Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2010-04-27 12:52 am
silveradept) wrote2010-04-27 12:52 am
Another week begins in earnest - 25-27 April 2010
Salutations, people who love their weather and wish that it would change to something better. To see examples where things have gone as self-sustaining as possible, observe these research stations set up in Antarctica, who have to be self-sufficient lest the people inside die.
Professionally speaking, the totally awesomejenett put out Things I would tell someone applying to library school, a piece I agree with wholeheartedly and curse slightly that I could write it as eloquently as this.
If you noticed a significantly larger amount of cleavage on display today, recall that the "boobquake", an idea testing an Iranian cleric's theory that immodestly-dressed women cause earthquakes, was today. And if you felt tremors, check with the local seismologists to see whether the ground was moving or something else. And while at it, why not also post the smarts and achievements of women around the world, to do double damage to the ideas that women should be both stupid and covered up, lest they tempt men with either brains or beauty.
Continuing in the tongue-in-cheek theme speculation of which book children and teenagers might come out of the closet later on in their lives. The leader of the Baby-Sitter’s Club, Harriet the Spy, and a character from the Westing Game all make the list.
Turning toward darker and less happy places, Florida is implementing sofware that claims to be a reliable predictor of who will be criminals so they can be monitored and stopped before they become criminals. Even if it’s better-than-chance accurate, that’s still a lot of innocent people presumed to be terrorists or criminals. It might be that all of us find out we've been put on the no-fly list while we're in the air and can thus be stranded and arrested far from home, because the computer said we were dangerous.
Also shameful and Worst-Person-like, the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, signed into law the bill that requires everyone in Arizona to carry their proof of citizenship or legal immigration or face arrest and leaves the decision of whether to ask for papers in the hands of law enforcement. Less than a week after the signing, at least one allegation of racial profiling by those police. Papers, Please. Even the people who are legal who can’t provide their documentation at request could be jailed and fined for not having their documents with them at all times. I suspect the Departments of Vital Records will have a bit of a boom, as everyone will suddenly need extra copies of their birth certificates, and someone else will make a killing producing extra copies of immigration and citizenship forms. Assuming, of course, that someone doesn’t step in and smack the law down for violating established federal law. Proponents of this law shouldn't even be able to hide behind the Bible for this one.
The silver lining to this might be that such a jarringly stupid move might be the impetus to get federal immigration legislation passed - of course, it could turn out to be as bad or worse than the state law. Either way, add one to the agenda for the President.
Last out, a thought exercise for all of us - imagine what the response would be if the tea party and their media supporters were people of color talking about white people. Threats of violence, praising of terrorists, all of that and more, but done by people of color instead of white folk, against white folk. Would that be seen as patriotic American dissent, or would we be in the throes of hysteria that the darkies are going to kill us all? Considering how the country reacted to the last time people of color spoke out, I think we’d have a much different story on our hands. (Or we might have generated the state of Jefferson, for all we know.) As things are right now, a person is still thankfully arrested when he asks to see the President at the airport where the plane was and is armed, because he’s, well, a security risk.
Out in the world today, ministers for the United Kingdom government apologized for some of the suggestions they came up with regarding a papl visit that would make it perfect, including Pope-themed condoms, opening an abortion ward, and ordainment of women. The official story is that it’s a joke that got out of hand and went places it should not have.
Al-Qaida confirmed the deaths of two of its top personnel, vowing to continue the fight anyway. One hopes that this is not a hydra-type organization, at least.
In domestic news, RNC chairman Michael Steele suggested the Southern Strategy of his party made them into a white people's party, and that minorities don't really have a reason to vote Republican. For which the chairman was roundly criticized by others who want to make Republicans more minority-friendly and those who want to deny that this history happened.
Rupert Murdoch launches a New York section of the Wall Street Journal, focusing his attention on the New York Times, as the daggers of silicon and keyboards silently position themselves to find his back. We did mention that newspaper circulation fell this year, right? Where News Corp and Murdoch should be worried about is Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show makes fun of the media's exaggerations and untruths, something that he finds Fox to be doing on an almost daily basis.
