Bring on the weekend - 29 May 2009
May. 30th, 2009 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGretings to Friday. Where we now know that Archie will ask Veronica to marry him, and she will say yes. And IPs and usernames associated with the Church of Scientology have been banned from editing on Wikipedia.
To get important matters out first, Mr. Doctorow asks us to spread the word far and wide that the United States and other governments are attempting to block discussion of a WIPO treaty that would allow the import and export of copyrighted materials produced for the blind and reading-difficult. Because helping provide literature and material in accessible formats is apparently secondary to The Market and other profitable solutions.
On a better note, a chellenge! Mosman Library versus The Free Web, or, hopefully, why using your library’s on-line databases that search and retrieve from The Deep Web will give you better and more complete answers than simply skipping a stone off the surface using a search engine. And some pretty general-purpose book club questions.
And a county is converting spare land into a garden to be staffed by volunteers, with the food to help feed the poor - temporarily, at the moment, but his idea is definitely what we could use in this economy. Having a share in the harvest would probably draw more than enough volunteers to keep up the garden.
On the international desk, North Korea threw up another short-range missile, which puts the United States bases in South Korea on high alert, but for now, people seems to be talking down crisis and keeping an eye out to see whether other provocations, like border closings, are going to follow. While it looks like the open hand policy is being rejected bythe adversaries of the United States, it might be the right policy to pursue, assuming we look past the headlines and editorials proclaiming that those enemies are doing vicious things to their opposition while the U.S. continues to try and engage without denouncing those moves.
The civilians were the losers in the government/LTTE conflict in Sri Lanka, according to a news report based on confidential U.N. documents. Both government and the LTTE have denied they did things taht contributed to the high civilian death toll.
Recent OPEC decisions will keep the price of petrol high despite the recession and the apparent stock of supply ready to be released, according to Time, because they are waiting for an economic recovery so they can make sufficient profits on their oil when it is in great supply.
The Obama administration stands firm on the need for Israel to stop adding settlements in disputed zones as part of the peace process, as well as urging Palestinians to tone down their anti-Israeli rhetoric in schooling.
Domestically, there's something to be said about your career when people devote entire comic books to make fun of it. So, thus, Michelle Bachmann, congratulations. The full comic will be released in the future.
A cancer patient visiting family from Singapore was detained for several hours upon trying to enter the country - because the medicine he was taking made his fingerprints vanish. He did eventually get in the country after being determined not to be a threat. Speaking of fingerprints, if you plan on leaving the country, expect your fingerprints to be taken and held on file - right now, it’s only non-US citizens who will be fingerprinted, but considering we’re already being required to carry RF-capable ID or passports or other such identification just to go to Canada, I think I agree with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thewayne that the fingerprinting of US citizens will soon be following.
Elsewhere in the country, the previous administrator spoke on the subject of torture and indicated that he is also a torture apologist and an ends-justify-the-means believer.
37 percent of persons surveyed recently by CNN have a favorable opinion of Richard Cheney. That’s a little bit more than the last figure I heard about appoval fo the Republican Party in general, but it’s still a higher figure than I would have thought, based on the continual information we get that indicate not only was “enhanced interrogation” torture (and thus illegal), but it was ineffective or less effective than conventional methods (like sugar-free cookies).
Fox News would like a more transparent and better-governed travel-reimbursement system, so that taxpayers don't end up paying for political trips, even those with a veneer of official business. No objections here, so long as taht support for transparency extends to both parties, and you can put those parties on the hook for the full cost of the political parts of the trip.
Senator Specter will have to face a Democratic primary challenger, according to Mr. Sestak, the potential opponent, despite requests from the Presidential office to not oppose him. Well, now’s the chance for Senator Specter to prove he has some rudimentary idea of how to run and win a Democratic campaign...
The AP highlights some tiptoeing on the issue of Judge Sotomayor, showing that the narratives being constructed, either to support her or to hurt her, based on her background, ethnicity (and awareness thereof), and gender are goign to tread lightly on all of those issues at the confirmation battle. In a sense, they can do that because the groundwork for coarse accusations that can be easily dismissed as simplistic, stupid, or sexist are being admirably taken care of by prominent opinion-writers and the leaders of the Republican Party (as opposed to their Senators or chairpersons).
