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silveradeptMay 25 was Towel Day, the annual remembrance of one of the great humorists of our times, Douglas Adams. Additionally, it was also a day of wearing the lilac for Alzheimer’s research in honor of Sir Terry Pratchett.
There also significant geeking out going on in various Rachel Maddow-related places. Because you need geeks to generate things like a visualization of what each country in the world is Number One at. Or a large bunch of mostly Flash-created websites to burn time on.
Good morning, people who believe that “with liberty and justice for all” means everyone, everywhere, with no exceptions. The United States Congress may move this week to repeal the policy in the armed forces that requires anyone found to be LGBT to be dsicharged, allowing everyone to serve in their military capacity more fully. (If it does pass, I’d like to see how many military people decide to quit because they don't want LGBT people in their military life.) Outside in civilian life, the most recent Gallup poll as of this post indicates about a ten point spread between "No LGBT Marriages!" and "Yes LGBT Marriages", with the NO slightly over 50 percent and the YES at about 45.
Western intelligence sources believe they can trace several lines of crime back to a group created and funded by North Korean authorities.
In Canada, the freedom to practice religious customs of dress is running into the need for identification of persons for government services or to testify to crimes that happened. The government’s vested interest in ensuring that the person applying/speaking is indeed the person in question and, in the case of trial, the need for reading facial and bodily cues in testimony adds new wrinkles to finding out ways of reasonably acommodating one’s religion where possible. I wonder if it would be possible to engender a situation where she could show her face and then use remote technology to administer the questioning, for example. Might need some religious scholars to work it all out and make some interpretations that work in concert with the government’s needs. That seems reasonable. The judge, likely not having the time to do such delicate work, ordered the woman to testify with her face uncovered. This also seesm reasonable considering requirements for swift trials and the like. It’s not elegant, nor necessarily the way that will work, but it will do. And now, having talked about reasonableness and the like, I’m going to wonder why Christine Williams comes out swinging about "female repression", and "safety and security" issues, and basically attempts to convince us that Islam is Evil, wants to repress women through full-face covering veils, and Canda's government will let them through multicultralism, instead of potentially violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by demanding they not practice that part of their religion. Well, I suppose, if you think that the bill in Quebec about requiring people to show their face is in relation to this order, and that the people who oppose the bill are deliberately tryign to oppress women, well, okay, I guess I see the logic chain, I just marvel at the way that it encourages Occam to commit homicide along several of the steps.
And, looking back into the past - confirmed. Members of the CIA wanted to create a Saddam sex tape that would portray him as gay and turn the Iraqi people against him, playing on their homophobia. Thus, Trey Parker and Matt Stone turn out, once again, to be oddly prescient about certain things...
The Pentagon is stepping up secret operations around the world, Fox News tells us. (Because they want more money in the Defense Appropriations Budget for such black-ops work?)
Finally, North Korea escalated again, officially severing ties to South Korea in response to the continued blame, pressure, and this-side-of-accusation that the North sank a South Korean warship.
Domestically, a new wrinkle in the Deep Water Horizons oil rig disaster - those who survived the blast claim they were isolated and forced to sign papers claiming they were unharmed and waiving legal rights to seek compensation before they were allowed to have contact with their families and loved ones. If substantiated, then we have another case to prosecute against TransOcean for deliberate cover-ups and intimidation. And if the memo making comparisons between worker lives and the three Little Pigs is substantiated, then we ahve plenty of evidence that it's all rotten to the core. Unfortunately, the oil continues to spill, wash up on beaches, and generally wreck the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, while BP continues to keep trying solutions that they’re not confident will work and the government seems to be unable to do anything that will increase the confidence or insist that BP be stuck with the entire bill for cleanup and livelihood damage.
(After all, Congress could use a spot where they're not defecit spending, and walking over pay-go rules just as nicely as the previous administration and Congresses did.)
Information that I did not completely know, put to use to make people shilling for corporations look bad. The Better Business Bureau's reatings are mysteriously higher for those businesses that pay to become "accredited". So when someone shilling for gold-buying companies cites the BBB without irony, they can be accused of Did Not Do The Research.
The recession's shedding of private-sector jobs has produced an all-new low and an all-new high, in the percentage of income coming from private sextor work and government assistance, respectively. The unsustainability of continuing the trend is obvious, but people still need to take care of their needs, even when a capricious private sector creates bubbles and then fires workers when they burst, instead of sacking those responsible for the bubble and trimming down dividends and executive pay/perks.
