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silveradeptGreetings. 11 November was, alternately, Armistice Day or Veterans' Day, depending on where you were to mark the time, remembering either the finishing of one major front of a war that was supposed to end all wars, only to have another of its kind erupt decades later and a lengthy period of open hostility and covert maneuvers following that one, or the countless dead and injured, men and women alike, on battlefields, fought for causes that were thought valiant at the time, even as history may judge them otherwise. Veterans who don't fit the white-and-male profile find themselves marginalized both by their administration and by other people, including not telling them about the legal options some of them have about taxes and their pay and blowhards sowing discontent about race, gender identity, sex, sexuality, and other "Others" with one face while claiming to support the troops in all ways with the other. Instead of that, we should be thanking them for their willingness to serve and their effective service, even as others, past and present, consider them less than human. Others wonder how a rememberance of the dead has somehow become a celebration of the living, and worse, a call for jingoism and fetishization of those people who came back from war as heroes...instead of survivors. It would definitely be in our interest to follow the line Mr. Horgan concludes, drawing from Margaret Mead, that war is something that we have invented, and that we can choose to discard, should we decide that it has egregious faults and we have alternative inventions to use in its stead.
Not that such a solemn occasion precluded cheap shots taken about why the President, who was on his way to a G-20 meeting, wasn's in the United States, even as he paid his respects to soldiers in both Indonesia and South Korea for their efforts, trying to make it sound like the President was running both from electoral defeats for the Democrats and choosing not to honor the soldiers (even though the next paragraph says he did just that.)
Last out, big opportunities missed by CBS to highlight Native Hawai'ians when they remade "Hawaii 5-0", showing what people think Hawai'i and the people there are about but not actually showing what the island and its peoples are really about.
Out in the world today, we pick up the theme of relations between the ethnicities with an article claiming some white kids and families of Canada are complaining their universities are being overrun with Asians and they not only can't compete with them, the academic focus is changing the climate so that they won't feel like they can have fun there. If this sounds familiar to you, then you might be pinging on a different situation where students in the United States were complaining about the same thing, not to mention the continued reinforcement of the stereotype of Asian immigrants and families as myopically academically focused. The people in the original article seem to know they're stereotyping, and they're uncomfortable with it, but they're choosing to believe their own lying eyes over clearing the fog and taking another look. Either that, or the writers, who seem to waffle between "Weeeeelll, maybe it's bad the promote this image" and "THEY'RE TAKING OUR UNIVERSITIES!", have set them up in this light so they can claim "It's not us who said it! They did, they did!"
Elswhere, check out how a German town revitalized itself by becoming truly accessible to everyone, and did so likely on a realtively cheap budget, because it was part of East Germany, without so much of the economic booms.
Coming out of the War Zone, Pakistani Muslims close to Sufism, fed up with being attacked by Taliban forces, are defending themselves and their practices. Hopefully our drone strikes will magically be able to tell the difference. More constructively, Iraq has a government, as an eight month standoff finally comes to a close. Al-Malaki gets the PM, the Kurds get the presidency, and the Sunni Iraqiya gets the speaker of parliament.
Finally, the "no, we can't make this up" department has a doozie for us - a French doctor caught a baby who had been dropped from 24 meters up and had bounced off a cafe awning before landing safely and unharmed into the passing doctor's arms.
Domestically, a novel approach to the question of legal gay marriage registered to marry in Washington, D.C., officiant is in Washington D.C., couple is in Texas, ceremony conducted using voice-and-video over Internet Protocol.
Activists, inspired by similar movements of Tony Blair's book in the United Kingdom, are suggesting to bookstores that they place the previous administrator's book, "Decision Points" in the "True Crime" section of their bookstores and/or libraries. According to Mr. Grim, however, it might be better placed in Fiction or in Anthologies, based on how much of it appears to be copied wholesale from other accounts already published. Either way, it means more interviews for the previous administrator.
