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silveradeptMorning, everyone. Greetings of the new year to you. As is fitting of the season both just past and still to come, some entertainment - a game called "The Eleven Doctors", where one must re-cast earlier Doctors for a special, as some are gone and others too old to reprise their younger selves. For those more kinesthetically inclined, you can build yourself a TARDIS, take a picture of it in a strange or interesting place, and then submit it to a contest.
If you feel a bit of a chill behind all the warmth of the season, perhaps it's because you've noticed something - The Gift of the Magi, in glorious colors and illustrations, perhaps, or worse, you've noticed that a perennial winter flick is not as happy as it appears - "It's A Wonderful Life" is a tale of pleasant fictions being torn away, not one of the difference one person makes in life.
There are reasons to be happy, many of them directed toward places other than the First World, or to those who now suffer from things that would have killed them outright and painfully, and of course, the fact that we haven't blown ourselves up.
...not yet, anyway. North Korea claims that any war the South starts with them will end with nuclear weapons used against them.
Elsewhere in the world, more predictions about world events and politics within the next 25 years or so.
According to Nigerian law, bribing someone to get out of a bribery charge isn't legal, so the plea deal and fine that was paid wasn't supposed to be legal.
Coptic Christians in Egypt demanded better security after militants blew up a church and killed 21.
The governor of Pakistan's major Punjab province was shot and killed by his bodyguard.
And then there's the plight of the Afghan women arrested because they fled arranged and/or abusive marriages.
Ten years on from changing their laws to require counseling instead of jail for drugs, Portgual has seen its addiction rates drop, even as more incidences of drug use happen. The United States may be looking into this idea as the ultimate solution to the relatively unsuccessful War on (Some) Drugs.
Oh, and last out, gas prices are definitely going up. How far is yet to be determined.
Inside the country, Governor Christe of New Jersey takes federal money to clean snowed state roads, appropriates local resources to clean state roads, then complains about local mayors for not cleaning their local roads.. The bit about staying in Disneyland is actually not all that important.
The incoming chair of the House Transportation committee is pushing hard to privatize airport security...and it's entirely "coincidental" that a major contractor for such is in his district, and has given money to his campaign. Your Congresscritters, bought and sold on the open market. First they sold you machines that show off your anatomy, and then were unamused when people took the logical step of going through as nearly-naked as they could, and don't seem to care that much when employees steal stuff from travelers. What next?
Then again, considering how easy it is to do something criminal, and that it's ridiculously easy to be put on the no-fly terror watch list, there's really only one conclusion. You are a terrorist. As are we all.
So, more pedestrian politics - the Republicans plan on implementing stricter rules for House business, including requiring Constitutional justification for all bills and resolutions that pass their house, and will kick off their new session with a reading of the Constitution in its entirety. I suspect this is their way of making it look like they're the Tea Party party before they find ways of doing things for Their Corporate Masters as they always have, and based on the statements of the Congresscritters involved, the "make it look like we're the Tea Party party" part is right. It remains to be seen whether the other half of the prediction is so. We assume they will read the entire thing, amendments and all, since so many of them are focused on exercising or repealing one or more of them.
Here are two things that are not related to each other at all, but are convenient to put together for the sake of a narrative - a study recently conducted shows that the brains of persons who identify as conservative have a more developed amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate - bigger fear/lizard brain sections, smaller courage/optimism sections. Keeping that in mind, the decision to have a speaker at a counter-terror official's conference who advocates for the wholesale destruction of Muslims, including women and children makes more sense. In defense of his extreme choice, the founder of the eventy appealed to the fear centers of the reader's brain, trying to make them construct and be afraid of the imaginary Muslim army just waiting to destroy the United States. Although, if we're getting smaller brains, and that means increased tolerance, then that would make those bigger and smaller portions more pronounced, I think, and more effective. So our extremists might get more extreme.
The United States Navy is investigating a 2006-2007 video for its content, which could be classed as anything from juvenile humor to lewd and homophobic content, depending on your viewpoint, and how much of "boys will be boys" you want to tolerate. That was then, this is now, Operation Yellow Elephant reminds us, and wonders whether the people have changed as the times have. According to a study done by the Universtiy College of London, love is love, regardless of whether the person loved is XX, XY, or something else entirely - scientific validation of what people have known for a while.
Finally, Book retailer chain Borders is in negotiations with publishers about making their payments - it looks like we might be losing another bookseller to the pressures of the market. Not good...
In technology, just because the humans think the cameras are hidden doesn't mean the polar bears do. And like many other animals, when they see something moving across the terrain, their first instincts are "food!" and "plaything!". Suffice to say, the humans got some neat footage of bears mauling their cameras.
3D fabricators making food to order may be part of The Future, depending on whether someone can get the raw materials right.
Speaking of raw materials, a process has been developed to artificially create a compound that looks and behaves like a rare-earth metal, palladium, which, if it can be done across the board, will lessen the impact of China's proposed reductions in rare-earth mining.
