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silveradeptGood morning, persons seeking solutions to vexing problems. A suggestion on how the places that are supposed to be the most morally decadent, according to red state Christian values, actually hold their family units together better than the supposedly morally superior - blue state values mesh with reality, red state values lack key acknowledgments of reality. The reality? It takes more than a high school education and a factory job to be able to provide for a family these days, and sex is not coupled with pregnancy nearly as tightly as it was before. Abstinence-until-marriage philosophies, then, expect boys and girls to go a decade to 15 years past the time of their sexual awakening (on average) without sex, assuming they get married straight out of their university experience and don’t have sex until them. That’s tough as it is, but with the way the world operates now, anyone who gets knocked off the college course, through pregnancy or having to care for your child, is almost certainly doomed to low-income living. Scary cliff, there. The other part, of course, is birth control, and failing that, abortion, things that blue staters embrace as a way of providing a safety rail for going up the cliff of “first career, then family” - and there’s the benefit of having sex, an immensely pleasurable and intimate act, without running a very high risk of pregnancy and the shotgun wedding resulting from it. So red state values actively shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to surviving in more modern times, and start a self-fulfilling loop, with abstinence resulting in early pregnancy and marriage, resulting in lower-wage living, resulting in having to grow up through the hardship of making mistakes, which then manifests itself on those parents telling their kids not to do what they did - by staying abstinent from sex and going on to college. But Abstinence Doesn’t Work that well, and so the cycle starts again.
The Dead Pool claimed Edgar Wright, better known as Antony Grey, who helped guide the United Kingdom through decriminalization of LGBT sexuality in private in 1967, died at 82 years of age.
Out in the world today, we note that the use of stock photography for political ads is dubious at best, and opening oneself to retaliation and snark at worst.
All of the parties contesting in the United Kingdom's Parliament elections have failed to gather a majority, the first "hung Parliament" in twenty-six years. The UK will thus have to make decisions about coalition governments, minority governments, and other possibilities that could make smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and Greens big players in how government is run. Exciting! (For perspective on why American conservatives might be concerned about this, Nile Gardiner offers his opinions.)
Greece approves austerity measures designed to secure international financial rescue efforts, and all the people who make their money on the strength of everyone’s economy watches nervously.
Russia reminds Somali pirates that they don’t particulaly like them either, in a raid rescuing a hijacked tanker.
The third Navy SEAL alleged to have assaulted an Iraqi civilian in 2004 has been cleared of the charge. Cue the crowing on how much the “left wing” media jumped on the story and rushed to judgment before all the facts came through.
Doemstically, if your opposition chooses one person, not a scientist and known for saying outrageous things as their sole witness to your legislation, can you legitimately declare them to not have any interest in the legislation and proceed without them?
You know those full body scanners that the TSA just bought, the ones that take pictures with enough clarity that someone can see your genitals? After a trainnig exercise where he went through the scanner, a TSA screener was subjected to jokes about the size of his penis. Said screener then confronted one of his tormentors and beat him up. Two wrongs don’t make a right, certainly, but now at least we know that the juvenile impulses of our society aren’t going to be restrained with this technology. It will just be one-way, now - all the screeners will be making commentary about all the passengers.
Looking solid in his candidacy for an ongoing Worst Persons In the World award, the CEO of British Petroleum, the parent company operating the well that bursty in the Gulf, claimed that most of the legal suits filed aginst his company will be illegitimate, because Americans are sharks looking to drain every dime they can from his company. And as CEO, he’s looking to not have to pay those as much as he can. So he resorts to calling the people who bring claims against him liars. Oh, and did we mention the United States isn't currently accepting foreign offers of aid to help clean up the spill?
The American Academy of Pediatrics, in their attempts to curb the practice of female genital mutilation, offered the possibility of doing a symbolic "nick" to take the place of the actual barbarous practice, so that persons for whom that is a cultural heritage can still feel like they did their ritual duty. It’s a compromise between telling them no and having them go do the whole thing elsewhere and the ideal result, which is that parents and others stop the practice entirely.
