Embloggered - 9 August 2010
Aug. 10th, 2010 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHello, people. It’s been a fun few days so far, with all the neat political noise and stuff. Elena Kagan was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice on Saturday, August 7, making her the fourth woman to hold the position in history, and giving the current court more women on it than it has had, well, ever. Anyone who fears for the end of the old boys club is probably quaking right now, especially when women start heading up major intelligence agencies.
The FBI offers some materials available on the web for what it considers to be frequent FOIA requests. So, if you want to see what happened at Roswell, or get some files on people that everybody wants to know about, no need to file the request - just go straight to the website.
A great reason why Common Sense Media and their reviews should probably be ignored - they single out content as bad or iffy for audiences, and they encourage people to think shortsightedly and censoriously about books for their children, regardless of the greater value that can be obtained by reading a book with a few damns in it. And speaking of books, have we mentioned lately the famed incompetence, collusion, and rip-off that is textbook selection and the prices one must pay for those textbooks, including the insistence on the newest version being the only correct one, so that one cannot buy used books for cheap. Why not be able to get your basic textbooks and unchanging material, like maths, for free? Or have available on the web the basic of high school sciences, available for free to anyone who wants them? The more we go along, the more traditional education looks more like “the degree I spend far too much money on without learning anything” for most people. People who want to quote the American founding fathers and several smart people often point out that many of them are autodidacts.
Out in the world today, A snapshot of the difficulty of working in Afghanistan - the insurgents will kill the villagers if they help, but the Americans will kill the villagers if they think they're insurgents or aligned with them. Or, perhaps more succinctly, “We are the space robots. We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of space” Do not trust the pusher robot...do not trust the shover robot... we are here to protect you.
Iraq, on the other hand, appears to be going swimmingly. the top general in charge of Iraqi operations, General Odierno, said that Iraqi security forces are ready to take over when the combat mission ends at the end of this month.
We start domestic news with an incredulous claim. A corporation says people would have to be stupid to believe a product called "vitaminwater" and advertised as a healthy hydration option actually had any sort of health benefits. They said this in response to being sued for deceptive advertising and false claims. I sincerely hope the judge/jury smacks them once for their deception and twice for the belief that the average American is discerning enough not to be swayed by advertising - clearly, based on their budgets and campaigns, they believe in the efficacy of advertising.
And then we get to go one better - there is still a quarter of the polled population that believes the President of the United States was not born in the country and is thus ineligible for the Presidency. At this point, it’s like a Linus blanket that someone is clinging to, using it as their justification to not accept the reality of what is and to refuse to move forward into the 21st century.
A serial killer in Flint Michigan is not called such by CNN - perhaps because it's a white dude killing predominantly black people. After all, we still have people who say Famous black people even now are being supported by white people, who can withdraw their support any time they like, so don't let the unions and other agitators drive a wedge between us by talking about race issues. You know, know your place and who really controls things here and all that. Plus, there are still the people that believe the children of undocumented workers, born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, should not be accorded their Constitutionally-required citizenship. But we shouldn’t allow those agitators to drive a wedge between us for political purposes - we’re all Americans here, and all equal, right?
The White House has been aggressively selling Democratic successes in the run up to the election, focusing on the still-on time withdrawal from Iraq, the successful capping of the Deepwater Horizon well, and the success of the bailed-out automotive industry. One should give credit where it’s due - the Iraq timeline was finalized by President Bush, and President Obama is just running right on the rails, but even that’s a good thing. A true success on BP will be that there’s sufficient safety equipment and research in place that the next blowout is a minor one. GM and Chrysler, though? All Obama and the Democrats, with an assist from President Bush’s TARP program that bailed out banks and financial institutions and demanded no accountability or change in their practices from them, some of which the Obama financial reform bill will attempt to do.
A church that kept demonizing and protesting the local gentleman's club is now locked in a protest-counter-protest, now that the dancers came to protest the church. When faced with an alternative interpretation, the pastor immediately shut it out of his mind and continued to harp upon the evil of working in such a club.
Last out, a dog sensed an infection and bit off a chunk of his owner's toe while said owner was passed out, apparently saving the owner's life, even though the toe was a lost cause.
One bit of technology - a solar conversion process that takes advantage of heat as well as light for generating electricity - which might bring the efficiency ratings up into competitive percentages with current fossil fuel-based energy.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist points out that the things that are lesser evils are still evil, and that no matter how much one justifies it, it is still an evil act to use atomic weapons on civilians. Thus, when we step into other scenarios where evil will be done, perhaps we can remember our history and either avoid the evil or minimize it as much as possible.
Mr. Fund blames the Bell city council salary scandal entirely on absentee voting fraud, as an intended condemnation of the process. What he misses out on, though, is the “traditionally low turnout of Bell” in their elections - in other words, a populace that wasn’t civically inclined and wouldn’t be looking at those sorts of things because they didn’t care. The real culprit, then, is not the method of voting and the fraud perpetuated by it, but the populace that doesn’t care and has been taught not to care about their local politics as uninteresting or otherwise unimportant. I’ll bet Bell residents are a lot more politically active for a while, since they’ve learned their lesson about not paying attention now. Right?
