Big Giant News Dump - 11-13 June 2010
Jun. 14th, 2010 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning, peoples of The Future! See a letter from the creator of Star Trek talking about his philosophy, the fans that make the series great, and NBC's decision to cancel. Also, apparently, a little bit of making Spock look devilish while playing his personality to be opposite that.
Also, of interest to you and others, See what happens when a four year-old picks up Grand Theft Auto. Here’s a hint: The sandbox possibilities of the world of GTA means that a four year old can do all the things they want to do when they grow up.
And something that might help explain why we have good days and bad - self control is an exhaustible resource, according to a study - which can mean that if your job kills all your self control becaue you can’t use the fist of death, when you get home, things may deteriorate further in relationships because you don’t have the self-control you need for the rest. This then casts the way to create a sick system, whether corporate or personal, into a new light, as the system created is one deliberately designed to run you ragged and pervent you from doing any actual thinking, and always make sure you don’t have any self-control left.
Outside in the world today, The United States military is looking for the founder of the Wikileaks website, fearing that their intelligence leak had already transmitted more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to the site. The suggestion may be that they’re looking for him to do him harm and arrest him for possessing such things. The Daily Beast also interviews someone who had a hit squad out after him for advice to the Wikileaks founder.
Iceland rocks their way into the Century of the Fruitbat, legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians.
Israel's Gaza blockade is economic warfare against Hamas, according to internal documents published by McClatchy News, making it more a siege than a security measure. Speaking of the country, Saudia Arabia is getting ready so that they won't shoot down Israeli planes if they're on their way to nuke Iran's nuclear sites.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is alleged to be expressing doubts that the NATO group in his country trying to defeat the Taliban will succeed. I’m sure that thought isn’t helped by reports indicating governmental entities in Pakistan are roviding funding and training to Taliban persons in Afghanistan. That said, columnists here in America think we can win, and they clearly know more about it that the President, so he should buck up and share in the optimism.
Inside the United States, you know you've been burned when the guy who shouted "You Lie!" at the president in the Congressional halls says your comment was inappropriate.
Looking for a cool $1 trillion to trim over the next few years to help with the deficit? Represenative Frank and others have a plan that can knock that much out of the defense budget without compromising security. Okay, deficit hawks, here’s your chance to prove you’re about reducing the debt instead of trying to systematically dismantle the social programs of the country. The President requested 50 billion in emergency funding for states and local governments to keep public services and education going, but he’s not getting much for traction on his party or the other.
Nevada's Republican candidate for Senate came out swinging, attempting to reverse classification of her as a "whack job" through the tried and true method of "No, YOU are".
The defeated primary candidate in the South Carolina Senate race has hired on some analysts to see whether there is anything improper about the election. Statistically, there’s a good chance of serious abnormality, but things could be explainable by pointing out that anyone can vote in the primaries.
The Senators of Maine are suddenly very eager to have a company that is now producing boom for oil seepage have lots bought - without necessarily having it first be tested for effectiveness. That’s interesting, although one wonders how much expediency should be applied now that estimaes of the spill's flow and amount have been revised upward to about double what they were before.
And finally, to remind you that the Tea Party is still about emotion rather than logic, Tea Partiers in Gwinnet County, Georgia, are protesting the adoption of mandatory trash pickup service for all the residents of the county. That’s right, they’re protesting that they’re going to get trash pickup from the city. Sorry for the convenience.
Into technology, where the wave of requirments for students to have laptops is still gaining momentum in the high school market - a school in Salem, Massachusettes is requiring the purchase or lease of Macbooks that conform to the school's standards. As we keep mentioning, Little Brother is suppsoed to be a cautionary tale, not a handbook. Not that anyone seems to be listening. Microsoft is installing secret extensions to Firefox again, deciding that they have the power to mess with your browser and that you should just accept it and move on. Have we mentioned that Microsoft's near-monopolistic dominance and lax security policies makes people weak against cyber-attacks lately?