In technology and science, Mr. Scoble welcoems our continued lack of privacy because of all the neat new features that get unlocked when we stop being private.
the craft that may be part of the "deliver weapons strikes anywhere in the world from orbit" program might function nicely as a Shuttle replacement, but as a military vehicle, of course, they don’t want it to be useful to civilians. And here is where we slip in the commentary analyzing why soldiers get a high from killing, even if the withdrawal effects at the end of one’s killing career are evil.
Using technology to its finest, Australian soldiers are training against robots on programmable Segways, meaning they can behave like the real things the soldiers will be facing, be they insurgents, hostages, or civilians.
There's also a car that steers in the direction you're looking, which is good in normal conditions, but bad in others, because we tend to look at things we want to avoid when we’re driving.
One of Gizmodo's editors was served with a search warrant demanding and confiscating all of his records relating to the leaked iPhone protoype, a warrant that may be illegal under the rules protecting journalists from having to divulge their sources.
Professor Stephen Hawking suggests that our first contact is likely to be with aliens of hostile intent, looking for resources and beings to exploit and enslave.
And finally, Happy 20th birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!
Into the opinions we go, where Senator Grassley says the fanfare about GM repaying its TARP obligations is smoke and mirrors, because GM withdrew money from one TARP account to pay off another TARP account.
Mr. Dershowitz sees anti-Israel, pro-Muslim stances in J Street, a group that allegedly claims the United States's close ties with Israel and Israel's intransigence on Palestinian peace endangers American troops abroad. He says this is bad because such statements reduce support for Israel, a democratic and secular government that’s for equal rights for women and LGBT people, and imply that Israel must cease to exist if America wants to make any sort of lasting peace. Both of these are bad results, of course, because Israel is the Sole Good People in the Middle East and must be supported.
Mr. Peters runs back and forth between criticizing President Obama and United Kingdom Prime Minister candidate Nicholas Clegg because they both supposedly believe dictators can do whatever they want within their own borders and that America is always bad whenever it does anything internationally. He’s joined by Ms. Weiss, who believes the worldwide agenda to promote United-States style freedom and democracy has suffered greatly under the current administrator, because he has a blind desire to not be the previous administrator, no matter what sort of good that person did.
Ms. Strassel analyzes the Florida Republican primary for governor, seeing the difference between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio as indicative of a larger fight between reformers and status-quo in the party. But not moderates versus tea partiers - people who believe there should be stances taken on issues versus those who perfer to duck, dodge, and weasel their way out of taking stands. If that’s the real civil war, then we should be rooting for the people who will proudly display a position to oppose. Eventually, they’ll be able to weed out the silly and ridiculous positions, and we might go back to being able to have positions, debate them vigorously, have options, amend, reject, and basically make politics a whole lot more effective and interesting.
Mr. Fund calls for tough and transparent voter and ballot laws, so as to avoid fiascoes like the 2000 election and the recount hell of the 2008 Minnesota election, suggesting that efforts to bring people to the vote, like abstenee registration, also make it easier for people to cast fraudulent votes. Finding the balance between too easy to defraud and too discouraging to vote will not be easy, Mr. Fund, but we hope you turn your brain to finding some proposals on how.
Trying to be Swiftian, but falling on his face instead, Mr. O'Connor suggests that as we reach 50 percent of households not paying taxes, we simply pair up a taxpayer with a tax receiver in a one-to-one relationship and have the taxpayer send whatever funds the receiver needs directly to him, so that the tax receiver gets their funds directly and we cut out the middleman of the tax bureaus. No downsaides, he says satricially, and taxpayers will always have their work eithic renewed when they think about their own personal parasite, err, tax receiver. Unfortuantely, satires work best when they make sense and seem reasonable. This one doesn’t get close. (As a personal note, Bloomfield, Mich, is one of the suburbs of Detroit, where all the rich people fled to and are afraid that extending public transportation to them will allow hoodlums from the city to catch a bus, rob them blind, and then take the wealth back to the city.)
