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silveradeptCheers, people who drink beverages ranging from water to concoctions of multiple ingredients. Have you hugged your public library today? If you’d like to evangelize or learn a few quick facts, the ALA Quotable Facts card for 2010 is available as a PDF, where you can learn there are more libraries than McDonalds locations in the USA, but Americans spend twice as much money on candy as they do on their libraries.
For those working on urgent deadlines and hoping to influence domestic policy, some options for those who believe the public option is the best option and want the Congresscritters to keep it robust and keep it going. Especially when insurance companies bought some opponents cheap with virtual currency for Facebook games.
To correct on an earlier story, apparently, Goldman Sachs bankers are not carrying guns for their own security. There are still much increased expenditures for security, however.
And for those that simply want a laugh... or a cry, Design Hell, where the client always thinks they’re right and they can do a better job than you, and Twelve breeds of clients, only one of which is actually the one that has no drawbacks.
Out in the world today, burger King in the United Kingdom acknowledges their male bias with the new ad campaign of a woman in a bikini taking a shower singing tunes, with both bikini and tune selected by users. Theuy justify this by saying their breakfast demographic is mostly male. So, smart advertising decision, but jury’s out on whether playing to the base like that will backfire.
Encouraging material from Uganda - a government-owned paper saying the Parliament should not pass the "death or imprisonment to homosexuals" bill. Perhaps they’ve realized just how they’ve been had? Or what kind of hell awaits them if they do?
The United States ambassador to a secretly-negotiated copyright treaty says that if the text of the treaty were made public before it is finished, negotiators would walk away from the table. So instead of wondering, “Gee, I wonder why they would do that? Perhaps because the provisions in here are flagrantly unfair, abusive, or otherwise unpalatable?”
Unfortunately, it currently lacks video or media coverage, but if the account of United States border guards beating, impounding, imprisoning, charging with assault of an officer, and then turning a Canadian citizen out into the Port Huron cold with just his jacket after making bond, all for questioning why his car was selected for an in-depth search is anywhere near true, then the continual grey zone of authority granted to border guards needs to be brought into sharp, dichromatic relief, and swiftly.
Xe, nee Blackwater, has had their contract to load missiles upon drones canceled by the CIA, after allegations surfaced that Blackwater personnel participated alongside CIA agents in raids in war zones. The government confirmed that personnel were in the area, but said they were not participating in any raids.
United States President Barack Obama traveled to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, although the shortness of his visit means many of the events traditionally planned have been canceled. Has a country to run, after all. In his speech, the President addressed the criticisms that his Nobel was awarded too early, defended the need for warmaking against evil people, and expressed his hope that we could get closer to a peaceful world. The speech drew praise from both consevatives that supported the previous administration’s actions and liberals who supported the idea of this administration being war free, which prompts Mr. Greenwald to ask precisely what the hell is going on in that speec that it got two wildly divergent and opposed camps to both shower the speaker with praise. My conclusion is that the conservatives like the substance, which is not very different from the last administrator, while the liberals like the language it’s been wrapped in, because it lets them think he’s saying the opposite of what he is, or that liberals think the lawless terrorist hunt is necessary, too.
Finally, FactCheck.org delivers their analysis on "Climategate" - a scandal made up where the evidence supposedly proving it doesn't. The e-mails are scientists at their worst, speaking frankly, sure, but they do not indicate some sort of massive conspiracy or provide proof that global warming is some sort of hoax. One bad data set does not bring down the entire conclusion, and the further context of the e-mails may indicate not deception, but use of language in older and less common ways. (English sure is funny, isn’t it?)
Domestically, first there was the mayor who claimed the Muslim President pre-empted A Charlie Brown Christmas because he was a Muslim and wanted to destroy our traditions. That was silly. He has since apparently threatened to skin persons who poked fun at him for his commentarry, after recommending that the fun-poker and his brother relocate northward, as they were “an embarassment to the South”, which is disturbing. Not silly nor easily dismissed at all is a complaint about how ABC eviscerated the special, cutting out important parts to add more commercials - providing an object example of the lesson the special is trying to communicate... or would, if there weren’t so many commercials interrupting it.
