Standard Newsie-post - 15-16 October 2010
Oct. 18th, 2010 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings, all. It's not too long before United States voters head to the polls to cast their votes on a variety of ballot initiatives, referenda, and a decision as to whether some part of the makeup of the national and state legislative bodies should be changed. Right before the election, the twin terrors of Stewart and Colbert are doing their best to try and downplay and enhance fear in the populace so they will vote for a preferred candidate. The Huffington Post gives those with a sign brewing in their heads after all the Red Pen travesties appearing at other rallies to inscribe their own.
And for those thinking about voting, give some consideration to the land war in Asia that we've been fighting for nine years and that has otherwise fallen off the radar with the economic issues. The one that has had active talks beteween the leaders of the government and the Taliban as an attemtp to wind the damn thing down into some sort of resolution.
Finally, though, take a thought about the conept of Open bookmarks, the way that we share, electronically, our annotations and comments and metatext on electronic text that we read. Because when you can create infinite copies of text, the text itself doesn't matter all that much.
Before we get to the regular news, The Dead Pool claims Barbara Billingsley, most famously known for her role as June Cleaver, at 94 years of age.
Out in the world today, have a look at Ibex goats climbing the nearly sheer face of a dam. And read up on how the platypus has more than 80 toxins at its disposal, making it seem more and more like the creature was created out of the spare parts left behind from all the other beings.
NATO looks ready to approve an anti-missile shield in Europe.
In the country, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger killed a significant amount of mothers' ability to work outside the house by removing their child care subsidies through his verto power. The people losing this subsidy have otherwise been off other public assistance programs for two years, but if forced to bear the entire brunt of child care, they're likely to drop right back onto those rolls and possibly be unable to continue working at the jobs they have secured and held through the recession. Governor, we understand the need to build reserve funds, but child care is not one of those things you can cut without rippling ramifications, including even more packed waiting lists for the other subsidized child care programs in the state.
Your mortgage problems are entirely your fault, according to Wall Street, because we don't make mistakes or take shortcuts. Riiiiiight. If the banking industry had any sort of credibility to back this up, instead of being scandal-plagued for the last couple decades, they'd still be wrong and trying to get blame reassigned away from the people who really are at fault - them.
The News Corp. donation to the Republican Governors' Association was larger than initially reported - it is now 1.25 million USD, not just 1 million. Throwing that kind of money around, most certainly, but News Corp. still wants you to not know that they're trying to buy influence in the election. This, while other conservatives accuse, say, George Soros of hiding his bid to influence the elections for the Demcorats. If we had, say, sane disclosure laws that applied everywhere, we wouldn't have to deal with accusations, denials, and counter-accusations that everyone is trying to make it so their opponents have to disclose while their supporters don't. (That Mr. Rove thinks of this as a sideshow is quaint, cute, and utterly wrong. With the amounts of money being slung about here, and the likely influence those ads will have on voters, it's a very important issue to talk disclosure of donors.)
Here's an example on how the way you write an article influences what people get out of it - headline says we have a 1.3 trillion USD deficit, third apragraph says this was an improvement of 122 billion USD compared to last year. Now, there's a perfectly valid argument that says that small of a shift is insufficient proof of any sort of progress on deficit reduction. But what we're getting out of the article is "Those Democrats in charge spent 1.3 trillion dollars in deficits on their social programs! That's so awful! Get the bums out!" without mentioning the other bits that were involved in there. Two land wars in Asia, for example. At least the opinion writers are more forthright about saying that all these debts are the Democrats' fault and that people are pissed that politicians keep telling them that all is good when the government runs deficits when they get smacked around by their creditholders if they so much as forget to cross a t.
An interesting case where the resolution likely reaffirms "Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose is" - a veteran was charged with theft after he stole a tattered flag from a local business. The vet had previously complained about the flag's state and was told by the person flying it that it was an accurate depiction of what the country's state at the time. So clearly there's a point being made in both cases - the vet's "You will not disrespect the symbol I hold sacred" and the businessman's "I have a right to make a statement on my property." Fist, nose. Where does the one have to stop for the other?
