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silveradeptGreetings, informed and interesting people. There is something to be said about living in a world where the foundational text of Christianity is often the text most stolen from bookstores, as part of an apparently wider sequence of people stealing from bookstores and author fears that piracy will run rampant on the publishing industry. There are two things to be said about this: first, for all the people thieving books, you do realize you can borrow them from the library, right? (If you steal from us, though, you go straight to Special Literary Hell, where you have to manually re-make every item you stole, using the most primitive technology available.) And second, what does the rash of thievery (and the statistics that say less than half of people buy the books they read and less than 30 percent buy them new) say about the price of a book, whether in print or digital form? Will publishing go through the gutting that should be rightly happening to the music industry, were it not for certain cabals with more money than brains?
Beginning again, as we do, in the world, the old becomes new, and cycles that have happened before repeat - the funeral for a cleric in Qom became a protest against the government in Iran. Agitation for change, with the question being whether or not the government responds with harder crackdowns or hopes that things will go away. Reports from the ground believe that the protest is now about regime change instead of reform candidacy, because regime change is what they want. Others try to paint the President's policies of open-hands negotiation as rebuffed and failures, citing what they see as the buildup of weapons, a lack of any political gesture or diplomacy, and continued support for terror organizations.
In Iraq, if you ever wanted to know how much the military is stretched thin, consider this - a major general in the United States army has made getting voluntarily pregnant or impregnating a female soldier an offense punishable by court-martial. Assault and forced sex cases will not have the female punished, the major general states. I'm sure there's also something that could be said about how the military still resents having women in it, and this is one of those ways that resentment plays out, but all the stresses are on how it's legal and part of a bigger restriction-of-behavior package. Plus, I'm not really versed enough to make a cogent argument about how much this behavior is or isn't intended to hurt women.
Elsewhere in Iraq, the ruling United States-backed power is continuing their outreach to clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr, hoping to bring them into the governing fold instead of staying apart as independent power structures.
The recent release of Avatar in other countries leads to an interesting story about subtitle re-positioning and the censorship offices in Egypt, where it takes family connections just to be seen after an ugly standoff with censorship security. And that's just over moving subtitles to the bottom of the screen (and re-editing in a "sex" scene, but mostly the subtitling). Definitely nice to know that films here don't have to pass a board with any more power than the MPAA (which is voluntary, I believe, but can sink a film if it rates it NC-17)
Last out for today, Israel admitted to harvesting organs from the dead without the consent of their families for much of the 1990s. While there are arguments to be made about whether organ donation should be the default instead of the exception, to do so without the consent of the dead or their surviving relatives (assuming the dead weren't organ donors) is not good.
On the domestic fronts, as health care bills make it to final passage, we find right-wing bloggers and Senators alike wishing that a Democrat, any Democrat, would have been unable to make it to the chamber to do their vote, so that the sixty-vote caucus would be broken by absence. This is not a new trend necessarily, witness tee shirts and other paraphernalia advocating, jokingly or otherwise, for the death of the current President, including the recent Psalm flap, but it is climbing up fairly high into the ranks of the government, which we would normally expect to be above that kind of talk or posturing. Other tacks taken include accusing the government of "seed Chicago politics" as an insult to the process and the President, or trying to pump up the populace to get their states to invoke nullification on whatever gets passed by the federal government, spinning it as the only way to get real change done, instead of wasting time with federal politicians, claiming the bill will be a death knell for Democratic politics, with the moderates being sacrificed to enact the dream of a welfare state the liberal elements and President Obama apparently want, and delcaring that the bill as noted won't actually achieve its ends.
On the other side of the coin, the compromise resulting in special treatment for Nebraska has earned flack for the way it was done, including the Governor who was concerned about budget stress from another federal mandate.
In the end, however, nobody should lose sight of who it's being done for - people like Sierra Cooper, a 21 year-old with muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, ineligible for life insurance (and probably most medical insurance) who is soliciting donations for her own funeral expenses, keenly aware that her time left on Terra is limited.
Some welcome news about open government - The Obama Administration is getting ready to issue an executive order requiring review of the classification procedures of each agency, as well as setting up an institute to process the severe backlog of documents ready to be declassified at the end of the year. Hopefully, that center can then keep putting the screws on government agencies to release their classified data at an improved rate.