Mr. Taibbi, continuing on his quest to prove that Rolling Stone should be cast more in the mold of Playboy than OK!, sits in on the process of the "rocket docket" of Florida, the courts charged with clearing as many backed-up foreclosures as they can, and concludes that they're not in it for justice, but to make sure that the houses just get foreclosed on like the banks want them to be so they can then be resold.
Rand Paul, Tea Party Darling, may soon be in the Tea Party Doghouse after he said he would fight to make sure Kentucky received its fair share of federal funds, just that he'd do it transparently, contradicting his earlier position that he favored a moratorium on earmarks. This could be the beginning of the unmasking, where those candidates that ran hard on the Tea Party platform reveal themselves to be much more like standard Republicans than the warriors they were portrayed as. That very well could leave the planks of the plan about "getting control of government" will find themselves unceremoniously tossed out.
As with all numbers, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department reminds us that what you hear in numbers may not be the real numbers, or useful numbers, numbers tha answer your questions, or even numbers that tell the truth, especially when asking questions like "Are we in a jobs recovery?"
Or, perhaps, "Does the web browser that I use change the rate I will be offered on an auto loan teaser?"
Or, for example, "Was the Obama Administration deliberately manipulating scientific findings to give us the best-case scenario on the Deepwater Horizon disaster?" (And were they the ones doing the number-running, or were outside interests doing it and pressuring them to promote them?)
Unfortunately, there's other signs that don't look nearly as good. Rather than standing firm and forcing Republicans to make a decision about whether or not to accept tax cuts for the middle class or be tarred for raising taxes on that same middle class, the Administration seems likely to roll over and accpt that the rich have to be pampered with tax cuts as well if they want to get their middle-class tax cuts extended as well. This isn't even the worst part about it - the proposal from the bipartisan Deficit Commission has arrived, and it's, well, a clusterfrak. As Mr. Krguman points out, if you plan on balancing a budget and creating a surplus, you don't usually propose a plan that reduces revenues as well as cutting spending. According to the draft report released on 10 November, there will be significant tax rate reductions for rich individuals and corporations, an elimination of tax breaks that the working and middle class use most often, a reduction of government jobs (mostly in non-defense sectors), and then chaining revenues to a certain percentage of GDP. They do propose a lot of spending cuts, in defense and non-defense, many of which would make Heritage proud, like cutting federal salaries and jobs, asking employees to put in a bigger portion of their paycheck into the retirement system and forcing students to pay the interest on their student loans while they are still taking classes, as well as some cutting for defense.
Social Security, on the other hand, is indexed to wages, not prices, meaning benefits are likely to be unable to cover expenditures over time, because while prices rise all the time, wages don't. The age eventually gets stepped up to 69 before you get full benefits. If you have other sources of income, lucky you, you can expect to see your Social Security benefits decline in proportion to those other sources of income, which makes me wonder if there will be a gap somewhere like there is with other government assistance where you make enough to have your beenfits reduced, but not enough to actually be able to stand on your own two feet. One good thing, though, is that they're raising the ceiling of what part of your income can be taxed for Social Security and the like.
So, the proposal will certainly give people plenty to talk about, but much of what they have in mind sems designed to kill the working classes by eliminating things they really make good use of and let the rich and the corporate off the hook for paying much of anything, continuing to shower them with benefits and breaks they don't need and probably shouldn't have.
Finally, a piece of property used to host a festival for a Grateful Dead cover band may be seized based on federal agents observing the sale of drugs on the property, under asset forfeiture laws. Seems like a perfect example of how the War on (Some) Drugs can perpetuate itself without having to actually charge anyone with a crime, which I'm sure is the preferred way to go about doing it.
And then there's the mother that tried to sell her baby to buy a car, the gentleman who answered entirely truthfully about the people he knew who had committed crimes and was excused from jury duty - he knew Jeffrey Dahmer, and the gentleman found without clothing, with a mouse in his rectum, not in his own house, and clearly on drugs. And, because I haven't disturbed you enough with this, so far, the product he probably would like to use afterward, which, yes, also has a female version.
