![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning, those who hope for a disease-free world. The Future may be closer to us with the announcement of what may be a vaccination against most forms of breast cancer, through targeting of certain protiens common to the most likely strains of cancer. Human trials are a ways off, and the complete product may not be ready for ten years or more down the line, but if this line of research pans out into a useful product, it could create a completely new line of preventative medicines (and generate a vaccination schedule for many of us in our later years, filling in the gap between kid vaccinations and elder vaccinations against the things that come back to haunt us later).
Out in the world today, The police saw a car with a window open and towed it to stop it and its contents from being stolen. They now, naturally, want the driver to pay the tow fee.
After significant pressure from worldwide governments and NGOs, Israel will release and deport the persons it took captive from the Gaza aid flotilla it raided yesterday.
Back here in the States, can we find someone here to investigate an oil company that hasn't spent a lifetime in it? It’s great that the Justice Department is looking into both civil and criminal cases against BP for this disaster, now that they’re basically waiting for the relief well to be drilled, but there’s got to be enough people around who can do a proper investigation of what went down that don’t have oil industry ties and can thus be seens as free from influence. Plus, they might also help stop BP from screening and denying access to reporters using a security company that's already been scandalized by a horrible hazing environment, including vodka shots off of anuses.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that one must affirmatively invoke one's Miranda rights to use them, and that simply refusing to speak or staying silent but allowing the questioning to continue is an indication that one has waived those rights and anything said later on can be used. The liberal wing of the court, led by Sotomayor, blasted the decision as both against precedent and against the spirit of the Miranda requirement.
Representative King claims that unions, the ACLU, and Muslims have taken over the Justice Department and are calling the real shots, which bodes exceedingly ill for the Papers Please law and other measures that the Representative no doubt believes are sane and essetnial laws and policies toward non-white people. I wonder whether he will also believe those three are responsible for the Justice Department currently not designating one agency or person to be the boss in case of a weapon of mass destruction attack.
On the politics of November, With so many hot-button social conservative issues raised in the course of the first half, the religious right may be energized sufficiently to be a player in midterm elections. This does not, however, guarantee that they will vote Republican, as a significant number of Blue Dog-style Demcorats may be seeking their vote and running as a candidate that will help rein in the Administration by sabotaging it from the majoirty position.
The passed eventual repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has pitted the people who can authorize the repeal after the study is done against the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are mostly rankled that the civilian leadership and the Chairman are telling them what they have to do instead of letting them continue to discriminate against openly LGBT people on pretenses that don’t play out in actual experience. Hell, from some of the accounts I’ve read, being gay is less problematic than being non-Christian.
In technology and sciences, a startup found its niche by collecting compostable waste from restaurants and performing the composting off-site, charging the restaurants less than other services.
Logic gates constructed of strands of DNA herald the possibility of injectable organic computing devices that can tailor their response patterns based on the markers they detect - multiple payloads loaded, one released based on what it detects is attempting to infect.
At&&T has decided to eliminate the unlimited iPhone data plan, will charge extra to allow other devices to tether to the phone, all in the hopes that their 3G network stablizes and allows more people to access the mobile Internet.
Finally, a conversation with a neuroscientist intrigued by the way all creatures work and respond to music, including the possibility of using musical phrases to return some speech ability to those whose language centers are damaged. (And the remarkable ability of even advanced Alzheimer’s patients to remember, in the proper order, the words to songs they have sung in their lives.)
Going up to the opinions department, The Infamous Brad calls anybody whose primary attack methods are to strike at unarmed civilians, because engaging the proper defense/military forces means your own people might get hurt or killed, cowards, and that extends to both the rulers of Gaza and the people who just attacked a flotilla of aid ships. Elsewhere on the issue, Mr. Carroll is swift to defend Israel's right to attack civilians, insists that the United States must forever be in lockstep with Israel, and that they should be doing more to directly stop Iran from doing more nuclear stuff and Mr. Hornik insists the pacifists were in fact, violent to the core and beat up the commandos before the commandos were allowed to fire their handguns, making them all “jihadis” because they have ties to dubious places and because they were intending to confront Israel when they sailed.
Mr. Weissberg suggests that the unease people feel with Barack Obama's presidency is that it's apparently similar to what life would be like if America were ruled by some outside entity that had its own ideas, agendas, and designs in mind, regardless of how that affected the people. He thinks Americans feel like they’ve lost the capacity for self-rule, and so the reappearance of imagery and words recalling the War of Independence is completely justified, tapping into our subconscious. If he’s right, then America has lost the capacity to imagine even centrism as something that can happen in America. I wonder what the phrases would be like if an actual liberal were somehow elected to the Presidency. Would there be some sort of epithet past the socialism/communism department that the president is routinely accused of being? Either way, it’s a scary thought, not because we’re supposed to believe that Barack Obama is ruling like a foreign king and we never liked that, but that the political imagination of America has diminshed so greatly that anything other than social conservatism mixed with corporatism, jingoism, and belligerence is considered alien, foreign, and unacceptable as a governing philosophy. That’s scary.
