Hello to all of you. As you well know, tax season is upon us, and thus for those of us in the library profession, I salute your diligence and your ability to point people in something resembling the right direction day after day.
For those looking to play with their lifespans, Death Risk Rankings allows you to compare your likelihood of dying in the next year to others, based on various factors.
If the following was too sobering for you, enjoy this list of famous drunks and addicts on your way to the liquor cabinet.
Out in the world, a former Guatemalan president was apprehended and charged with laundering international money intended to buy children's books. I salmost think the appropriate punishment would be to require him to be subjected to every punishment a librarian can think of, to have to read to every child he screwed as much as they want him to, or to be used as a live pinata until dead, have his insides removed, and then to be used as a dead pinata until ground into dust. But then again, I might just be biased on this matter.
North Korea fired artillery shells near South Korean territory, reminding the world that the Korean War is not officially over, and much work has to be done before any sort of formal peace treaty is created.
The leader of Montenegro praises the United States for their assistance in helping develop the tiny nation into what it is today. I can see a lot of ways this can be interpreted, both in a pro-war and an anti-war stance, so I’ll let the viewing audience decide how they want to interpret it. If they would like something less ambiguous, The Christian Science Monitor provides with an opinion on how American-style democracy is still the best, because of the equality of opportunity it provides at the core. Yes, even with all that’s been built on top of that that makes that equality look like a funhouse mirror of itself, that makes some people ascend easily and forces others to go the very long way around.
A Fox News blog follows the story of persecution of Christians in Egypt, a story that will resonate well with the people afraid of the brown people, the people who think Islam is a bloodthirsty religion, and the people who think Christianity should be the one and only religion across all the world. Most of those people, however, will miss the application of that story to how minority religions here in the United States may feel - although thankfully not in the “everyone, private or public, is trying to kill me because of my religion” sense.
Domestically, a fragment of an article reports a Congressionally mandated panel says the current administration would not be able to respond to a bioterror attack. The example often referred to was the outbreak of H1N1 flu and the response there. The White House pushed back against that attack, claiming it had put into place several reviews and programs that would make the US prepared to respond.
Health insurance executive claims politics has gotten in the way of good policy on health care and insurance reform. And the reason we should listen to him at all is...?
Defecits for this fiscal year are projected to run approximately the same amount as last year, mostly thanks to the stubbornness of the unemployment rate causing bigger than expected spending on benefits and planned stimulus spending. The Republicans point to all this and say the stimulus is a failure, and Democrats ignore the dire warnings of defecits at their own peril, because if they continue, they will kill the economy with public sector everything and The Market (all praise to its name), which is always more efficient, will be crushed. The liberals point to all of this and say, “If you had funded this the right way, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The Republican Party has had a purity test introduced as a resolution at their current meeting. It doesn’t look like it will pass, based on the article, but its mere presence should say something about the state of the Republican Party in our current times.
In technology, accusations from climate change skeptics that the data used to create the models is coming from only some of the thermometers deployed worldwide, instead of taking all of the data from everywhere and modeling it.
Despite fears of a brain drain, it appears that most science and engineering doctoral graduates stayed in the United States through 2007. The 2009 data may have a completely different story to tell, with the economy the way that it is.
Technology has progressed closer to making intelligent pills that deliver their payload directly to the affected site, using nanoparticle drug delivery systems.
In the United Kingdom, the government and a contractor are developing drones to fly and take CCTV images and video over UK citizens. Makes me wonder if someone’s going to make it a sport to disable, control, or destroy those drones once spotted.
Apple and Steve Jobs today unveiled a device called the iPad that appears to have no real benefits compared to ereaders, netbooks, tablets, or their own smaller iProducts, and a whole lot more drawbacks than any of the other ones. It’s a nice try, and I’m sure that schools and libraries will have plenty of them soon as everyone else who wants to use devices gets the real devices and donates their iPads. (Actually, we’re not sure whether it will be a hit or a bust, but from the looks of things, actual usefulness an an iProduct looks to be very close to zip.)
And last, a comparison - going for the most powerful laser yet constructed and going for very tiny antennas thanks to metamaterials.
Into the opinions we go, with speechwriters making commentary on the President at the podium, combining his lack of catchphrases and signature single lines with praise that he always knows what he's talking about and can communicate that. He’s a paragraph prsident, instead of a one-liner president. For some of the people there, that makes him a snooze and a wonk and boring. For others, that makes him a President that addresses the populace as adults and expects them to use their brains.