Not that he’s the only person who could receive the award. At least an honorable mention goes to the mother that checked out the Gossip Girl series from the library and initially refused to return them, claiming they were inappropriate for minors.. Her solution was that the library should sticker them to warn people about the inappropriate content. And then, after the first story ran, she took the books back, claiming that she wanted the media to pay attention to the issue, too, and it was up to the library now to make sure inappropriate material wasn't available to children. She’s also not going to pay the fines she’s racked up in overdues, claiming the library should waive them. (The library has said they can’t.) The library will, however, shelve the books in the adult section.
There are many, many places to criticize this. I’ll start with the one criticism I can level aginst the library - moving the books because a parent is holding them hostage creates bad precedents and lets other literary terrorists around know that you can be bullied. What will your YA customers think of you now that they know you might move their favorite books somewhere else if some other parent complains? Parents are responsible for monitoring the content of the books their children read. No censorship, no stickers, no moving, unless it’s the consensus of the librarian staff and the administration to move it. Period.
As for the parent, well, I commend you for taking an interest in the content of the books your daughter is reading. We wish more parents would do this. However, you do not have the authority to determine what other people can read, nor do you have the authority to decree where things are shelved. That authority lies primarily with the selectors and the catalogers, and then the administration and staff of the library afterward. What you consider inappropriate for minors, someone else considers tame reading for them. As for your stickers idea, putting stickers on some books opens us up to having to put stickers on every book someone thinks is inappropriate, and putting stickers on all the books would be a waste of time and money. So we don’t sticker, and expect you to continue being interested, but without holding our books hostage, please. You might not think anything you are doing is censorship, because you’re not trying to remove the books entirely or have them burnt, but holding them hostage, asking to sticker them with adult content warnings, or asking for them to be moved to a different section is requesting an act of censorship. We tend to think dimly of censors.
As for your argument that your tax dollars entitle you to some control of our collection, I’m afraid that you don’t pay nearly enough in taxes for that argument to hold. Your portion of the tax base may have been spent on wholesome books, while mine went toward edgy books that I think are totally appropriate for young people. The library is here for everyone - everyone pays in, everyone can use it, so we have to appeal to as much of everyone as we can.
Two people have been injured in an explosion at Redstone Arsenal, a place where rockets and rocket fuel goes to die.
Time for technology - we're flipping gene switches in mice to encourage them to build new nurons, which might mean developing some sbstances that will convince Humes to do the same, and reverse things like Alzheimer’s. We’re also running experiments to see if we can't stop robots from accidentally causing serious puncture wounds if we equip them with knives and blades, and Google improves their Goggles by letting people point a phone with the app at a sign and receive text translation in several languages. Working in reverse, that would be pretty helpful to, say, a tourist in East Asia who wants to know what those things mean.
Last out, Voyager 2, still going strong after 33 years out in the fringe, needs some diagnostics and repairs done...mind you, though, it takes a full day to send commands and receive responses to those commands. Still, though, 33 years and still sending back data! Engineering can clearly pat themselves on the back for that one.
And thus, we settle comfotably in opinions. Let’s begin with Mr. Williams, who laments that balck people aren't more suspicious and openly hostile to the governemnt, despite the clear history of government screwing black people routinely. He starts with slavery, and then accuses the government of not fulfilling a duty to protect its black citizens from harm and violence, leaving them with run-down cities with few shopping options and loads of violence, then calls the public education system a joke, turning out seniors who are perhaps 7th-grade educated, and finishes by calling social safety nets theft and that black people should be outraged at it instead of encouraging the government to do so to enrich themselves. Oh, and black people in the tea party movement, or conservative blacks in general, are true liberty-seekers and shouldn’t be denigrated as white people in black skin or race traitors.
I don’t think he’s getting the whole picture. I would think that after many years of slavery and many more of being considered second-class, the first thing on the mind of an African-American would be to achieve equality. Considering the start point that he lays out - cities where all the white people with money ran away from because they didn’t like [REDACTED. Cause: No N-Word privileges], where the police are more likely to react badly to black kids in the cities than white kids in the burbs (as a part of their training and the statistics), and where the schools are dependent on property taxes (which have very few rich people and very few businesses), it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of equality anywhere. Things like social safety nets, income supplements, and the like are a pretty basic way of trying to rectify some of that inequality. And truthfully, without them, a lot of people would die, become sans domicile fixe, or get really sick. (And a lot do anyway.) They’re not the whole picture, which involves somehow getting investment back into those areas, with the resulting increase in wealth for the people living there, stabilizing the tax base while also demanding better services, and you can go from there. Assuming, of course, that the investors don’t decide they want to drive all the locals out because “those people” will just loot and steal from them, the savages, and make the problem worse.