Ms. Williams peers into the case of a man who claims he had an agreement with his girlfriend that if she got prengant (again), they'd abort, and that he shouldn't have to pay child support because she carried the child to term and gave birth over his objections. It has thus become a poster case for the Men’s Rights Organization, who believe that men should be able to have some control over whether or not the women in their lives have children. Which trips the very well-aimed trigger of I Blame the Patriarchy, pointing out that the only 100 percent effective way of not getting pregnant is not having sex, and that once the decision to have sex and ejaculate is made, it's basically out of the hands of the man what happens next. It is the same argument that women should not be given a choice on whether they want to have a kid, but in this case, the mother chooses to have the kid when the man doesn’t want her to, instead of the woman choosing not to have a kid when the man and the society are telling her she has to. There’s further taking of the conclusion that once given, an agreement is binding all the way out to the fringe end, where every woman is always and forever saying yes to any man that she encounters, because she dresses a certain way, or she agreed to it once with someone, somewhere. We’ll have to see how the courts decide this one.
On the matter of the oil spill, Mr. Boortz blames environmentalists for the scope of the disaster, because their decrees apparently forced oil companies to move further out to drill instead of letting them stay closer to shore, where disastrous explosions would have even less time to make it to the shore and begin contaminating the ground.
Mr. Will considers the latest attempts by President Obama to give him some measure of control on spending to be shadow puppetry, because the grand majority of the budget as is will never be denied passage, with entitlements and defense covering more than three-fourths of the budget.
We return to Mr. Boortz, as he complains the media is not covering all of the swastikas and Nazi comparisons on the Papers Please law, one that would require persons who are not white to carry their identification with them at all times or risk fines, jail time, and deportation back to their home countries. Can’t understand at all why someone might invoke a historical example where non-white people were required to carry papers at all times and even then faces fines, jail time, deportation, or extermination.
Mr. Hawkins returns to a familiar well in claiming the President lives in fantasyland where people get along and cooperate on big international issues, isntead of only going along to get along or going along until they can find the right point to stab each other in the back. Running counter to that idea, Mr. Brooks suggests that the people are the ones living in fantasyland, expecting the President to be able to do things he can't, a government to run effectively without corporate corruption, and corporations and the individual people to be able to run purely without the spectre of government corruption. Mr. Brooks points out about the only place such desires can land is in comrpomise, where we should go, to regulate enough to minimize disaster risk but not to kill innovation. (It can also end in the looney bin, if those contradictions don’t get resolves or the people are insistent that all of those competing things be done at the same time.)
Mr. Tapscott shouts fire and damnation about the results of an FTC worksop on reinvigorating journalism, citing all sorts of people making opinions about the proposal, but providing no links to the primary source itself. Fact-checking ability? Never. For those who want to do their own research, the data and presentations are available from the FTC itself, without snark attached. These are policy proposals, generated from a workshop in March. If/when any of them get adopted or put up for serious adoption, then someone can scream their head off all they like, but this is premature at best and fearmongering at worst.
Finally, staying in the journalism vein, Mr. O'Rourke suggests that newspapers begin a column of "Pre-Obituaries", where columnists can talk about the still living and say why they should already be dead because of all the bad things they've done. He naturally provides a few capsule examples, most of them aimed at liberals, feminists, pop culture figures, and Randy Newman, although he does throw a small bone to the liberal crowd by talking about alleged and actual philanderers as deserving of Pre-Obits.
Last out for tonight, the conservative graduation speech to encourage students to go into the private sector, compete, and invent, and thus drive the real economy instead of listening to bureaucrats extol the virtues of becoming bureaucrats in the name of making a difference. Missing the point entirely of volunteerism and public service, which performs a lot of needed functions. Want to start your business? The library has information and provides it as a public service. Want people to buy your product or service? Then they need to know it’s manufactured safely and that you’re a competent person, which requires regulation and licensing. Do you want to help the poor? Good, we’d like to make sure that you’re not going to rip them off, or rip your donors off, and that you’re actually qualified to do the work that you want to do. Oh, the bureaucracy! Just making sure that everyone comes out of it alive, safe, and better off than they were before. And by the time you graduate, really, most people have an idea of what they want to do with themselves, whether in the public or private sector. They’re ready to walk the walk, and most of them will be good enough at it. Some will be brilliant, some mediocre, and there’s always the chance that someone will become a CEO and drive an entire sector of the economy into the ground. Them’s the breaks. Praising the private sector over the public sector mindlessly does them all the good you perceive is done to them by praising the public sector mindlessly over the private one.