The retiring chief of the Marine Corps says that 90-95 percent of Marines would be uncomfortable serving in the same unit as an openly gay man, based on unscientific polling in a group environment. His figure really shouldn't be cited as anything, but it's what he's using as his justification to oppose the end of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
A soldier testified that his immediate superior ordered deletion of a cell-phone recording of the Fort Hood shooting, althoguh the article declines to go any further into the whys and whoms of that situation.
Finally, pay only as much attention as you need to the event in question - focus more on the allegation that a lawyer was yelled at and pressured to attend a retreat with co-workers by the boss, with retaliation alleged after he refused to go.
In sciences and technologies, in addition to the things above regarding goats and platypus, science has eliminated all wild cases of the rinderpest virus, causes of cattle plagues. Yay for the livestock. The humans, on teh other hand, must deal with a study suggesting that cancers are a result of our industiralized and technological society, one that creates pollutants not found in nature nor in history.
What you delete from Facebook may not actually be physically deleted from their servers for a very long time, meaning that someone with access to direct URLs, or indexers, or scrapers, may still be able to get to things you thought were gone long after they were supposed to be gone.
As with much of our technology, the military is trying to develop flexible LED displays to give soldiers a wristband communicator and data display, so that those soldiers can have all sorts of extra information available to them as they do their movements and fight combat. Whatever gets developed there will likely eventually trickle down to the rest of us as they improve their tech to newer versions.
Finally, if adults treat social robots like sentient beings, then babies will treat social robots like sentient beings. Young children take their cues from the adults in their life, yes indeed. So it makes sense that they would key into things if the adults took an interest in them, and ignore them or class them as something else if they don't.
In opinions, Mr. Krugman points out the current mortgage documntation crisis threatens to provoke another economic crisis, proves that the whole thing was operating without any actual rule of law, and criticizes both the current administration's unwillingness to do anything effective and the conservative insistence that the inability to prove a chain of custody and legal ownership is a trivial matter and shouldn't be fussed over.
Librarians, who have a great desire to provide access, are finding themselves being snookered by the companies they buy that access from, because those companies have all the leverage to get to the places the libraries need, and know it.
Finally, Mr. Elder says that if the Republican Party wants a winning straetgy, they should ask black voters whether their children are better off in public schools than in private ones. Thos public schools, he says, are "domianted by teachers' unions and the Democratic party", where poor teachers get shuffled off to poor urban schools, and kids in the city suffer from these bad teachers and a violent, drop-out heavy but discipline and expulsion-light environment that makes it impossible to learn. Mr. Elder's solution is "vouchers! Vouchers for everyone!" claiming that those who have voucher programs and can move their children out of public schools do better because...well, private schools are inherently superior, and besides, Obama sent his kids to private schools after he had private schooling, so he's a condescending elitist who doesn't want those dirty urban kids marring the education of his daughters. Anyone who's been around the block once or twice on education wouldn't make such a non-sequitur, but would instead point out a few things that private and charter schools can do that public schools can't. For example:
Mr. Trzupek accuses the administration of promoting dangerous fuel additives like ethanol without sound science to back it up, saying they're using regulations and narrow interpretations of the law to get around the "obvious" problems that ethanol introduces into fuel systems like accelerated degradation of components due to increased acids. He then only footnotes the argument that ethanol subsidies makes food prices rise as more cropland is convereted to fuel land. If I were him, I'd reverse the two arguments' importance - first talk about the fact that we still need to be able to feed the people, then talk about how the additional ethanol could be damaging to the cars, too.
Mr. Carroll jumps with glee at the rejection of a motion to dismiss challenges against the individual mandate portion of the health care law passed in January, with the judge disagreeing with the government's assertion that under either the Commerce Clause or the government's power of taxation hey could require such a thing. Messrs. Gottlieb and Miller present an idea that states could choose to create exchanges that differ from the federally-mandated ones and thus kill the health care bill by offering different options that contain all the good things already passed in the health care bill. Which reminds me - this is a tale of two things. The mandate to carry insurance is broadly unpopular because of all the ways it can be abused and the way that it doesn't make much in terms of immediate substantive reform to the insurance system. All the things that do reform the system and include all sorts of people that were otherwise excluded are popular, however, and so any "repeal" usually has a "replace" component with it that keeps the parts people like. Which begs the question - why not work on the existing framework and make it better than insisting that it has to be dismantled and rebuilt?