In North Carolina, Republicans have gone after the Tea Party darling for being insane, and they have proof of his crazy. Even so, the Tea Party candidate was popular enough to have forced the runoff the Republicans are now hoping to win. Things are a bit insane in the political world - perhaps the fact that the Republicans of 2010 and the Republicans of 1866 would have bitterly and ideologically fought each other (as well as both sets of Democrats) has something to do with it?
And finally, President Obama is deploying more than 1,200 National Guard troops to the United States-Mexico border, perhaps in an attempt to look like he's strengthening security so the Papers Please law will go away. That won’t be enough for some, who will insist the government deploy the military to chase and raid across the border so as to quell the drug cartels, kidnappings, and other attacks in the "invasion" of America from Mexico.
If substantiated, Representative Issa suggests that the White House offering Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate race is an impeachable offense. Congressman Issa suggests as well that there’s a cover-up going on about it. The rest of us are waiting for the evidence to appear.
In technology, say hello to the 7-atom transistor. Yes, a quantum dot composed of seven atoms. Nanotech in the air we breathe can’t be far behind.
Genes that contribute to a long lifespan may have been isolated for the first time. And then they’ll start getting spliced in...
The Phoenix Mars Lander mission officially finished yesterday, as NASA scientists were unable to establish communication with the lander. That said, Phoenix outlived its original mission parameters by a little while and collected a lot of data, so the engineers should get a pat on the back for building something with staying power.
Amazon's first experiment in trying to use a Kindle as a replacement for college textbooks is... a failure. For one, you can’t browse quickly, another, highlighting doesn’t work, the bookmarking is buggy, and when doing research, you want to have multiple items open at the same time to synthesize between the authors and to help construct a coherent thought amongst several sources. The Kindle, like any reader that won’t be able to do multiple windows, will be great for fiction or when someone wants to go through one book at a time. For information science and research needs, though, it’s just not going to be able to get there.
Because it's a slow news day, we also get this study claiming that more male babies were miscarried as a result of the stress, tragedy, and grief of the 11 September attacks.
Last out, A group of scientists posits that a major ice age in Terra's history may have been a drop in methane production due to the extinction of megafauna. That’s right - a lack of mammoth farts may have caused an ice age.
And into opinions we go, where worries that after some period of growth, the economy will revert to a recession again absed on international market situations are always lurking somewhere.
There’s a serious beatdown going on in the Internets, where The Infamous Brad leads the way with a common-sense piece about education reform - success and failure do not hinge solely on what teachers are in the classroom and whether they're unionized, no matter how many times anyone else suggests this is the case. The best teachers will fail if they only get the worst context to work with, and some of the worst teachers might turn out brilliant students because they have a support system that helps them strive for excellence. The source material that he’s smashing on? An article from Steven Brill about how teachers' unions are ruining the education system by not letting administrators fire poor performers, by dictating what teachers can and can't do in their day, and hampering efforts to create competitive programs that will inspire teachers and administrators to do more so they can get more funding. (Mostly based on standardized testing, which isn’t worth shit.)
For your satirical education needs, a brief history of the United States, according to the social science curriculum of Texas and the current actions of Arizona.
Mr. Carroll believes the government has overstepped its limited-government Constitutional bounds with the increasing number of commissions and regulatory agencies appointed to find solutions and recommendations for problems and to study the impacts of legislation. He blames Progressivism for the expansion of these entities and finds them to be both the way that government strips the ability of the people to govern themselves (or, rather, for The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) to govern them) and gives itself cover so as not to be accountable to the people when things go wrong.
Turning the “government sucks” idea highly partisan, Ms. Doan says that we should see a refutation of every liberal Obama policy in the fact that Chicago didn't improve, even with Senator Obama directing lots of earmarks to the city. Instead, she says, look at Texas, which is very business-friendly and doing quite well, and that if someone wanted to find the person who made it all happen, they should look at a particular ranch in Crawford. Because he’s entirely blameless for how the national economy went on his watch and Senator Obama was in the Senate. (It’s actually a bti of a catch-22. You can really only say thae last administrator is blameless if you ignore and keep a lot of debt off the books that conservatives have been clamoring to add to the national balance sheet for years.)
Taking that last point into account, actually, Mr. Barone suggests that the referendum in politics for this year will be about reining in spending, rather than being primarily about taxation, and he suggests that anyone who wants to make good on their bids for Congressional seats should do so on the platform that they have a plan to reduce government spending back to levels the people are comfortable with, if not all the way back to within the budget. The other side may have to find a way to jusify the spending on jobs material that they're classing as emergency spending. Much like the previous President sold his supplemental appropriations bills for fighting two land wars in Asia.