In technology, designs unveiled for a lush Singaporean garden that captures some of water and solar and other natural resources to feed itself, hope that climate change agreements will help reverse the acidification of the oceans, an effect not talked about much in climate change arguments, a robot got very close and personal pictures of a violent deep-water volcanic eruption, including the formation of a lava previously only found in samples millions of years old,
Starting with opinions, Ecocosmology, the belief that every intelligent lifeform on a planet close enough to a star to be destroyed by it is being tested to see whether they will overcome their limitations and achieve independence of destroying stars before their stars expand to engulf them. Certainly frames the cosmic clock properly - if we can avoid destroying ourselves through our own hands, we still have to get far enough away from Terra so that the eventual death of Sol does not consume all of humanity.
Mr. Michaels claims that the East Anglia e-mails were the exposure of an already known conspiracy by scientists to shut out dissenting voices from peer-reviewed journals, with disastrous results for official policies, a conspiracy whose pressure he experienced firsthand as it became more difficult for him to be able to publish anywhere, and now he fears the effects of what the EPA has decided about CO2.
And out of opinions, Ms. Noonan suggests that America is feeling things are going the wrong way not just because of economics, but because Americans feel their values and their children are under constant assault by the cultural left, with the Adam Lambert performance on broadcast television as a recent example of that attack. Ms. Noonan is almost correct. People are concerned that their children are being subjected to violence and sexualized images on television, which does happen on broadcast television at more intervals that sport programs and music award performances, like sitcoms and crime dramas and reality television. They're also under constant siege by marketers with commercials attempting to turn them into consumers that will get you to spend $50-100 USD on a piece of easily-breakable mass-molded plastic that doesn't do anything like what the commercial said it would do. Some of them feel religious values are being demeaned, too, by the programming that's on. To accuse the "cultural left" of being behind these changes, however, is to fire an arrow in the wrong direction. Marketing departments for large corporate conglomerates are not composed exclusively of New york or Hollywood liberals. The executives that approve those campaigns are certainly not exclusively cultural liberals. Performers all across the political stripe tap into the energy in their work and their stage presence. What they are doing is playing the culture, which is well-tuned and responds to their efforts. Sometimes strings break, which usually results in public outrage over a wardrobe malfunction or Mr. Lambert's performance bringing out into the open what the cultural conservatives would like to see stay in the back of the closet, but for the most part, he culture feeds on it and generates a lot of revenue from it. "Pop Princesses" make albums full of sexual songs, put to video where they wear revealing costumes and gyrate their hips and tops in sexually suggestive manners. Rap talks about the violence present in a lot of places and of making one's money any way one can, whether legally or not, to live the good life instead of the slums. Change the skin color and put a suit on them, and that could describe a lot of CEOs. The culture approves of sexuality and violence in its marketing and performances - Sarah Palin and the NRA for two on the conservative side of the fence. What it does not approve of is when the sex, sexuality, or violence is obvious and can't be explained away behind one of many fig leaves put up. Then, the last-ditch fig leaf appears, the children, the immature, the people who supposedly can't handle the marketing blitz yet grow up to prove themselves savvy consumers and people who understand the messages really well before they even get past the legal requirements of age. The mythical past is just that, mythical, but if one really wanted to try and put the brakes on this perceived cultural slide, they'd have to manage to stop up commercial success using sex appeal. Far easier (and probably more Taoist of them) would be to instead push in the direction the water is flowing - get kids to understand the nature of sexuality with frank conversation, to understand what kind of sexual advertising is going on, the differences between real and fantastic violence, all of that - if we educate early, age appropriately, and constantly, then perhaps we can lessen the taboo power that sexuality and violence have on kids and teenagers and break the ability of marketers to use that as effectively. To many of the Mythic History defenders, though, if we do that, we've thrown ourselves headlong into the abyss and abandoned all of our core principles, so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
Mr. Fitzgerald examines what he sees as the trend moving evangelism away from anti-intellectual feelings-based ministry into a more intellectual mind, a return to the time where the religious theology mixed, mingled, and debated with the contemporary philosophy, concluding that the move is a good one and will make evangelism better, although the progress toward it is quite slow.
