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silveradeptUp top today, here’s an item of interest - The Science Patrol is actively recruiting personnel.
Additionally, if your favorite social media sites have been slow or nonresponsive over the last few days, there'a a DDoS going around that's targeting various blog-hosting and social-media sites, so patience will probably get you through.
And the Dead Pool snagged someone near and dear to some hearts of people growing up in last two decades - John Hughes, director of movies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club", died at 59 years of age. Perhaps the best eulogies for famous people come from the fans who made it through the form letters and had real conversations with them. This is one of those stories.
Out in the world, Iran might have to fight off more than just protesters - inflation and currency strength could be a big menace.
This may be a truism of empires, but Russia is hurting right now, but seems unwilling to admit it. Not like any great power of the past would willingly say, “Yes, we were good, and things suck now, so let’s fix them.”
According to Pakistani officials, a drone strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. And which head will rise up to take his place?
Not to mention the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks we've made negative progress in Afghanistan over the last eight years.
Back home, those town hall protests are getting vicious. Six people, including a reporter, were arrested as dueling protests and counter-protests happened outside a St. Louis Democrat's town hall. The events were hot, but the accounts of police action at the events are also worth looking at - behaving badly is probably applicable in many of those cases. And the fracas may be getting only louder and more vicious - the head of the AFL-CIO laid out a plan to send union members to town halls to counter-disrupt the disrupters, and possibly even get in some of their own messages about what they want from the bill. In other words, angry protests, and angry retorts. Which may now involve gun violence, if some accounts are to be believed.
Also of good news, Sonia Sotomayor confirmed, will be sowrn in Saturday.
Elsewhere, Uh, people, when reporting, especially on motivations for killings, we want everything, not just some selected bits here and there. No fair leaving out the bits that could be important.
Senator Martinez from Florida is resigning his post, Governor Crist will be running for that seat in 2010.
Cash for Clunkers gets another $2 billion to keep going.
In the opinions, our best person awards to Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, for laying out Republican hypocrisy and lying about health care reform and calling a spade a spade and Joan Walsh, for pointing out that even if not directly mobilized by insurance agents, people making town hells are working off of lies, deceptions, fear, and right-wing leaders' increasingly shrill (and Godwin-comparing) rhetoric about the Democrats and the health care bill. Also rocking out are Michael Rachlis, comparing the U.S. and Canadian health care systems (from Canada) and pointing out lessons that can be learned and applied to the U.S. from Canada, and Kathleen Parker, giving voice to the realization that the GOP has become the party of the South and of the insane, and that hopefully the party will soon shake off the birthers and the Palinites and go back to being the grand old party that she knows it is. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Mr. Metta implores us to have our soldiers die in war, instead of waging war with robots and autonomous vehicles that disconnect the people from the reality and the shock of war. So that we understand the cost of death. For celebrating life, the slacktivist has one idea, the latter half of his piece on being a witness to how those who make it their business to take offense is harmful and wasteful, showing the alternative where a preacher overhears that a prostitute is having her birthday tomorrow, and enlists the aid of the diner that he’s eating at to throw her a party. Including cake.
ddjango notes the requisite background work in breaking the two-party system so that people who represent our values can be elected is not even started, and thus voting, which is promoted as the end-all, be-all, is supposed to be the end result of a whole lot of other things that we need to get working on. On the other side of that line, the WSJ looks on with amusement at what it sees as Democrats shooting other Democrats to make sure the Democrats all stay in line.
Mr. Rogers says nuclear power sure looks like a good trend, especially with carbon taxes, and that this trne dshould be encouraged. Mr. Kotkin is not as rosily enthusiastic about green jobs, claiming they won’t save the economy, but they do have their place in the world.
Mr. Hanson is concerned about the increasingly large debt holdings that China has, and the inability of either political party to start cuttign defecits. (I’m guessing that’s all he’s hoping for, as anyone suggesting that we actually pay back principal on our debts is probably going to be laughed out of the room - in good times. In these times, they’d be stabbed before they got in the door.
Ms. Charen laments the lack of individual drive on the part of the country, using the example of a the clerk who tackled a bank robber instead of complying with demands (for which he was fired for violating company policy on the matter) and the gentleman who stopped traffic to let geese cross the road. Both were actions that turned out all right in the end, and could have instead been disastrous, had the robber been armed, or the cars not willing or able to stop. She also complains about how her bank seemed utterly uninterested in pursuing someone who wrote themselves a check with her funds, instead assuring her the funds would be back in the account. Perhaps because the police are the people who investigate those kinds of things? Apparently, we’re all moving down the road to becoming “good witnesses” and will never take any independent, possibly boat-rocking actions on our own. Baa, baa. We’ll check in later to see if Ms. Charen ever calls someone who attempted to save someone but was gunned down along with the person they were trying to save stupid or whether they will always and constantly be heroic individual thinkers.