If it is about spending and not taxes, I wonder how proposals in states to cap how much in property tax can be collected will fare. Probably well, because Everyone Hates Taxes, even the ones that go to fund the very infrastructure they use unthinkingly every day.
Rasmussen's latest poll data says 63 per cent of the their poll supports repeal of the health care bill, with 67 percent of what they consider mainstream, meaning they trust each other rather than the government thinking it will be bad, while 77 percent of the Political Class, those who trust politicians over the wisdom of the crowds, say it will be good. Well, no wonder they’ve got such nice numbers - the definitions they use for mainstream versus not-mainstream make it damn near impossible for anyone to make it into the Political Class, especially in these times. Also, as with any other poll about the health care bill, they lack the reasons why people oppose it - most of them may be “zOMG SOCIALISM KILLS GRANDMA!”, but there’s a nonzero percentage saying, “Ugh, bailouts to insurance companies? No thanks. Sack them and the bill.”
It all boils down to a conservative mood that nothing the President has done so far has been positive in any way, leading to the wild fantasy that he's deliberately trying to destroy America through systmatically transforming it and giving it all of Europe’s worst excesses.
Mr. Spencer says that the prohibition against images of Mohammed and the violent response to the printing of satirical images is what prompts further satire such as Draw Mohammed Day, and that if Muslims wanted to not be mocked for their beliefs, they should either change them or learn to suffer the indignity without protest. Or, in the words ot the Internet Troll, “Grow a thicker skin.” In a similar vein, Mr. Sowell mends and wends his way along the path, almost stopping in a place that suggests we should be fixing societal problems to help with things like crime rate and poor school performance before remembering he's a conservative, and escaping through "personal responsibility", blaming things on parents, and insisting that the only way to make society safer is to lock up all the people who commit crimes and not waste time or money on things like rehabilitation or prevention programs, because all those do is blame others for the sins of the person in jail.
Last out of opinions, the need for labels - labels, that is, that we define and use on ourselves, along with the presence of mind to either not use our labels on someone else, or to graciously accept the rejection of our labels be someone else who wants to use their own labels to describe themselves. And the need for loudly self-defining when in a culture that mainstream society considers abhorrent or wants to erase.
And finally, an estimate that Google Pac-Man cost the world about $120 million USD in productivity (as well as instructions on how to get back to the game and to download it to your own machine for offline browser-based fun). That, perhaps the greatest sign yet that there are no new ideas, and County Sin rankings.
There also significant geeking out going on in various Rachel Maddow-related places. Because you need geeks to generate things like a visualization of what each country in the world is Number One at. Or a large bunch of mostly Flash-created websites to burn time on.
Good morning, people who believe that “with liberty and justice for all” means everyone, everywhere, with no exceptions. The United States Congress may move this week to repeal the policy in the armed forces that requires anyone found to be LGBT to be dsicharged, allowing everyone to serve in their military capacity more fully. (If it does pass, I’d like to see how many military people decide to quit because they don't want LGBT people in their military life.) Outside in civilian life, the most recent Gallup poll as of this post indicates about a ten point spread between "No LGBT Marriages!" and "Yes LGBT Marriages", with the NO slightly over 50 percent and the YES at about 45.
Western intelligence sources believe they can trace several lines of crime back to a group created and funded by North Korean authorities.
In Canada, the freedom to practice religious customs of dress is running into the need for identification of persons for government services or to testify to crimes that happened. The government’s vested interest in ensuring that the person applying/speaking is indeed the person in question and, in the case of trial, the need for reading facial and bodily cues in testimony adds new wrinkles to finding out ways of reasonably acommodating one’s religion where possible. I wonder if it would be possible to engender a situation where she could show her face and then use remote technology to administer the questioning, for example. Might need some religious scholars to work it all out and make some interpretations that work in concert with the government’s needs. That seems reasonable. The judge, likely not having the time to do such delicate work, ordered the woman to testify with her face uncovered. This also seesm reasonable considering requirements for swift trials and the like. It’s not elegant, nor necessarily the way that will work, but it will do. And now, having talked about reasonableness and the like, I’m going to wonder why Christine Williams comes out swinging about "female repression", and "safety and security" issues, and basically attempts to convince us that Islam is Evil, wants to repress women through full-face covering veils, and Canda's government will let them through multicultralism, instead of potentially violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by demanding they not practice that part of their religion. Well, I suppose, if you think that the bill in Quebec about requiring people to show their face is in relation to this order, and that the people who oppose the bill are deliberately tryign to oppress women, well, okay, I guess I see the logic chain, I just marvel at the way that it encourages Occam to commit homicide along several of the steps.
