary suspended the sale of federal land parcels in Utah pending review, checking to see whether parcels are too close to parks or monuments to have been sold as well as dealing with lawsuits from environmental groups about the land itself. The government could use some funding here, though, as the last administration gave too much TARP money to corporations, acording to the latest study.
The articles here are a bit on the sketchy as in incomplete data side, so we’ll start with the local news item. A teacher in Texas has apparently resigned his position after being placed on indefinite administrative leave after a parent complained that he let inappropriate conversations happen in his classroom. The parent also apparently accused Mr. Mullens of being an atheist, and or supporting President Obama in a highly conservative neighborhood, and made threats against Mr. Mullens Mr. Mullens relates to us the accounts of actions in his own words, with some details redacted by Democracy For America, which indicates school board pressure, the principal talking to the local church minister, a list of people apparently to be blacklisted, several people commenting about his religious beliefs (“but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”, recall.), and his suspension changing from “teaching atheism and being too liberal” to “inappropriate contact with students and comments”, and then rumors planted to make it sound like he was letting students smoke marijuana in his class, all pressure from the baptist church of the minister talked to. More details as everything unfolds and the media get involved. If all accounts turn out to be true in all their particulars, then Mr. Mullens should have probably made the school district fire him so that he could retaliate for a wrongful termination, considering the large amount of taint the whole affair already has.
Tennessee youth used evangelism as their cover for casing, and then robbing, homes. Gives a whole new meaning to “blessed are the poor”, I guess.
In the matters where opinion sometimes means more than fact, The General has an inspiring series of posters for the Republican Party, all about their favorite subject - tax cuts, whether for the wealthy or otherwise.
Wingnut says terrorist should rot in prison forever for bomb plot in 1973, instead of release and rendition to Iraq after good behavior and 15 years. Not only that, the wingnut uses it as a roundabout justification for the Iraq war, claiming that they started it with this act in 1973. Other wingnut says we should be paying attention to Iran's satellite launch, because the inevitable multi-stage ballistic missiles will follow, raining doom on Israel and pulling the United States even deeper into the Middle East. Unless we build good missile defense shields and/or cripple/destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Lieberman is optimistic about Afghanistan, though, thinking it will be a good place to sink al-Qaeda, instead of having it sink another empire.
After The President penned an op-ed in the Washington Post abotu the needs to get the stimulus bill through the legislature without delay and then went on camera talking about much of the same, Mr. Krauthammer pans President Obama's taking to the airwaves to talk up the stimulus bill and the bill itself, of course, with the standard arguments about how it’s wasteful spending, pork and influence-peddling, and that the American people have awakened from their fantasy-world and now see the President as a person to oppose. Curiously enough, he also pans the usage of words designed to inspire fear (or, more properly, evoke the fear that a lot of Americans have about things going south, and quickly) because the candidate was all about hope and change, as if reinforcing that the Barack-magic has worn off on the populace. Except that the President doesn’t need the populace to pass the bill. He needs the legislative houses to do it, and if the opposition party is digging in their heels, then talking about the consequences of resistance for resistance’s sake seems pretty logical to me. Making a more substantive argument, Mr. Melloan is certain stimulus spending will make for inflation, as there is simply not enough credit to go around to finance the (bloated, pork-filled) stimulus bill. Mr. Johnson is none too pleased with globalization as it is, considering that the tighter the links are between economies, the easier it is for one economy going out of whack to bring everyone else down with them. While disguised as “more globalization won’t solve this”, he also gets his knock in at the stimulus plan, too.
Ms. Noonan sees the growing debate over the stimulus bill as a failure of Barack Obama to be a man of change, because he let a standard Democratic bill appear which galvanized the standard Republican opposition and left the country feeling like nobody’s in charge or knows anything about new ways of getting things done. Instead, the President should have hammered out a bill that would have had good support from both sides and then presented that. Taht bill may have been totally neutered for effectiveness, however, depending on how much the opposition stomped its foot and demanded concessions. Kind of like what they’re doing now, although it’s supposed to be a much more dignified foot-stomping. Which kind of leads into Ms. Strassel's remarks that the populace and Washington has become focused, perhaps myopic, on the hows of things getting done that they're losing the whats, because they believe the candidate was all about hows and not whats, as well. All those “Who is Barack Obama?” and “empty suit” types of attacks took better hold than previously thought. For all the talk of being a “prgamatist”, committed to doing what works, these first few weeks have been really focused on the methods, perhaps to the exclusion of the ends (unless its convenient, like Guantanamo, where the opposition can safely snipe both means and ends). Might be a public flip-flop from the last administration, where lots of people were scared about getting things done, no matter what the methods are.