Finally, we end in opinions that are all about unvarnished praise for the unregulated free market. Mr. Lagone chastises the President for taking a stance that big corporations and businesses are the enemy of the people who need guidance from them, declaring that his corporation, the Home Depot, would never have gotten off the ground under the current regulatory environment if he had tried to start it today, because he couldn't make incentives to the workers in the form of stock options, and he would, of course, have to provide some measure of health care to his employees, which would have ruined him, cost-wise. He says that he started as just a hard-working person who built up his company into something successful, and that the current President should strive to encourage other people to do the same.
Then Mr. Henninger says that the Chilean mine rescue should be touted as a complete victory for the free market, because all the products that were used in the rescue come from companies competing in the free market to make money in drilling, or lifting, or munching up foot bacteria. Those free-marketers have the drive to innovate new products to avoid being chewed up by the competition, and that's why those miners are alive today, he says. The profit motive ends up saving lives. Which apaprently means that unregulated unrestricted free-market capitalism is clearly superior and should be implemented immediately, at least according to him. If he's not stretching it out that far, then nevermind, but if he is, then he's discounting that the profit motive can still work easily within a more regulated market, too.
Last out for today, The Slacktivist details the conversation he had with someone who chose to build the religious house for their nephew on poor foundations and then freaked out when the house fell down and the nephew walked away, blaming the blog for influencing him to "renounce Jesus and to become a nihilistic narcissist" and possibly an antichrist as well.
Test everything. Hold on to the good. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Build your house on solid foundations. Keep at it, even if the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Levites, and the priests all tell you that your house can't possibly have solid foundations because it's not built on sand and it doesn't look like their houses. Make sure that you let all the people spouting crazy nonsense be interviewed and exposed as the nutters they are, because ignoring them often lets them thrive. Much like how taking time in the classroom to walk your students through the consequences of bullying, cowardice, and how "fun" can sometimes not be fun for the person on the receiving end makes for a great lesson.
Do well. Be well. Probi Immotiqve Este.
And for those thinking about voting, give some consideration to the land war in Asia that we've been fighting for nine years and that has otherwise fallen off the radar with the economic issues. The one that has had active talks beteween the leaders of the government and the Taliban as an attemtp to wind the damn thing down into some sort of resolution.
Finally, though, take a thought about the conept of Open bookmarks, the way that we share, electronically, our annotations and comments and metatext on electronic text that we read. Because when you can create infinite copies of text, the text itself doesn't matter all that much.
Before we get to the regular news, The Dead Pool claims Barbara Billingsley, most famously known for her role as June Cleaver, at 94 years of age.
Out in the world today, have a look at Ibex goats climbing the nearly sheer face of a dam. And read up on how the platypus has more than 80 toxins at its disposal, making it seem more and more like the creature was created out of the spare parts left behind from all the other beings.
NATO looks ready to approve an anti-missile shield in Europe.
In the country, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger killed a significant amount of mothers' ability to work outside the house by removing their child care subsidies through his verto power. The people losing this subsidy have otherwise been off other public assistance programs for two years, but if forced to bear the entire brunt of child care, they're likely to drop right back onto those rolls and possibly be unable to continue working at the jobs they have secured and held through the recession. Governor, we understand the need to build reserve funds, but child care is not one of those things you can cut without rippling ramifications, including even more packed waiting lists for the other subsidized child care programs in the state.
Your mortgage problems are entirely your fault, according to Wall Street, because we don't make mistakes or take shortcuts. Riiiiiight. If the banking industry had any sort of credibility to back this up, instead of being scandal-plagued for the last couple decades, they'd still be wrong and trying to get blame reassigned away from the people who really are at fault - them.
The News Corp. donation to the Republican Governors' Association was larger than initially reported - it is now 1.25 million USD, not just 1 million. Throwing that kind of money around, most certainly, but News Corp. still wants you to not know that they're trying to buy influence in the election. This, while other conservatives accuse, say, George Soros of hiding his bid to influence the elections for the Demcorats. If we had, say, sane disclosure laws that applied everywhere, we wouldn't have to deal with accusations, denials, and counter-accusations that everyone is trying to make it so their opponents have to disclose while their supporters don't. (That Mr. Rove thinks of this as a sideshow is quaint, cute, and utterly wrong. With the amounts of money being slung about here, and the likely influence those ads will have on voters, it's a very important issue to talk disclosure of donors.)