Mr. Blackwell is incensed that the Pentagon doesn't talk about Major Hasan's religious beliefs as the cause of his attack, blaming political correctness and diversity on why Major Hasan wasn’t fired or reprimanded and allowed to continue serving in the military before he opened fire in Fort Hood. The media, he complains, was all too quick to go after an officer expressing Christian beliefs around the time of the planned Iraq invasion. There are a lot of things that the Pentagon does have to answer for on why its prodecures failed to get someone who was, in retrospect, exhibiting signs of instability. If it does tuen out that political correctness or diversity was the cause, Mr. Blackwell can sing all he wants, and I will expect the Pentagon to act just as swiftly if a Christian soldier starts showing those same signs of instability. I doubt that’s the whole story, and I seriously doubt that Islam was responsible for this specifically, when just about any radicalized ideology would substitute.
Getting out of the opinion department, however, are two bits - the Conservapedia page on "Professor Values", accusing academics of holding and promoting "atheism, antichristian politics, censorship, socialism, unjustified claims of expertise and knowledge (for example, the dogmatic promotion of the theory of evolution), liberal beliefs, liberal grading, liberal bias, anti-patriotism, lack of productivity, bullying or discouraging conservative students (for example, homeschoolers), and promotion of sexual immorality". Wow. That’s an impressive list. And then they get into the sections of “Crimes and Alleged Crimes by Professors and Former Professors” and “Immoral, Unethical, or Bizarre Behavior” - all liberals, socialists, Marxists, or feminists, no doubt. (Because conservative professors don’t commit crimes, or don’t exist?) The end piece - “Are Professor Values a Crime Against Humanity?” because professors don’t expose their students to the supernatural and transcendent world (which means The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, of course). It’s a pretty big laugh, to be honest, but at least they’re unapologetic about their mission and values.
Second, and last for tonight, social commentator, birther, and all around blowhard Rush Limbaugh defends protestors carrying signs advocating violence by saying they are protesting because they love America and its values. Running through his checklist, he starts with “They Do It, Too” - liberals protest, sometimes violently, and runs through “They Hate America” - when they’re not in power, and “They Want to Turn You Socialist” - when they are in power, before staking his claim as a Constitution-advocating, pro-rights, pro-private property, America-is-exceptional and the solution to the world’s problems, tough-on-terror citizen unjustly being accused of inciting people to violence and sedition. And then he says that he was slandered by Bill Clinton, on the day he was doing great humanitarian work (nice Schmuck Bait, there, Rush), for implying that his rhetoric helped inspire Timothy McVeigh, when it is clear to everyone that the way Bill Clinton handled the Waco compound incident was the inspiration for McVeigh. His concluding argument (after more Schmuck Bait about his humanitarian work in the aftermath of the attack) is to return to “They Hate America” with the twist of “by letting discord and unrest happen, they can more easily extend their control over your lives by promising solutions to that discord.” As opposed to exaggerating what your opponents are going to do so as to increase your market share, make people paranoid, and make the case that you deserve to be paid more? And then shipping those people out into the world not just to spread those ideas, but possibly act on them? Sure, you’re not saying, “Go kill the President”, because that would be stupid. You’re saying “the President is a socialist and has to be stopped.” The wrong word in the right ear, and one thing leads to another. The practice of covering your ass is sufficiently developed that there will likely never be direct links to any talk radio personality and violence done by a deranged individual. I’d bet some of those peaceful rallies can be traced back, though, and it’s not too far a step from there.
Last for tonight, the story of a ghost army, whose campaign was disinformation and whose talents were situated to make the enemy beleive they were bigger than they were and they were going to be in places they weren't. And the apparent tying together of south Park and Triscuits as things for extremists to hate.
