Last for the year 29-31 December 2010
Jan. 1st, 2011 01:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings, everyone. Take a look at this - changes wrought in the world from 2000 to 2010.
We've almost closed out the year. It's been a ride, hasn't it? Which also means it's time for predictions of the next year, like New Scientist's thoughts about the future of medicine, science, and technology, IBM's Five in Five predictions, and a look in at the best jobs on-line for the next year.
That also means that It's time to usher in the Year of the Rabbit with some nice images.
And, the last Dead Pool mark of the year - Geraldine Hoff, inspiration and model for the Rosie the Riveter posters, passed away to accolades at 86 years of age.
Out in the world today, the network of actors working against United States forces in Afghanistan is much larger and harder to bring down than U.S. forces would like.
Two shots of "terror, terror!" - Turkish police detaining suspected al-Qaeda members, and Denmark arrests five on suspicion of terror plotting, apparently in revenge for the publishing house that ran the cartoons making mockery of Mohammed. Which gives commentators in America plenty of time to dust off their "freedom of expression is great, and those evul Muslims should be made fun of, instead of getting the kid gloves that Christianity never gets" columns, putting a good point - religions should not be exempted from criticism, including iconic criticism, and those making that criticism should not be killed or threatened with death - right next to a bad once - Christians are so persecuted by the evil Islam-worshipping government that gives Muslims special treatment!
More Wikileaks data - despirte giving significant amounts of aid to Egypt, the United States is frustrated that their military hasn't turned into a more modern fighting force and joined in on fighting border smugglers, terrorists, and other things of interest to the United States. The continuing releases of the leaked data may be impeding the ability of United States diplomats to obtain information that they need, because nobody likes having their dirty laundry aired out for public consumption. The most serious consequence of this action might be the passing of far more draconian restrictions of speech and journalism by governments who do not want to repeat the Wikileaks endeavour. (There's a secondary argument in that column that the Pentagon Papers were a leak that was done right - with the most sensitive material kept secret so as not to interfere with ongoing diplomacy - and that Wikileaks indiscrimiante publishing is a leak done wrong, because it interferes with diplomacy by airing out the laundry. Argue that at your own leisure.)
Venezuelan President Chavez got a bill through his legislature allowing him to rule by decree for 18 months, starting 5 January. He also rejected and expelled the United States ambassador to Venezuela, sparking rumors of a retailation expulsion of the Venezuelan ambassador.
And if you examine the words of Assange himself in relation to his rape charges, it sounds a lot less like some sort of conspiracy and a lot more like a man who feels unrepentant at the things he did and is blinkered enough by Privilege that he doesn't really think he did anything wrong.
Finally, China is scaling back its rare-earth exports, meaning technology manufacturers will have to find other sources for the rare materials they need.
Domestically, a remarkably well-coordinated strike by the inmates in Georgia's prison system went largely unreported by major media outlets - and the list of offenses and demands made by the prisoners are all things that they should have as part of humane incarceration. How did this not get covered - too much focus on Wikileaks, perhaps?
A previous oil company executive is predicting five dollars per gallon prices by 2012 and oil shortages by the end of the 2010s. This announcement gets some to accuse the President of deliberately making policy decisions to raise the price of gas, and letting his regulators do the same, because the President is obsessed with a mythic idea of actually getting significant amounts of power from non-fossil fuel sources. More on that in opinions.
The residents of the Appamatox Mobile Home Park have to leave their houses, not because people were behind on their rent, but because their landlord sold out the land from under their houses. And because most mobile homes have to be de-mobilized to be allowed to settle on park land, most of those residents have had to abandon their houses. In other places, because of the helpless, non land-owning nature of mobile homes and their de-mobility requirements, you can push their rents significantly higher. After all, what are they going to do? Pack up and leave? There are few situations better than this for the commission of evil.