Which leads nicely to the opinions. Mr. Diaz says we need to look past Judge Sotomayor's ethnicity and origins and evaluate her on whether or not she is qualified for the job, while chiding the reasoning that white men don’t get it when it comes to minorities because they lack the experience, and expressing his concerns that the judge is a judicial activist who will legislate from the bench. Well, in a sense, every judge has that potential - their interpretation of the law is not always reviewed by a higher court, and their interpretation of the law helps to shape the precedent by which we understand how other courts are likely to interpret that law, as well.
Mr. Schlesinger is concerned that movements in bond markets might upset the grand stimulus plans, but ultimately complains about how the intended plans don't help anyone, making unintended consequences trump the intended ones, if the intended ones has any intent of being helpful on a wide scale.
A deft handling of a pretty stupid question - answering "are men smarter than women" seriously, and then turning it up to 11 on how stupid the question, and any study claiming to have the answer, is.
The bronze effort to Mr. Elder, stating that the flap over Pelosi and the CIA is an attempt to rewrite history, like our opinion of Iraq was. It’s only rewriting history in the sense of needing to correct and be truthful in our history-writing, now that we have more information than we did before. Abu Ghraib, we were told, was an isolated incident. Now we know it wasn’t. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, we were told. Now we know there’s a high probability those links and intelligence reports were based on information obtained through torture, to serve a particular purpose, instead of real information. The real information indicated there were no WMD in Iraq. So we go beyond “misinformed” to “deliberately decieved” or “lied to”. It’s not just the winds of opinion that are changing, Mr. Elder. It’s the facts.
Our silver recipient Erick Erickson accuses the Republican Party of denying the people they should be supporting, to appease liberals who don't care about them, so people should support Boss Limbaugh and those willing to fight dirty, no matter how racist, sexist, or flar-out stupid they may sound, because it’s more important to show your support for the conservative movement than to have a discussion about whether or not those people actually speak for you. This is the opposite of the ideological purity strain, but it’s just as stupid - unless you like being thought of as a racist, sexist, homophobic, intransigent ideologue who would sacrifice the country to satisfy your personal vendetta. The General responds with a reminder of who the modern GOP is seen as.
And, returning to the top of the trash heap after so very long away from it, Ann Coulter, taking it one! Step! Further! and accusing the nominee of not only racism, but laying blame at her feet if people should die in fires because of the New Haven firefighter exam being thrown out. This is her opening into how the Democrats are enslaved to teachers’ unions (who clearly output inferior product in their students and in the teachers themselves, although they do know everything they need to know about safe sex, apparently), and are only interested in victims that fit their designs and that give money and influence to them, and disguising their naked want for political power and “activist judges” under “empathy”. Nice to know that an appellate judge is the person to lay the blame on if inferior firefighters are hired and that teacher’s unions are solely responsible for the quality of students exiting the public schools, Ann. For confirming that you are still disconnected from reality, without the use of any pharmaceuticals or illegal substances, as best I can tell, and for making several not-even-remotely-true claims, I award you quiche. to the face.
And technology: Google Wave, which is a protocol in development that looks like an amalgamation of e-mail, instant messaging, and social applications, pictures taken of a black hole while it is eating the material sucked into its gravity well, the possibility that a small dosage of oxidative stress will help prolong life, rather than trying to cut it out entirely - thus, the “moderation” tack may win out yet again, a chip-camera combo that can detect whether someone has a virus, and what type it is, within minutes, assuming that it’s a type of virus or illness that we already know about or will react with antibodies that already exist, iPhone apps that let you do art with the touchscreen, and an iPhone app that claims to be able to answer natural language queries and display the relevant answer information, desired search, or proximity information.
Last for tonight - sage interview advice: Bringing your Penthouse to the interview may not be your best option. Additionally, a proud non-reader would like you to buy his book.