He is at least right that people who choose to believe the same way Mr. Williams does shouldn’t be called traitors - we come in all philosophical stripes, including ones that would seem to be totally opposite to the ones that would help us the most.
Mr. Jeffery says the country should remember well that the President lied to them about the cost of health care reform, based on the CBO figures provided to Representative Ryan about the combined impact of several pieces of legislation. And then, from there, we should curse him for his defecits and bankrupting America with his budgets.
Speaking of spending, Mr. Trzupek talks about the wind farm "scam", where government subsidies are the only reason anyone is building any sort of wind-related energy, because it costs far too much to make wind energy, wind energy is farr to unreliable, and as slavish devotees of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), anything that costs too much must be discarded, regardless of any other factors. Yet these same companies will gladly accept government money to build things they consider completely inefficient. If those same people are sticklers for government efficiency with tax dollars, shouldn’t they be refusing the subsidies and not building until the engineers in-house have developed a turbine that is efficient enough for them to want it? It is hypocritical to denounce government waste on one hand and then accept government waste on the other.
Mr. Carroll chastises Senator Dodd's bill, because it allows Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue existing, and thus the taxpayer will still be on teh hook for a lot of money to come, instead of letting the GSEs die off and take their toxic assets with them. Doing so would truly indicate a willingness to keep things from getting too big to fail, he says, and combined with better bankruptcy proceedings, things could actually fail in an orderly fashion, letting The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) take care of its own.
Mr. Elder smokescreens Greece before getting to his main point, that government safety nets stifle freedom, produce dependency, and kill prosperity, using John Edwards and his father as his example of how a country without safety nets can still function fine, and people can climb up out of their disadvantages into middle-to-upper class living if they just keep pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Mr. Thomas does his smoksecreen one better, with a fog around his column about incivility and radicals in government before getting to his actual point - do something pro-life and stop abortions by making woemn see pictures of their fetuses, Mr. President. Mr. Thomas, the “radical leftist” president is in your head. The associations of his advisors, and his own associations, may influence his thinking, but that hasn’t turned into anything “readically lefitst”, except by the standards of the American conservative, where anything not them is radically leftist. And your solution - show that you’re not a radical leftist by doing something that’s fairly hard to the right (throwing obstacles up in the way of women who want medical procedures and putting pressure on them, explicit or not, to nto get that medical procedure) is not a real solution.
And last out of opinions, Mr. Hanson praises several military personnel, finished with their service, now running for legislative seats, considering them to be a strong antidote to the corruption present in both Republican and Democratic machines and incumbents.
Last out for tonight - The Edmonton Public Library has some very nice stickers. I wish we had things like that to spread the word about our library.
The Dead Pool claimed Edgar Wright, better known as Antony Grey, who helped guide the United Kingdom through decriminalization of LGBT sexuality in private in 1967, died at 82 years of age.
Out in the world today, we note that the use of stock photography for political ads is dubious at best, and opening oneself to retaliation and snark at worst.
All of the parties contesting in the United Kingdom's Parliament elections have failed to gather a majority, the first "hung Parliament" in twenty-six years. The UK will thus have to make decisions about coalition governments, minority governments, and other possibilities that could make smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and Greens big players in how government is run. Exciting! (For perspective on why American conservatives might be concerned about this, Nile Gardiner offers his opinions.)
Greece approves austerity measures designed to secure international financial rescue efforts, and all the people who make their money on the strength of everyone’s economy watches nervously.
Russia reminds Somali pirates that they don’t particulaly like them either, in a raid rescuing a hijacked tanker.
The third Navy SEAL alleged to have assaulted an Iraqi civilian in 2004 has been cleared of the charge. Cue the crowing on how much the “left wing” media jumped on the story and rushed to judgment before all the facts came through.
Doemstically, if your opposition chooses one person, not a scientist and known for saying outrageous things as their sole witness to your legislation, can you legitimately declare them to not have any interest in the legislation and proceed without them?