A member of the House of Representatives intends on ontroducing a bill to prevent the Congress from holding its lame-duck session, intending to prevent another session like the last one, where the threat of not getting vacation actually managed to motivate the Congress into doing things. Well, some things, anyway, and the Republicans complained bitterly about having to do work on major issues that demonstrated how much their over-riding desire to make Barack Obama look bad had taken hold. After all, they didn't have to cast votes against the DREAM Act, originally introduced by a Republican, so that they would lose the Hispanic vote for years to come.
The truth of our economic times - American companies have created enough jobs overseas that could have lowered the unemployment rate in the U.S. close to a full percentage point. But corporations don't want to pay the wage and benefit costs associated with hiring Americans, because labor for manufacturing and assembly is far cheaper overseas.
And as for the mechanical hands that are the Rulers of Everything (aah) they're starting to analyze the news to make their trading decisions with, as well as examining Twitter feeds and using that data to make decisions with. Just think, a single tweet could potentially crash the market.
Last out, rule one of information is that it must be fact-checked and researched before declared to be valid. Thus, when falling for a hoax that says a Canadian singer supports the Park51 project, make sure that you enjoy the egg on your face thoroughly.
In technology, the first truly honest privacy policy.
Mr. Shafer believes the Internet as we know it would nver have been developed if the FCC had been allowed to regulate it when it was still in infancy. It culminates in Microsoft Bob coming to fruition, insteaed of being a dead project. Then again, with the amount of traitorware currently already on our devices revealing our data to advertisers and others, it might have already happened, just not so monolithically.
Mr. Trzupek falls on his face in trying to describe the net neutrality debate as a question of allowed-blocked censorship that no ISP in the United States would ever do, discounting the "fast versus slow" argument and assuming that network neutrality regulation is just the first step in restoring the Fairness Doctrine and giving the socialist government more control and ability to promote their anti-market agenda. It's interesting how the Fairness Doctrine is the boogeyman in both of the opinion columns, considering nobody had ever made any noise about that kind of thing at all, and the arguments were not about governmental censorship, but corporate censorship.
Finally, Kodachrome will no longer be devlopable, as the last machine able to produce prints from the film in the country is being sold and scrapped.
In the opinions, Mr. Carroll believes the upcoming fight will be the Administration's bureaucracies versus the Republcian House of Representatives, calling the administrators "central planners", the Corporatist Republicans "the people", and urging the Corporatists to deny funding to any rules written and the states to refuse to implement any of them as their way of fighting the "leftist agenda" of the administration. Mr. DuPont certainly believes the elections were about stopping the agenda and that the new overlords should be ready to roll back all the works of the last two years. And Mr. Sowell thinks that these "end runs" around the Constitution will continue. As what is likely a representative example, Mr. Trzupek certainly thinks the EPA is doing it's best to ensure that no more fossil fuel plants ever get built, as well as wrecking the economy with newer and tougher standards on emissions for all our products. All over the "nonexistent" problem of anthropogenic climate change.
Others think the presidency is just beginning, now that the Democrats no longer have complete control of all three branches of government and will have to compromise. They may, in fact, be happy with this situation because it means they will start getting the goodies they've wanted and can indulge in whatever petty spite they like against the Democrats and call it stopping a socialist agenda. Because as "everyone knows", socialists and liberals are fanatics and authoritarians who find common cause with The Bloodthirsty Religion and both work to undermine Our Sacred Freedom and our country so that they can destroy you and rule as unquestioned elites.
And speaking thereof, Mr. Spencer basically accuses any Muslim agent of the TSA of being a terrorist, potential terrorist, or person of suspicion and a person to be afraid of that no Red-Blooded American should ever have to submit to, even as he tosses a line saying "But I'm sure they're not all like that, honestly" as an attemtp to avoid being too obvious about his Islampohobia. I'm sure that he and Representative King would get along. Mr. Mauro defends Representative King's statement that most mosques in America are controlled by extremists amd says that the Representative did not say that the people attending are extremists, just that, y'know, you should be afraid of The Bloodthirsty Religion imparting extremism into its mosque-goers. Mr. Mauro then goes on to blame moderate Muslim groups for having such a bad relationship with the governemnt, because they're too closed and suspicious of the government that considers them to be potential terrorists all the time.
