News-type Entry - 12 August 2010
Aug. 12th, 2010 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptWe open today with a case of mistaken identity - One Walt Disney received a letter intended for a Walter Lantz asking for some pictures of Woody Woodpecker. Considering Disney is the more famous Walt, it's a pretty understandable mistake, and leads to a gentle teasing from Disney to Lantz about how he's blamed for everything. For those looking for something a bit more sentimental, the beginning of what was likely a very happy marriage.
MRI scans indicate that the brain processes intent when witnessing an act - we feel good about watching people do good, and we shun those we perceive as being stingy or motivated by bad ideas. We interpret what people's actions are according to our own perceptions. Which makes art all that much more interesting, as the creative professions are banking on you interpreting things the same way they are, or something reasonably close.
The solution to the unemployment problem is very simple - the unemployed have skills that can repair our crumbling infrastructure. The solution to our deficit problem is simple - the unemployed have skills that can repair our crumbling infrastructure. The Slacktivist points out the painfully obvious - the employed pay taxes and do not require unemployment insurance. More revenue, less spending. The infrastructure of our company needs major improvements - and we have basically 14.5 million people available to work on that, if we would just front the money to get it done. There's your stimulus - and think of the knock-on effects - all those workers doing repairs need materials, tools, safety equipment, supervisors, trainers, and somewhere to go to knock back a beer at the end of their shift. You want to kickstart the economy? Spend the money we need to repair our infrastructure. Need a boost to your ratings and the confidence that the American people have in your economic leadership? Put the unemployed to work. It'll solve a lot of problems with an up-front investment. It might even help prevent more near-riots over getting applications for public housing, aid that will likely never come to them. 30,000+ people, more than 10,000 applications, and all of the 600 or so vouchers and places are already full. Anyone else think we needed a bigger stimulus and to not insist the unemployed are that way by choice?
(And perhaps scarily, note the military-industrial complex might well be one of the few places that we are doing this kind of jobs program, continuing to build things and employ people and spend money.)
Out in the world today, keeping the story consistent about the readiness of Iraqi troops to assume control when United States troops leave is apparently more difficult than previously thought - the U.S. insists they're ready, the Iraqi commanders say they're not. Like "Not for another ten years" not.
A confession extracted through the threatening of rape is considered admissible in a Guantanamo Bay military commission trial, according to one of the judges there. There's also the issue that the person captured and accused of crimes was fifteen at the time. The Khadr case just went sideways, unless the jury is convinced that confessions wrought cannot be admitted or used based on the treatment Mr. Khadr received at the facility. Rule of law? Only when we want it to be.
Inside the United States, a new advertising campaign is underway to convince Americans that Mormons are normal people, instead of scary polygamists with bizarre beliefs. Best of luck to them, actually - although the timing is a little odd, considering the insitution was involved heavily in the Proposition 8 campaign, and so they might receive some resistance from that. As with most religious things, though, the truth is that the followers, once you get to know them, are usually pretty normal, sane, well-adjusted people. It's the institutions that generate the perception of scary fringe or not-real-Christians or other such things. For example, when the Pope refuses to accept the resignation of bishops who covered and shifted pedophile priests around instead of turning them in to authorities, you might conclude that Catholicism is apparently totally okay with pedophile priests. Most Catholics aren't, but the institution certainly is. That's not good.
Is the FBI walking away from some of its core purposes to feed the paranoia of media cabals? If the FBI is increasingly doing copyright work to the exclusion of identity theft, fraud,and missing persons, then there are some seriously messed-up priorities going on there. Not to mention that it took six years after the intiial National Security Letter for a judge to release some part of the gag order, even though the request for information covered in the NSL was dropped well before that point. We also mention, yet again, that giving an agency the ability to secretly demand information without a court order that also compels the person not to talk about the request they were just served runs pretty far in the face of what open and democratic societies do. USAPATRIOT is still an awful piece of legislation and should be expired or repealed.
If I were feeling cynical, I would title the following story as "A link forged between two people suffering from disasters", but instead, I'll just mention that a bottle dropped in memory of a solider who was killed in Afghanistan was found by workers cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on a Louisiana shore.
The American Bar Association tells its members to get on board with the Century of the Fruitbat.
And finally, President Obama signed a law today preventing foreign courts from enacting judgment against United States publishers for libel if the case would not pass First Amendment muster in the United States.
In technology, successful spacewalk removes faulty component of space station cooling system, a successful device to use the spin of electrons to store and retrieve information, finding segments of DNA that might explain why humans turn out so differently - depending on where those segments appear in the genome, they contribute different effects.