In more serious matters, a thirteen year-old hanged herself because of the fallout that happened from her showing a picture of her breasts to a boyfriend, or so the article would have you believe. When you look deeper, you find out that It's all the parents, adults, and administrators who prefered to blame her, punish her, take away her support group, let her be bullied, and and cover their asses instead of understanding, explaining, and helping her that drove her to hanging herself. The act itself was supposed to be from one person to another, as a way of getting his attention. That it was intercepted and then spread is a failure of ethics and intelligence on on intercepter’s part, but he’s in high school. It’s not like American schooling does a whole lot about human maturation, sexuality, and attempts any sort of guidance about what are good and poor expressions of sexuality. We prefer to stick our fingers in our ears and shot how muh we’re not hearing anyone who does something like that. Still, it could have been curbed there with a “this is unintended consequences. It’s embarrassing, but we’ll live.” That it then progressed to bullying, suspension, revocation of privileges, the noticing of self-harm tendencies that were not immediately given real help (and no, a “no-harm” contract is not real help. I’m frankly ambivalent about whether notifying the parents would have made things better or worse, but it was a necessary thing to do.), and a complete freak-out about a child showing sexual tendencies is the real crime. The adults in her life had every opportunity to be supportive and they chose to pile on, and now they’re choosing to blame her for the action, instead of working to fix the climate that made her into feeling like a whore everywhere she went over one picture.
Elsewhere, a teenage girl seeking an abortion past the point of legal procedure was charged with attempted murder when she paid a friend to strike her and cause a miscarraige. As it turns out, the judge dismissed the case against her because Utah law states persons seeking an abortion cannot be held criminally liable for their actions regarding the induction of the abortion. the friend, however, was charged, pled guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison for attemtped murder. I don’t know if he’s covered under the statute and should be released as well, or whether he will have to serve out his prison term. At least one Utah lawmaker is furious and promised to rewrite the law to close off the “loophole” that the judge used to dismiss the case. The General admires him for his stalwart commitments to the unborn, and pokes at prominent Catholics to egg their representatives toward making laws like these.
The United States government is set to raise the debt celing to allow them to run more defecits to pay for wars and domestic spending programs - and the Democrats are worried that Republicans will exploit this to paint them as wildly spendthrift liberals, regardless of what debts were incurred by previous presidents in their war exercises and other excursions.
In technology, facebook defaults tend to share not to keep, and they hope that the users won't care, as there's some good, soem bad, and some really ugly in the changes, noninvasive ways of removing the fear ressponse, which could make us unafraid of things we really should be scared of (as well as relieving anxiety and panic attacks), evidence indicating that children do, in fact, rewire their brains to fit their situations, and a game for XBox360 to help shy male gamers learn coversation with women...and I’m sure all the dating sim gamers are popping their eyebrows and saying, “So?” I think it’s just that we’re starting to get them to appear here in the States without needing translation and localization. Erogames are next, I’m sure.
Working into the opinions, Mr. Medved offers his solution to bring Republicans back to power - run a centrist with conservative leanings, like the country is, instead of an ideological purist, like the party seems to want to put into power. Eisenhower as the example, not Reagan, so as to be a sober centrist to play against the image of Obama as a wild-spending flagrant liberal. Cue Mr. McGurn's opinion that the President and his party believe firmly in the idea that Big Government is Better and that they know what's best for everyone - sounds an awful like saying “socialist” without saying socialist, as opposed to the completely freedom-loving, individual-promoting Republicans Mr. McGurn flutters his eyelashes at. The Editors take their own stab at it by ridiculing the plan to take recovered TARP money and spend it on more jobs and infrastructure programs, saying that if there was to be any benefit from these spending programs, it should have been evident in the first two stimului programs, even as they ridicule those for not actually spending money on the things they say would have created jobs. So, by their own words, there hasn’t actually been a stimulus plan that could be judged on whether it worked, so why stop this one when it looks to actually try and settle the question?
Perhaps the people above would like to follow the true Chicago Way, privatization of public assets into long-term leases that are priced and sold without public input and at prices that are not anywhere close to what should have been charged as the equivalent of what the city would have made had they kept those assets.
On the Copenhagen climate-change conference, the editors of the WSJ start swinging by claiming that reality trumps climate change, and the money and time spent on this is better spent on fixing real problems, like HIV/AIDS. Actually, if the governments of the world did do that, I think we’d be praising them pretty heavily. Climate change, if it is a possible Earth-dooming situation, does need to be addressed, as we are not a space-faring race yet. I guess what we really need to do is learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Anyway, then the editors claim the EPS's ruling on CO2 is a bully tactic intended to go around the will of the people and force the people and businesses to be greener at great expense. And thus, we land on Mr. Stephens declaring that the ideologies and methods of the Stalinist regime and climate change advocates are far too similar for comfort. And then we can go beyond that to Mr. Williams' dismissal of climate change based on the East Anglia e-mails, where he expects the government to plow ahead even if permafrost reached New Jersey and Mr. Jeffrey's insistence that climate change is really an overt plot to redistribute the wealth of hardworking Americans to other countries, making us poor and them rich, instead of clingling to every dollar that we have and angrily dismissing any idea that Humes might be affecting their climate.