Out in the world today, The police saw a car with a window open and towed it to stop it and its contents from being stolen. They now, naturally, want the driver to pay the tow fee.
After significant pressure from worldwide governments and NGOs, Israel will release and deport the persons it took captive from the Gaza aid flotilla it raided yesterday.
Back here in the States, can we find someone here to investigate an oil company that hasn't spent a lifetime in it? It’s great that the Justice Department is looking into both civil and criminal cases against BP for this disaster, now that they’re basically waiting for the relief well to be drilled, but there’s got to be enough people around who can do a proper investigation of what went down that don’t have oil industry ties and can thus be seens as free from influence. Plus, they might also help stop BP from screening and denying access to reporters using a security company that's already been scandalized by a horrible hazing environment, including vodka shots off of anuses.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that one must affirmatively invoke one's Miranda rights to use them, and that simply refusing to speak or staying silent but allowing the questioning to continue is an indication that one has waived those rights and anything said later on can be used. The liberal wing of the court, led by Sotomayor, blasted the decision as both against precedent and against the spirit of the Miranda requirement.
Representative King claims that unions, the ACLU, and Muslims have taken over the Justice Department and are calling the real shots, which bodes exceedingly ill for the Papers Please law and other measures that the Representative no doubt believes are sane and essetnial laws and policies toward non-white people. I wonder whether he will also believe those three are responsible for the Justice Department currently not designating one agency or person to be the boss in case of a weapon of mass destruction attack.
On the politics of November, With so many hot-button social conservative issues raised in the course of the first half, the religious right may be energized sufficiently to be a player in midterm elections. This does not, however, guarantee that they will vote Republican, as a significant number of Blue Dog-style Demcorats may be seeking their vote and running as a candidate that will help rein in the Administration by sabotaging it from the majoirty position.
The passed eventual repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has pitted the people who can authorize the repeal after the study is done against the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are mostly rankled that the civilian leadership and the Chairman are telling them what they have to do instead of letting them continue to discriminate against openly LGBT people on pretenses that don’t play out in actual experience. Hell, from some of the accounts I’ve read, being gay is less problematic than being non-Christian.
In technology and sciences, a startup found its niche by collecting compostable waste from restaurants and performing the composting off-site, charging the restaurants less than other services.
Logic gates constructed of strands of DNA herald the possibility of injectable organic computing devices that can tailor their response patterns based on the markers they detect - multiple payloads loaded, one released based on what it detects is attempting to infect.
At&&T has decided to eliminate the unlimited iPhone data plan, will charge extra to allow other devices to tether to the phone, all in the hopes that their 3G network stablizes and allows more people to access the mobile Internet.
Finally, a conversation with a neuroscientist intrigued by the way all creatures work and respond to music, including the possibility of using musical phrases to return some speech ability to those whose language centers are damaged. (And the remarkable ability of even advanced Alzheimer’s patients to remember, in the proper order, the words to songs they have sung in their lives.)
Going up to the opinions department, The Infamous Brad calls anybody whose primary attack methods are to strike at unarmed civilians, because engaging the proper defense/military forces means your own people might get hurt or killed, cowards, and that extends to both the rulers of Gaza and the people who just attacked a flotilla of aid ships. Elsewhere on the issue, Mr. Carroll is swift to defend Israel's right to attack civilians, insists that the United States must forever be in lockstep with Israel, and that they should be doing more to directly stop Iran from doing more nuclear stuff and Mr. Hornik insists the pacifists were in fact, violent to the core and beat up the commandos before the commandos were allowed to fire their handguns, making them all “jihadis” because they have ties to dubious places and because they were intending to confront Israel when they sailed.
Mr. Weissberg suggests that the unease people feel with Barack Obama's presidency is that it's apparently similar to what life would be like if America were ruled by some outside entity that had its own ideas, agendas, and designs in mind, regardless of how that affected the people. He thinks Americans feel like they’ve lost the capacity for self-rule, and so the reappearance of imagery and words recalling the War of Independence is completely justified, tapping into our subconscious. If he’s right, then America has lost the capacity to imagine even centrism as something that can happen in America. I wonder what the phrases would be like if an actual liberal were somehow elected to the Presidency. Would there be some sort of epithet past the socialism/communism department that the president is routinely accused of being? Either way, it’s a scary thought, not because we’re supposed to believe that Barack Obama is ruling like a foreign king and we never liked that, but that the political imagination of America has diminshed so greatly that anything other than social conservatism mixed with corporatism, jingoism, and belligerence is considered alien, foreign, and unacceptable as a governing philosophy. That’s scary.