In technology, a court case on whether or not an image posted to Twitter is free for the taking and use by other agencies based on the Twitter Terms of Service. So after we had the nice bit about how the Internet is not public domain, we have a company arguing that if you use social media services, their licensing agreements allow others to pilfer your work without compensation. It's an important question - after all, on YouTube alone, more than 35 hours of video are being uploaded every minute to the service, so that's a lot of stuff that could potentially be swiped.
Speaking of Google, a watchdog group is calling for an investigation to see whether Google and this administration have ties that are too close for comfort or legality, including as evidence that Google managed to dodge being skewered by the FTC for the privacy violations made by their Street View cars capturing data transmitted over insecure networks.
Something worth thinking about - a lack of broadband adoption is a negatively self-fulfilling prophecy, but places that are not adopting are often structurally unable to handle widespread broadband adoption, whether through income or infrastructure, and so the trend continues. Something like that could be stopped, with some help from the companies or, more likely, the influx of serious infrastructure cash from somewhere to build up the community enough that widespread broadband adoption becomes possible.
Staying on the Web, the RockMelt browser hopes to find purchase by beleiving everyone uses the Web for a few limited functions that they want at their fingertips, rather than making them open lots of tabs or plug-ins to make their browsers more functional.
The danger of relying on the web for wisdom is that you also get the web's prejudices, at least, if you're trying to post things on Craigslist, anyway.
And then looking into tech that will definitely help push boundaries, I'm betting the machinima folks will love the Motus software, allowing for a user to act as a cameraperson in any three-dimensional virtual environment, which might mean they won't be restricted to the space on the desktop not covered by the HUD in a game, or that they can produce alternate camera angles from one runthrough of a game, and cut in and between those angles as they like. What I'm going to be much more interested in is the current hacks in existence for the Microsoft Kinect controller that allow it and its camera to be used for things like gesture-based systems, allowing people to behave like they are in a movie or television show that lets people resize and move data simply by moving their hands.
Out of tech, a technology failure - a controlled demolition had only one half of the explosives fire, which resulted in a large structure toppling in the wrong direction and knocking out power for several residents in Ohio.
Two bits of science - speaking more than one language can help delay the onset of Alzheimer's denegeration, and we have finally videographed how cats drink liquids - a high-speed, low-noise lapping process.
Into opinions, Sana Milbank continues to be targeted by Bill O'Reilly's violent "joking" rhetoric, and wants it to stop before someone takes Bill seriously and attacks him. Considering that some loose cannons in the Beck fellowship, and sevearl loose cannons in the anti-choice fellowship have taken action after being goaded on by ciolent rhetoric, Milbank has both a point and a case - it should be easy to tell when someone isn't being serious about it, and if they aren't, there should be pressure on them to cease and desist, even if they can get away from any charges because they can prove the person who took up the charge was crazy.
Zoltan Hajnal analyses the Republican Southern Strategy and concludes that it's not going to keep working for them based on the demographic trends of the United States - soon enough, there won't be enough white people to appeal solely to and win with. Not that it will stop a lot of the rhetoric going around (might actually increase it some, because we're perverse people like that.) - out latest test case is Oklahoma, where the anti-international law constitutional amendment is being painted as citizens fighting back against the pernicious influence of the evil Sharia law, the arm of The Bloodthirsty Religion (as well as a case in Tennessee where a planned mosque is being protested because the people who would be associated with it hold extreme positions, a proposition that should easily wipe out several Christian churches in the state if allowed to stand), and that such amendments are simply clarifying the law that American law is superior and explicitly banning systems of law that contradict our own codex, and furthermore, if people really wanted to show that they weren't on the side of those evil, bloodthirsty terrorists and their evil, bloodthirsty legal code, then they would be supporting this measure wholeheartedly instead of suing for its overturning. Fear the Muslims, because they're not denouncing an aspect of their own culture
Mr. Fund opines that Alaska wants to move as quickly as possible on the Murkowski-Miller contest, so as not to be in the spotlight for too long and get dogged into the recount-and-lawsuit problems of other close elections
Mr. Henninger claims the reason the Democrats lost their election is because they've reduced the private sector to an abstraction, instead of considering it over all other things when making decisions, and then suffer cognitive dissonance and refuse to believe their politics have had consequences.