Mr. Wood believes the American military is so concentrated on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan that they've forgotten how to fight a war, when the next war comes to them, be it from Korea or elsewhere.
All of these opinions provide highlights and examples of the likelihood that the United States has long been a Corpofascist state, and that the government is no longer in charge, but the CEOs and the corporations. Citizens United was likely just another way of bringing this reality out into the open, so that Our Overlords can be more direct in how they control the government to the detriment of the people. To the point where working for one of them is more like indentured servitude than free people working for a living wage, and then you have people claiming that things like Social Security are Ponzi schemes and should be disbanded, and that tax increases on the rich are always illusions, because the rich will know how to get around them, inevitably leading to the conclusion that spending has to be cut if any sort of balance is to be achieved, instead of addressing the elephant in the room about how tax evasion is an assumption and that most tax cuts and loopholes are put in by the rich to benefit the rich. The reduction of those tax cuts and loopholes might very well generate more revenue, assuming that you close off all the avenues of escape, instead of shutting one door to open a window. Staying on that same theme, Mr. Stossel rails against the government for enacting comsumer protections against usurious rates and fees in credit cards, because the effect of it was that less people could get credit cards and have to turn to payday lenders. Because the credit card companies decided they didn't want to play by the new rules, and denied people the ability to get credit when they couldn't make monstrous profts off of them, or raised the interest rates on the existing cards. While Mr. Stossel believes that The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) would control any usurious intent among lenders, he seems to miss the point that if everyone raises their rates, then they're all still competitive, sure, but at a higher rate. And inevitably, the profit demand would find excuses to raise the rates or impose more fees. Yet this is somehow the government's fault that private enterprise decided to pick up their ball and go home, knwoing full well what it would do to people. In the end, people have to deal with even more usurious rates from payday lenders and loan sharks because the people who were offering affordable credit by comparison threw a temper tantrum. I wonder what kind of howl would go up if the government, in response, capped the rates that payday lenders could charge to something resembling credit card interest, if not drove the moneychangers out of the temple entirely. And what kind of grassroots opposition would form when it became clear that nobody could get credit because the companies decided that their profits would be too small.
Elsewhere, The Marine Commandant's letter of 30 November, laying out the case in his own had for why he should be dismissed from service: For believing that being openly gay or lesbian in the armed forces constitutes a handicap that will diminsh the effectiveness of those armed forces on the same severity as being insufficiently physically fit for service, arguing that the amount of persons dismissed is miniscule compared to those dismissals for other reasons, furthermore that those persons dismissed are not actually in critical positions, many of those people dismissed did so because they would say anything to get away from basic training, not because they were actually gay or lesbian, and that the risk of losing straight people because they can't be in the same military as gay people is more important. He also argues that most Americans don't actually understand the law and have been fed media spin, that if the armed forces were actually surveyed about their opinion on gay people, they would overwhelmingly vote to continue the ban on gay people serving, that the American people actually want the ban on gay people serving in the military to continue, and that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's opinion should be treated as one senior naval officer among many in the decision-making process. It's a very good case for dismissal of him and all the other people who will affect good order, discipline, and effectiveness by choosing not to work with their fellow military personnel over something that does not actually impact their ability to complete missions and do their jobs. Since the repeal passed, I expect this Commandant to be resigning his commission and retiring, not because the military needs Yes Men, but his stated inability to work with other people in the military will be an impediment to the good order and function of his branch. And it would be better to resign now than to be fired should it come to light that he practiced or encouraged discrimination against gay and lesbian military members in officer promotions or other aspects of their lives.
The WSJ prints their objections to the FCC's claims that they can regulate the Internet.
Mr. Hanson touts the strength of the foundations of America, claiming that is has been and will continue to be the only country that endures, while the communists and socialists in Europe and Asia collapse under the weight of their own social programs and central planning, the theorcratic Muslims and Hindus continue to oppress people they should be bringing into equality, and America rights itself from falling into either of those traps, continues to successfully integrate its immigrants in ways that those other countries could only dream of, and charges on. His example of Japan should be worrying to Mr. Hanson - things were going well until a real estate bubble popped and there wasn't any fiscal transparency resulted in a Lost Generation - but he seems unconerned about it. I also find his assurances that America Does It All, and Better than You, to ring a bit hollow, based mostly on what other columnists are complaining about - the Hispanic bloc, the Muslim bloc, the continued accusations of state socialism from the current President. So somebody's spouting hot air about nothing somewhere...