Here's an example on how the way you write an article influences what people get out of it - headline says we have a 1.3 trillion USD deficit, third apragraph says this was an improvement of 122 billion USD compared to last year. Now, there's a perfectly valid argument that says that small of a shift is insufficient proof of any sort of progress on deficit reduction. But what we're getting out of the article is "Those Democrats in charge spent 1.3 trillion dollars in deficits on their social programs! That's so awful! Get the bums out!" without mentioning the other bits that were involved in there. Two land wars in Asia, for example. At least the opinion writers are more forthright about saying that all these debts are the Democrats' fault and that people are pissed that politicians keep telling them that all is good when the government runs deficits when they get smacked around by their creditholders if they so much as forget to cross a t.
An interesting case where the resolution likely reaffirms "Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose is" - a veteran was charged with theft after he stole a tattered flag from a local business. The vet had previously complained about the flag's state and was told by the person flying it that it was an accurate depiction of what the country's state at the time. So clearly there's a point being made in both cases - the vet's "You will not disrespect the symbol I hold sacred" and the businessman's "I have a right to make a statement on my property." Fist, nose. Where does the one have to stop for the other?
The retiring chief of the Marine Corps says that 90-95 percent of Marines would be uncomfortable serving in the same unit as an openly gay man, based on unscientific polling in a group environment. His figure really shouldn't be cited as anything, but it's what he's using as his justification to oppose the end of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
A soldier testified that his immediate superior ordered deletion of a cell-phone recording of the Fort Hood shooting, althoguh the article declines to go any further into the whys and whoms of that situation.
Finally, pay only as much attention as you need to the event in question - focus more on the allegation that a lawyer was yelled at and pressured to attend a retreat with co-workers by the boss, with retaliation alleged after he refused to go.
In sciences and technologies, in addition to the things above regarding goats and platypus, science has eliminated all wild cases of the rinderpest virus, causes of cattle plagues. Yay for the livestock. The humans, on teh other hand, must deal with a study suggesting that cancers are a result of our industiralized and technological society, one that creates pollutants not found in nature nor in history.
What you delete from Facebook may not actually be physically deleted from their servers for a very long time, meaning that someone with access to direct URLs, or indexers, or scrapers, may still be able to get to things you thought were gone long after they were supposed to be gone.
As with much of our technology, the military is trying to develop flexible LED displays to give soldiers a wristband communicator and data display, so that those soldiers can have all sorts of extra information available to them as they do their movements and fight combat. Whatever gets developed there will likely eventually trickle down to the rest of us as they improve their tech to newer versions.
Finally, if adults treat social robots like sentient beings, then babies will treat social robots like sentient beings. Young children take their cues from the adults in their life, yes indeed. So it makes sense that they would key into things if the adults took an interest in them, and ignore them or class them as something else if they don't.
In opinions, Mr. Krugman points out the current mortgage documntation crisis threatens to provoke another economic crisis, proves that the whole thing was operating without any actual rule of law, and criticizes both the current administration's unwillingness to do anything effective and the conservative insistence that the inability to prove a chain of custody and legal ownership is a trivial matter and shouldn't be fussed over.
Librarians, who have a great desire to provide access, are finding themselves being snookered by the companies they buy that access from, because those companies have all the leverage to get to the places the libraries need, and know it.
Finally, Mr. Elder says that if the Republican Party wants a winning straetgy, they should ask black voters whether their children are better off in public schools than in private ones. Thos public schools, he says, are "domianted by teachers' unions and the Democratic party", where poor teachers get shuffled off to poor urban schools, and kids in the city suffer from these bad teachers and a violent, drop-out heavy but discipline and expulsion-light environment that makes it impossible to learn. Mr. Elder's solution is "vouchers! Vouchers for everyone!" claiming that those who have voucher programs and can move their children out of public schools do better because...well, private schools are inherently superior, and besides, Obama sent his kids to private schools after he had private schooling, so he's a condescending elitist who doesn't want those dirty urban kids marring the education of his daughters. Anyone who's been around the block once or twice on education wouldn't make such a non-sequitur, but would instead point out a few things that private and charter schools can do that public schools can't. For example:
- Private schools can pick who they want to have, dismiss anyone that doesn't fit them, and limit their class sizes to numbers that research indicates are proper, since they don't have to follow any requirements that all children get educated.