The matter of Scott Brown’s election continues to make opinions, from pundits, those who claim to be pundits, and sitting Congresscritters. And idiots, too, but the Internet is a big place. Mr. Henninger, for example, can say that things are the way they are because Kennedy let the federal work force unionize, and that opened the door to unions everywhere, who broke the economy through their incessant demands for higher wages and better benefits, ignoring any other possible cause in his anti-union zeal. Mr. Fund chooses to focus on the apparent fantasy-world of Ms. Pelosi, unflapped by the election while her caucus runs and hides with their tail between their legs. As it is, Mr. Rove turns out to be the sane voice of the three, believing health care reform will only anger the defecit populace more by adding on even more spending.
Messrs. Glassman and Doran agitate for the adoption of a policy that will undercut the current regime in Iran and replace it with the Green Revolution protesters, still ignoring that we don’t know whether the Greeen Revolution people are for democracy-without-clerics, or are just agitating to have their voices hears and the candidate they elected fairly be put into office.
The WSJ believes the creation of budget deficit comissions is really a political move to get Republicans to give them political cover for raising taxes, because the “bipartisan” commission recommends doing so, and thus, it’s not totally a Democratic thing.
Providing us with yet more evidence that people can be both wonderful and horrible, it’s tonight’s high-velocity flaky pastry competition.
The bronze for sheer audacity to the unnamed blogger claiming Interpol is associated with Nazis and will gladly arrest dissidents if their countries make them criminals, as well as uncritically sharing files of U.S. citizens and accepting disinformation planted into files by governments hostile to the United States. Because Interpol isn’t composed of, say, police detectives and workers who would know to vet information and check sources and the like before putting material into someone’s file.
Doing them several grades better, however, is the Florida doctor and judge who may have just established a court precedent saying the rights of a mother are subordinate to the rights of their unborn fetus, with the doctor getting a court order to force the mother to stay in the hospital after she wanted to leave, because she was pregnant. If the appeal doesn’t overturn the idea, it could very easily be used as some way of forcing women to carry to term, regardless of their wishes, because they’re pregnant. Silver effort to them, though, only because...
...the gold standard is once again, tough to beat. Elaine Donnelly attacks Richard Socarides's column saying Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be repealed because men and women have served together in the armed forces without incident by blaming the Abu Ghraib incident squarely on the policy that let women serve in the military, calling it an incident that started between men and women and then became an abuse of prisoners incident as discipline continued to break down in the unit. Uh, yeah. What about the bit where they determined it to not be a bunch of people acting on their own, but systematic from the top down? Oh, and the whole thing is
Last for tonight, the rumored secrets of the Tokyo subway system, including secret bases, fallout shelters, and military-application lines. Additionally, bizarre dinosaurs and extinct species.
For those looking to play with their lifespans, Death Risk Rankings allows you to compare your likelihood of dying in the next year to others, based on various factors.
If the following was too sobering for you, enjoy this list of famous drunks and addicts on your way to the liquor cabinet.
Out in the world, a former Guatemalan president was apprehended and charged with laundering international money intended to buy children's books. I salmost think the appropriate punishment would be to require him to be subjected to every punishment a librarian can think of, to have to read to every child he screwed as much as they want him to, or to be used as a live pinata until dead, have his insides removed, and then to be used as a dead pinata until ground into dust. But then again, I might just be biased on this matter.
North Korea fired artillery shells near South Korean territory, reminding the world that the Korean War is not officially over, and much work has to be done before any sort of formal peace treaty is created.
The leader of Montenegro praises the United States for their assistance in helping develop the tiny nation into what it is today. I can see a lot of ways this can be interpreted, both in a pro-war and an anti-war stance, so I’ll let the viewing audience decide how they want to interpret it. If they would like something less ambiguous, The Christian Science Monitor provides with an opinion on how American-style democracy is still the best, because of the equality of opportunity it provides at the core. Yes, even with all that’s been built on top of that that makes that equality look like a funhouse mirror of itself, that makes some people ascend easily and forces others to go the very long way around.
A Fox News blog follows the story of persecution of Christians in Egypt, a story that will resonate well with the people afraid of the brown people, the people who think Islam is a bloodthirsty religion, and the people who think Christianity should be the one and only religion across all the world. Most of those people, however, will miss the application of that story to how minority religions here in the United States may feel - although thankfully not in the “everyone, private or public, is trying to kill me because of my religion” sense.
Domestically, a fragment of an article reports a Congressionally mandated panel says the current administration would not be able to respond to a bioterror attack. The example often referred to was the outbreak of H1N1 flu and the response there. The White House pushed back against that attack, claiming it had put into place several reviews and programs that would make the US prepared to respond.
Health insurance executive claims politics has gotten in the way of good policy on health care and insurance reform. And the reason we should listen to him at all is...?