...and there's always plenty of it. Mr. Rove argues that the absence of presence indicates presence of absence when it comes to the importance of the lawless facility in Guantanamo Bay to recruiting people to terrorism. Mr. Rove believes that if Guantanamo Bay were actually a terrorist recruiting tool, it would be mentioned more often in manifestos, given more prominence, and referred to repeatedly. Instead, the manifestos talk about the continued presence of Israel, the United States' meddling in their and other countries, and the lens of Christians Versus Muslims that agitators on both sides prefer to use. Besides, he then argues, civilian trials would give The Enemy a much better mouthpiece to speak from, so the beset course of action to Defeat The Terrorists is to keep the lawless facility open and doing what it does best - being yet one more reason for people to join groups that fight the United States. After all, if your options are death and paradise versus a place where you know you'll be tortured and demeaned, blowing yourself up suddenly looks like a much better idea. It's probably not going to be mentioned in public speeches - everyone knows its there and what it does - better to focus your PR on the things people don't know that will swing them to your cause. In private, though, I'll bet that Guantanamo Bay receives a few more mentions than Mr. Rove would believe.
The WSJ revists "death panels", complaining that the decision to permit end-of-life counseling as a reimbursible expense to Medicare was buried in regulation changes after it was expressly stripped from the health care bill, and that this sort of fiat makes the idea of having government bureaucrats deciding what you get for care all the more real as the population ages. They're not against the decision, they're against the method. It's not as overblown as some of the other examples above, but it does remind us of the ideas of checks and balances - the legislators get to write the laws, but the executive gets to write the implementation of those laws. If the legislative wants to remove that implementation, then they have to pass new laws. There's always been the tension between over-writing laws to restrictive specificity and leaving things too broad to allow an executive to twist the intent into something wrong.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger endorses the Vatican - he says that the Vatican's insistence that Christians be free to practice everywhere, without threat of violence, is the same call that America should be answering with their own efforts to spread freedom through the world. For him, the concepts of religious freedom and individual freedom are bound together, forever. He starts this account, however, with accounts of Muslim extremists everywhere, out to kill as many Christians as they can, through violence and explosions, and of China's policy toward religious practice, one that students of history might recall resembles the policy of Rome in the Empire's time - and one that even the United States practices today: Your religion can be practiced here, so long as it conforms to the law. It's very interesting to see how the insistence that it's about individual freedom to practice never quite hangs together consistently when the places you're talking about move from places considered The Enemy to places considered Friends. Keep an eye on that wandering standard in the new year - it's likely to have some very visible examples.
Finally, at the bottom of the year, we make it to the bottom of the barrel. Ms. Coulter writes her column about how conservatives are so much better at private giving than those socialists in the Democratic party, as if that produces some sort of moral superiority. She even references the Praying in the Streets verse, but contextualizes it as "liberals will only give when they get accolades for it", and missing that her trumpeting the generous nature of conservatives as moral superiority is also praying in the street. furthermore, when she compares members of the base, she compares someone on government assistance, who probably doesn't have money to spare, with someone who is working poor and presumably can meet expenses with a little to spare. Second, she likes to use percentages instead of dollar amounts where she can when talking about giving, because it makes it easier for her to hide the disparate income levels, too. 5 percent of a billionaire verses 77 percent of a millionaire means the billionaire still gives more in total dollar amounts, for example. (.05 x 1,000,000,000 = $50,000,000 v .77 x 1,000,000 = $770,000)
Finally, there's another verse that applies in this situation, too, Ms. Coulter, and it's straight from Jesus himself,
We've almost closed out the year. It's been a ride, hasn't it? Which also means it's time for predictions of the next year, like New Scientist's thoughts about the future of medicine, science, and technology, IBM's Five in Five predictions, and a look in at the best jobs on-line for the next year.