And then there’s the Big Brother part of Little Brother, kind of like how Australia is still gunning to require ISPs to keep the browsing history of all their customers for up to five years, in case the government wants to find that they've been doing something illegal and arrest them for it. And of course, they’re screaming about “paedophiles” and “terrorists” as their justification.
Well, at least SCO lost again, and so it's even less likely anyone will let them try to convice us that Linux is an unauthorized UNIX derivative.
And a judge ruled that border searches are still legal, but seizing and then searching again later requires a search warrant. Hooray. Still better to present a blank laptop to the border agents if/when you travel.
Anyway, in happier things - Japan unveils a solar sail on the IKAROS craft, and now we get to see how well it works, and Japan's Hayabusa craft lands in Woomera, Australia, carrying a payload of an asteroid sample it picked up years ago.
Last out, we're beginning to develop technology to project stereoscopy (three dimensions) without having to wear the glasses. And then, if we can make those interfaces haptic...
Beginning the opinion section - The Slacktivist returns to the theme of using one's brain to interpret the rules so they follow the important ones, and how that means we change our opinions on usury and should change our opinions on LGBT, because if your reading of the rules say that not having love for someone is the right way to go, then your doin’ it rong.
Mr. Hofstader slices the langauge at the right angle and reconstructs it so as to point out the inherent assumptions and biases of the language that we take for granted - and why it might be worthwhile to fix the language so as to not have those biases. How so? Well, start with replacing the world “man” with “white” and “woman” with “black” and see what happens...
Mr. Harsanyi attempts to resolve his "Good riddance!" and " bad precedent" issues in the Helen Thomas case, skillfully pointing out that a columnist losing their job over a political statement is a bad idea (if you believe that the government and liberals are intent on censoring anything they don’t like, which he does) while indicating how much contempt he held her in in the first place.It sounds to me like he’s saying “she should have been fired for her views, because they suck and are poorly thought out, but she shouldn’t have been fired for expressing her views because they ran counter to the CW”. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Which reason are you assuming, Mr. Harsanyi?
Mr. Ajami still wishes to castigate Barack Obama on his apparent non-response to the Green Revolution of Iran, even though he admits that Presidential involvement in the matter might not have changed the outcome. Mr. J. Klein find a way to complain about the new sancations against Iran, seemingly now at the nitpicking stage, which would imply he thinks the thing itself is actually pretty good. The Washington Times doesn't even address the sanctions, choosing to instead claim that diplomacy for the President is failing because of his voting record on Iran sanctions in the UN compared to the previous administrator.
WORLD magazine offers an article about the still-going-strong one child policy of China, doing their best to describe all the grisly details of abortions and the incentives in place that create them, but I’m not sure whether they’re trying to inspire Christian anger against the godless communists or put off audiences in America on the still-needed legality of abortion.
The Washington Times presents us another data set that confirms their opinion about climate change - this time the expansion of shorline of certain Pacific islands. They poke at Al Gore and say he should offer a refund for people who bought his fictional work, now that all of the grand tenants of climate change are supposedly debunked. We suggest glasses to correct their near-sightedness so they can actually see the time scale at which many climate change dangers appear.
Mr. Hanson says that Turkey is about to become an enemy instead of an ally thanks to their growing Muslim population and their lesser importance in defending the West against the Godless Communists, so we can expect Israel to still be the One True Democracy of the Middle East.
And in the politics of the country, Mr. Ortega spins a truly terrifying tale of the federal government taking control of your child's education and spending more of your taxpayer-earned dollars to satisfy bloated teacher's unions without improving anything. Terrifying, that is, if the arrow he loosed was aiming anywhere near the target. Despite the continued insistence that unions are evil and we’re already spending too much on schools, that’s not actually the problem with the school systems. Incentives that insist that school is about test-taking and not learning and a blindness to how much influence the community around a school has on the success of its students are. The brightest school in the most poor neighborhood is not going to be able to do much other than struggle to convince the kids that they can get away by learning.