Mr. Kozak opines about the mutability of history quite well, even though he's trying to defend why people should see the use of the atomic bomb on Japan as a necessary and eventually life-saving measure, when compared to what the invasion would have done in terms of lives lost and furthering of the war.
Health care continues to bring out the opinions, both sane and not sane. the WSJ says that the ten-year outlook is a mirage and that costs will continue to outpace revenues under the new plan... by assuming that costs will grow at a greater rate than revenues do. Mr. Turd Blossom thinks the President is losing control of the debate and resorting to dirty tricks to get things through, savaging insurance companies in “insurance reform” instead of going for the broader “health care reform”. All based on that the President made promises about taxes he couldn’t keep and this bill will be more of the same. We still note the Pot, Kettle relationship Mr. Rove has when referring to anyone else’s actions in the realm of trickery, deceit, or deception.
Further down the slide into the insane, Mr. Sowell says the populace should resist utopian calls on this bill, because it will only lead to further restriction of our freedoms, putting ourselves at the mercy of bureaucrats, price controls, and government decisions on what care we get and when we die. All solutions create problems, he says, and so we shouldn’t follow people who claim to have all the solutions. Instead, says he, we can make it all that much cheaper by simply not covering routine things, like checkups. (Did he notice that his last dental checkup, including x-rays, would have cost him more than $500, and that those are recommended every sixmonth?) It’s not quite “Do nothing”, but it’s pretty close. Mr. Laffer joins the slide, talking about "the wedge" where the less people pay for their care, and the more people that are covered, the more care they demand, and that means more government costs and taxes. which will not work, of course, because the new taxes will have employers dumping coverage, firing employees, or shuttering their doors because the costs of paying this tax are too high. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Landing at the bottom of the slope, and rather conveniently in our Quiche Derby, Michelle Malkin, claiming that Democrats accusing health care opponents of being corporately ginned up are hypocrites, considering their own organizational ties, which would not be a problem if left by itself, because there is truth to that, but then Ms. Malkin takes things one. step. further by declaring all those protesters to not be corporately financed and organized, but a “Tea Party counterinsurgency” against the Democrats made totally of normal people acting in the grassroots, and that the Democrats can’t stand their peaceful and open dissent. Woul that be before or after the congressperson was hung in effigy, Ms. Malkin? Or the continued noise dissent that prevents actual discourse and does not express any actual opposition past “Just Say No”? Mr. Boortz joins this train, declaring Democrats scared of the Independents and protesters against "The Democrat’s biggest power grab since FDR", pinning their clearly grassroots opposition as a “mob”. Well, Mr. Boortz, if it looks like a mob, shouts like a mob, disrupts like a mob...
Further down the line, in second place tonight, Rasmussen Reports gives the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department a shining example of how numbers can be used to make people think the populace wants or demands one thing or another, starting with an innocuous number about hwo most people think Obama is adding to the defecit and then contextualizing it with how people think newer taxes are bad, along with government spending, to make it seem like most people think that Obama’s defecit-adding programs are bad, despite that not actually being surveyed, by pointing out a slim majority of people think tax cuts are more important than health care reform.
We go back to health care, though, for the nadir of the nadir. Say hello to our loser/winner, Pat Buchanan, who sees the UK's proposal to cut steroid injections mixed with the Obama proposal to have people consult on their end-of-life decisions as fusing into the government advising the elderly that terminating their life really is painless and their best option. There is also the requisite Nazi Germany comparison, and the comparison of this to abortion, for which Godwin is noted and invoked, as well as the spirit of Dr. Tiller. Additionally, Buchanan compares the faith-based idea that all life is sacred against the secular idea that quality of life is also important in making end-of-life decisions, many of which do not and never will involve anything like physician-assisted death, we note. More likely, it will be living wills, DNR orders, and other such things that make the end-of-lfie process easier. But no, of course all the anti-religious secularists just want all the old people to die, and to do it quickly, because there are more people getting old all the time and because all secular people are utilitarian, we want the useless to be gone so they stop being a drain. There is no government plot to kill old people, nor, I suspect, will the government promote physician-assisted death to every person in the Social Security age bracket. Repeat it with me until you believe it. Or until you die naturally.
In technology, the computer side of the market, where attempted AIs work with incomplete information to try and achieve dominance in their areas of purview, holoprojection with touch feedback, the reality that a warmer planet will induce evolution and extinction, new e-readers from Sony, and glasses that can mechanically adjust their focus, freeing people from bifocals and trifocals that only let them use some part of their lens to see things in front of them.
And last for tonight, pictures of people in retail environments, and pictures of stores that have gone dark. So keep yourselves healthy, but don’t get too overextended...assuming you have a choice in the matter.