(Oh, okay, one more thing. learning to programe in a LISP variant, through the magic of Interactive Fiction.)
Professionally speaking, the totally awesome
jenett put out Things I would tell someone applying to library school, a piece I agree with wholeheartedly and curse slightly that I could write it as eloquently as this.If you noticed a significantly larger amount of cleavage on display today, recall that the "boobquake", an idea testing an Iranian cleric's theory that immodestly-dressed women cause earthquakes, was today. And if you felt tremors, check with the local seismologists to see whether the ground was moving or something else. And while at it, why not also post the smarts and achievements of women around the world, to do double damage to the ideas that women should be both stupid and covered up, lest they tempt men with either brains or beauty.
Continuing in the tongue-in-cheek theme speculation of which book children and teenagers might come out of the closet later on in their lives. The leader of the Baby-Sitter’s Club, Harriet the Spy, and a character from the Westing Game all make the list.
Turning toward darker and less happy places, Florida is implementing sofware that claims to be a reliable predictor of who will be criminals so they can be monitored and stopped before they become criminals. Even if it’s better-than-chance accurate, that’s still a lot of innocent people presumed to be terrorists or criminals. It might be that all of us find out we've been put on the no-fly list while we're in the air and can thus be stranded and arrested far from home, because the computer said we were dangerous.
Also shameful and Worst-Person-like, the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, signed into law the bill that requires everyone in Arizona to carry their proof of citizenship or legal immigration or face arrest and leaves the decision of whether to ask for papers in the hands of law enforcement. Less than a week after the signing, at least one allegation of racial profiling by those police. Papers, Please. Even the people who are legal who can’t provide their documentation at request could be jailed and fined for not having their documents with them at all times. I suspect the Departments of Vital Records will have a bit of a boom, as everyone will suddenly need extra copies of their birth certificates, and someone else will make a killing producing extra copies of immigration and citizenship forms. Assuming, of course, that someone doesn’t step in and smack the law down for violating established federal law. Proponents of this law shouldn't even be able to hide behind the Bible for this one.
The silver lining to this might be that such a jarringly stupid move might be the impetus to get federal immigration legislation passed - of course, it could turn out to be as bad or worse than the state law. Either way, add one to the agenda for the President.
Last out, a thought exercise for all of us - imagine what the response would be if the tea party and their media supporters were people of color talking about white people. Threats of violence, praising of terrorists, all of that and more, but done by people of color instead of white folk, against white folk. Would that be seen as patriotic American dissent, or would we be in the throes of hysteria that the darkies are going to kill us all? Considering how the country reacted to the last time people of color spoke out, I think we’d have a much different story on our hands. (Or we might have generated the state of Jefferson, for all we know.) As things are right now, a person is still thankfully arrested when he asks to see the President at the airport where the plane was and is armed, because he’s, well, a security risk.
Out in the world today, ministers for the United Kingdom government apologized for some of the suggestions they came up with regarding a papl visit that would make it perfect, including Pope-themed condoms, opening an abortion ward, and ordainment of women. The official story is that it’s a joke that got out of hand and went places it should not have.
Al-Qaida confirmed the deaths of two of its top personnel, vowing to continue the fight anyway. One hopes that this is not a hydra-type organization, at least.
In domestic news, RNC chairman Michael Steele suggested the Southern Strategy of his party made them into a white people's party, and that minorities don't really have a reason to vote Republican. For which the chairman was roundly criticized by others who want to make Republicans more minority-friendly and those who want to deny that this history happened.
Rupert Murdoch launches a New York section of the Wall Street Journal, focusing his attention on the New York Times, as the daggers of silicon and keyboards silently position themselves to find his back. We did mention that newspaper circulation fell this year, right? Where News Corp and Murdoch should be worried about is Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show makes fun of the media's exaggerations and untruths, something that he finds Fox to be doing on an almost daily basis.