And we must recall that war changes people - those who survive will never be the same. As will those who survive those that don't. And we worry that this is the way the military is being sold to children.
To get important matters out first, Mr. Doctorow asks us to spread the word far and wide that the United States and other governments are attempting to block discussion of a WIPO treaty that would allow the import and export of copyrighted materials produced for the blind and reading-difficult. Because helping provide literature and material in accessible formats is apparently secondary to The Market and other profitable solutions.
On a better note, a chellenge! Mosman Library versus The Free Web, or, hopefully, why using your library’s on-line databases that search and retrieve from The Deep Web will give you better and more complete answers than simply skipping a stone off the surface using a search engine. And some pretty general-purpose book club questions.
And a county is converting spare land into a garden to be staffed by volunteers, with the food to help feed the poor - temporarily, at the moment, but his idea is definitely what we could use in this economy. Having a share in the harvest would probably draw more than enough volunteers to keep up the garden.
On the international desk, North Korea threw up another short-range missile, which puts the United States bases in South Korea on high alert, but for now, people seems to be talking down crisis and keeping an eye out to see whether other provocations, like border closings, are going to follow. While it looks like the open hand policy is being rejected bythe adversaries of the United States, it might be the right policy to pursue, assuming we look past the headlines and editorials proclaiming that those enemies are doing vicious things to their opposition while the U.S. continues to try and engage without denouncing those moves.
The civilians were the losers in the government/LTTE conflict in Sri Lanka, according to a news report based on confidential U.N. documents. Both government and the LTTE have denied they did things taht contributed to the high civilian death toll.
Recent OPEC decisions will keep the price of petrol high despite the recession and the apparent stock of supply ready to be released, according to Time, because they are waiting for an economic recovery so they can make sufficient profits on their oil when it is in great supply.
The Obama administration stands firm on the need for Israel to stop adding settlements in disputed zones as part of the peace process, as well as urging Palestinians to tone down their anti-Israeli rhetoric in schooling.
Domestically, there's something to be said about your career when people devote entire comic books to make fun of it. So, thus, Michelle Bachmann, congratulations. The full comic will be released in the future.
A cancer patient visiting family from Singapore was detained for several hours upon trying to enter the country - because the medicine he was taking made his fingerprints vanish. He did eventually get in the country after being determined not to be a threat. Speaking of fingerprints, if you plan on leaving the country, expect your fingerprints to be taken and held on file - right now, it’s only non-US citizens who will be fingerprinted, but considering we’re already being required to carry RF-capable ID or passports or other such identification just to go to Canada, I think I agree with
thewayne that the fingerprinting of US citizens will soon be following. Elsewhere in the country, the previous administrator spoke on the subject of torture and indicated that he is also a torture apologist and an ends-justify-the-means believer.
37 percent of persons surveyed recently by CNN have a favorable opinion of Richard Cheney. That’s a little bit more than the last figure I heard about appoval fo the Republican Party in general, but it’s still a higher figure than I would have thought, based on the continual information we get that indicate not only was “enhanced interrogation” torture (and thus illegal), but it was ineffective or less effective than conventional methods (like sugar-free cookies).
Fox News would like a more transparent and better-governed travel-reimbursement system, so that taxpayers don't end up paying for political trips, even those with a veneer of official business. No objections here, so long as taht support for transparency extends to both parties, and you can put those parties on the hook for the full cost of the political parts of the trip.
Senator Specter will have to face a Democratic primary challenger, according to Mr. Sestak, the potential opponent, despite requests from the Presidential office to not oppose him. Well, now’s the chance for Senator Specter to prove he has some rudimentary idea of how to run and win a Democratic campaign...
The AP highlights some tiptoeing on the issue of Judge Sotomayor, showing that the narratives being constructed, either to support her or to hurt her, based on her background, ethnicity (and awareness thereof), and gender are goign to tread lightly on all of those issues at the confirmation battle. In a sense, they can do that because the groundwork for coarse accusations that can be easily dismissed as simplistic, stupid, or sexist are being admirably taken care of by prominent opinion-writers and the leaders of the Republican Party (as opposed to their Senators or chairpersons).
