![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's... the blogstuff! We begin by mentioning that famed graffiti artist Banksy was invited to storyboard the beginning of a Simpsons episode. The finished product subverts several of the opening tropes and then goes forth into a minute-long commentary on the practice of Korean outsourcing for animation. It's worth watching, assuming that all the copies don't eventually get DMCA'd into submission.
In other show business material, a 1976 letter from Leonard Nimoy to Gene Roddenberry asking him to stop showing a blooper reel of Star Trek to fans, because it showed him without his permission and, in his opinion, reflected poorly on the characters to show their outtakes.
And then in other important commentary, the United Nations, in July, affirmed the quote that the next war will likely be fought over water, by declaring access to safe and clean water is a universal human right.
Finally, we're getting the Worst Person in the World out of the way early tonight - Jennifer and Scott Petkov, who turned an irritation about insufficiently swift text replies into a taunting and bullying of the death of a mother and the dying of her girl, including several manipulated photos putting the dead and dying in an unflattering light. And then not really apologizing for it when the bright light was shone on them.
Out in the world today, having determined that their opponents are originating from university education, the government of Iran made the first step toward a state takeover of the largest currently-private university in the country by denying that its endowment was religiously legitimate.
The Yemen offshot of al-Qaida has make grand threats that it has an army sufficiently powerful to topple the president of the country. Not that you ever want to see someone prove it, but they're going to have to show something if they want to be taken legitimately.
Inside the United States, New York City's mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, took offense to New York State not sending out their overseas military ballots for the midterms, even after a waiver extended their deadline to the 1st of this month.
The AP points out that there's no evidence to prove organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are using foreign money to try and influence U.S. Elections, and then point out that it's damn near impossible to prove that they aren't, either, because many of those organizations don't have to disclose their donors, and there's nothing stopping foreign companies from setting up U.S. PACs that are funded supposedly through the donations of their U.S. employees. (At the end, they question the wisdom of the attack, because it doesn't work well in television ad soundbites, which as The Infamous Brad noted previously, are the real indicators of who will win an election.) If you support the candidates that benfit from the Citizens United decision, like, say, News Corp. does, then it makes sense to run editorials in News Corp.-owned papers claiming the Democrats don't really want disclosure, they just want to intimidate businesses into not giving by throwing prosecutors and the IRS at the places where that corporate money ends up and to get public lists of donators so they can intimidate them with their unions and their mainstream media. If you're Heritage, which benefits greatly in their support of the conservative movement and Republican Party, it makes sense to declare that liberals are desperate to silence their opponents because they haven't actually got any policy victories to run on. The example in the WSJ article, of the corporation that supported the anti-gay candidate because of his business views, is disclosure working correctly, not an intimidation campaign. If you're going to give corporations the right to outspend any one individual in advertisements and television time, then the people deserve the right to know which corporations are working with their political interests and which ones are not, so they know who to spend their money on. Disclosure is necessary, believe it or not, so that both customers and workers can know when the corporation speaks for them and whether they want to let the corporation continue speaking for them. Now, the exemption of unions and other groups seems odd, but I wonder if that's because they already have robust practices in place to disclose and to make sure that all their money is legitimately spent. If that's not the case, then all interest groups should be included in the requirement to disclose. If that has a chilling effect, then one should conclude that most people are unwilling to have their names associated with something they claim to believe in. In other words, they're cowards. If you believe in a political thing enough to donate money to it, then you should be willing to take the heat associated with having your name on a public disclosure list.
Pension funds are getting exceedingly unfunded, needing significant amounts of money to meet their obligations, which could be raised through taxes...or have a significant part of it captured, if, say, a significant part of the $144 billion dollars in total compensation that Wall Street executives are slated for this year were to be used instead to pay the pensions of those who have worked for those companies, and companies that those Wall Street people have loaned credit to.
Research newly minted suggests that abortions do not increase risk for depression or have guilt about their decision, but that "informed consent" laws that mandate those coming in for the procedure be told they'll feel guilt or depressed, give their parents time to work on them, constrain their options, and tell them that that they' doing a horrible thing YOU MURDERER YOU might be the real culprits in anxiety and depression over abortion. People might need actual informed consent and support in their decision-making, but what supposedly passes for that now is not anything helpful. It achieves the desired effect of the people who put such things into place - fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and social shame. Way to go.