Additionally, if your favorite social media sites have been slow or nonresponsive over the last few days, there'a a DDoS going around that's targeting various blog-hosting and social-media sites, so patience will probably get you through.
And the Dead Pool snagged someone near and dear to some hearts of people growing up in last two decades - John Hughes, director of movies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club", died at 59 years of age. Perhaps the best eulogies for famous people come from the fans who made it through the form letters and had real conversations with them. This is one of those stories.
Out in the world, Iran might have to fight off more than just protesters - inflation and currency strength could be a big menace.
This may be a truism of empires, but Russia is hurting right now, but seems unwilling to admit it. Not like any great power of the past would willingly say, “Yes, we were good, and things suck now, so let’s fix them.”
According to Pakistani officials, a drone strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. And which head will rise up to take his place?
Not to mention the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks we've made negative progress in Afghanistan over the last eight years.
Back home, those town hall protests are getting vicious. Six people, including a reporter, were arrested as dueling protests and counter-protests happened outside a St. Louis Democrat's town hall. The events were hot, but the accounts of police action at the events are also worth looking at - behaving badly is probably applicable in many of those cases. And the fracas may be getting only louder and more vicious - the head of the AFL-CIO laid out a plan to send union members to town halls to counter-disrupt the disrupters, and possibly even get in some of their own messages about what they want from the bill. In other words, angry protests, and angry retorts. Which may now involve gun violence, if some accounts are to be believed.
Also of good news, Sonia Sotomayor confirmed, will be sowrn in Saturday.
Elsewhere, Uh, people, when reporting, especially on motivations for killings, we want everything, not just some selected bits here and there. No fair leaving out the bits that could be important.
Senator Martinez from Florida is resigning his post, Governor Crist will be running for that seat in 2010.
Cash for Clunkers gets another $2 billion to keep going.
In the opinions, our best person awards to Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, for laying out Republican hypocrisy and lying about health care reform and calling a spade a spade and Joan Walsh, for pointing out that even if not directly mobilized by insurance agents, people making town hells are working off of lies, deceptions, fear, and right-wing leaders' increasingly shrill (and Godwin-comparing) rhetoric about the Democrats and the health care bill. Also rocking out are Michael Rachlis, comparing the U.S. and Canadian health care systems (from Canada) and pointing out lessons that can be learned and applied to the U.S. from Canada, and Kathleen Parker, giving voice to the realization that the GOP has become the party of the South and of the insane, and that hopefully the party will soon shake off the birthers and the Palinites and go back to being the grand old party that she knows it is. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Mr. Metta implores us to have our soldiers die in war, instead of waging war with robots and autonomous vehicles that disconnect the people from the reality and the shock of war. So that we understand the cost of death. For celebrating life, the slacktivist has one idea, the latter half of his piece on being a witness to how those who make it their business to take offense is harmful and wasteful, showing the alternative where a preacher overhears that a prostitute is having her birthday tomorrow, and enlists the aid of the diner that he’s eating at to throw her a party. Including cake.
ddjango notes the requisite background work in breaking the two-party system so that people who represent our values can be elected is not even started, and thus voting, which is promoted as the end-all, be-all, is supposed to be the end result of a whole lot of other things that we need to get working on. On the other side of that line, the WSJ looks on with amusement at what it sees as Democrats shooting other Democrats to make sure the Democrats all stay in line.
Mr. Rogers says nuclear power sure looks like a good trend, especially with carbon taxes, and that this trne dshould be encouraged. Mr. Kotkin is not as rosily enthusiastic about green jobs, claiming they won’t save the economy, but they do have their place in the world.
Mr. Hanson is concerned about the increasingly large debt holdings that China has, and the inability of either political party to start cuttign defecits. (I’m guessing that’s all he’s hoping for, as anyone suggesting that we actually pay back principal on our debts is probably going to be laughed out of the room - in good times. In these times, they’d be stabbed before they got in the door.
Ms. Charen laments the lack of individual drive on the part of the country, using the example of a the clerk who tackled a bank robber instead of complying with demands (for which he was fired for violating company policy on the matter) and the gentleman who stopped traffic to let geese cross the road. Both were actions that turned out all right in the end, and could have instead been disastrous, had the robber been armed, or the cars not willing or able to stop. She also complains about how her bank seemed utterly uninterested in pursuing someone who wrote themselves a check with her funds, instead assuring her the funds would be back in the account. Perhaps because the police are the people who investigate those kinds of things? Apparently, we’re all moving down the road to becoming “good witnesses” and will never take any independent, possibly boat-rocking actions on our own. Baa, baa. We’ll check in later to see if Ms. Charen ever calls someone who attempted to save someone but was gunned down along with the person they were trying to save stupid or whether they will always and constantly be heroic individual thinkers.