Opinions opens with opposing viewpoints - first, a plea from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for sanity and tolerance, both from American Muslims and to American Muslims. The Imam was recently in the news for being tapped to go on a State Department trip to try and show the way that one can be faithful to the religion and still exist peaceably in a democratic society. Now, for his opposition, or at least the caricature thereof. I'd love to beleive they're caricatures, but unfortunately I can find people who want to criminalize the practice of Islam or commit religicide against all Muslims, based on the belief that Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion out to kill all the non-Muslims, utter idiots saying that we should abandon our First Amendment principles because other countries do not reciprocate them, and flat-out morons demanding we spike those same principles on an extraordinary claim that all Muslims are in favor of the overthrow of the United States government and all Islamic houses of worship are potential terrorist recruitment centers, and they're all serious about it. That said, perhaps my worry should be checked - the fact that despite the palpable distrust, unease, and malaise permeating the opposition, they haven't done anything violent or mobby is enough to convince Ms. Dalmia that America handles its hatreds better than most, including, I'll add, the American past, where that mob behavior and violence was a lot more widespread. Sure, the people have a temper, but the fact that they're still only loudly declaring the election of certain candidates and pressuring people politically, instead of taking up those "Second Amendment remedies" and going out says somewhere that we still believe in the system enough to think we can control it or influence it to our ends.
Sticking with the trope of someone willingly grabbing the Idiot Ball, Bill O'Reilly suggests that single motherhood and a message saying that women don't have to settle for men to have children is "destructive to our society". I'm going to stay away from the armchair psychology - if you want that, talk to Olbermann - and point out that Bill's sitting on the wrong side of the fence, even with his own argument. He suggests the argument is about demeaning the role of the father and diminishing dadhood. While traditionally in the media, fathers are usually troped as buffoons, clowns, and ignorant Luddites, usually for cheap laughs, out here in reality, when we say "You don't have to settle for a man to have children", we're trying to raise the standards bar. Hopefully not impsosibly high, but telling women that they can raise kids on their own if there isn't good father material around them is empowering. And a swift kick in either the arse or the nuts to men to get our evolutionary game going better. If we want to be dads and have kids, we've got to be able to put on a really effective mating dance, which includes having the skills to raise the kids once they're here. Otherwise, the women can adopt or inseminate and they don't have to deal with us - they can seek out the right kinds of male role models for their kids. If I were a reactionary, I wouldn't be claiming it's destructive to society, I'd be hollering about how it pushes men entirely out of the process and makes us obsolete. The wimmens would be taking over and displacing our God-given rights as MEN, and they'd have to be put in their place fast. I'm betting that argument gets more traction than a retread of "one man, one woman, married households are the anchor of society and should be prized above all else."
And then, with an excellent volley pass, Mr. Carroll bumps the Idiot Ball off his chest long enough to continue characterizing the state aid bill as a bailout to Medicare and government unions, the first he can get away with, but the second he only gets to through "the money will hire teachers, who are unionized, and pay dues. Thus, unions are being bailed out." And the teachers, apparently, are unimportant.
Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann narrowly miss being brained by the Idiot Ball, by going further than just the notation that the Michelle Obama trip to Spain will trigger backlash from people who wish they could take vacations like that into suggesting that the Obamas take no vacations ro do them at home.
Mr. Elder returns to a familiar well, detailing all the hope people had that Barack Obama could do better and then almost gleefully pointing out all the ways that he's made things supposedly worse or done exactly what his predecessor did, with no mind paid at all to his opposition or to the continually changing situations in the world. I think I've said this before, but if the President had half the power the conservatives think he does, he'd be more than able to impose whatever he wanted to the people of the world. Maybe that's the idea - conservative dictatorship, done just so in such a way that we wouldnt' notice it until the last piece clicked into place.
But it is truly Mr. Williams who receives the full brunt of the earlier Idiot Ball repartee, getting hit squarely on the head by a very heavy Ball, in a column saying that the best way to stop our deficit spending trends is to cut entitlements from the elderly, people he claims have very high net worth and who could, y'know, reverse mortgage their houses and put the burden on their children to pay for their old age, instead of getting government subsidies and assistance like Social Security and Medicare, so that when they die, they won't have anything to bequesath to their children, and the government won't have to pay for their long-livedness nor fulfill the promise it made to them about Social Security. While citing statistics of net worth of the young and the old, and then the statistic of the age of people who actually own their homes, Williams looks ready to break through and come to the right conclusion, only for him to abruptly start digging a hole so he can blame the government, instead of noticing that people who are under 65 tend to have debts. Big ones, like mortgages and student loans. Net worth, I'm guessing, is assets minus liabilities, which means those loans and mortgages count against young people and drives their worth down. Once you've paid for the house and the college, suddenly your net worth goes up a lot - the house is now an asset, not a liability! It's a big effing swing. Think about it.