Last for tonight, two letters of note, one a thank you to a fan who had read the first book of seven and hoped it would win an award, the other a thank you from a client about the most excellent space suit that they built for him, including the great property that it hid the wearer from view when it was being photographed.
Not that such a solemn occasion precluded cheap shots taken about why the President, who was on his way to a G-20 meeting, wasn's in the United States, even as he paid his respects to soldiers in both Indonesia and South Korea for their efforts, trying to make it sound like the President was running both from electoral defeats for the Democrats and choosing not to honor the soldiers (even though the next paragraph says he did just that.)
Last out, big opportunities missed by CBS to highlight Native Hawai'ians when they remade "Hawaii 5-0", showing what people think Hawai'i and the people there are about but not actually showing what the island and its peoples are really about.
Out in the world today, we pick up the theme of relations between the ethnicities with an article claiming some white kids and families of Canada are complaining their universities are being overrun with Asians and they not only can't compete with them, the academic focus is changing the climate so that they won't feel like they can have fun there. If this sounds familiar to you, then you might be pinging on a different situation where students in the United States were complaining about the same thing, not to mention the continued reinforcement of the stereotype of Asian immigrants and families as myopically academically focused. The people in the original article seem to know they're stereotyping, and they're uncomfortable with it, but they're choosing to believe their own lying eyes over clearing the fog and taking another look. Either that, or the writers, who seem to waffle between "Weeeeelll, maybe it's bad the promote this image" and "THEY'RE TAKING OUR UNIVERSITIES!", have set them up in this light so they can claim "It's not us who said it! They did, they did!"
Elswhere, check out how a German town revitalized itself by becoming truly accessible to everyone, and did so likely on a realtively cheap budget, because it was part of East Germany, without so much of the economic booms.
Coming out of the War Zone, Pakistani Muslims close to Sufism, fed up with being attacked by Taliban forces, are defending themselves and their practices. Hopefully our drone strikes will magically be able to tell the difference. More constructively, Iraq has a government, as an eight month standoff finally comes to a close. Al-Malaki gets the PM, the Kurds get the presidency, and the Sunni Iraqiya gets the speaker of parliament.
Finally, the "no, we can't make this up" department has a doozie for us - a French doctor caught a baby who had been dropped from 24 meters up and had bounced off a cafe awning before landing safely and unharmed into the passing doctor's arms.
Domestically, a novel approach to the question of legal gay marriage registered to marry in Washington, D.C., officiant is in Washington D.C., couple is in Texas, ceremony conducted using voice-and-video over Internet Protocol.
Activists, inspired by similar movements of Tony Blair's book in the United Kingdom, are suggesting to bookstores that they place the previous administrator's book, "Decision Points" in the "True Crime" section of their bookstores and/or libraries. According to Mr. Grim, however, it might be better placed in Fiction or in Anthologies, based on how much of it appears to be copied wholesale from other accounts already published. Either way, it means more interviews for the previous administrator.
Mr. Taibbi, continuing on his quest to prove that Rolling Stone should be cast more in the mold of Playboy than OK!, sits in on the process of the "rocket docket" of Florida, the courts charged with clearing as many backed-up foreclosures as they can, and concludes that they're not in it for justice, but to make sure that the houses just get foreclosed on like the banks want them to be so they can then be resold.
Rand Paul, Tea Party Darling, may soon be in the Tea Party Doghouse after he said he would fight to make sure Kentucky received its fair share of federal funds, just that he'd do it transparently, contradicting his earlier position that he favored a moratorium on earmarks. This could be the beginning of the unmasking, where those candidates that ran hard on the Tea Party platform reveal themselves to be much more like standard Republicans than the warriors they were portrayed as. That very well could leave the planks of the plan about "getting control of government" will find themselves unceremoniously tossed out.