In technology and science, Mr. Scoble welcoems our continued lack of privacy because of all the neat new features that get unlocked when we stop being private.
the craft that may be part of the "deliver weapons strikes anywhere in the world from orbit" program might function nicely as a Shuttle replacement, but as a military vehicle, of course, they don’t want it to be useful to civilians. And here is where we slip in the commentary analyzing why soldiers get a high from killing, even if the withdrawal effects at the end of one’s killing career are evil.
Using technology to its finest, Australian soldiers are training against robots on programmable Segways, meaning they can behave like the real things the soldiers will be facing, be they insurgents, hostages, or civilians.
There's also a car that steers in the direction you're looking, which is good in normal conditions, but bad in others, because we tend to look at things we want to avoid when we’re driving.
One of Gizmodo's editors was served with a search warrant demanding and confiscating all of his records relating to the leaked iPhone protoype, a warrant that may be illegal under the rules protecting journalists from having to divulge their sources.
Professor Stephen Hawking suggests that our first contact is likely to be with aliens of hostile intent, looking for resources and beings to exploit and enslave.
And finally, Happy 20th birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!
Into the opinions we go, where Senator Grassley says the fanfare about GM repaying its TARP obligations is smoke and mirrors, because GM withdrew money from one TARP account to pay off another TARP account.
Mr. Dershowitz sees anti-Israel, pro-Muslim stances in J Street, a group that allegedly claims the United States's close ties with Israel and Israel's intransigence on Palestinian peace endangers American troops abroad. He says this is bad because such statements reduce support for Israel, a democratic and secular government that’s for equal rights for women and LGBT people, and imply that Israel must cease to exist if America wants to make any sort of lasting peace. Both of these are bad results, of course, because Israel is the Sole Good People in the Middle East and must be supported.
Mr. Peters runs back and forth between criticizing President Obama and United Kingdom Prime Minister candidate Nicholas Clegg because they both supposedly believe dictators can do whatever they want within their own borders and that America is always bad whenever it does anything internationally. He’s joined by Ms. Weiss, who believes the worldwide agenda to promote United-States style freedom and democracy has suffered greatly under the current administrator, because he has a blind desire to not be the previous administrator, no matter what sort of good that person did.
Ms. Strassel analyzes the Florida Republican primary for governor, seeing the difference between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio as indicative of a larger fight between reformers and status-quo in the party. But not moderates versus tea partiers - people who believe there should be stances taken on issues versus those who perfer to duck, dodge, and weasel their way out of taking stands. If that’s the real civil war, then we should be rooting for the people who will proudly display a position to oppose. Eventually, they’ll be able to weed out the silly and ridiculous positions, and we might go back to being able to have positions, debate them vigorously, have options, amend, reject, and basically make politics a whole lot more effective and interesting.
Mr. Fund calls for tough and transparent voter and ballot laws, so as to avoid fiascoes like the 2000 election and the recount hell of the 2008 Minnesota election, suggesting that efforts to bring people to the vote, like abstenee registration, also make it easier for people to cast fraudulent votes. Finding the balance between too easy to defraud and too discouraging to vote will not be easy, Mr. Fund, but we hope you turn your brain to finding some proposals on how.
Trying to be Swiftian, but falling on his face instead, Mr. O'Connor suggests that as we reach 50 percent of households not paying taxes, we simply pair up a taxpayer with a tax receiver in a one-to-one relationship and have the taxpayer send whatever funds the receiver needs directly to him, so that the tax receiver gets their funds directly and we cut out the middleman of the tax bureaus. No downsaides, he says satricially, and taxpayers will always have their work eithic renewed when they think about their own personal parasite, err, tax receiver. Unfortuantely, satires work best when they make sense and seem reasonable. This one doesn’t get close. (As a personal note, Bloomfield, Mich, is one of the suburbs of Detroit, where all the rich people fled to and are afraid that extending public transportation to them will allow hoodlums from the city to catch a bus, rob them blind, and then take the wealth back to the city.)
