Finally, a new entry - 22-28 July 2010

[silveradept]

Greetings, everyone. Think of what beauty standards would be like in a world where women have always been in charge and are just as sexist as men have been and are today, and it is the men that kill themselves to look impossibly hot like the models in the magazines and on television.

For a laugh, enjoy typestaches, or what curly braces turned sideways look like in different fonts.

Over the weekend, the attendees of the San Diego Comic Con gave their best taunts, signs, and raspberries to the Westboro Baptist Church, come to protest them. Would that such a crowd were portable and usable elsewhere, like when pedophile-protecting priests campaign against QUILTBAG inclusiveness, or anti-QUILTBAG organizations advocate lynching QUILTBAG couples who want to be recognized under marriage like everyone else, or even better, when judges order a freeze on death benefit payments from a husband to his wife because she was born male and transitioned.

But, as even the Pentagon will tell us, these things are far more important, than, say, child porn on work computers and downloaded by contractors. Unless, that is, you’re the victim of the horror story of Zero Tolerance Gone Wrong - two families accused but never charged with child pornography and exploitation of their children based on some 35mm photos taken while the children were camping. Out of context, reported by a photo lab technician, and the labyrinth of secrecy and beauracracy that unnecessarily stressed and pulled at a family. The Little People should be scared to be found deviants. The higher-ups? Never.

And then hear our dispatch from the newly-formed Worthiness Bureau, advertising the perfect quantitiative solution to figuring out just how worthy a person is. It’s like Whuffie, in a sense, but the potential for damage is much, much, greater. So you can pay them a nice fee to dispute anyone’s challenges to your worthiness, while making sure to report them to the Worthiness Bureau if they are somehow unworthy. - And then we can learn all about why our current Worthiness measure is completely unsuited to the task and should be banned, as well as why your worthiness score is inversely proportional to the amount of responsible thinking and planning you do.

Then fly whatever obscene gesture you like at the DMCA and add on an expletive, blasphemy, or obscene statement, as the Library of Congress has exempted jailbreaking phones, busting old DRM, showing short DVD clips for educational purposes, and defeating accessibility locks on e-books when there are no accessible versions available from copyright violations. This is a good first step. Fair Use is essential and important in our world today, and a broad definition of fair use helps to make creative works more possible.

Out in the world today, the website Wikileaks published, along with several major newspapers, more than 90,000 documents giving ground-level perspectives on how the war in Afghanistan is going - badly. Anti-war activists may be renewed, and some members of Congress may be able to join the anti-war bandwagon, as others rush to ensure that the war machine gets all the funding it needs with no waiting, now that the justification for getting out is out in the official record, instead of just speculation. The President downplayed the leak, considering it to be all old information, and the official spin seems to be that all of that which was released was used to inform and generate the new shiny strategy we’re doing now. Odds on whether this person gets arrested, too, if they’re found out? Assuming, that is, they don't charge the person already under investigation for leaking.

In our Perspective Matters Department, a request for people living inside the bubble of Israel to go outside it and see how all the people that are supposedly evil live, and try to peel back all the layers that are in place to shield you from realizing what’s going on.

A report indicates that Russia fairly continuously violated the terms of the 1991 START agreement until its expiration in 2010. Just in case you trusted that the new agreement would be followed properly this time.

The United Kingdom may see some changes to the National Health Service plan currently in place in England, with the possibility of devolving control over much of the funding to GPs as one of the major proposals.

Finally, as lighter fare, the town of Shitterton, fed up with vandals and thieves taking their town signs, have decided that a stone block is better to advertise the town with. It’s only a matter of time, I know, before the vandals catch up and remove the stone, but for now, it’s safe.

Domestically, a list of the Tea Party Caucus in the House. Also, possibly, a list of confirmed rabble-rousers and people who will court any conservative fringe they can find if they think it will get them votes or notoriety. Then again, some Tea Party people think that Anonymous is the right model to emulate. Does make you wonder what sort of intelligence we’re losing daily. And then you see it plainly writ in stories like the people who chose to faith-heal and wait rather than seeking conventional medical care for their infant, allowing what was treatable to grow and fester into something horrible.

Surface temperatures around the globe are going up over time, which makes it very hard to deny that there is a warming pattern. You can still debate whether it’s people-influenced or not, but to deny the basic facts makes it very difficult to mount a cogent argument.

Speaking of denying basic facts, trying to convince someone who believes that tax cuts are inherently stimulative can be a bit of a bear - they don't get it or they just don't care. And by not caring and not balancing it out with other cuts, if left alone, they could cause even greater economic damage and defecits. Yes, bigger than the projected $1.47 trillion deficit for this year. But they’re mostly focusing on trying to find whatever way they can paint the Obama attempts at economic revival as failures, and trying to use that as the reason why their preferred candidates, the ones who believe in magic money, should be elected to office.