Ms. Williams peers into the case of a man who claims he had an agreement with his girlfriend that if she got prengant (again), they'd abort, and that he shouldn't have to pay child support because she carried the child to term and gave birth over his objections. It has thus become a poster case for the Men’s Rights Organization, who believe that men should be able to have some control over whether or not the women in their lives have children. Which trips the very well-aimed trigger of I Blame the Patriarchy, pointing out that the only 100 percent effective way of not getting pregnant is not having sex, and that once the decision to have sex and ejaculate is made, it's basically out of the hands of the man what happens next. It is the same argument that women should not be given a choice on whether they want to have a kid, but in this case, the mother chooses to have the kid when the man doesn’t want her to, instead of the woman choosing not to have a kid when the man and the society are telling her she has to. There’s further taking of the conclusion that once given, an agreement is binding all the way out to the fringe end, where every woman is always and forever saying yes to any man that she encounters, because she dresses a certain way, or she agreed to it once with someone, somewhere. We’ll have to see how the courts decide this one.
On the matter of the oil spill, Mr. Boortz blames environmentalists for the scope of the disaster, because their decrees apparently forced oil companies to move further out to drill instead of letting them stay closer to shore, where disastrous explosions would have even less time to make it to the shore and begin contaminating the ground.
Mr. Will considers the latest attempts by President Obama to give him some measure of control on spending to be shadow puppetry, because the grand majority of the budget as is will never be denied passage, with entitlements and defense covering more than three-fourths of the budget.
We return to Mr. Boortz, as he complains the media is not covering all of the swastikas and Nazi comparisons on the Papers Please law, one that would require persons who are not white to carry their identification with them at all times or risk fines, jail time, and deportation back to their home countries. Can’t understand at all why someone might invoke a historical example where non-white people were required to carry papers at all times and even then faces fines, jail time, deportation, or extermination.
Mr. Hawkins returns to a familiar well in claiming the President lives in fantasyland where people get along and cooperate on big international issues, isntead of only going along to get along or going along until they can find the right point to stab each other in the back. Running counter to that idea, Mr. Brooks suggests that the people are the ones living in fantasyland, expecting the President to be able to do things he can't, a government to run effectively without corporate corruption, and corporations and the individual people to be able to run purely without the spectre of government corruption. Mr. Brooks points out about the only place such desires can land is in comrpomise, where we should go, to regulate enough to minimize disaster risk but not to kill innovation. (It can also end in the looney bin, if those contradictions don’t get resolves or the people are insistent that all of those competing things be done at the same time.)
Mr. Tapscott shouts fire and damnation about the results of an FTC worksop on reinvigorating journalism, citing all sorts of people making opinions about the proposal, but providing no links to the primary source itself. Fact-checking ability? Never. For those who want to do their own research, the data and presentations are available from the FTC itself, without snark attached. These are policy proposals, generated from a workshop in March. If/when any of them get adopted or put up for serious adoption, then someone can scream their head off all they like, but this is premature at best and fearmongering at worst.
Finally, staying in the journalism vein, Mr. O'Rourke suggests that newspapers begin a column of "Pre-Obituaries", where columnists can talk about the still living and say why they should already be dead because of all the bad things they've done. He naturally provides a few capsule examples, most of them aimed at liberals, feminists, pop culture figures, and Randy Newman, although he does throw a small bone to the liberal crowd by talking about alleged and actual philanderers as deserving of Pre-Obits.
Last out for tonight, the conservative graduation speech to encourage students to go into the private sector, compete, and invent, and thus drive the real economy instead of listening to bureaucrats extol the virtues of becoming bureaucrats in the name of making a difference. Missing the point entirely of volunteerism and public service, which performs a lot of needed functions. Want to start your business? The library has information and provides it as a public service. Want people to buy your product or service? Then they need to know it’s manufactured safely and that you’re a competent person, which requires regulation and licensing. Do you want to help the poor? Good, we’d like to make sure that you’re not going to rip them off, or rip your donors off, and that you’re actually qualified to do the work that you want to do. Oh, the bureaucracy! Just making sure that everyone comes out of it alive, safe, and better off than they were before. And by the time you graduate, really, most people have an idea of what they want to do with themselves, whether in the public or private sector. They’re ready to walk the walk, and most of them will be good enough at it. Some will be brilliant, some mediocre, and there’s always the chance that someone will become a CEO and drive an entire sector of the economy into the ground. Them’s the breaks. Praising the private sector over the public sector mindlessly does them all the good you perceive is done to them by praising the public sector mindlessly over the private one.