And, looking back into the past - confirmed. Members of the CIA wanted to create a Saddam sex tape that would portray him as gay and turn the Iraqi people against him, playing on their homophobia. Thus, Trey Parker and Matt Stone turn out, once again, to be oddly prescient about certain things...
The Pentagon is stepping up secret operations around the world, Fox News tells us. (Because they want more money in the Defense Appropriations Budget for such black-ops work?)
Finally, North Korea escalated again, officially severing ties to South Korea in response to the continued blame, pressure, and this-side-of-accusation that the North sank a South Korean warship.
Domestically, a new wrinkle in the Deep Water Horizons oil rig disaster - those who survived the blast claim they were isolated and forced to sign papers claiming they were unharmed and waiving legal rights to seek compensation before they were allowed to have contact with their families and loved ones. If substantiated, then we have another case to prosecute against TransOcean for deliberate cover-ups and intimidation. And if the memo making comparisons between worker lives and the three Little Pigs is substantiated, then we ahve plenty of evidence that it's all rotten to the core. Unfortunately, the oil continues to spill, wash up on beaches, and generally wreck the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, while BP continues to keep trying solutions that they’re not confident will work and the government seems to be unable to do anything that will increase the confidence or insist that BP be stuck with the entire bill for cleanup and livelihood damage.
(After all, Congress could use a spot where they're not defecit spending, and walking over pay-go rules just as nicely as the previous administration and Congresses did.)
Information that I did not completely know, put to use to make people shilling for corporations look bad. The Better Business Bureau's reatings are mysteriously higher for those businesses that pay to become "accredited". So when someone shilling for gold-buying companies cites the BBB without irony, they can be accused of Did Not Do The Research.
The recession's shedding of private-sector jobs has produced an all-new low and an all-new high, in the percentage of income coming from private sextor work and government assistance, respectively. The unsustainability of continuing the trend is obvious, but people still need to take care of their needs, even when a capricious private sector creates bubbles and then fires workers when they burst, instead of sacking those responsible for the bubble and trimming down dividends and executive pay/perks.
In North Carolina, Republicans have gone after the Tea Party darling for being insane, and they have proof of his crazy. Even so, the Tea Party candidate was popular enough to have forced the runoff the Republicans are now hoping to win. Things are a bit insane in the political world - perhaps the fact that the Republicans of 2010 and the Republicans of 1866 would have bitterly and ideologically fought each other (as well as both sets of Democrats) has something to do with it?
And finally, President Obama is deploying more than 1,200 National Guard troops to the United States-Mexico border, perhaps in an attempt to look like he's strengthening security so the Papers Please law will go away. That won’t be enough for some, who will insist the government deploy the military to chase and raid across the border so as to quell the drug cartels, kidnappings, and other attacks in the "invasion" of America from Mexico.
If substantiated, Representative Issa suggests that the White House offering Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate race is an impeachable offense. Congressman Issa suggests as well that there’s a cover-up going on about it. The rest of us are waiting for the evidence to appear.
In technology, say hello to the 7-atom transistor. Yes, a quantum dot composed of seven atoms. Nanotech in the air we breathe can’t be far behind.
Genes that contribute to a long lifespan may have been isolated for the first time. And then they’ll start getting spliced in...
The Phoenix Mars Lander mission officially finished yesterday, as NASA scientists were unable to establish communication with the lander. That said, Phoenix outlived its original mission parameters by a little while and collected a lot of data, so the engineers should get a pat on the back for building something with staying power.
Amazon's first experiment in trying to use a Kindle as a replacement for college textbooks is... a failure. For one, you can’t browse quickly, another, highlighting doesn’t work, the bookmarking is buggy, and when doing research, you want to have multiple items open at the same time to synthesize between the authors and to help construct a coherent thought amongst several sources. The Kindle, like any reader that won’t be able to do multiple windows, will be great for fiction or when someone wants to go through one book at a time. For information science and research needs, though, it’s just not going to be able to get there.
Because it's a slow news day, we also get this study claiming that more male babies were miscarried as a result of the stress, tragedy, and grief of the 11 September attacks.
Last out, A group of scientists posits that a major ice age in Terra's history may have been a drop in methane production due to the extinction of megafauna. That’s right - a lack of mammoth farts may have caused an ice age.
And into opinions we go, where worries that after some period of growth, the economy will revert to a recession again absed on international market situations are always lurking somewhere.