That also means that It's time to usher in the Year of the Rabbit with some nice images.
And, the last Dead Pool mark of the year - Geraldine Hoff, inspiration and model for the Rosie the Riveter posters, passed away to accolades at 86 years of age.
Out in the world today, the network of actors working against United States forces in Afghanistan is much larger and harder to bring down than U.S. forces would like.
Two shots of "terror, terror!" - Turkish police detaining suspected al-Qaeda members, and Denmark arrests five on suspicion of terror plotting, apparently in revenge for the publishing house that ran the cartoons making mockery of Mohammed. Which gives commentators in America plenty of time to dust off their "freedom of expression is great, and those evul Muslims should be made fun of, instead of getting the kid gloves that Christianity never gets" columns, putting a good point - religions should not be exempted from criticism, including iconic criticism, and those making that criticism should not be killed or threatened with death - right next to a bad once - Christians are so persecuted by the evil Islam-worshipping government that gives Muslims special treatment!
More Wikileaks data - despirte giving significant amounts of aid to Egypt, the United States is frustrated that their military hasn't turned into a more modern fighting force and joined in on fighting border smugglers, terrorists, and other things of interest to the United States. The continuing releases of the leaked data may be impeding the ability of United States diplomats to obtain information that they need, because nobody likes having their dirty laundry aired out for public consumption. The most serious consequence of this action might be the passing of far more draconian restrictions of speech and journalism by governments who do not want to repeat the Wikileaks endeavour. (There's a secondary argument in that column that the Pentagon Papers were a leak that was done right - with the most sensitive material kept secret so as not to interfere with ongoing diplomacy - and that Wikileaks indiscrimiante publishing is a leak done wrong, because it interferes with diplomacy by airing out the laundry. Argue that at your own leisure.)
Venezuelan President Chavez got a bill through his legislature allowing him to rule by decree for 18 months, starting 5 January. He also rejected and expelled the United States ambassador to Venezuela, sparking rumors of a retailation expulsion of the Venezuelan ambassador.
And if you examine the words of Assange himself in relation to his rape charges, it sounds a lot less like some sort of conspiracy and a lot more like a man who feels unrepentant at the things he did and is blinkered enough by Privilege that he doesn't really think he did anything wrong.
Finally, China is scaling back its rare-earth exports, meaning technology manufacturers will have to find other sources for the rare materials they need.
Domestically, a remarkably well-coordinated strike by the inmates in Georgia's prison system went largely unreported by major media outlets - and the list of offenses and demands made by the prisoners are all things that they should have as part of humane incarceration. How did this not get covered - too much focus on Wikileaks, perhaps?
A previous oil company executive is predicting five dollars per gallon prices by 2012 and oil shortages by the end of the 2010s. This announcement gets some to accuse the President of deliberately making policy decisions to raise the price of gas, and letting his regulators do the same, because the President is obsessed with a mythic idea of actually getting significant amounts of power from non-fossil fuel sources. More on that in opinions.
The residents of the Appamatox Mobile Home Park have to leave their houses, not because people were behind on their rent, but because their landlord sold out the land from under their houses. And because most mobile homes have to be de-mobilized to be allowed to settle on park land, most of those residents have had to abandon their houses. In other places, because of the helpless, non land-owning nature of mobile homes and their de-mobility requirements, you can push their rents significantly higher. After all, what are they going to do? Pack up and leave? There are few situations better than this for the commission of evil.
A member of the House of Representatives intends on ontroducing a bill to prevent the Congress from holding its lame-duck session, intending to prevent another session like the last one, where the threat of not getting vacation actually managed to motivate the Congress into doing things. Well, some things, anyway, and the Republicans complained bitterly about having to do work on major issues that demonstrated how much their over-riding desire to make Barack Obama look bad had taken hold. After all, they didn't have to cast votes against the DREAM Act, originally introduced by a Republican, so that they would lose the Hispanic vote for years to come.