Thrice-married Newt Gingrich is incensed about the destruction of the sanctity of marriage that will happen when gays and lesbians are allowed to marry. We wonder if his vows on any of them included “till death should part you.” The speck-plank difficulty here is particularly thick. And for many American Christians, it's getting bigger, sufficiently so that they're no longer able to reconcile the differences.
Perhaps more in wishful thinking, the progressive position on the Obama Administration, especially in relation to appointments, seems to not notice how its offers and campaigns are consistently rejected - Obama is a centrist, always has been, and always will be. If you want a liberal, elect a liberal. And that way you don’t end up with people with brains pointing out that the stuff needed to pass legislation in the face of mostly-brainless opposition totally ruins what the stuff was supposed to do in the first place. Why not just elect actual liberals who will write a real progressive bill and get it passed?
Last out, we waste a little time looking at someone trying to paint Barack and Michelle Obama as living like royalty and taking vacations when there's work to do in fixing everything, admitting only a shred of the truth that the last administrator was just as imperial as this one, while also denying the fundamental reality that people need a break sometimes to stay sane and able to do their job.
That’s all for tonight. Working through some thoughts in my head thanks to some other articles. Hope it will be finished soon.
The FBI offers some materials available on the web for what it considers to be frequent FOIA requests. So, if you want to see what happened at Roswell, or get some files on people that everybody wants to know about, no need to file the request - just go straight to the website.
A great reason why Common Sense Media and their reviews should probably be ignored - they single out content as bad or iffy for audiences, and they encourage people to think shortsightedly and censoriously about books for their children, regardless of the greater value that can be obtained by reading a book with a few damns in it. And speaking of books, have we mentioned lately the famed incompetence, collusion, and rip-off that is textbook selection and the prices one must pay for those textbooks, including the insistence on the newest version being the only correct one, so that one cannot buy used books for cheap. Why not be able to get your basic textbooks and unchanging material, like maths, for free? Or have available on the web the basic of high school sciences, available for free to anyone who wants them? The more we go along, the more traditional education looks more like “the degree I spend far too much money on without learning anything” for most people. People who want to quote the American founding fathers and several smart people often point out that many of them are autodidacts.
Out in the world today, A snapshot of the difficulty of working in Afghanistan - the insurgents will kill the villagers if they help, but the Americans will kill the villagers if they think they're insurgents or aligned with them. Or, perhaps more succinctly, “We are the space robots. We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of space” Do not trust the pusher robot...do not trust the shover robot... we are here to protect you.
Iraq, on the other hand, appears to be going swimmingly. the top general in charge of Iraqi operations, General Odierno, said that Iraqi security forces are ready to take over when the combat mission ends at the end of this month.
We start domestic news with an incredulous claim. A corporation says people would have to be stupid to believe a product called "vitaminwater" and advertised as a healthy hydration option actually had any sort of health benefits. They said this in response to being sued for deceptive advertising and false claims. I sincerely hope the judge/jury smacks them once for their deception and twice for the belief that the average American is discerning enough not to be swayed by advertising - clearly, based on their budgets and campaigns, they believe in the efficacy of advertising.
And then we get to go one better - there is still a quarter of the polled population that believes the President of the United States was not born in the country and is thus ineligible for the Presidency. At this point, it’s like a Linus blanket that someone is clinging to, using it as their justification to not accept the reality of what is and to refuse to move forward into the 21st century.
A serial killer in Flint Michigan is not called such by CNN - perhaps because it's a white dude killing predominantly black people. After all, we still have people who say Famous black people even now are being supported by white people, who can withdraw their support any time they like, so don't let the unions and other agitators drive a wedge between us by talking about race issues. You know, know your place and who really controls things here and all that. Plus, there are still the people that believe the children of undocumented workers, born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, should not be accorded their Constitutionally-required citizenship. But we shouldn’t allow those agitators to drive a wedge between us for political purposes - we’re all Americans here, and all equal, right?
The White House has been aggressively selling Democratic successes in the run up to the election, focusing on the still-on time withdrawal from Iraq, the successful capping of the Deepwater Horizon well, and the success of the bailed-out automotive industry. One should give credit where it’s due - the Iraq timeline was finalized by President Bush, and President Obama is just running right on the rails, but even that’s a good thing. A true success on BP will be that there’s sufficient safety equipment and research in place that the next blowout is a minor one. GM and Chrysler, though? All Obama and the Democrats, with an assist from President Bush’s TARP program that bailed out banks and financial institutions and demanded no accountability or change in their practices from them, some of which the Obama financial reform bill will attempt to do.
A church that kept demonizing and protesting the local gentleman's club is now locked in a protest-counter-protest, now that the dancers came to protest the church. When faced with an alternative interpretation, the pastor immediately shut it out of his mind and continued to harp upon the evil of working in such a club.
Last out, a dog sensed an infection and bit off a chunk of his owner's toe while said owner was passed out, apparently saving the owner's life, even though the toe was a lost cause.