In tech and science, putting up guesses, based on models, as to how many other intelligent civilizations there are in the galaxy. Doesn’t necessarily help us find them or make contact, but it does suggest that it’s probable that we’re not alone in the universe. Additionally, testing on a prototype artifical liver, a butterfly that can mimc ant sounds so the workers treat it as a queen, robots that climb and that can forage for additional energy supplies, carbon nanotubes (the phlebotinum of our times) as possibly making fuel cells affordable, making genome sequencing really cheap through the use of server farms tuned for computing horsepower, and finding genetic markers that control synaesthesia, which could mean therapy for those that don’t want it, or a new form of trippy drug for those that do (didn’t LSD supposedly have that effect?). For those of us that aren’t synasthetes, though, color still apparently affects our strengths at certain tasks - red makes recall and detail tasks better, blue makes creativity tasks better.
Last out, IBM planning computers that attempt to mimic the way natural brain circuitry works, which sent up more than a few Singularity flags should they succeed.
At the very end, Heavy Metal Laundry Tips, or, how to make sure that your dark shirts professing your allegiances to various bands stay dark with their logos intact. Speaking of logos, DesktopGaming has some nice, big, cool retro gaming backgrounds.
Oh, and I’ve become a Twitterhead. Follow Silver_Adept at your own peril, and/or decloak yourself and reveal your name so that I may join in. I’ve already started following many of you that broadcast yourselves, and
2dlife, d’you think it would be feasible/possible to think about borrowing/using your script for my own Twitterverse stuff?Because I can’t resist, and because I think it’s actually a healthy sign that the President is not a Ned Fladers clone, the raw fodder for many a remix and/or soundboard to come - clips of Barack Obama reading his own book, cuss words and all, because a faithful reading means all the words, not just the ones you like. And since it’s audiobook and not broadcast, there’s no reason to censor them, either. Besides, we know what censorship is and does. I wonder whether this isn’t a follow-on of some sort from the Christian Bale outburst.
If books is what you want, though, Google and Amazon are putting a lot of them in a mobile phone readable format. Be careful, though - a pocket-sized translation of the Qu'ran in Afghanistan that lacked the Arabic originals has two men facing the death penalty for modifying the book, trying to set themselves up as prophets, and possibly warping the Word of God itself. We don’t have nuts like that in our country, do we?
Internationally, reversing a trend of his predecessor, President Obama intends to embark on serious diplomatic negotations and treaties to further reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the possession of the United States and Russia. Good start. Let’s see if the number reductions still let us destroy our world many times over or not.
Hamas walked away from negotiations for long-term ceasefires in Egypt, leaving them and Israel without a plan to move forward, but with talks resuming at a later date. This is mixed in with a story about suitcases of cash that were stopped by Egyptian authorities from entering Gaza. Elsewhere, Israel's ambassador in Sweden took a shoe to the leg. It’s like hitting Bill Gates with a cream pie, I suspect - once seen, it plants an idea for others to try it, too.
On the domestic desk, the source of a sweet, maple syrup type of smell wafting through New York City is in, unsurprisingly to those who like to make jokes about such, New Jersey.
More seriously, charges were dropped against an accused participant in the USS Cole bombing, bringing the military tribunal system into line with the President's order to freeze trials regarding Guantanamo Bay residents. Those charges can be re-brought after the review period the Obama administration wants. Furthermore, the new CIA director insists that there will be no "extraordinary rendition", unlike the previous administration, continuing to cement the possibility that the President will succeed in his planned policy rollbacks. Rendition for prosecution is still on the table, and it looks like only those who were doing things they knew were illegal at the time will be prosecuted - the Nuremberg defense might work here.
The President re-mandated an office of faith-based initiatives, spreading it out to all sorts of assistance organizations, regardless of faith, (and even whether they have any) or politics. I think what he wanted to call it was the office of Communnity Organizers and Helpers, really. There’s still possible problems with religious hiring qualifications on orgs that receive federal funsd, and to what purpose that money can be put to. So, uh, is it just somethign to try and get the churches on board? Seriously, this could all be done secularly, without nearly as much fuss or muss.
The Interior Secretary suspended the sale of federal land parcels in Utah pending review, checking to see whether parcels are too close to parks or monuments to have been sold as well as dealing with lawsuits from environmental groups about the land itself. The government could use some funding here, though, as the last administration gave too much TARP money to corporations, acording to the latest study.
The articles here are a bit on the sketchy as in incomplete data side, so we’ll start with the local news item. A teacher in Texas has apparently resigned his position after being placed on indefinite administrative leave after a parent complained that he let inappropriate conversations happen in his classroom. The parent also apparently accused Mr. Mullens of being an atheist, and or supporting President Obama in a highly conservative neighborhood, and made threats against Mr. Mullens Mr. Mullens relates to us the accounts of actions in his own words, with some details redacted by Democracy For America, which indicates school board pressure, the principal talking to the local church minister, a list of people apparently to be blacklisted, several people commenting about his religious beliefs (“but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”, recall.), and his suspension changing from “teaching atheism and being too liberal” to “inappropriate contact with students and comments”, and then rumors planted to make it sound like he was letting students smoke marijuana in his class, all pressure from the baptist church of the minister talked to. More details as everything unfolds and the media get involved. If all accounts turn out to be true in all their particulars, then Mr. Mullens should have probably made the school district fire him so that he could retaliate for a wrongful termination, considering the large amount of taint the whole affair already has.