Last for tonight, the year in band names, proving that we're pretty good about coming up with all sorts of names for our musical groups, and a study confirming that some people experience physical sympathy pains when viewing other people in pain.
Beginning again, as we do, in the world, the old becomes new, and cycles that have happened before repeat - the funeral for a cleric in Qom became a protest against the government in Iran. Agitation for change, with the question being whether or not the government responds with harder crackdowns or hopes that things will go away. Reports from the ground believe that the protest is now about regime change instead of reform candidacy, because regime change is what they want. Others try to paint the President's policies of open-hands negotiation as rebuffed and failures, citing what they see as the buildup of weapons, a lack of any political gesture or diplomacy, and continued support for terror organizations.
In Iraq, if you ever wanted to know how much the military is stretched thin, consider this - a major general in the United States army has made getting voluntarily pregnant or impregnating a female soldier an offense punishable by court-martial. Assault and forced sex cases will not have the female punished, the major general states. I'm sure there's also something that could be said about how the military still resents having women in it, and this is one of those ways that resentment plays out, but all the stresses are on how it's legal and part of a bigger restriction-of-behavior package. Plus, I'm not really versed enough to make a cogent argument about how much this behavior is or isn't intended to hurt women.
Elsewhere in Iraq, the ruling United States-backed power is continuing their outreach to clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr, hoping to bring them into the governing fold instead of staying apart as independent power structures.
The recent release of Avatar in other countries leads to an interesting story about subtitle re-positioning and the censorship offices in Egypt, where it takes family connections just to be seen after an ugly standoff with censorship security. And that's just over moving subtitles to the bottom of the screen (and re-editing in a "sex" scene, but mostly the subtitling). Definitely nice to know that films here don't have to pass a board with any more power than the MPAA (which is voluntary, I believe, but can sink a film if it rates it NC-17)
Last out for today, Israel admitted to harvesting organs from the dead without the consent of their families for much of the 1990s. While there are arguments to be made about whether organ donation should be the default instead of the exception, to do so without the consent of the dead or their surviving relatives (assuming the dead weren't organ donors) is not good.
On the domestic fronts, as health care bills make it to final passage, we find right-wing bloggers and Senators alike wishing that a Democrat, any Democrat, would have been unable to make it to the chamber to do their vote, so that the sixty-vote caucus would be broken by absence. This is not a new trend necessarily, witness tee shirts and other paraphernalia advocating, jokingly or otherwise, for the death of the current President, including the recent Psalm flap, but it is climbing up fairly high into the ranks of the government, which we would normally expect to be above that kind of talk or posturing. Other tacks taken include accusing the government of "seed Chicago politics" as an insult to the process and the President, or trying to pump up the populace to get their states to invoke nullification on whatever gets passed by the federal government, spinning it as the only way to get real change done, instead of wasting time with federal politicians, claiming the bill will be a death knell for Democratic politics, with the moderates being sacrificed to enact the dream of a welfare state the liberal elements and President Obama apparently want, and delcaring that the bill as noted won't actually achieve its ends.
On the other side of the coin, the compromise resulting in special treatment for Nebraska has earned flack for the way it was done, including the Governor who was concerned about budget stress from another federal mandate.
In the end, however, nobody should lose sight of who it's being done for - people like Sierra Cooper, a 21 year-old with muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, ineligible for life insurance (and probably most medical insurance) who is soliciting donations for her own funeral expenses, keenly aware that her time left on Terra is limited.
Some welcome news about open government - The Obama Administration is getting ready to issue an executive order requiring review of the classification procedures of each agency, as well as setting up an institute to process the severe backlog of documents ready to be declassified at the end of the year. Hopefully, that center can then keep putting the screws on government agencies to release their classified data at an improved rate.
In technology, designs unveiled for a lush Singaporean garden that captures some of water and solar and other natural resources to feed itself, hope that climate change agreements will help reverse the acidification of the oceans, an effect not talked about much in climate change arguments, a robot got very close and personal pictures of a violent deep-water volcanic eruption, including the formation of a lava previously only found in samples millions of years old,
Starting with opinions, Ecocosmology, the belief that every intelligent lifeform on a planet close enough to a star to be destroyed by it is being tested to see whether they will overcome their limitations and achieve independence of destroying stars before their stars expand to engulf them. Certainly frames the cosmic clock properly - if we can avoid destroying ourselves through our own hands, we still have to get far enough away from Terra so that the eventual death of Sol does not consume all of humanity.