The WSJ editors proclaim once again their undying love for charter schools, saying they're succeeding despite all the union and government interference that is deliberately trying to make them fail. So what’s stopping us from making our public schools more like charter schools? The fear of being arbitrarily dismissed makes teachers be on their best all the time, so unions should be removed and schools should have to be reauthorized every few years? That’s the tack the editors take, which I’m sure they believe doesn’t accelerate any sort of burnout or stress on the teachers and administrators. Maybe funding? Well, the WSJ says they get far less public money per student, so one would think they’re underfunded, too...that is, until you realize most charter schools charge tuition to their students. Maybe that’s what they think will work - if you force parents to pay money to go to the school, instead of passively paying taxes, they’ll make sure that their kids succeed at school, because they won’t want that money to go to waste. Whatever it is, it’s not in this opinion. I’d like to see them be more constructive and show us all how we could eaily import all the success of the charter school into the public school and thus make all our schools just as good.
Mr. Merola takes Mr. Reid to task for implying that the Republican Party has been on the wrong side of several historic decisions, which, if that is what Mr. Reid intended, he is correct to do - the Democratic Party is only recently the party that claims to be all about the civil liberties and rights. If the quotation he puts in is correct, and Mr. Reid was intending just to speak generally about how some Senators always were on the wrong side, and we ridicule them now for being so, then mountain out of molehill. Tough to tell without knowing intent.
Last out, Rupert Murdoch lays out his reasons why he thinks people will pay for news content, attacks aggregators and bloggers as thieves of that content, and wants the government to have less regulation of media markets and keep themselves out of funding them.
Last for tonight, because a new Twilight movie means new life to old mockery, twenty unfortunate lessons that Twilight teaches about love, the appropriate wear for the Red Shirt in your life, and something far more serious - Detainee 063, the account of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, seven years afterward, but otherwise in real-time.
For those working on urgent deadlines and hoping to influence domestic policy, some options for those who believe the public option is the best option and want the Congresscritters to keep it robust and keep it going. Especially when insurance companies bought some opponents cheap with virtual currency for Facebook games.
To correct on an earlier story, apparently, Goldman Sachs bankers are not carrying guns for their own security. There are still much increased expenditures for security, however.
And for those that simply want a laugh... or a cry, Design Hell, where the client always thinks they’re right and they can do a better job than you, and Twelve breeds of clients, only one of which is actually the one that has no drawbacks.
Out in the world today, burger King in the United Kingdom acknowledges their male bias with the new ad campaign of a woman in a bikini taking a shower singing tunes, with both bikini and tune selected by users. Theuy justify this by saying their breakfast demographic is mostly male. So, smart advertising decision, but jury’s out on whether playing to the base like that will backfire.
Encouraging material from Uganda - a government-owned paper saying the Parliament should not pass the "death or imprisonment to homosexuals" bill. Perhaps they’ve realized just how they’ve been had? Or what kind of hell awaits them if they do?
The United States ambassador to a secretly-negotiated copyright treaty says that if the text of the treaty were made public before it is finished, negotiators would walk away from the table. So instead of wondering, “Gee, I wonder why they would do that? Perhaps because the provisions in here are flagrantly unfair, abusive, or otherwise unpalatable?”
Unfortunately, it currently lacks video or media coverage, but if the account of United States border guards beating, impounding, imprisoning, charging with assault of an officer, and then turning a Canadian citizen out into the Port Huron cold with just his jacket after making bond, all for questioning why his car was selected for an in-depth search is anywhere near true, then the continual grey zone of authority granted to border guards needs to be brought into sharp, dichromatic relief, and swiftly.
Xe, nee Blackwater, has had their contract to load missiles upon drones canceled by the CIA, after allegations surfaced that Blackwater personnel participated alongside CIA agents in raids in war zones. The government confirmed that personnel were in the area, but said they were not participating in any raids.