You know those full body scanners that the TSA just bought, the ones that take pictures with enough clarity that someone can see your genitals? After a trainnig exercise where he went through the scanner, a TSA screener was subjected to jokes about the size of his penis. Said screener then confronted one of his tormentors and beat him up. Two wrongs don’t make a right, certainly, but now at least we know that the juvenile impulses of our society aren’t going to be restrained with this technology. It will just be one-way, now - all the screeners will be making commentary about all the passengers.
Looking solid in his candidacy for an ongoing Worst Persons In the World award, the CEO of British Petroleum, the parent company operating the well that bursty in the Gulf, claimed that most of the legal suits filed aginst his company will be illegitimate, because Americans are sharks looking to drain every dime they can from his company. And as CEO, he’s looking to not have to pay those as much as he can. So he resorts to calling the people who bring claims against him liars. Oh, and did we mention the United States isn't currently accepting foreign offers of aid to help clean up the spill?
The American Academy of Pediatrics, in their attempts to curb the practice of female genital mutilation, offered the possibility of doing a symbolic "nick" to take the place of the actual barbarous practice, so that persons for whom that is a cultural heritage can still feel like they did their ritual duty. It’s a compromise between telling them no and having them go do the whole thing elsewhere and the ideal result, which is that parents and others stop the practice entirely.
Not that he’s the only person who could receive the award. At least an honorable mention goes to the mother that checked out the Gossip Girl series from the library and initially refused to return them, claiming they were inappropriate for minors.. Her solution was that the library should sticker them to warn people about the inappropriate content. And then, after the first story ran, she took the books back, claiming that she wanted the media to pay attention to the issue, too, and it was up to the library now to make sure inappropriate material wasn't available to children. She’s also not going to pay the fines she’s racked up in overdues, claiming the library should waive them. (The library has said they can’t.) The library will, however, shelve the books in the adult section.
There are many, many places to criticize this. I’ll start with the one criticism I can level aginst the library - moving the books because a parent is holding them hostage creates bad precedents and lets other literary terrorists around know that you can be bullied. What will your YA customers think of you now that they know you might move their favorite books somewhere else if some other parent complains? Parents are responsible for monitoring the content of the books their children read. No censorship, no stickers, no moving, unless it’s the consensus of the librarian staff and the administration to move it. Period.
As for the parent, well, I commend you for taking an interest in the content of the books your daughter is reading. We wish more parents would do this. However, you do not have the authority to determine what other people can read, nor do you have the authority to decree where things are shelved. That authority lies primarily with the selectors and the catalogers, and then the administration and staff of the library afterward. What you consider inappropriate for minors, someone else considers tame reading for them. As for your stickers idea, putting stickers on some books opens us up to having to put stickers on every book someone thinks is inappropriate, and putting stickers on all the books would be a waste of time and money. So we don’t sticker, and expect you to continue being interested, but without holding our books hostage, please. You might not think anything you are doing is censorship, because you’re not trying to remove the books entirely or have them burnt, but holding them hostage, asking to sticker them with adult content warnings, or asking for them to be moved to a different section is requesting an act of censorship. We tend to think dimly of censors.
As for your argument that your tax dollars entitle you to some control of our collection, I’m afraid that you don’t pay nearly enough in taxes for that argument to hold. Your portion of the tax base may have been spent on wholesome books, while mine went toward edgy books that I think are totally appropriate for young people. The library is here for everyone - everyone pays in, everyone can use it, so we have to appeal to as much of everyone as we can.
Two people have been injured in an explosion at Redstone Arsenal, a place where rockets and rocket fuel goes to die.
Time for technology - we're flipping gene switches in mice to encourage them to build new nurons, which might mean developing some sbstances that will convince Humes to do the same, and reverse things like Alzheimer’s. We’re also running experiments to see if we can't stop robots from accidentally causing serious puncture wounds if we equip them with knives and blades, and Google improves their Goggles by letting people point a phone with the app at a sign and receive text translation in several languages. Working in reverse, that would be pretty helpful to, say, a tourist in East Asia who wants to know what those things mean.
Last out, Voyager 2, still going strong after 33 years out in the fringe, needs some diagnostics and repairs done...mind you, though, it takes a full day to send commands and receive responses to those commands. Still, though, 33 years and still sending back data! Engineering can clearly pat themselves on the back for that one.