The WSJ claps their hands delightedly at how primary races are turning out and the results of new, Tea-infused blood being injected into general elections, and hopes that they can manage to overcome the obviously negative and personal attacks coming from Democrats desperate to defend their radical agenda. Gee, have no idea whose corner these people are in, do we?
Mr. Steyn runs with the latest "other" idea that President Obama is governing the country as if he were a citizen of the world, instead of a citizen of America, fierce and proud of his country, and that makes him a generalist at best, an empty suit trying to pose as a man of action at worst. So we have a President who doesn’t feel the need to get all jingoistic - perhaps his perspective will be helpful in actually getting us to move toward the Number One “everyone knows” America is. After all, we have plenty of people claiming that a lack of government and complete trust in The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) in our lives is what made America the prosperous Number One that it is now, despite clear examples of how that trust is wrong and hurting us all. Mr. Rove picks up the theme of the absent president, claiming that he's been late and ineffective in handling the oil spill and that he's really only been approving what Congress drafts instead of rolling up his sleeves and trying to get into teh business of making bills. So, wait, Karl, you’re complaining about a President that is apparently respecting the divisions of power outlined in the Constitution? Are you sure you want to go down that road?
Mr. Elder provides justification for thinking liberals are economic morons by citing as many conservative-leaning sources he can get a hold of, saying the stimulus failed by citing the private-business industry association we mentioned much earlier on that said “No, we’re not giving anyone any new jobs. Stop looking at our profit sheets.”, claiming the CBO said the stimulus article failed by quoting a Washington Times article about it and referencing the poll we mentioned earlier about liberals’ supposed economic ignorance, claiming the matter of good/bad is immaterial and the “pure” answer was the only one that counted.
Ms. Noonan frets about the recent report indicating the federal government is still unprepared to handle a WMD attack on the United States. How interesting that we’re now seeing these reports, in the context of the disaster, and a new presidency, as if they weren’t getting a lot of press under the President who routinely boasted that he had kept us safe... - and, of course, are now making lots of money on the lecture circuit saying how much worse the current Presidency is and justifying what they did before them as legal and the right thing to do.
Running out of opinions, and thus scraping the bottom of the barrel for people who would qualify for a Worst Persons award, Representative Gomert of Texas suggests the Obama administration would condone attacks against TSA personnel if people just tried to peacefully overwhelm airport security and then started beating and knifing the agents, trying to draw a parallel between this and Israel’s response to the Gaza aid flotilla. It has about as much sense as The Washington Times editorial that says the counterterrorism expert is fishing for nothing and being deliberately ignorant by not immediately saying "They hate us because their religion is one of terrorism and conquering to get their way", and should be delegitimized in the country and Ms. Fields' column basically saying all intellectuals are to be distrusted because they don't immediately denounce Islam as the bloody violent terrorist religion and venerate Israel Who Can Do No Wrong.
At the end of it all, however, is Ms. West, who just can't understand why the mainstream media would have a vicious reaction to a book authored by a WingNutDaily columnist claiming the President is a radical bent on destroying America, unless they were somehow covering for his radicalness, because, after all, the book is selling quite well among the populace. You may invoke P.T. Barnum at your leisure. It might also be because those respectable reporters did due diligence in investigations of the President, found nothing really to suggest that he’s a secret socialist, and moved on to actual news, instead of hanging back in the back with the Birthers and staking their credibility on something that goes nowhere and does nothing. If you think the President has been governing like a socialist radical, take your blinders off and look again. But if you want to see communists under every corner of the Obama Administration, read this review that claims the books is well-documented and necessary for any freedom-loving American, because the President clearly has ties to socialists and extremists everywhere you look.
But if you want Worst Persons in the World, once again the Real World trumps column-land by a wide margin. Teacher tells school she's pregnant. School asks when she conceived. Turns out it was before she was married. School fires her, denying her maternity leave, and then tells the entire community that she was fornicating and they fired her. Understandably humiliated (and likely royally pissed off), teacher sues the school district for humiliating her and for firing her. Courts may decide she could be fired and exposed in this way, but regardless of how it turns out, the Southland Christian School is now on notice as the Worst People In The World.