In technology, an attempt at a robot census, which then requires questions such as what constitutes a proper robot and then estimations of just how many robots there are already in the world.
Also, a 19 year-old was handed a jail sentence for refusing to give police his password after they made a formal request for it in relation to trying to track illegal activity. Well, so long as it had the appropriate accompanying court order or equivalent, then they're covered. That said, requests like those continue to presume that anyone with a password-protected computer is hiding illegal activity of some sort - perhaps in this case, it would be justified, but in many lesser cases, it could easily be abused.
And opinions, where Mr. Pendry opines that today's youth are too stupid to understand the dangers of communism and will vote for it again in the midterms by re-electing Democrats, having been drawn out to vote with initiatives like California marijuana legalization. Mr. Pendry is undercut severely by his own inability to parse that the various forms of communism he speaks of are quite different than the Marxism they originate from and the socialism that is their cousin, and that the free markets that he claims bring wealth and prosperity do so only when regulated, sometimes heavily, lest they end up in the same situation that he claims Communism ends up in - an elite that controls most of the wealth, and an underclass that fights over scraps. The very things that communism and socialism were supposed to fight, Mr. Pendry. I still believe that we will not know whether socialism and communism can truly work until we have a planet with sufficient life-supporting resources to give to them and run the experiment on a proper minimum scale.
An interview with the writer of a book that steps back through the history of the Coca-Cola company and brings to light all the bad, bad things they have done and continue to do today. It's a small chunk of the dark side of corporatism, one that can show up in how pineapples are produced and exported to the developed world as easily as soft drink wars and skullduggery. Not that the government is blameless, either - the "isolated incidents" of the past that inflict death and destruction in the name of liberty and freedom are not necessarily isolated, but part of a pattern intended to inflict terror on those deemed enemies of the state. It only shows up in spots, here and there, or when someone gets the courage to seriously ask about why the people Over There are doing what they do.
Even in the academics, there are certain classes, like those who understand poverty first-hand, that never seem to make it to the tenure track or to the prestigious positions. I'm more inclined to believe that than someone else spewing about how all the stuff coming out of academic presses is uniformly anti-American and Hates America, and is completely liberally-biased, but that may be because I have, in my usual experience, found that people making the claims that Academics and Liberals Hate America take very little time to provide examples that don't require you to already believe the premise and their underlying foundations, like Unions Are Evil, for them to make sense. (Tellingly, he also admits that those presses don't necessarily have a duty to be fair and balanced at the very end, but only after he's gone on for some length about this conspiracy of academics to make your students hate their country.) For someone to say, "Hey, look, there's not a whole lot of people who have poor upbringings or are still poor in their academic work on the tenure track or in positions about adjunct faculty", it's easy to prove/disprove that and it requires no specialized political leanings.
The account of an encounter with subtextual and overt racism, now popular again, thanks to the rise of the Tea Party and conservatism that is re-embracing the roots it was trying to distance itself from for the last few years in a desperate attempt to muster enough people to bring them back to power. Whether you consider it Frankenstein's monster, turned out in the world without having been instructed in humanity, or finally coming out and displaying the dark side overtly once again, the issue that was supposedly over and gone shows just how much it's like a variella infection.
And finally, the word "gay" has become shorthand slang for "insufficiently masculine" and as such is being slung about far and wide, used by the bullies and the teachers and administrators that don't quell those bullies at all. It also recognizes that High School is Hell for anyone who doesn't gender-conform, and that with the way things are right now, any nonconforming male can expect a constant barrage of homophobic comments about himself, if not physical violence because of his nonconformity. Because it's been reduced to either being a guy or being gay, with no middle ground anywhere. That's what the guys are learning in school, and unless we fix that problem, nothing in their lessons is going to sink in.
Last for tonight, a little snarkiness about how to be a successful lifestyle designer.