- Private schools don't have their funding tied to standardized test scores or other measures that don't measure learning.
- Private schools are usually adequately funded, because the students, not politicians, provide the funding. Adequate funding really helps schools and students achieve their goals.
Mr. Trzupek accuses the administration of promoting dangerous fuel additives like ethanol without sound science to back it up, saying they're using regulations and narrow interpretations of the law to get around the "obvious" problems that ethanol introduces into fuel systems like accelerated degradation of components due to increased acids. He then only footnotes the argument that ethanol subsidies makes food prices rise as more cropland is convereted to fuel land. If I were him, I'd reverse the two arguments' importance - first talk about the fact that we still need to be able to feed the people, then talk about how the additional ethanol could be damaging to the cars, too.
Mr. Carroll jumps with glee at the rejection of a motion to dismiss challenges against the individual mandate portion of the health care law passed in January, with the judge disagreeing with the government's assertion that under either the Commerce Clause or the government's power of taxation hey could require such a thing. Messrs. Gottlieb and Miller present an idea that states could choose to create exchanges that differ from the federally-mandated ones and thus kill the health care bill by offering different options that contain all the good things already passed in the health care bill. Which reminds me - this is a tale of two things. The mandate to carry insurance is broadly unpopular because of all the ways it can be abused and the way that it doesn't make much in terms of immediate substantive reform to the insurance system. All the things that do reform the system and include all sorts of people that were otherwise excluded are popular, however, and so any "repeal" usually has a "replace" component with it that keeps the parts people like. Which begs the question - why not work on the existing framework and make it better than insisting that it has to be dismantled and rebuilt?
Finally, we end in opinions that are all about unvarnished praise for the unregulated free market. Mr. Lagone chastises the President for taking a stance that big corporations and businesses are the enemy of the people who need guidance from them, declaring that his corporation, the Home Depot, would never have gotten off the ground under the current regulatory environment if he had tried to start it today, because he couldn't make incentives to the workers in the form of stock options, and he would, of course, have to provide some measure of health care to his employees, which would have ruined him, cost-wise. He says that he started as just a hard-working person who built up his company into something successful, and that the current President should strive to encourage other people to do the same.
Then Mr. Henninger says that the Chilean mine rescue should be touted as a complete victory for the free market, because all the products that were used in the rescue come from companies competing in the free market to make money in drilling, or lifting, or munching up foot bacteria. Those free-marketers have the drive to innovate new products to avoid being chewed up by the competition, and that's why those miners are alive today, he says. The profit motive ends up saving lives. Which apaprently means that unregulated unrestricted free-market capitalism is clearly superior and should be implemented immediately, at least according to him. If he's not stretching it out that far, then nevermind, but if he is, then he's discounting that the profit motive can still work easily within a more regulated market, too.
Last out for today, The Slacktivist details the conversation he had with someone who chose to build the religious house for their nephew on poor foundations and then freaked out when the house fell down and the nephew walked away, blaming the blog for influencing him to "renounce Jesus and to become a nihilistic narcissist" and possibly an antichrist as well.
Test everything. Hold on to the good. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Build your house on solid foundations. Keep at it, even if the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Levites, and the priests all tell you that your house can't possibly have solid foundations because it's not built on sand and it doesn't look like their houses. Make sure that you let all the people spouting crazy nonsense be interviewed and exposed as the nutters they are, because ignoring them often lets them thrive. Much like how taking time in the classroom to walk your students through the consequences of bullying, cowardice, and how "fun" can sometimes not be fun for the person on the receiving end makes for a great lesson.
Do well. Be well. Probi Immotiqve Este.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-10-19 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-19 02:55 am (UTC)Maybe it's a think, but I'd like for everyone to be able live long enough to write their own obituaries the way they want them and arrange their funerals properly, to help those still living, before they die.
grist for the mill
Date: 2010-10-18 06:29 pm (UTC)Re: grist for the mill
Date: 2010-10-18 06:55 pm (UTC)