At the very end, however, is something that will help your spelling-bee people, and others looking for just the right prefix - Prefixes and Words based on Latin number names.
Also, of interest to you and others, See what happens when a four year-old picks up Grand Theft Auto. Here’s a hint: The sandbox possibilities of the world of GTA means that a four year old can do all the things they want to do when they grow up.
And something that might help explain why we have good days and bad - self control is an exhaustible resource, according to a study - which can mean that if your job kills all your self control becaue you can’t use the fist of death, when you get home, things may deteriorate further in relationships because you don’t have the self-control you need for the rest. This then casts the way to create a sick system, whether corporate or personal, into a new light, as the system created is one deliberately designed to run you ragged and pervent you from doing any actual thinking, and always make sure you don’t have any self-control left.
Outside in the world today, The United States military is looking for the founder of the Wikileaks website, fearing that their intelligence leak had already transmitted more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to the site. The suggestion may be that they’re looking for him to do him harm and arrest him for possessing such things. The Daily Beast also interviews someone who had a hit squad out after him for advice to the Wikileaks founder.
Iceland rocks their way into the Century of the Fruitbat, legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians.
Israel's Gaza blockade is economic warfare against Hamas, according to internal documents published by McClatchy News, making it more a siege than a security measure. Speaking of the country, Saudia Arabia is getting ready so that they won't shoot down Israeli planes if they're on their way to nuke Iran's nuclear sites.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is alleged to be expressing doubts that the NATO group in his country trying to defeat the Taliban will succeed. I’m sure that thought isn’t helped by reports indicating governmental entities in Pakistan are roviding funding and training to Taliban persons in Afghanistan. That said, columnists here in America think we can win, and they clearly know more about it that the President, so he should buck up and share in the optimism.
Inside the United States, you know you've been burned when the guy who shouted "You Lie!" at the president in the Congressional halls says your comment was inappropriate.
Looking for a cool $1 trillion to trim over the next few years to help with the deficit? Represenative Frank and others have a plan that can knock that much out of the defense budget without compromising security. Okay, deficit hawks, here’s your chance to prove you’re about reducing the debt instead of trying to systematically dismantle the social programs of the country. The President requested 50 billion in emergency funding for states and local governments to keep public services and education going, but he’s not getting much for traction on his party or the other.
Nevada's Republican candidate for Senate came out swinging, attempting to reverse classification of her as a "whack job" through the tried and true method of "No, YOU are".
The defeated primary candidate in the South Carolina Senate race has hired on some analysts to see whether there is anything improper about the election. Statistically, there’s a good chance of serious abnormality, but things could be explainable by pointing out that anyone can vote in the primaries.
The Senators of Maine are suddenly very eager to have a company that is now producing boom for oil seepage have lots bought - without necessarily having it first be tested for effectiveness. That’s interesting, although one wonders how much expediency should be applied now that estimaes of the spill's flow and amount have been revised upward to about double what they were before.
And finally, to remind you that the Tea Party is still about emotion rather than logic, Tea Partiers in Gwinnet County, Georgia, are protesting the adoption of mandatory trash pickup service for all the residents of the county. That’s right, they’re protesting that they’re going to get trash pickup from the city. Sorry for the convenience.
Into technology, where the wave of requirments for students to have laptops is still gaining momentum in the high school market - a school in Salem, Massachusettes is requiring the purchase or lease of Macbooks that conform to the school's standards. As we keep mentioning, Little Brother is suppsoed to be a cautionary tale, not a handbook. Not that anyone seems to be listening. Microsoft is installing secret extensions to Firefox again, deciding that they have the power to mess with your browser and that you should just accept it and move on. Have we mentioned that Microsoft's near-monopolistic dominance and lax security policies makes people weak against cyber-attacks lately?
And then there’s the Big Brother part of Little Brother, kind of like how Australia is still gunning to require ISPs to keep the browsing history of all their customers for up to five years, in case the government wants to find that they've been doing something illegal and arrest them for it. And of course, they’re screaming about “paedophiles” and “terrorists” as their justification.