Mr. Michaels claims that the East Anglia e-mails were the exposure of an already known conspiracy by scientists to shut out dissenting voices from peer-reviewed journals, with disastrous results for official policies, a conspiracy whose pressure he experienced firsthand as it became more difficult for him to be able to publish anywhere, and now he fears the effects of what the EPA has decided about CO2.
And out of opinions, Ms. Noonan suggests that America is feeling things are going the wrong way not just because of economics, but because Americans feel their values and their children are under constant assault by the cultural left, with the Adam Lambert performance on broadcast television as a recent example of that attack. Ms. Noonan is almost correct. People are concerned that their children are being subjected to violence and sexualized images on television, which does happen on broadcast television at more intervals that sport programs and music award performances, like sitcoms and crime dramas and reality television. They're also under constant siege by marketers with commercials attempting to turn them into consumers that will get you to spend $50-100 USD on a piece of easily-breakable mass-molded plastic that doesn't do anything like what the commercial said it would do. Some of them feel religious values are being demeaned, too, by the programming that's on. To accuse the "cultural left" of being behind these changes, however, is to fire an arrow in the wrong direction. Marketing departments for large corporate conglomerates are not composed exclusively of New york or Hollywood liberals. The executives that approve those campaigns are certainly not exclusively cultural liberals. Performers all across the political stripe tap into the energy in their work and their stage presence. What they are doing is playing the culture, which is well-tuned and responds to their efforts. Sometimes strings break, which usually results in public outrage over a wardrobe malfunction or Mr. Lambert's performance bringing out into the open what the cultural conservatives would like to see stay in the back of the closet, but for the most part, he culture feeds on it and generates a lot of revenue from it. "Pop Princesses" make albums full of sexual songs, put to video where they wear revealing costumes and gyrate their hips and tops in sexually suggestive manners. Rap talks about the violence present in a lot of places and of making one's money any way one can, whether legally or not, to live the good life instead of the slums. Change the skin color and put a suit on them, and that could describe a lot of CEOs. The culture approves of sexuality and violence in its marketing and performances - Sarah Palin and the NRA for two on the conservative side of the fence. What it does not approve of is when the sex, sexuality, or violence is obvious and can't be explained away behind one of many fig leaves put up. Then, the last-ditch fig leaf appears, the children, the immature, the people who supposedly can't handle the marketing blitz yet grow up to prove themselves savvy consumers and people who understand the messages really well before they even get past the legal requirements of age. The mythical past is just that, mythical, but if one really wanted to try and put the brakes on this perceived cultural slide, they'd have to manage to stop up commercial success using sex appeal. Far easier (and probably more Taoist of them) would be to instead push in the direction the water is flowing - get kids to understand the nature of sexuality with frank conversation, to understand what kind of sexual advertising is going on, the differences between real and fantastic violence, all of that - if we educate early, age appropriately, and constantly, then perhaps we can lessen the taboo power that sexuality and violence have on kids and teenagers and break the ability of marketers to use that as effectively. To many of the Mythic History defenders, though, if we do that, we've thrown ourselves headlong into the abyss and abandoned all of our core principles, so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
Mr. Fitzgerald examines what he sees as the trend moving evangelism away from anti-intellectual feelings-based ministry into a more intellectual mind, a return to the time where the religious theology mixed, mingled, and debated with the contemporary philosophy, concluding that the move is a good one and will make evangelism better, although the progress toward it is quite slow.
Last for tonight, the year in band names, proving that we're pretty good about coming up with all sorts of names for our musical groups, and a study confirming that some people experience physical sympathy pains when viewing other people in pain.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 11:51 pm (UTC)Libraries, or at least the ones I've worked at, often offer a dazzling array of Bibles, one usually of each of the major translation versions (NIV, NSRV, KJV, et cetera) for checkout.
I don't know whether it's a matter of really needing one or feeling somewhere that the Word of God shouldn't be charged for, or some other reason, but it is rather odd to have that book be the most shoplifted and stolen book.