As with all numbers, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department reminds us that what you hear in numbers may not be the real numbers, or useful numbers, numbers tha answer your questions, or even numbers that tell the truth, especially when asking questions like "Are we in a jobs recovery?"
Or, perhaps, "Does the web browser that I use change the rate I will be offered on an auto loan teaser?"
Or, for example, "Was the Obama Administration deliberately manipulating scientific findings to give us the best-case scenario on the Deepwater Horizon disaster?" (And were they the ones doing the number-running, or were outside interests doing it and pressuring them to promote them?)
Unfortunately, there's other signs that don't look nearly as good. Rather than standing firm and forcing Republicans to make a decision about whether or not to accept tax cuts for the middle class or be tarred for raising taxes on that same middle class, the Administration seems likely to roll over and accpt that the rich have to be pampered with tax cuts as well if they want to get their middle-class tax cuts extended as well. This isn't even the worst part about it - the proposal from the bipartisan Deficit Commission has arrived, and it's, well, a clusterfrak. As Mr. Krguman points out, if you plan on balancing a budget and creating a surplus, you don't usually propose a plan that reduces revenues as well as cutting spending. According to the draft report released on 10 November, there will be significant tax rate reductions for rich individuals and corporations, an elimination of tax breaks that the working and middle class use most often, a reduction of government jobs (mostly in non-defense sectors), and then chaining revenues to a certain percentage of GDP. They do propose a lot of spending cuts, in defense and non-defense, many of which would make Heritage proud, like cutting federal salaries and jobs, asking employees to put in a bigger portion of their paycheck into the retirement system and forcing students to pay the interest on their student loans while they are still taking classes, as well as some cutting for defense.
Social Security, on the other hand, is indexed to wages, not prices, meaning benefits are likely to be unable to cover expenditures over time, because while prices rise all the time, wages don't. The age eventually gets stepped up to 69 before you get full benefits. If you have other sources of income, lucky you, you can expect to see your Social Security benefits decline in proportion to those other sources of income, which makes me wonder if there will be a gap somewhere like there is with other government assistance where you make enough to have your beenfits reduced, but not enough to actually be able to stand on your own two feet. One good thing, though, is that they're raising the ceiling of what part of your income can be taxed for Social Security and the like.
So, the proposal will certainly give people plenty to talk about, but much of what they have in mind sems designed to kill the working classes by eliminating things they really make good use of and let the rich and the corporate off the hook for paying much of anything, continuing to shower them with benefits and breaks they don't need and probably shouldn't have.
Finally, a piece of property used to host a festival for a Grateful Dead cover band may be seized based on federal agents observing the sale of drugs on the property, under asset forfeiture laws. Seems like a perfect example of how the War on (Some) Drugs can perpetuate itself without having to actually charge anyone with a crime, which I'm sure is the preferred way to go about doing it.
And then there's the mother that tried to sell her baby to buy a car, the gentleman who answered entirely truthfully about the people he knew who had committed crimes and was excused from jury duty - he knew Jeffrey Dahmer, and the gentleman found without clothing, with a mouse in his rectum, not in his own house, and clearly on drugs. And, because I haven't disturbed you enough with this, so far, the product he probably would like to use afterward, which, yes, also has a female version.
In technology, a court case on whether or not an image posted to Twitter is free for the taking and use by other agencies based on the Twitter Terms of Service. So after we had the nice bit about how the Internet is not public domain, we have a company arguing that if you use social media services, their licensing agreements allow others to pilfer your work without compensation. It's an important question - after all, on YouTube alone, more than 35 hours of video are being uploaded every minute to the service, so that's a lot of stuff that could potentially be swiped.
Speaking of Google, a watchdog group is calling for an investigation to see whether Google and this administration have ties that are too close for comfort or legality, including as evidence that Google managed to dodge being skewered by the FTC for the privacy violations made by their Street View cars capturing data transmitted over insecure networks.