Well, at least SCO lost again, and so it's even less likely anyone will let them try to convice us that Linux is an unauthorized UNIX derivative.
And a judge ruled that border searches are still legal, but seizing and then searching again later requires a search warrant. Hooray. Still better to present a blank laptop to the border agents if/when you travel.
Anyway, in happier things - Japan unveils a solar sail on the IKAROS craft, and now we get to see how well it works, and Japan's Hayabusa craft lands in Woomera, Australia, carrying a payload of an asteroid sample it picked up years ago.
Last out, we're beginning to develop technology to project stereoscopy (three dimensions) without having to wear the glasses. And then, if we can make those interfaces haptic...
Beginning the opinion section - The Slacktivist returns to the theme of using one's brain to interpret the rules so they follow the important ones, and how that means we change our opinions on usury and should change our opinions on LGBT, because if your reading of the rules say that not having love for someone is the right way to go, then your doin’ it rong.
Mr. Hofstader slices the langauge at the right angle and reconstructs it so as to point out the inherent assumptions and biases of the language that we take for granted - and why it might be worthwhile to fix the language so as to not have those biases. How so? Well, start with replacing the world “man” with “white” and “woman” with “black” and see what happens...
Mr. Harsanyi attempts to resolve his "Good riddance!" and " bad precedent" issues in the Helen Thomas case, skillfully pointing out that a columnist losing their job over a political statement is a bad idea (if you believe that the government and liberals are intent on censoring anything they don’t like, which he does) while indicating how much contempt he held her in in the first place.It sounds to me like he’s saying “she should have been fired for her views, because they suck and are poorly thought out, but she shouldn’t have been fired for expressing her views because they ran counter to the CW”. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Which reason are you assuming, Mr. Harsanyi?
Mr. Ajami still wishes to castigate Barack Obama on his apparent non-response to the Green Revolution of Iran, even though he admits that Presidential involvement in the matter might not have changed the outcome. Mr. J. Klein find a way to complain about the new sancations against Iran, seemingly now at the nitpicking stage, which would imply he thinks the thing itself is actually pretty good. The Washington Times doesn't even address the sanctions, choosing to instead claim that diplomacy for the President is failing because of his voting record on Iran sanctions in the UN compared to the previous administrator.
WORLD magazine offers an article about the still-going-strong one child policy of China, doing their best to describe all the grisly details of abortions and the incentives in place that create them, but I’m not sure whether they’re trying to inspire Christian anger against the godless communists or put off audiences in America on the still-needed legality of abortion.
The Washington Times presents us another data set that confirms their opinion about climate change - this time the expansion of shorline of certain Pacific islands. They poke at Al Gore and say he should offer a refund for people who bought his fictional work, now that all of the grand tenants of climate change are supposedly debunked. We suggest glasses to correct their near-sightedness so they can actually see the time scale at which many climate change dangers appear.
Mr. Hanson says that Turkey is about to become an enemy instead of an ally thanks to their growing Muslim population and their lesser importance in defending the West against the Godless Communists, so we can expect Israel to still be the One True Democracy of the Middle East.
And in the politics of the country, Mr. Ortega spins a truly terrifying tale of the federal government taking control of your child's education and spending more of your taxpayer-earned dollars to satisfy bloated teacher's unions without improving anything. Terrifying, that is, if the arrow he loosed was aiming anywhere near the target. Despite the continued insistence that unions are evil and we’re already spending too much on schools, that’s not actually the problem with the school systems. Incentives that insist that school is about test-taking and not learning and a blindness to how much influence the community around a school has on the success of its students are. The brightest school in the most poor neighborhood is not going to be able to do much other than struggle to convince the kids that they can get away by learning.
The WSJ claps their hands delightedly at how primary races are turning out and the results of new, Tea-infused blood being injected into general elections, and hopes that they can manage to overcome the obviously negative and personal attacks coming from Democrats desperate to defend their radical agenda. Gee, have no idea whose corner these people are in, do we?