The truth of our economic times - American companies have created enough jobs overseas that could have lowered the unemployment rate in the U.S. close to a full percentage point. But corporations don't want to pay the wage and benefit costs associated with hiring Americans, because labor for manufacturing and assembly is far cheaper overseas.
And as for the mechanical hands that are the Rulers of Everything (aah) they're starting to analyze the news to make their trading decisions with, as well as examining Twitter feeds and using that data to make decisions with. Just think, a single tweet could potentially crash the market.
Last out, rule one of information is that it must be fact-checked and researched before declared to be valid. Thus, when falling for a hoax that says a Canadian singer supports the Park51 project, make sure that you enjoy the egg on your face thoroughly.
In technology, the first truly honest privacy policy.
Mr. Shafer believes the Internet as we know it would nver have been developed if the FCC had been allowed to regulate it when it was still in infancy. It culminates in Microsoft Bob coming to fruition, insteaed of being a dead project. Then again, with the amount of traitorware currently already on our devices revealing our data to advertisers and others, it might have already happened, just not so monolithically.
Mr. Trzupek falls on his face in trying to describe the net neutrality debate as a question of allowed-blocked censorship that no ISP in the United States would ever do, discounting the "fast versus slow" argument and assuming that network neutrality regulation is just the first step in restoring the Fairness Doctrine and giving the socialist government more control and ability to promote their anti-market agenda. It's interesting how the Fairness Doctrine is the boogeyman in both of the opinion columns, considering nobody had ever made any noise about that kind of thing at all, and the arguments were not about governmental censorship, but corporate censorship.
Finally, Kodachrome will no longer be devlopable, as the last machine able to produce prints from the film in the country is being sold and scrapped.
In the opinions, Mr. Carroll believes the upcoming fight will be the Administration's bureaucracies versus the Republcian House of Representatives, calling the administrators "central planners", the Corporatist Republicans "the people", and urging the Corporatists to deny funding to any rules written and the states to refuse to implement any of them as their way of fighting the "leftist agenda" of the administration. Mr. DuPont certainly believes the elections were about stopping the agenda and that the new overlords should be ready to roll back all the works of the last two years. And Mr. Sowell thinks that these "end runs" around the Constitution will continue. As what is likely a representative example, Mr. Trzupek certainly thinks the EPA is doing it's best to ensure that no more fossil fuel plants ever get built, as well as wrecking the economy with newer and tougher standards on emissions for all our products. All over the "nonexistent" problem of anthropogenic climate change.
Others think the presidency is just beginning, now that the Democrats no longer have complete control of all three branches of government and will have to compromise. They may, in fact, be happy with this situation because it means they will start getting the goodies they've wanted and can indulge in whatever petty spite they like against the Democrats and call it stopping a socialist agenda. Because as "everyone knows", socialists and liberals are fanatics and authoritarians who find common cause with The Bloodthirsty Religion and both work to undermine Our Sacred Freedom and our country so that they can destroy you and rule as unquestioned elites.
And speaking thereof, Mr. Spencer basically accuses any Muslim agent of the TSA of being a terrorist, potential terrorist, or person of suspicion and a person to be afraid of that no Red-Blooded American should ever have to submit to, even as he tosses a line saying "But I'm sure they're not all like that, honestly" as an attemtp to avoid being too obvious about his Islampohobia. I'm sure that he and Representative King would get along. Mr. Mauro defends Representative King's statement that most mosques in America are controlled by extremists amd says that the Representative did not say that the people attending are extremists, just that, y'know, you should be afraid of The Bloodthirsty Religion imparting extremism into its mosque-goers. Mr. Mauro then goes on to blame moderate Muslim groups for having such a bad relationship with the governemnt, because they're too closed and suspicious of the government that considers them to be potential terrorists all the time.
Mr. Wood believes the American military is so concentrated on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan that they've forgotten how to fight a war, when the next war comes to them, be it from Korea or elsewhere.