Mr. Kozak opines about the mutability of history quite well, even though he's trying to defend why people should see the use of the atomic bomb on Japan as a necessary and eventually life-saving measure, when compared to what the invasion would have done in terms of lives lost and furthering of the war.
Health care continues to bring out the opinions, both sane and not sane. the WSJ says that the ten-year outlook is a mirage and that costs will continue to outpace revenues under the new plan... by assuming that costs will grow at a greater rate than revenues do. Mr. Turd Blossom thinks the President is losing control of the debate and resorting to dirty tricks to get things through, savaging insurance companies in “insurance reform” instead of going for the broader “health care reform”. All based on that the President made promises about taxes he couldn’t keep and this bill will be more of the same. We still note the Pot, Kettle relationship Mr. Rove has when referring to anyone else’s actions in the realm of trickery, deceit, or deception.
Further down the slide into the insane, Mr. Sowell says the populace should resist utopian calls on this bill, because it will only lead to further restriction of our freedoms, putting ourselves at the mercy of bureaucrats, price controls, and government decisions on what care we get and when we die. All solutions create problems, he says, and so we shouldn’t follow people who claim to have all the solutions. Instead, says he, we can make it all that much cheaper by simply not covering routine things, like checkups. (Did he notice that his last dental checkup, including x-rays, would have cost him more than $500, and that those are recommended every sixmonth?) It’s not quite “Do nothing”, but it’s pretty close. Mr. Laffer joins the slide, talking about "the wedge" where the less people pay for their care, and the more people that are covered, the more care they demand, and that means more government costs and taxes. which will not work, of course, because the new taxes will have employers dumping coverage, firing employees, or shuttering their doors because the costs of paying this tax are too high. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Landing at the bottom of the slope, and rather conveniently in our Quiche Derby, Michelle Malkin, claiming that Democrats accusing health care opponents of being corporately ginned up are hypocrites, considering their own organizational ties, which would not be a problem if left by itself, because there is truth to that, but then Ms. Malkin takes things one. step. further by declaring all those protesters to not be corporately financed and organized, but a “Tea Party counterinsurgency” against the Democrats made totally of normal people acting in the grassroots, and that the Democrats can’t stand their peaceful and open dissent. Woul that be before or after the congressperson was hung in effigy, Ms. Malkin? Or the continued noise dissent that prevents actual discourse and does not express any actual opposition past “Just Say No”? Mr. Boortz joins this train, declaring Democrats scared of the Independents and protesters against "The Democrat’s biggest power grab since FDR", pinning their clearly grassroots opposition as a “mob”. Well, Mr. Boortz, if it looks like a mob, shouts like a mob, disrupts like a mob...
Further down the line, in second place tonight, Rasmussen Reports gives the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department a shining example of how numbers can be used to make people think the populace wants or demands one thing or another, starting with an innocuous number about hwo most people think Obama is adding to the defecit and then contextualizing it with how people think newer taxes are bad, along with government spending, to make it seem like most people think that Obama’s defecit-adding programs are bad, despite that not actually being surveyed, by pointing out a slim majority of people think tax cuts are more important than health care reform.
We go back to health care, though, for the nadir of the nadir. Say hello to our loser/winner, Pat Buchanan, who sees the UK's proposal to cut steroid injections mixed with the Obama proposal to have people consult on their end-of-life decisions as fusing into the government advising the elderly that terminating their life really is painless and their best option. There is also the requisite Nazi Germany comparison, and the comparison of this to abortion, for which Godwin is noted and invoked, as well as the spirit of Dr. Tiller. Additionally, Buchanan compares the faith-based idea that all life is sacred against the secular idea that quality of life is also important in making end-of-life decisions, many of which do not and never will involve anything like physician-assisted death, we note. More likely, it will be living wills, DNR orders, and other such things that make the end-of-lfie process easier. But no, of course all the anti-religious secularists just want all the old people to die, and to do it quickly, because there are more people getting old all the time and because all secular people are utilitarian, we want the useless to be gone so they stop being a drain. There is no government plot to kill old people, nor, I suspect, will the government promote physician-assisted death to every person in the Social Security age bracket. Repeat it with me until you believe it. Or until you die naturally.
In technology, the computer side of the market, where attempted AIs work with incomplete information to try and achieve dominance in their areas of purview, holoprojection with touch feedback, the reality that a warmer planet will induce evolution and extinction, new e-readers from Sony, and glasses that can mechanically adjust their focus, freeing people from bifocals and trifocals that only let them use some part of their lens to see things in front of them.
And last for tonight, pictures of people in retail environments, and pictures of stores that have gone dark. So keep yourselves healthy, but don’t get too overextended...assuming you have a choice in the matter.