Mr. Steyn runs with the latest "other" idea that President Obama is governing the country as if he were a citizen of the world, instead of a citizen of America, fierce and proud of his country, and that makes him a generalist at best, an empty suit trying to pose as a man of action at worst. So we have a President who doesn’t feel the need to get all jingoistic - perhaps his perspective will be helpful in actually getting us to move toward the Number One “everyone knows” America is. After all, we have plenty of people claiming that a lack of government and complete trust in The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) in our lives is what made America the prosperous Number One that it is now, despite clear examples of how that trust is wrong and hurting us all. Mr. Rove picks up the theme of the absent president, claiming that he's been late and ineffective in handling the oil spill and that he's really only been approving what Congress drafts instead of rolling up his sleeves and trying to get into teh business of making bills. So, wait, Karl, you’re complaining about a President that is apparently respecting the divisions of power outlined in the Constitution? Are you sure you want to go down that road?
Mr. Elder provides justification for thinking liberals are economic morons by citing as many conservative-leaning sources he can get a hold of, saying the stimulus failed by citing the private-business industry association we mentioned much earlier on that said “No, we’re not giving anyone any new jobs. Stop looking at our profit sheets.”, claiming the CBO said the stimulus article failed by quoting a Washington Times article about it and referencing the poll we mentioned earlier about liberals’ supposed economic ignorance, claiming the matter of good/bad is immaterial and the “pure” answer was the only one that counted.
Ms. Noonan frets about the recent report indicating the federal government is still unprepared to handle a WMD attack on the United States. How interesting that we’re now seeing these reports, in the context of the disaster, and a new presidency, as if they weren’t getting a lot of press under the President who routinely boasted that he had kept us safe... - and, of course, are now making lots of money on the lecture circuit saying how much worse the current Presidency is and justifying what they did before them as legal and the right thing to do.
Running out of opinions, and thus scraping the bottom of the barrel for people who would qualify for a Worst Persons award, Representative Gomert of Texas suggests the Obama administration would condone attacks against TSA personnel if people just tried to peacefully overwhelm airport security and then started beating and knifing the agents, trying to draw a parallel between this and Israel’s response to the Gaza aid flotilla. It has about as much sense as The Washington Times editorial that says the counterterrorism expert is fishing for nothing and being deliberately ignorant by not immediately saying "They hate us because their religion is one of terrorism and conquering to get their way", and should be delegitimized in the country and Ms. Fields' column basically saying all intellectuals are to be distrusted because they don't immediately denounce Islam as the bloody violent terrorist religion and venerate Israel Who Can Do No Wrong.
At the end of it all, however, is Ms. West, who just can't understand why the mainstream media would have a vicious reaction to a book authored by a WingNutDaily columnist claiming the President is a radical bent on destroying America, unless they were somehow covering for his radicalness, because, after all, the book is selling quite well among the populace. You may invoke P.T. Barnum at your leisure. It might also be because those respectable reporters did due diligence in investigations of the President, found nothing really to suggest that he’s a secret socialist, and moved on to actual news, instead of hanging back in the back with the Birthers and staking their credibility on something that goes nowhere and does nothing. If you think the President has been governing like a socialist radical, take your blinders off and look again. But if you want to see communists under every corner of the Obama Administration, read this review that claims the books is well-documented and necessary for any freedom-loving American, because the President clearly has ties to socialists and extremists everywhere you look.
But if you want Worst Persons in the World, once again the Real World trumps column-land by a wide margin. Teacher tells school she's pregnant. School asks when she conceived. Turns out it was before she was married. School fires her, denying her maternity leave, and then tells the entire community that she was fornicating and they fired her. Understandably humiliated (and likely royally pissed off), teacher sues the school district for humiliating her and for firing her. Courts may decide she could be fired and exposed in this way, but regardless of how it turns out, the Southland Christian School is now on notice as the Worst People In The World.
At the very end, however, is something that will help your spelling-bee people, and others looking for just the right prefix - Prefixes and Words based on Latin number names.