Which leads nicely to the opinions. Mr. Diaz says we need to look past Judge Sotomayor's ethnicity and origins and evaluate her on whether or not she is qualified for the job, while chiding the reasoning that white men don’t get it when it comes to minorities because they lack the experience, and expressing his concerns that the judge is a judicial activist who will legislate from the bench. Well, in a sense, every judge has that potential - their interpretation of the law is not always reviewed by a higher court, and their interpretation of the law helps to shape the precedent by which we understand how other courts are likely to interpret that law, as well.
Mr. Schlesinger is concerned that movements in bond markets might upset the grand stimulus plans, but ultimately complains about how the intended plans don't help anyone, making unintended consequences trump the intended ones, if the intended ones has any intent of being helpful on a wide scale.
A deft handling of a pretty stupid question - answering "are men smarter than women" seriously, and then turning it up to 11 on how stupid the question, and any study claiming to have the answer, is.
The bronze effort to Mr. Elder, stating that the flap over Pelosi and the CIA is an attempt to rewrite history, like our opinion of Iraq was. It’s only rewriting history in the sense of needing to correct and be truthful in our history-writing, now that we have more information than we did before. Abu Ghraib, we were told, was an isolated incident. Now we know it wasn’t. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, we were told. Now we know there’s a high probability those links and intelligence reports were based on information obtained through torture, to serve a particular purpose, instead of real information. The real information indicated there were no WMD in Iraq. So we go beyond “misinformed” to “deliberately decieved” or “lied to”. It’s not just the winds of opinion that are changing, Mr. Elder. It’s the facts.
Our silver recipient Erick Erickson accuses the Republican Party of denying the people they should be supporting, to appease liberals who don't care about them, so people should support Boss Limbaugh and those willing to fight dirty, no matter how racist, sexist, or flar-out stupid they may sound, because it’s more important to show your support for the conservative movement than to have a discussion about whether or not those people actually speak for you. This is the opposite of the ideological purity strain, but it’s just as stupid - unless you like being thought of as a racist, sexist, homophobic, intransigent ideologue who would sacrifice the country to satisfy your personal vendetta. The General responds with a reminder of who the modern GOP is seen as.
And, returning to the top of the trash heap after so very long away from it, Ann Coulter, taking it one! Step! Further! and accusing the nominee of not only racism, but laying blame at her feet if people should die in fires because of the New Haven firefighter exam being thrown out. This is her opening into how the Democrats are enslaved to teachers’ unions (who clearly output inferior product in their students and in the teachers themselves, although they do know everything they need to know about safe sex, apparently), and are only interested in victims that fit their designs and that give money and influence to them, and disguising their naked want for political power and “activist judges” under “empathy”. Nice to know that an appellate judge is the person to lay the blame on if inferior firefighters are hired and that teacher’s unions are solely responsible for the quality of students exiting the public schools, Ann. For confirming that you are still disconnected from reality, without the use of any pharmaceuticals or illegal substances, as best I can tell, and for making several not-even-remotely-true claims, I award you quiche. to the face.
And technology: Google Wave, which is a protocol in development that looks like an amalgamation of e-mail, instant messaging, and social applications, pictures taken of a black hole while it is eating the material sucked into its gravity well, the possibility that a small dosage of oxidative stress will help prolong life, rather than trying to cut it out entirely - thus, the “moderation” tack may win out yet again, a chip-camera combo that can detect whether someone has a virus, and what type it is, within minutes, assuming that it’s a type of virus or illness that we already know about or will react with antibodies that already exist, iPhone apps that let you do art with the touchscreen, and an iPhone app that claims to be able to answer natural language queries and display the relevant answer information, desired search, or proximity information.
Last for tonight - sage interview advice: Bringing your Penthouse to the interview may not be your best option. Additionally, a proud non-reader would like you to buy his book.
And we must recall that war changes people - those who survive will never be the same. As will those who survive those that don't. And we worry that this is the way the military is being sold to children.