Defecits for this fiscal year are projected to run approximately the same amount as last year, mostly thanks to the stubbornness of the unemployment rate causing bigger than expected spending on benefits and planned stimulus spending. The Republicans point to all this and say the stimulus is a failure, and Democrats ignore the dire warnings of defecits at their own peril, because if they continue, they will kill the economy with public sector everything and The Market (all praise to its name), which is always more efficient, will be crushed. The liberals point to all of this and say, “If you had funded this the right way, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The Republican Party has had a purity test introduced as a resolution at their current meeting. It doesn’t look like it will pass, based on the article, but its mere presence should say something about the state of the Republican Party in our current times.
In technology, accusations from climate change skeptics that the data used to create the models is coming from only some of the thermometers deployed worldwide, instead of taking all of the data from everywhere and modeling it.
Despite fears of a brain drain, it appears that most science and engineering doctoral graduates stayed in the United States through 2007. The 2009 data may have a completely different story to tell, with the economy the way that it is.
Technology has progressed closer to making intelligent pills that deliver their payload directly to the affected site, using nanoparticle drug delivery systems.
In the United Kingdom, the government and a contractor are developing drones to fly and take CCTV images and video over UK citizens. Makes me wonder if someone’s going to make it a sport to disable, control, or destroy those drones once spotted.
Apple and Steve Jobs today unveiled a device called the iPad that appears to have no real benefits compared to ereaders, netbooks, tablets, or their own smaller iProducts, and a whole lot more drawbacks than any of the other ones. It’s a nice try, and I’m sure that schools and libraries will have plenty of them soon as everyone else who wants to use devices gets the real devices and donates their iPads. (Actually, we’re not sure whether it will be a hit or a bust, but from the looks of things, actual usefulness an an iProduct looks to be very close to zip.)
And last, a comparison - going for the most powerful laser yet constructed and going for very tiny antennas thanks to metamaterials.
Into the opinions we go, with speechwriters making commentary on the President at the podium, combining his lack of catchphrases and signature single lines with praise that he always knows what he's talking about and can communicate that. He’s a paragraph prsident, instead of a one-liner president. For some of the people there, that makes him a snooze and a wonk and boring. For others, that makes him a President that addresses the populace as adults and expects them to use their brains.
The matter of Scott Brown’s election continues to make opinions, from pundits, those who claim to be pundits, and sitting Congresscritters. And idiots, too, but the Internet is a big place. Mr. Henninger, for example, can say that things are the way they are because Kennedy let the federal work force unionize, and that opened the door to unions everywhere, who broke the economy through their incessant demands for higher wages and better benefits, ignoring any other possible cause in his anti-union zeal. Mr. Fund chooses to focus on the apparent fantasy-world of Ms. Pelosi, unflapped by the election while her caucus runs and hides with their tail between their legs. As it is, Mr. Rove turns out to be the sane voice of the three, believing health care reform will only anger the defecit populace more by adding on even more spending.
Messrs. Glassman and Doran agitate for the adoption of a policy that will undercut the current regime in Iran and replace it with the Green Revolution protesters, still ignoring that we don’t know whether the Greeen Revolution people are for democracy-without-clerics, or are just agitating to have their voices hears and the candidate they elected fairly be put into office.
The WSJ believes the creation of budget deficit comissions is really a political move to get Republicans to give them political cover for raising taxes, because the “bipartisan” commission recommends doing so, and thus, it’s not totally a Democratic thing.
Providing us with yet more evidence that people can be both wonderful and horrible, it’s tonight’s high-velocity flaky pastry competition.
The bronze for sheer audacity to the unnamed blogger claiming Interpol is associated with Nazis and will gladly arrest dissidents if their countries make them criminals, as well as uncritically sharing files of U.S. citizens and accepting disinformation planted into files by governments hostile to the United States. Because Interpol isn’t composed of, say, police detectives and workers who would know to vet information and check sources and the like before putting material into someone’s file.
Doing them several grades better, however, is the Florida doctor and judge who may have just established a court precedent saying the rights of a mother are subordinate to the rights of their unborn fetus, with the doctor getting a court order to force the mother to stay in the hospital after she wanted to leave, because she was pregnant. If the appeal doesn’t overturn the idea, it could very easily be used as some way of forcing women to carry to term, regardless of their wishes, because they’re pregnant. Silver effort to them, though, only because...
...the gold standard is once again, tough to beat. Elaine Donnelly attacks Richard Socarides's column saying Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be repealed because men and women have served together in the armed forces without incident by blaming the Abu Ghraib incident squarely on the policy that let women serve in the military, calling it an incident that started between men and women and then became an abuse of prisoners incident as discipline continued to break down in the unit. Uh, yeah. What about the bit where they determined it to not be a bunch of people acting on their own, but systematic from the top down? Oh, and the whole thing is
Last for tonight, the rumored secrets of the Tokyo subway system, including secret bases, fallout shelters, and military-application lines. Additionally, bizarre dinosaurs and extinct species.