And thus, we settle comfotably in opinions. Let’s begin with Mr. Williams, who laments that balck people aren't more suspicious and openly hostile to the governemnt, despite the clear history of government screwing black people routinely. He starts with slavery, and then accuses the government of not fulfilling a duty to protect its black citizens from harm and violence, leaving them with run-down cities with few shopping options and loads of violence, then calls the public education system a joke, turning out seniors who are perhaps 7th-grade educated, and finishes by calling social safety nets theft and that black people should be outraged at it instead of encouraging the government to do so to enrich themselves. Oh, and black people in the tea party movement, or conservative blacks in general, are true liberty-seekers and shouldn’t be denigrated as white people in black skin or race traitors.
I don’t think he’s getting the whole picture. I would think that after many years of slavery and many more of being considered second-class, the first thing on the mind of an African-American would be to achieve equality. Considering the start point that he lays out - cities where all the white people with money ran away from because they didn’t like [REDACTED. Cause: No N-Word privileges], where the police are more likely to react badly to black kids in the cities than white kids in the burbs (as a part of their training and the statistics), and where the schools are dependent on property taxes (which have very few rich people and very few businesses), it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of equality anywhere. Things like social safety nets, income supplements, and the like are a pretty basic way of trying to rectify some of that inequality. And truthfully, without them, a lot of people would die, become sans domicile fixe, or get really sick. (And a lot do anyway.) They’re not the whole picture, which involves somehow getting investment back into those areas, with the resulting increase in wealth for the people living there, stabilizing the tax base while also demanding better services, and you can go from there. Assuming, of course, that the investors don’t decide they want to drive all the locals out because “those people” will just loot and steal from them, the savages, and make the problem worse.
He is at least right that people who choose to believe the same way Mr. Williams does shouldn’t be called traitors - we come in all philosophical stripes, including ones that would seem to be totally opposite to the ones that would help us the most.
Mr. Jeffery says the country should remember well that the President lied to them about the cost of health care reform, based on the CBO figures provided to Representative Ryan about the combined impact of several pieces of legislation. And then, from there, we should curse him for his defecits and bankrupting America with his budgets.
Speaking of spending, Mr. Trzupek talks about the wind farm "scam", where government subsidies are the only reason anyone is building any sort of wind-related energy, because it costs far too much to make wind energy, wind energy is farr to unreliable, and as slavish devotees of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), anything that costs too much must be discarded, regardless of any other factors. Yet these same companies will gladly accept government money to build things they consider completely inefficient. If those same people are sticklers for government efficiency with tax dollars, shouldn’t they be refusing the subsidies and not building until the engineers in-house have developed a turbine that is efficient enough for them to want it? It is hypocritical to denounce government waste on one hand and then accept government waste on the other.
Mr. Carroll chastises Senator Dodd's bill, because it allows Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue existing, and thus the taxpayer will still be on teh hook for a lot of money to come, instead of letting the GSEs die off and take their toxic assets with them. Doing so would truly indicate a willingness to keep things from getting too big to fail, he says, and combined with better bankruptcy proceedings, things could actually fail in an orderly fashion, letting The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) take care of its own.
Mr. Elder smokescreens Greece before getting to his main point, that government safety nets stifle freedom, produce dependency, and kill prosperity, using John Edwards and his father as his example of how a country without safety nets can still function fine, and people can climb up out of their disadvantages into middle-to-upper class living if they just keep pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Mr. Thomas does his smoksecreen one better, with a fog around his column about incivility and radicals in government before getting to his actual point - do something pro-life and stop abortions by making woemn see pictures of their fetuses, Mr. President. Mr. Thomas, the “radical leftist” president is in your head. The associations of his advisors, and his own associations, may influence his thinking, but that hasn’t turned into anything “readically lefitst”, except by the standards of the American conservative, where anything not them is radically leftist. And your solution - show that you’re not a radical leftist by doing something that’s fairly hard to the right (throwing obstacles up in the way of women who want medical procedures and putting pressure on them, explicit or not, to nto get that medical procedure) is not a real solution.
And last out of opinions, Mr. Hanson praises several military personnel, finished with their service, now running for legislative seats, considering them to be a strong antidote to the corruption present in both Republican and Democratic machines and incumbents.
Last out for tonight - The Edmonton Public Library has some very nice stickers. I wish we had things like that to spread the word about our library.
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Date: 2010-05-09 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 09:43 am (UTC)