All of these opinions provide highlights and examples of the likelihood that the United States has long been a Corpofascist state, and that the government is no longer in charge, but the CEOs and the corporations. Citizens United was likely just another way of bringing this reality out into the open, so that Our Overlords can be more direct in how they control the government to the detriment of the people. To the point where working for one of them is more like indentured servitude than free people working for a living wage, and then you have people claiming that things like Social Security are Ponzi schemes and should be disbanded, and that tax increases on the rich are always illusions, because the rich will know how to get around them, inevitably leading to the conclusion that spending has to be cut if any sort of balance is to be achieved, instead of addressing the elephant in the room about how tax evasion is an assumption and that most tax cuts and loopholes are put in by the rich to benefit the rich. The reduction of those tax cuts and loopholes might very well generate more revenue, assuming that you close off all the avenues of escape, instead of shutting one door to open a window. Staying on that same theme, Mr. Stossel rails against the government for enacting comsumer protections against usurious rates and fees in credit cards, because the effect of it was that less people could get credit cards and have to turn to payday lenders. Because the credit card companies decided they didn't want to play by the new rules, and denied people the ability to get credit when they couldn't make monstrous profts off of them, or raised the interest rates on the existing cards. While Mr. Stossel believes that The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) would control any usurious intent among lenders, he seems to miss the point that if everyone raises their rates, then they're all still competitive, sure, but at a higher rate. And inevitably, the profit demand would find excuses to raise the rates or impose more fees. Yet this is somehow the government's fault that private enterprise decided to pick up their ball and go home, knwoing full well what it would do to people. In the end, people have to deal with even more usurious rates from payday lenders and loan sharks because the people who were offering affordable credit by comparison threw a temper tantrum. I wonder what kind of howl would go up if the government, in response, capped the rates that payday lenders could charge to something resembling credit card interest, if not drove the moneychangers out of the temple entirely. And what kind of grassroots opposition would form when it became clear that nobody could get credit because the companies decided that their profits would be too small.
Elsewhere, The Marine Commandant's letter of 30 November, laying out the case in his own had for why he should be dismissed from service: For believing that being openly gay or lesbian in the armed forces constitutes a handicap that will diminsh the effectiveness of those armed forces on the same severity as being insufficiently physically fit for service, arguing that the amount of persons dismissed is miniscule compared to those dismissals for other reasons, furthermore that those persons dismissed are not actually in critical positions, many of those people dismissed did so because they would say anything to get away from basic training, not because they were actually gay or lesbian, and that the risk of losing straight people because they can't be in the same military as gay people is more important. He also argues that most Americans don't actually understand the law and have been fed media spin, that if the armed forces were actually surveyed about their opinion on gay people, they would overwhelmingly vote to continue the ban on gay people serving, that the American people actually want the ban on gay people serving in the military to continue, and that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's opinion should be treated as one senior naval officer among many in the decision-making process. It's a very good case for dismissal of him and all the other people who will affect good order, discipline, and effectiveness by choosing not to work with their fellow military personnel over something that does not actually impact their ability to complete missions and do their jobs. Since the repeal passed, I expect this Commandant to be resigning his commission and retiring, not because the military needs Yes Men, but his stated inability to work with other people in the military will be an impediment to the good order and function of his branch. And it would be better to resign now than to be fired should it come to light that he practiced or encouraged discrimination against gay and lesbian military members in officer promotions or other aspects of their lives.
The WSJ prints their objections to the FCC's claims that they can regulate the Internet.
Mr. Hanson touts the strength of the foundations of America, claiming that is has been and will continue to be the only country that endures, while the communists and socialists in Europe and Asia collapse under the weight of their own social programs and central planning, the theorcratic Muslims and Hindus continue to oppress people they should be bringing into equality, and America rights itself from falling into either of those traps, continues to successfully integrate its immigrants in ways that those other countries could only dream of, and charges on. His example of Japan should be worrying to Mr. Hanson - things were going well until a real estate bubble popped and there wasn't any fiscal transparency resulted in a Lost Generation - but he seems unconerned about it. I also find his assurances that America Does It All, and Better than You, to ring a bit hollow, based mostly on what other columnists are complaining about - the Hispanic bloc, the Muslim bloc, the continued accusations of state socialism from the current President. So somebody's spouting hot air about nothing somewhere...