United States President Barack Obama traveled to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, although the shortness of his visit means many of the events traditionally planned have been canceled. Has a country to run, after all. In his speech, the President addressed the criticisms that his Nobel was awarded too early, defended the need for warmaking against evil people, and expressed his hope that we could get closer to a peaceful world. The speech drew praise from both consevatives that supported the previous administration’s actions and liberals who supported the idea of this administration being war free, which prompts Mr. Greenwald to ask precisely what the hell is going on in that speec that it got two wildly divergent and opposed camps to both shower the speaker with praise. My conclusion is that the conservatives like the substance, which is not very different from the last administrator, while the liberals like the language it’s been wrapped in, because it lets them think he’s saying the opposite of what he is, or that liberals think the lawless terrorist hunt is necessary, too.
Finally, FactCheck.org delivers their analysis on "Climategate" - a scandal made up where the evidence supposedly proving it doesn't. The e-mails are scientists at their worst, speaking frankly, sure, but they do not indicate some sort of massive conspiracy or provide proof that global warming is some sort of hoax. One bad data set does not bring down the entire conclusion, and the further context of the e-mails may indicate not deception, but use of language in older and less common ways. (English sure is funny, isn’t it?)
Domestically, first there was the mayor who claimed the Muslim President pre-empted A Charlie Brown Christmas because he was a Muslim and wanted to destroy our traditions. That was silly. He has since apparently threatened to skin persons who poked fun at him for his commentarry, after recommending that the fun-poker and his brother relocate northward, as they were “an embarassment to the South”, which is disturbing. Not silly nor easily dismissed at all is a complaint about how ABC eviscerated the special, cutting out important parts to add more commercials - providing an object example of the lesson the special is trying to communicate... or would, if there weren’t so many commercials interrupting it.
In more serious matters, a thirteen year-old hanged herself because of the fallout that happened from her showing a picture of her breasts to a boyfriend, or so the article would have you believe. When you look deeper, you find out that It's all the parents, adults, and administrators who prefered to blame her, punish her, take away her support group, let her be bullied, and and cover their asses instead of understanding, explaining, and helping her that drove her to hanging herself. The act itself was supposed to be from one person to another, as a way of getting his attention. That it was intercepted and then spread is a failure of ethics and intelligence on on intercepter’s part, but he’s in high school. It’s not like American schooling does a whole lot about human maturation, sexuality, and attempts any sort of guidance about what are good and poor expressions of sexuality. We prefer to stick our fingers in our ears and shot how muh we’re not hearing anyone who does something like that. Still, it could have been curbed there with a “this is unintended consequences. It’s embarrassing, but we’ll live.” That it then progressed to bullying, suspension, revocation of privileges, the noticing of self-harm tendencies that were not immediately given real help (and no, a “no-harm” contract is not real help. I’m frankly ambivalent about whether notifying the parents would have made things better or worse, but it was a necessary thing to do.), and a complete freak-out about a child showing sexual tendencies is the real crime. The adults in her life had every opportunity to be supportive and they chose to pile on, and now they’re choosing to blame her for the action, instead of working to fix the climate that made her into feeling like a whore everywhere she went over one picture.
Elsewhere, a teenage girl seeking an abortion past the point of legal procedure was charged with attempted murder when she paid a friend to strike her and cause a miscarraige. As it turns out, the judge dismissed the case against her because Utah law states persons seeking an abortion cannot be held criminally liable for their actions regarding the induction of the abortion. the friend, however, was charged, pled guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison for attemtped murder. I don’t know if he’s covered under the statute and should be released as well, or whether he will have to serve out his prison term. At least one Utah lawmaker is furious and promised to rewrite the law to close off the “loophole” that the judge used to dismiss the case. The General admires him for his stalwart commitments to the unborn, and pokes at prominent Catholics to egg their representatives toward making laws like these.
The United States government is set to raise the debt celing to allow them to run more defecits to pay for wars and domestic spending programs - and the Democrats are worried that Republicans will exploit this to paint them as wildly spendthrift liberals, regardless of what debts were incurred by previous presidents in their war exercises and other excursions.
In technology, facebook defaults tend to share not to keep, and they hope that the users won't care, as there's some good, soem bad, and some really ugly in the changes, noninvasive ways of removing the fear ressponse, which could make us unafraid of things we really should be scared of (as well as relieving anxiety and panic attacks), evidence indicating that children do, in fact, rewire their brains to fit their situations, and a game for XBox360 to help shy male gamers learn coversation with women...and I’m sure all the dating sim gamers are popping their eyebrows and saying, “So?” I think it’s just that we’re starting to get them to appear here in the States without needing translation and localization. Erogames are next, I’m sure.