There’s a serious beatdown going on in the Internets, where The Infamous Brad leads the way with a common-sense piece about education reform - success and failure do not hinge solely on what teachers are in the classroom and whether they're unionized, no matter how many times anyone else suggests this is the case. The best teachers will fail if they only get the worst context to work with, and some of the worst teachers might turn out brilliant students because they have a support system that helps them strive for excellence. The source material that he’s smashing on? An article from Steven Brill about how teachers' unions are ruining the education system by not letting administrators fire poor performers, by dictating what teachers can and can't do in their day, and hampering efforts to create competitive programs that will inspire teachers and administrators to do more so they can get more funding. (Mostly based on standardized testing, which isn’t worth shit.)
For your satirical education needs, a brief history of the United States, according to the social science curriculum of Texas and the current actions of Arizona.
Mr. Carroll believes the government has overstepped its limited-government Constitutional bounds with the increasing number of commissions and regulatory agencies appointed to find solutions and recommendations for problems and to study the impacts of legislation. He blames Progressivism for the expansion of these entities and finds them to be both the way that government strips the ability of the people to govern themselves (or, rather, for The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) to govern them) and gives itself cover so as not to be accountable to the people when things go wrong.
Turning the “government sucks” idea highly partisan, Ms. Doan says that we should see a refutation of every liberal Obama policy in the fact that Chicago didn't improve, even with Senator Obama directing lots of earmarks to the city. Instead, she says, look at Texas, which is very business-friendly and doing quite well, and that if someone wanted to find the person who made it all happen, they should look at a particular ranch in Crawford. Because he’s entirely blameless for how the national economy went on his watch and Senator Obama was in the Senate. (It’s actually a bti of a catch-22. You can really only say thae last administrator is blameless if you ignore and keep a lot of debt off the books that conservatives have been clamoring to add to the national balance sheet for years.)
Taking that last point into account, actually, Mr. Barone suggests that the referendum in politics for this year will be about reining in spending, rather than being primarily about taxation, and he suggests that anyone who wants to make good on their bids for Congressional seats should do so on the platform that they have a plan to reduce government spending back to levels the people are comfortable with, if not all the way back to within the budget. The other side may have to find a way to jusify the spending on jobs material that they're classing as emergency spending. Much like the previous President sold his supplemental appropriations bills for fighting two land wars in Asia.
If it is about spending and not taxes, I wonder how proposals in states to cap how much in property tax can be collected will fare. Probably well, because Everyone Hates Taxes, even the ones that go to fund the very infrastructure they use unthinkingly every day.
Rasmussen's latest poll data says 63 per cent of the their poll supports repeal of the health care bill, with 67 percent of what they consider mainstream, meaning they trust each other rather than the government thinking it will be bad, while 77 percent of the Political Class, those who trust politicians over the wisdom of the crowds, say it will be good. Well, no wonder they’ve got such nice numbers - the definitions they use for mainstream versus not-mainstream make it damn near impossible for anyone to make it into the Political Class, especially in these times. Also, as with any other poll about the health care bill, they lack the reasons why people oppose it - most of them may be “zOMG SOCIALISM KILLS GRANDMA!”, but there’s a nonzero percentage saying, “Ugh, bailouts to insurance companies? No thanks. Sack them and the bill.”
It all boils down to a conservative mood that nothing the President has done so far has been positive in any way, leading to the wild fantasy that he's deliberately trying to destroy America through systmatically transforming it and giving it all of Europe’s worst excesses.
Mr. Spencer says that the prohibition against images of Mohammed and the violent response to the printing of satirical images is what prompts further satire such as Draw Mohammed Day, and that if Muslims wanted to not be mocked for their beliefs, they should either change them or learn to suffer the indignity without protest. Or, in the words ot the Internet Troll, “Grow a thicker skin.” In a similar vein, Mr. Sowell mends and wends his way along the path, almost stopping in a place that suggests we should be fixing societal problems to help with things like crime rate and poor school performance before remembering he's a conservative, and escaping through "personal responsibility", blaming things on parents, and insisting that the only way to make society safer is to lock up all the people who commit crimes and not waste time or money on things like rehabilitation or prevention programs, because all those do is blame others for the sins of the person in jail.
Last out of opinions, the need for labels - labels, that is, that we define and use on ourselves, along with the presence of mind to either not use our labels on someone else, or to graciously accept the rejection of our labels be someone else who wants to use their own labels to describe themselves. And the need for loudly self-defining when in a culture that mainstream society considers abhorrent or wants to erase.
And finally, an estimate that Google Pac-Man cost the world about $120 million USD in productivity (as well as instructions on how to get back to the game and to download it to your own machine for offline browser-based fun). That, perhaps the greatest sign yet that there are no new ideas, and County Sin rankings.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-27 05:35 pm (UTC)that link is a 404 message. the correct URI is http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/24/north-korea-elite-linked-to-crime/
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Date: 2010-05-28 12:04 am (UTC)