Tennessee youth used evangelism as their cover for casing, and then robbing, homes. Gives a whole new meaning to “blessed are the poor”, I guess.
In the matters where opinion sometimes means more than fact, The General has an inspiring series of posters for the Republican Party, all about their favorite subject - tax cuts, whether for the wealthy or otherwise.
Wingnut says terrorist should rot in prison forever for bomb plot in 1973, instead of release and rendition to Iraq after good behavior and 15 years. Not only that, the wingnut uses it as a roundabout justification for the Iraq war, claiming that they started it with this act in 1973. Other wingnut says we should be paying attention to Iran's satellite launch, because the inevitable multi-stage ballistic missiles will follow, raining doom on Israel and pulling the United States even deeper into the Middle East. Unless we build good missile defense shields and/or cripple/destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Lieberman is optimistic about Afghanistan, though, thinking it will be a good place to sink al-Qaeda, instead of having it sink another empire.
After The President penned an op-ed in the Washington Post abotu the needs to get the stimulus bill through the legislature without delay and then went on camera talking about much of the same, Mr. Krauthammer pans President Obama's taking to the airwaves to talk up the stimulus bill and the bill itself, of course, with the standard arguments about how it’s wasteful spending, pork and influence-peddling, and that the American people have awakened from their fantasy-world and now see the President as a person to oppose. Curiously enough, he also pans the usage of words designed to inspire fear (or, more properly, evoke the fear that a lot of Americans have about things going south, and quickly) because the candidate was all about hope and change, as if reinforcing that the Barack-magic has worn off on the populace. Except that the President doesn’t need the populace to pass the bill. He needs the legislative houses to do it, and if the opposition party is digging in their heels, then talking about the consequences of resistance for resistance’s sake seems pretty logical to me. Making a more substantive argument, Mr. Melloan is certain stimulus spending will make for inflation, as there is simply not enough credit to go around to finance the (bloated, pork-filled) stimulus bill. Mr. Johnson is none too pleased with globalization as it is, considering that the tighter the links are between economies, the easier it is for one economy going out of whack to bring everyone else down with them. While disguised as “more globalization won’t solve this”, he also gets his knock in at the stimulus plan, too.
Ms. Noonan sees the growing debate over the stimulus bill as a failure of Barack Obama to be a man of change, because he let a standard Democratic bill appear which galvanized the standard Republican opposition and left the country feeling like nobody’s in charge or knows anything about new ways of getting things done. Instead, the President should have hammered out a bill that would have had good support from both sides and then presented that. Taht bill may have been totally neutered for effectiveness, however, depending on how much the opposition stomped its foot and demanded concessions. Kind of like what they’re doing now, although it’s supposed to be a much more dignified foot-stomping. Which kind of leads into Ms. Strassel's remarks that the populace and Washington has become focused, perhaps myopic, on the hows of things getting done that they're losing the whats, because they believe the candidate was all about hows and not whats, as well. All those “Who is Barack Obama?” and “empty suit” types of attacks took better hold than previously thought. For all the talk of being a “prgamatist”, committed to doing what works, these first few weeks have been really focused on the methods, perhaps to the exclusion of the ends (unless its convenient, like Guantanamo, where the opposition can safely snipe both means and ends). Might be a public flip-flop from the last administration, where lots of people were scared about getting things done, no matter what the methods are.
In tech and science, putting up guesses, based on models, as to how many other intelligent civilizations there are in the galaxy. Doesn’t necessarily help us find them or make contact, but it does suggest that it’s probable that we’re not alone in the universe. Additionally, testing on a prototype artifical liver, a butterfly that can mimc ant sounds so the workers treat it as a queen, robots that climb and that can forage for additional energy supplies, carbon nanotubes (the phlebotinum of our times) as possibly making fuel cells affordable, making genome sequencing really cheap through the use of server farms tuned for computing horsepower, and finding genetic markers that control synaesthesia, which could mean therapy for those that don’t want it, or a new form of trippy drug for those that do (didn’t LSD supposedly have that effect?). For those of us that aren’t synasthetes, though, color still apparently affects our strengths at certain tasks - red makes recall and detail tasks better, blue makes creativity tasks better.
Last out, IBM planning computers that attempt to mimic the way natural brain circuitry works, which sent up more than a few Singularity flags should they succeed.
At the very end, Heavy Metal Laundry Tips, or, how to make sure that your dark shirts professing your allegiances to various bands stay dark with their logos intact. Speaking of logos, DesktopGaming has some nice, big, cool retro gaming backgrounds.