Last for tonight, crafty lemmings.
MRI scans indicate that the brain processes intent when witnessing an act - we feel good about watching people do good, and we shun those we perceive as being stingy or motivated by bad ideas. We interpret what people's actions are according to our own perceptions. Which makes art all that much more interesting, as the creative professions are banking on you interpreting things the same way they are, or something reasonably close.
The solution to the unemployment problem is very simple - the unemployed have skills that can repair our crumbling infrastructure. The solution to our deficit problem is simple - the unemployed have skills that can repair our crumbling infrastructure. The Slacktivist points out the painfully obvious - the employed pay taxes and do not require unemployment insurance. More revenue, less spending. The infrastructure of our company needs major improvements - and we have basically 14.5 million people available to work on that, if we would just front the money to get it done. There's your stimulus - and think of the knock-on effects - all those workers doing repairs need materials, tools, safety equipment, supervisors, trainers, and somewhere to go to knock back a beer at the end of their shift. You want to kickstart the economy? Spend the money we need to repair our infrastructure. Need a boost to your ratings and the confidence that the American people have in your economic leadership? Put the unemployed to work. It'll solve a lot of problems with an up-front investment. It might even help prevent more near-riots over getting applications for public housing, aid that will likely never come to them. 30,000+ people, more than 10,000 applications, and all of the 600 or so vouchers and places are already full. Anyone else think we needed a bigger stimulus and to not insist the unemployed are that way by choice?
(And perhaps scarily, note the military-industrial complex might well be one of the few places that we are doing this kind of jobs program, continuing to build things and employ people and spend money.)
Out in the world today, keeping the story consistent about the readiness of Iraqi troops to assume control when United States troops leave is apparently more difficult than previously thought - the U.S. insists they're ready, the Iraqi commanders say they're not. Like "Not for another ten years" not.
A confession extracted through the threatening of rape is considered admissible in a Guantanamo Bay military commission trial, according to one of the judges there. There's also the issue that the person captured and accused of crimes was fifteen at the time. The Khadr case just went sideways, unless the jury is convinced that confessions wrought cannot be admitted or used based on the treatment Mr. Khadr received at the facility. Rule of law? Only when we want it to be.
Inside the United States, a new advertising campaign is underway to convince Americans that Mormons are normal people, instead of scary polygamists with bizarre beliefs. Best of luck to them, actually - although the timing is a little odd, considering the insitution was involved heavily in the Proposition 8 campaign, and so they might receive some resistance from that. As with most religious things, though, the truth is that the followers, once you get to know them, are usually pretty normal, sane, well-adjusted people. It's the institutions that generate the perception of scary fringe or not-real-Christians or other such things. For example, when the Pope refuses to accept the resignation of bishops who covered and shifted pedophile priests around instead of turning them in to authorities, you might conclude that Catholicism is apparently totally okay with pedophile priests. Most Catholics aren't, but the institution certainly is. That's not good.
Is the FBI walking away from some of its core purposes to feed the paranoia of media cabals? If the FBI is increasingly doing copyright work to the exclusion of identity theft, fraud,and missing persons, then there are some seriously messed-up priorities going on there. Not to mention that it took six years after the intiial National Security Letter for a judge to release some part of the gag order, even though the request for information covered in the NSL was dropped well before that point. We also mention, yet again, that giving an agency the ability to secretly demand information without a court order that also compels the person not to talk about the request they were just served runs pretty far in the face of what open and democratic societies do. USAPATRIOT is still an awful piece of legislation and should be expired or repealed.
If I were feeling cynical, I would title the following story as "A link forged between two people suffering from disasters", but instead, I'll just mention that a bottle dropped in memory of a solider who was killed in Afghanistan was found by workers cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on a Louisiana shore.
The American Bar Association tells its members to get on board with the Century of the Fruitbat.
And finally, President Obama signed a law today preventing foreign courts from enacting judgment against United States publishers for libel if the case would not pass First Amendment muster in the United States.
In technology, successful spacewalk removes faulty component of space station cooling system, a successful device to use the spin of electrons to store and retrieve information, finding segments of DNA that might explain why humans turn out so differently - depending on where those segments appear in the genome, they contribute different effects.