Mr. Blackwell is incensed that the Pentagon doesn't talk about Major Hasan's religious beliefs as the cause of his attack, blaming political correctness and diversity on why Major Hasan wasn’t fired or reprimanded and allowed to continue serving in the military before he opened fire in Fort Hood. The media, he complains, was all too quick to go after an officer expressing Christian beliefs around the time of the planned Iraq invasion. There are a lot of things that the Pentagon does have to answer for on why its prodecures failed to get someone who was, in retrospect, exhibiting signs of instability. If it does tuen out that political correctness or diversity was the cause, Mr. Blackwell can sing all he wants, and I will expect the Pentagon to act just as swiftly if a Christian soldier starts showing those same signs of instability. I doubt that’s the whole story, and I seriously doubt that Islam was responsible for this specifically, when just about any radicalized ideology would substitute.
Getting out of the opinion department, however, are two bits - the Conservapedia page on "Professor Values", accusing academics of holding and promoting "atheism, antichristian politics, censorship, socialism, unjustified claims of expertise and knowledge (for example, the dogmatic promotion of the theory of evolution), liberal beliefs, liberal grading, liberal bias, anti-patriotism, lack of productivity, bullying or discouraging conservative students (for example, homeschoolers), and promotion of sexual immorality". Wow. That’s an impressive list. And then they get into the sections of “Crimes and Alleged Crimes by Professors and Former Professors” and “Immoral, Unethical, or Bizarre Behavior” - all liberals, socialists, Marxists, or feminists, no doubt. (Because conservative professors don’t commit crimes, or don’t exist?) The end piece - “Are Professor Values a Crime Against Humanity?” because professors don’t expose their students to the supernatural and transcendent world (which means The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, of course). It’s a pretty big laugh, to be honest, but at least they’re unapologetic about their mission and values.
Second, and last for tonight, social commentator, birther, and all around blowhard Rush Limbaugh defends protestors carrying signs advocating violence by saying they are protesting because they love America and its values. Running through his checklist, he starts with “They Do It, Too” - liberals protest, sometimes violently, and runs through “They Hate America” - when they’re not in power, and “They Want to Turn You Socialist” - when they are in power, before staking his claim as a Constitution-advocating, pro-rights, pro-private property, America-is-exceptional and the solution to the world’s problems, tough-on-terror citizen unjustly being accused of inciting people to violence and sedition. And then he says that he was slandered by Bill Clinton, on the day he was doing great humanitarian work (nice Schmuck Bait, there, Rush), for implying that his rhetoric helped inspire Timothy McVeigh, when it is clear to everyone that the way Bill Clinton handled the Waco compound incident was the inspiration for McVeigh. His concluding argument (after more Schmuck Bait about his humanitarian work in the aftermath of the attack) is to return to “They Hate America” with the twist of “by letting discord and unrest happen, they can more easily extend their control over your lives by promising solutions to that discord.” As opposed to exaggerating what your opponents are going to do so as to increase your market share, make people paranoid, and make the case that you deserve to be paid more? And then shipping those people out into the world not just to spread those ideas, but possibly act on them? Sure, you’re not saying, “Go kill the President”, because that would be stupid. You’re saying “the President is a socialist and has to be stopped.” The wrong word in the right ear, and one thing leads to another. The practice of covering your ass is sufficiently developed that there will likely never be direct links to any talk radio personality and violence done by a deranged individual. I’d bet some of those peaceful rallies can be traced back, though, and it’s not too far a step from there.
Last for tonight, the story of a ghost army, whose campaign was disinformation and whose talents were situated to make the enemy beleive they were bigger than they were and they were going to be in places they weren't. And the apparent tying together of south Park and Triscuits as things for extremists to hate.
(Oh, okay, one more thing. learning to programe in a LISP variant, through the magic of Interactive Fiction.)