The Obama Administration's look into executive compensation says...let them have what they want, letting the bankers make off with the bonuses they got for themselves while wrecking the economy. Not a very populist move, and one sure to irritate those who are as-yet-unconvinced that the President is a corporatist Democrat.

And just in time for us to remember Arizona still has a Papers Please law they intend on putting into action, in Utah, a priest praying in Spanish for a 4 July celebration is apparently offensive. If you believe Rasmussen’s polling data, the population also apparently finds the idea of sanctuary cities offensive. Which reminds me, I think I’ve got a Judicial Watch survey comment stashed somewhere....Wonder if they’ll hook up with the Florida church that plans on holding a book burning of the Qu'ran on the anniversary of the 11 September attacks this year, considering it their duty to warn us about the rise and continued world-conquering of The Bloodthirsty Religion.

The Republican National Committee failed to report more than $7 million USD in debts to the Federal Election Commission, a move which the Treasurer of the organization blamed on its chairman, Michael Steele, and accused him of trying to hide the truth. Mr. Steele denies such a claim, but the RNC faces a possible fine for not disclosing properly.

Your Terrorism Scare comes from the FBI, who constructed a properly-working version of the Times Square failed bomb and detonated it, with the predictable explosive and destructive effects. Be afraid, people, the next one will make his properly and you’ll all be dead! So give us whatever we want without question.

Last out, The Army discharged Lt. Dan Choi after more than a year of limbo after he came out as an openly gay serviceman to raise awareness of and hopefully repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the law behind it. Putting yet another serviceperson back into civilian life when the military branches probably need every body they can get.

Tech time - where we analyze Twitter words to gauge the happiness of the nation, point out the eventual end of IPv4 addresses, meaning we're going to have to switch up to IPv6 if we want to keep assigning IP numbers to unique locations on the Web, change our thinking about where to look for intelligent wireless signals, develop exceedingly inexpensive computing platforms, look at various ways of using our thought waves to control objects, and look into the use of augmented reality technology to enchance textbooks, chemistry sets, and other learning technologies.

We also suggest that time might select hard against paradox, and will manipulate probability in all sorts of increasingly unlikely ways to stop the paradox from happening. And then we note that root access has been gained on the phone with the eFuse technology.

Finally, left to their own devices, children are remarkably adept at figuring out technology and how to do things, even if they appear to be bumps on a log in the classroom.

In opinions, Mr. George Washington lets it be known that in his America, bigotry has no place, and that true liberty means that all people are treated equally as citizens.

Ms. Parker may set a new record for "missing the point" in her column claiming that the American public doesn't want to talk about race issues, being concerned far too much more for their jobs, the economy, and her projection that the citizenry is uniformly disgusted with the government to care about racism like what the Shirley Sherrod case brought to the fore. The Sherrod case is about fraudulent video editing used to achieve a political purpose through deception and how quickly it was amplified and then bought by members of the administration, who fired without thinking. If it’s about anything, it’s about how easy it is for the government and its officials to be suckered by a liar into making a stupid decision before all the facts are out. No, if you’re going to try and paint the President as someone who will happily play the race card to his advantage, you have to pick better scenarios that you think apply, like the Papers Please Law or the incident that resulted in the Beer Summit. (To be fair, this author does spend a sentence complaining about Republican unwillingness to fill the void, take leadership, or offer an alternative to the supposedly divisive politics of the President, but one sentence isn’t nearly enough to document how much the Republicans, sometimes under their Tea Party subsidiary, are also deliberately pushing race as an issue.)

Mr. Vincent proclaims that most oil production is actually done by small businesses, small businesses that will be irrevocably harmed by any new rulemaking or taxation on oil and natural gas production. Precisely what kind of business model runs itself out to the hilt in such a way that fluctuations or regulations will cause widespread failures? A business that probably needs to have those regulations put in place to stop them from going to far out on the brink.

Doing his best to paint the administration as simply incompetent, Mr. Bialosky tars the President and his appointees uniformly with being people who have never created wealth or run private enterprise, and thus could not possibly be expected to produce any sort of sane policy where private business is involved. Because it’s “obvious” that government spending only crowds out the Inherently Superior private sector that really runs the economy and creates all the good things that Americans enjoy.

This type of thinking never sits well with me. Blaming the government for something the private sector isn’t doing seems like claiming your tiger repellent works because you haven’t seen any tigers around. The first thing one should be doing is figuring out whether one lives somewhere where tigers are likely to be found.

Mr. Stephens sees parallels of a bad kind between Cambodia and Afghanistan - immediate withdrawal results in evil people taking over and genociding everyone not them. Be afraid, America, be afraid.

Last for tonight - looking in at the Maori legends of New Zealand, and the creatures that figure prominently in the legends - giant eels.

That and weird science that says staring at female breasts is good for male health - because sexual attraction gives men better blood circulation.