Something worth thinking about - a lack of broadband adoption is a negatively self-fulfilling prophecy, but places that are not adopting are often structurally unable to handle widespread broadband adoption, whether through income or infrastructure, and so the trend continues. Something like that could be stopped, with some help from the companies or, more likely, the influx of serious infrastructure cash from somewhere to build up the community enough that widespread broadband adoption becomes possible.
Staying on the Web, the RockMelt browser hopes to find purchase by beleiving everyone uses the Web for a few limited functions that they want at their fingertips, rather than making them open lots of tabs or plug-ins to make their browsers more functional.
The danger of relying on the web for wisdom is that you also get the web's prejudices, at least, if you're trying to post things on Craigslist, anyway.
And then looking into tech that will definitely help push boundaries, I'm betting the machinima folks will love the Motus software, allowing for a user to act as a cameraperson in any three-dimensional virtual environment, which might mean they won't be restricted to the space on the desktop not covered by the HUD in a game, or that they can produce alternate camera angles from one runthrough of a game, and cut in and between those angles as they like. What I'm going to be much more interested in is the current hacks in existence for the Microsoft Kinect controller that allow it and its camera to be used for things like gesture-based systems, allowing people to behave like they are in a movie or television show that lets people resize and move data simply by moving their hands.
Out of tech, a technology failure - a controlled demolition had only one half of the explosives fire, which resulted in a large structure toppling in the wrong direction and knocking out power for several residents in Ohio.
Two bits of science - speaking more than one language can help delay the onset of Alzheimer's denegeration, and we have finally videographed how cats drink liquids - a high-speed, low-noise lapping process.
Into opinions, Sana Milbank continues to be targeted by Bill O'Reilly's violent "joking" rhetoric, and wants it to stop before someone takes Bill seriously and attacks him. Considering that some loose cannons in the Beck fellowship, and sevearl loose cannons in the anti-choice fellowship have taken action after being goaded on by ciolent rhetoric, Milbank has both a point and a case - it should be easy to tell when someone isn't being serious about it, and if they aren't, there should be pressure on them to cease and desist, even if they can get away from any charges because they can prove the person who took up the charge was crazy.
Zoltan Hajnal analyses the Republican Southern Strategy and concludes that it's not going to keep working for them based on the demographic trends of the United States - soon enough, there won't be enough white people to appeal solely to and win with. Not that it will stop a lot of the rhetoric going around (might actually increase it some, because we're perverse people like that.) - out latest test case is Oklahoma, where the anti-international law constitutional amendment is being painted as citizens fighting back against the pernicious influence of the evil Sharia law, the arm of The Bloodthirsty Religion (as well as a case in Tennessee where a planned mosque is being protested because the people who would be associated with it hold extreme positions, a proposition that should easily wipe out several Christian churches in the state if allowed to stand), and that such amendments are simply clarifying the law that American law is superior and explicitly banning systems of law that contradict our own codex, and furthermore, if people really wanted to show that they weren't on the side of those evil, bloodthirsty terrorists and their evil, bloodthirsty legal code, then they would be supporting this measure wholeheartedly instead of suing for its overturning. Fear the Muslims, because they're not denouncing an aspect of their own culture
Mr. Fund opines that Alaska wants to move as quickly as possible on the Murkowski-Miller contest, so as not to be in the spotlight for too long and get dogged into the recount-and-lawsuit problems of other close elections
Mr. Henninger claims the reason the Democrats lost their election is because they've reduced the private sector to an abstraction, instead of considering it over all other things when making decisions, and then suffer cognitive dissonance and refuse to believe their politics have had consequences.
Last for tonight, two letters of note, one a thank you to a fan who had read the first book of seven and hoped it would win an award, the other a thank you from a client about the most excellent space suit that they built for him, including the great property that it hid the wearer from view when it was being photographed.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 06:51 pm (UTC)On the subject of universities being "too Asian," I don't really have a dog in that fight, but I do have a problem (admittedly, my problem) with this idea that the purpose of higher education is "to have fun."
Er, no. It's a side effect of the youth and hormone levels of the main and shifting student population.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-14 05:41 pm (UTC)