In other show business material, a 1976 letter from Leonard Nimoy to Gene Roddenberry asking him to stop showing a blooper reel of Star Trek to fans, because it showed him without his permission and, in his opinion, reflected poorly on the characters to show their outtakes.
And then in other important commentary, the United Nations, in July, affirmed the quote that the next war will likely be fought over water, by declaring access to safe and clean water is a universal human right.
Finally, we're getting the Worst Person in the World out of the way early tonight - Jennifer and Scott Petkov, who turned an irritation about insufficiently swift text replies into a taunting and bullying of the death of a mother and the dying of her girl, including several manipulated photos putting the dead and dying in an unflattering light. And then not really apologizing for it when the bright light was shone on them.
Out in the world today, having determined that their opponents are originating from university education, the government of Iran made the first step toward a state takeover of the largest currently-private university in the country by denying that its endowment was religiously legitimate.
The Yemen offshot of al-Qaida has make grand threats that it has an army sufficiently powerful to topple the president of the country. Not that you ever want to see someone prove it, but they're going to have to show something if they want to be taken legitimately.
Inside the United States, New York City's mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, took offense to New York State not sending out their overseas military ballots for the midterms, even after a waiver extended their deadline to the 1st of this month.
The AP points out that there's no evidence to prove organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are using foreign money to try and influence U.S. Elections, and then point out that it's damn near impossible to prove that they aren't, either, because many of those organizations don't have to disclose their donors, and there's nothing stopping foreign companies from setting up U.S. PACs that are funded supposedly through the donations of their U.S. employees. (At the end, they question the wisdom of the attack, because it doesn't work well in television ad soundbites, which as The Infamous Brad noted previously, are the real indicators of who will win an election.) If you support the candidates that benfit from the Citizens United decision, like, say, News Corp. does, then it makes sense to run editorials in News Corp.-owned papers claiming the Democrats don't really want disclosure, they just want to intimidate businesses into not giving by throwing prosecutors and the IRS at the places where that corporate money ends up and to get public lists of donators so they can intimidate them with their unions and their mainstream media. If you're Heritage, which benefits greatly in their support of the conservative movement and Republican Party, it makes sense to declare that liberals are desperate to silence their opponents because they haven't actually got any policy victories to run on. The example in the WSJ article, of the corporation that supported the anti-gay candidate because of his business views, is disclosure working correctly, not an intimidation campaign. If you're going to give corporations the right to outspend any one individual in advertisements and television time, then the people deserve the right to know which corporations are working with their political interests and which ones are not, so they know who to spend their money on. Disclosure is necessary, believe it or not, so that both customers and workers can know when the corporation speaks for them and whether they want to let the corporation continue speaking for them. Now, the exemption of unions and other groups seems odd, but I wonder if that's because they already have robust practices in place to disclose and to make sure that all their money is legitimately spent. If that's not the case, then all interest groups should be included in the requirement to disclose. If that has a chilling effect, then one should conclude that most people are unwilling to have their names associated with something they claim to believe in. In other words, they're cowards. If you believe in a political thing enough to donate money to it, then you should be willing to take the heat associated with having your name on a public disclosure list.
Pension funds are getting exceedingly unfunded, needing significant amounts of money to meet their obligations, which could be raised through taxes...or have a significant part of it captured, if, say, a significant part of the $144 billion dollars in total compensation that Wall Street executives are slated for this year were to be used instead to pay the pensions of those who have worked for those companies, and companies that those Wall Street people have loaned credit to.
Research newly minted suggests that abortions do not increase risk for depression or have guilt about their decision, but that "informed consent" laws that mandate those coming in for the procedure be told they'll feel guilt or depressed, give their parents time to work on them, constrain their options, and tell them that that they' doing a horrible thing YOU MURDERER YOU might be the real culprits in anxiety and depression over abortion. People might need actual informed consent and support in their decision-making, but what supposedly passes for that now is not anything helpful. It achieves the desired effect of the people who put such things into place - fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and social shame. Way to go.
In technology, an attempt at a robot census, which then requires questions such as what constitutes a proper robot and then estimations of just how many robots there are already in the world.