One bit of technology - a solar conversion process that takes advantage of heat as well as light for generating electricity - which might bring the efficiency ratings up into competitive percentages with current fossil fuel-based energy.
In the opinions, The Slacktivist points out that the things that are lesser evils are still evil, and that no matter how much one justifies it, it is still an evil act to use atomic weapons on civilians. Thus, when we step into other scenarios where evil will be done, perhaps we can remember our history and either avoid the evil or minimize it as much as possible.
Mr. Fund blames the Bell city council salary scandal entirely on absentee voting fraud, as an intended condemnation of the process. What he misses out on, though, is the “traditionally low turnout of Bell” in their elections - in other words, a populace that wasn’t civically inclined and wouldn’t be looking at those sorts of things because they didn’t care. The real culprit, then, is not the method of voting and the fraud perpetuated by it, but the populace that doesn’t care and has been taught not to care about their local politics as uninteresting or otherwise unimportant. I’ll bet Bell residents are a lot more politically active for a while, since they’ve learned their lesson about not paying attention now. Right?
Thrice-married Newt Gingrich is incensed about the destruction of the sanctity of marriage that will happen when gays and lesbians are allowed to marry. We wonder if his vows on any of them included “till death should part you.” The speck-plank difficulty here is particularly thick. And for many American Christians, it's getting bigger, sufficiently so that they're no longer able to reconcile the differences.
Perhaps more in wishful thinking, the progressive position on the Obama Administration, especially in relation to appointments, seems to not notice how its offers and campaigns are consistently rejected - Obama is a centrist, always has been, and always will be. If you want a liberal, elect a liberal. And that way you don’t end up with people with brains pointing out that the stuff needed to pass legislation in the face of mostly-brainless opposition totally ruins what the stuff was supposed to do in the first place. Why not just elect actual liberals who will write a real progressive bill and get it passed?
Last out, we waste a little time looking at someone trying to paint Barack and Michelle Obama as living like royalty and taking vacations when there's work to do in fixing everything, admitting only a shred of the truth that the last administrator was just as imperial as this one, while also denying the fundamental reality that people need a break sometimes to stay sane and able to do their job.
That’s all for tonight. Working through some thoughts in my head thanks to some other articles. Hope it will be finished soon.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-10 12:46 pm (UTC)But that's exactly what people want: to be spoonfed what to think on a silver platter. Depressing, but the more I observe, the more I deem it to be true.
Vitaminwater was always weird to me because it's so brightly colored but tastes like plain water. As far as the linked page, which basically seems to be centered around permutations of, "How many people with weight problems have consumed products like vitaminwater in the mistaken belief that the product was nutritionally positive and carried no caloric consequences?" -- they should have read the label. It's there - it's legislated to be there for a reason. We really shouldn't cater to the absolute lowest common denominator, because then we'll all be limited to swinging from the vines while wearing leaves.
But we shouldn’t allow those agitators to drive a wedge between us for political purposes - we’re all Americans here, and all equal, right?
There was a great op-ed on this sort of thing I read not too long ago. Here in the UK, austerity budgets and the like are all in the news at the moment (well, they were the last time I read the news). This columnist was saying that as the government was announcing harsher and harsher cuts, the public opinion polls of the government were going up quite a lot. The author believes that it's tapping into a psyche fed for so many years by the mass media: the way the commoners are thinking, twas argued, is that someone else will finally get theirs. Whether it's those dang immigrants, or no-good single mothers, or lousy administrators, or whomever it is the person doesn't like, they'll finally be getting theirs. The author argued that we love misery, as long as it isn't ours.
I think that author may be on to something, which is depressing. But yes, there is less and less of a tendency to think of us all in this together, and more of a tendency to think only in terms of your own small group, whatever that is. So no, we're not all equal.
Thing is, I think part of that comes from needing to insulate oneself - used to be, we didn't get much news about all the other people on the planet. Now we do, constantly, too much, and there's a lot of tragedy: moreso than most of us are capable of coping with, I think. So most do the only thing they know how, and cease caring about those they don't know or identify with. Me, I just avoid the news much of the time. I don't know an actual good answer to this problem, though. I do imagine getting more good news reports in the media would be a good start, if we could only get rid of the "if it bleeds it leads" mantra.
The church vs. strip club gave both Chris and I a laugh first thing this morning, thanks :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-10 02:52 pm (UTC)Yes, people should read the label, that's true. But at the same time, there's got to be some admission that vitaminwater wouldn't necessarily sell unless people were led to the conclusion that it was healthy-ish for you and allowed to take that leap themselves.
More good news in the media would be a great start. And I hadn't considered the idea of austerity budgets as a political way of telling people "the people you hate will finally suffer instead of continuing to be able to freeload" - it certainly fits in with the philosophy of the party that's proposing it.
You've also tapped where I'm going in the other piece that I'm still writing. I must telegraph my intent...or maybe I'm consistent? (Naaaah. I'm American. Consistency in philosophy is one of our weaknesses.)