Opinions opens with opposing viewpoints - first, a plea from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for sanity and tolerance, both from American Muslims and to American Muslims. The Imam was recently in the news for being tapped to go on a State Department trip to try and show the way that one can be faithful to the religion and still exist peaceably in a democratic society. Now, for his opposition, or at least the caricature thereof. I'd love to beleive they're caricatures, but unfortunately I can find people who want to criminalize the practice of Islam or commit religicide against all Muslims, based on the belief that Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion out to kill all the non-Muslims, utter idiots saying that we should abandon our First Amendment principles because other countries do not reciprocate them, and flat-out morons demanding we spike those same principles on an extraordinary claim that all Muslims are in favor of the overthrow of the United States government and all Islamic houses of worship are potential terrorist recruitment centers, and they're all serious about it. That said, perhaps my worry should be checked - the fact that despite the palpable distrust, unease, and malaise permeating the opposition, they haven't done anything violent or mobby is enough to convince Ms. Dalmia that America handles its hatreds better than most, including, I'll add, the American past, where that mob behavior and violence was a lot more widespread. Sure, the people have a temper, but the fact that they're still only loudly declaring the election of certain candidates and pressuring people politically, instead of taking up those "Second Amendment remedies" and going out says somewhere that we still believe in the system enough to think we can control it or influence it to our ends.
Sticking with the trope of someone willingly grabbing the Idiot Ball, Bill O'Reilly suggests that single motherhood and a message saying that women don't have to settle for men to have children is "destructive to our society". I'm going to stay away from the armchair psychology - if you want that, talk to Olbermann - and point out that Bill's sitting on the wrong side of the fence, even with his own argument. He suggests the argument is about demeaning the role of the father and diminishing dadhood. While traditionally in the media, fathers are usually troped as buffoons, clowns, and ignorant Luddites, usually for cheap laughs, out here in reality, when we say "You don't have to settle for a man to have children", we're trying to raise the standards bar. Hopefully not impsosibly high, but telling women that they can raise kids on their own if there isn't good father material around them is empowering. And a swift kick in either the arse or the nuts to men to get our evolutionary game going better. If we want to be dads and have kids, we've got to be able to put on a really effective mating dance, which includes having the skills to raise the kids once they're here. Otherwise, the women can adopt or inseminate and they don't have to deal with us - they can seek out the right kinds of male role models for their kids. If I were a reactionary, I wouldn't be claiming it's destructive to society, I'd be hollering about how it pushes men entirely out of the process and makes us obsolete. The wimmens would be taking over and displacing our God-given rights as MEN, and they'd have to be put in their place fast. I'm betting that argument gets more traction than a retread of "one man, one woman, married households are the anchor of society and should be prized above all else."
And then, with an excellent volley pass, Mr. Carroll bumps the Idiot Ball off his chest long enough to continue characterizing the state aid bill as a bailout to Medicare and government unions, the first he can get away with, but the second he only gets to through "the money will hire teachers, who are unionized, and pay dues. Thus, unions are being bailed out." And the teachers, apparently, are unimportant.
Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann narrowly miss being brained by the Idiot Ball, by going further than just the notation that the Michelle Obama trip to Spain will trigger backlash from people who wish they could take vacations like that into suggesting that the Obamas take no vacations ro do them at home.
Mr. Elder returns to a familiar well, detailing all the hope people had that Barack Obama could do better and then almost gleefully pointing out all the ways that he's made things supposedly worse or done exactly what his predecessor did, with no mind paid at all to his opposition or to the continually changing situations in the world. I think I've said this before, but if the President had half the power the conservatives think he does, he'd be more than able to impose whatever he wanted to the people of the world. Maybe that's the idea - conservative dictatorship, done just so in such a way that we wouldnt' notice it until the last piece clicked into place.
But it is truly Mr. Williams who receives the full brunt of the earlier Idiot Ball repartee, getting hit squarely on the head by a very heavy Ball, in a column saying that the best way to stop our deficit spending trends is to cut entitlements from the elderly, people he claims have very high net worth and who could, y'know, reverse mortgage their houses and put the burden on their children to pay for their old age, instead of getting government subsidies and assistance like Social Security and Medicare, so that when they die, they won't have anything to bequesath to their children, and the government won't have to pay for their long-livedness nor fulfill the promise it made to them about Social Security. While citing statistics of net worth of the young and the old, and then the statistic of the age of people who actually own their homes, Williams looks ready to break through and come to the right conclusion, only for him to abruptly start digging a hole so he can blame the government, instead of noticing that people who are under 65 tend to have debts. Big ones, like mortgages and student loans. Net worth, I'm guessing, is assets minus liabilities, which means those loans and mortgages count against young people and drives their worth down. Once you've paid for the house and the college, suddenly your net worth goes up a lot - the house is now an asset, not a liability! It's a big effing swing. Think about it.
Last for tonight, crafty lemmings.