Working into the opinions, Mr. Medved offers his solution to bring Republicans back to power - run a centrist with conservative leanings, like the country is, instead of an ideological purist, like the party seems to want to put into power. Eisenhower as the example, not Reagan, so as to be a sober centrist to play against the image of Obama as a wild-spending flagrant liberal. Cue Mr. McGurn's opinion that the President and his party believe firmly in the idea that Big Government is Better and that they know what's best for everyone - sounds an awful like saying “socialist” without saying socialist, as opposed to the completely freedom-loving, individual-promoting Republicans Mr. McGurn flutters his eyelashes at. The Editors take their own stab at it by ridiculing the plan to take recovered TARP money and spend it on more jobs and infrastructure programs, saying that if there was to be any benefit from these spending programs, it should have been evident in the first two stimului programs, even as they ridicule those for not actually spending money on the things they say would have created jobs. So, by their own words, there hasn’t actually been a stimulus plan that could be judged on whether it worked, so why stop this one when it looks to actually try and settle the question?
Perhaps the people above would like to follow the true Chicago Way, privatization of public assets into long-term leases that are priced and sold without public input and at prices that are not anywhere close to what should have been charged as the equivalent of what the city would have made had they kept those assets.
On the Copenhagen climate-change conference, the editors of the WSJ start swinging by claiming that reality trumps climate change, and the money and time spent on this is better spent on fixing real problems, like HIV/AIDS. Actually, if the governments of the world did do that, I think we’d be praising them pretty heavily. Climate change, if it is a possible Earth-dooming situation, does need to be addressed, as we are not a space-faring race yet. I guess what we really need to do is learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Anyway, then the editors claim the EPS's ruling on CO2 is a bully tactic intended to go around the will of the people and force the people and businesses to be greener at great expense. And thus, we land on Mr. Stephens declaring that the ideologies and methods of the Stalinist regime and climate change advocates are far too similar for comfort. And then we can go beyond that to Mr. Williams' dismissal of climate change based on the East Anglia e-mails, where he expects the government to plow ahead even if permafrost reached New Jersey and Mr. Jeffrey's insistence that climate change is really an overt plot to redistribute the wealth of hardworking Americans to other countries, making us poor and them rich, instead of clingling to every dollar that we have and angrily dismissing any idea that Humes might be affecting their climate.
The WSJ editors proclaim once again their undying love for charter schools, saying they're succeeding despite all the union and government interference that is deliberately trying to make them fail. So what’s stopping us from making our public schools more like charter schools? The fear of being arbitrarily dismissed makes teachers be on their best all the time, so unions should be removed and schools should have to be reauthorized every few years? That’s the tack the editors take, which I’m sure they believe doesn’t accelerate any sort of burnout or stress on the teachers and administrators. Maybe funding? Well, the WSJ says they get far less public money per student, so one would think they’re underfunded, too...that is, until you realize most charter schools charge tuition to their students. Maybe that’s what they think will work - if you force parents to pay money to go to the school, instead of passively paying taxes, they’ll make sure that their kids succeed at school, because they won’t want that money to go to waste. Whatever it is, it’s not in this opinion. I’d like to see them be more constructive and show us all how we could eaily import all the success of the charter school into the public school and thus make all our schools just as good.
Mr. Merola takes Mr. Reid to task for implying that the Republican Party has been on the wrong side of several historic decisions, which, if that is what Mr. Reid intended, he is correct to do - the Democratic Party is only recently the party that claims to be all about the civil liberties and rights. If the quotation he puts in is correct, and Mr. Reid was intending just to speak generally about how some Senators always were on the wrong side, and we ridicule them now for being so, then mountain out of molehill. Tough to tell without knowing intent.
Last out, Rupert Murdoch lays out his reasons why he thinks people will pay for news content, attacks aggregators and bloggers as thieves of that content, and wants the government to have less regulation of media markets and keep themselves out of funding them.
Last for tonight, because a new Twilight movie means new life to old mockery, twenty unfortunate lessons that Twilight teaches about love, the appropriate wear for the Red Shirt in your life, and something far more serious - Detainee 063, the account of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, seven years afterward, but otherwise in real-time.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-13 04:10 am (UTC)