...and there's always plenty of it. Mr. Rove argues that the absence of presence indicates presence of absence when it comes to the importance of the lawless facility in Guantanamo Bay to recruiting people to terrorism. Mr. Rove believes that if Guantanamo Bay were actually a terrorist recruiting tool, it would be mentioned more often in manifestos, given more prominence, and referred to repeatedly. Instead, the manifestos talk about the continued presence of Israel, the United States' meddling in their and other countries, and the lens of Christians Versus Muslims that agitators on both sides prefer to use. Besides, he then argues, civilian trials would give The Enemy a much better mouthpiece to speak from, so the beset course of action to Defeat The Terrorists is to keep the lawless facility open and doing what it does best - being yet one more reason for people to join groups that fight the United States. After all, if your options are death and paradise versus a place where you know you'll be tortured and demeaned, blowing yourself up suddenly looks like a much better idea. It's probably not going to be mentioned in public speeches - everyone knows its there and what it does - better to focus your PR on the things people don't know that will swing them to your cause. In private, though, I'll bet that Guantanamo Bay receives a few more mentions than Mr. Rove would believe.
The WSJ revists "death panels", complaining that the decision to permit end-of-life counseling as a reimbursible expense to Medicare was buried in regulation changes after it was expressly stripped from the health care bill, and that this sort of fiat makes the idea of having government bureaucrats deciding what you get for care all the more real as the population ages. They're not against the decision, they're against the method. It's not as overblown as some of the other examples above, but it does remind us of the ideas of checks and balances - the legislators get to write the laws, but the executive gets to write the implementation of those laws. If the legislative wants to remove that implementation, then they have to pass new laws. There's always been the tension between over-writing laws to restrictive specificity and leaving things too broad to allow an executive to twist the intent into something wrong.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger endorses the Vatican - he says that the Vatican's insistence that Christians be free to practice everywhere, without threat of violence, is the same call that America should be answering with their own efforts to spread freedom through the world. For him, the concepts of religious freedom and individual freedom are bound together, forever. He starts this account, however, with accounts of Muslim extremists everywhere, out to kill as many Christians as they can, through violence and explosions, and of China's policy toward religious practice, one that students of history might recall resembles the policy of Rome in the Empire's time - and one that even the United States practices today: Your religion can be practiced here, so long as it conforms to the law. It's very interesting to see how the insistence that it's about individual freedom to practice never quite hangs together consistently when the places you're talking about move from places considered The Enemy to places considered Friends. Keep an eye on that wandering standard in the new year - it's likely to have some very visible examples.
Finally, at the bottom of the year, we make it to the bottom of the barrel. Ms. Coulter writes her column about how conservatives are so much better at private giving than those socialists in the Democratic party, as if that produces some sort of moral superiority. She even references the Praying in the Streets verse, but contextualizes it as "liberals will only give when they get accolades for it", and missing that her trumpeting the generous nature of conservatives as moral superiority is also praying in the street. furthermore, when she compares members of the base, she compares someone on government assistance, who probably doesn't have money to spare, with someone who is working poor and presumably can meet expenses with a little to spare. Second, she likes to use percentages instead of dollar amounts where she can when talking about giving, because it makes it easier for her to hide the disparate income levels, too. 5 percent of a billionaire verses 77 percent of a millionaire means the billionaire still gives more in total dollar amounts, for example. (.05 x 1,000,000,000 = $50,000,000 v .77 x 1,000,000 = $770,000)
Finally, there's another verse that applies in this situation, too, Ms. Coulter, and it's straight from Jesus himself,
And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he [Jesus] called his disciples to him and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."It's not the amount that counts, nor the percentage of one's income, really, if what you are giving comes from your surpluses. The people who give their trust that G-d will provide them with what they need and sacrifice to make their offerings, and who do so secretly, without fanfares or press conferences, or columns written - those are the people that G-d cherishes and will reward. Why not try sacrifice for a change, and do so anonymously?