Also, a 19 year-old was handed a jail sentence for refusing to give police his password after they made a formal request for it in relation to trying to track illegal activity. Well, so long as it had the appropriate accompanying court order or equivalent, then they're covered. That said, requests like those continue to presume that anyone with a password-protected computer is hiding illegal activity of some sort - perhaps in this case, it would be justified, but in many lesser cases, it could easily be abused.
And opinions, where Mr. Pendry opines that today's youth are too stupid to understand the dangers of communism and will vote for it again in the midterms by re-electing Democrats, having been drawn out to vote with initiatives like California marijuana legalization. Mr. Pendry is undercut severely by his own inability to parse that the various forms of communism he speaks of are quite different than the Marxism they originate from and the socialism that is their cousin, and that the free markets that he claims bring wealth and prosperity do so only when regulated, sometimes heavily, lest they end up in the same situation that he claims Communism ends up in - an elite that controls most of the wealth, and an underclass that fights over scraps. The very things that communism and socialism were supposed to fight, Mr. Pendry. I still believe that we will not know whether socialism and communism can truly work until we have a planet with sufficient life-supporting resources to give to them and run the experiment on a proper minimum scale.
An interview with the writer of a book that steps back through the history of the Coca-Cola company and brings to light all the bad, bad things they have done and continue to do today. It's a small chunk of the dark side of corporatism, one that can show up in how pineapples are produced and exported to the developed world as easily as soft drink wars and skullduggery. Not that the government is blameless, either - the "isolated incidents" of the past that inflict death and destruction in the name of liberty and freedom are not necessarily isolated, but part of a pattern intended to inflict terror on those deemed enemies of the state. It only shows up in spots, here and there, or when someone gets the courage to seriously ask about why the people Over There are doing what they do.
Even in the academics, there are certain classes, like those who understand poverty first-hand, that never seem to make it to the tenure track or to the prestigious positions. I'm more inclined to believe that than someone else spewing about how all the stuff coming out of academic presses is uniformly anti-American and Hates America, and is completely liberally-biased, but that may be because I have, in my usual experience, found that people making the claims that Academics and Liberals Hate America take very little time to provide examples that don't require you to already believe the premise and their underlying foundations, like Unions Are Evil, for them to make sense. (Tellingly, he also admits that those presses don't necessarily have a duty to be fair and balanced at the very end, but only after he's gone on for some length about this conspiracy of academics to make your students hate their country.) For someone to say, "Hey, look, there's not a whole lot of people who have poor upbringings or are still poor in their academic work on the tenure track or in positions about adjunct faculty", it's easy to prove/disprove that and it requires no specialized political leanings.
The account of an encounter with subtextual and overt racism, now popular again, thanks to the rise of the Tea Party and conservatism that is re-embracing the roots it was trying to distance itself from for the last few years in a desperate attempt to muster enough people to bring them back to power. Whether you consider it Frankenstein's monster, turned out in the world without having been instructed in humanity, or finally coming out and displaying the dark side overtly once again, the issue that was supposedly over and gone shows just how much it's like a variella infection.
And finally, the word "gay" has become shorthand slang for "insufficiently masculine" and as such is being slung about far and wide, used by the bullies and the teachers and administrators that don't quell those bullies at all. It also recognizes that High School is Hell for anyone who doesn't gender-conform, and that with the way things are right now, any nonconforming male can expect a constant barrage of homophobic comments about himself, if not physical violence because of his nonconformity. Because it's been reduced to either being a guy or being gay, with no middle ground anywhere. That's what the guys are learning in school, and unless we fix that problem, nothing in their lessons is going to sink in.
Last for tonight, a little snarkiness about how to be a successful lifestyle designer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 06:43 pm (UTC)it would be different if he didn't actually know the password, and the article is sort of vague on the details when it comes to that. how many 19-year-olds do you know that would arbitrarily use a 50-character password? i know that there are more than a few out there, but not everyone, by any stretch of the imagination, which begs the question: did he actually know the 50-character password? if not, then he shouldn't be jailed at all.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 07:02 pm (UTC)