Now that we're talking about net neutrality and acknowledging that corporations run the show, maybe it's time to put together a truly peer-to-peer network and use that instead of our centralized Internet. It's most likely that the software required to run a node on such a network will be easily hacked together. Then it's just a matter of figuring out how the antennas and the nodes connect to each other.
Last for tonight, weather wizards are bringing rain to the desert through generating artificial clouds of ionized particles that attract moisture.
Into opinions, where the changing of the Congress inspires Mr. Pendry to talk about "Obamastan", the world where liberals crush the middle class into serfdom and force them to go back to places like Detroit that Freedom had let them escape, while the wealthy eat cake and otherwise aren't affected. As someone who's been around Detroit and actually knows the place, it sure as hell wasn't Freedom that made all those white people run away from the black people as fast as they could, and then do their best to stop the black people from getting out to their supposedly-safe white enclaves. And as for killing the middle class and enslaving them, that sounds suspiciously like the goal of Our Corporate Masters and Republicans, too, so it's not just "Obamastan". If there's going to be a civil disobedience, and states going for the nullification route, the alternative has to be markedly different than the status quo. At least in "Obamastan" we make an effort to preserve the planet and keep it habitable and provide care for the serfs. The alternative does no such thing. So, Mr. Pendry, you should be widening your gaze and attacking the very core of the system that allows corporations to buy and sell politicians, get their own way through the power of the purse, offshore and outsource jobs, drop wages, and keep the profits without anyone so much as thinking it strange. You need to spend some time as a committed communist ideologue, Mr. Pendry. Your copy of Marx is at the library. Check it out.
Mr. Milbank warns President Obama of hubris based on the sudden flurry of accomplishment achieved in the lame duck session, instead of letting the President take his victory lap before he has to return to dealing with obstructionism as the way of the Congress. It's almost more a critique that he got softballs instead of hard questions from the press corps than it is an accusation of the "Obama ego" reasserting itself. Truthfully, his critics still think he's disconnected from reality by his ego - they just haven't used that line, thinking there are better ones to pursue.
Like the following - Using unfounded speculation about sanitation workers deliberately fouling the snow cleanup in New York, a case against allowing government workers to stay unionized is made - apparently, those darn unionized workers are causing all those state budget shortfalls because they can demand outrageous things and they have no competition from anyone. And besides, the state will just borrow money to pay them, so it's a totally win-win situation for the unions, and thus they must be busted, because it's all their fault. It apparently has nothing at all to do with the housing bubble bursting, causing property values to plummet and tax revenues with it. It apparently has nothing to do with Wall Street bankers trading in complex financial instruments that basically made gold-plated shit bricks and then laughed as the government bought them to avoid having the entire financial system go belly-up. No, it must be those public-sector employees and their unions, with their pension benefits and health care plans and on average 4% less pay than their private sector counterparts that are blowing the giant holes in the budget.
Why attack Obama's ego when you can instead make progress for your Corporate Masters toward removing all the power from the people and placing it in the hands of the executives?
The Slacktivist takes the "reading the Constitution" stunt and hopes that it will result in a significant lesson - that the Constitution is remarkably Godless - and that all the people agitating for religious tests and "The Judeo-Christian heritage" that basically says "all the members of government must be my religious belief or anarchy and amorality will reign supreme" will realize that their arguments have been made, found wanting, disproven, and been wrong for as long as the country continues to exist. all the things that people are saying now about how we need a particualr religion to lead us, or that we have to pick the "right" religion and adopt it, less we pick the "wrong" religion and adopt it, or how atheists and non-Christians are amoral people, all of these things were argued while they were drafting the Constitution. They made apocalyptic comments about it, claimed the new country would be destroyed if it stayed religion-free, and said that things would never work. They were wrong, and continue to be so. We do not need a State Religion, nor should we insist that all our leaders follow our own belief system.
Ms. Saunders finds it reprehensible that people making fun of Muslims suffer assassination attempts and death threats, yet people can be as offensive as possible to Christians without receiving similar threats and attacks. The charitable interpretation is that she hopes that all the extremists will learn to be able to take a religious joke in stride and not go all bonkers over the matter. The uncharitable one, the one that's actually in the column, is that it means Muslims get Special Kid Gloves that they don't deserve from governments and elsewhere, while Christians simply get shit upon regularly and are told to grin and eat it. Well, if you wanted that same kind of treatment, you could adopt similar tactics and start killing and threatening people who poke fun at you. It's in Christian history - nothing really stopping you but the law. And whatever Thing it is that makes you want to retain the moral high ground so you can complain. Because that's what it really is - you want to be the ones getting the special treatment because you don't go around killing the people that disagree with you or making fun of your major figures any more. Which is nice, and we appreciate it, really. Did we mention that most Muslim extremist violence is against other Muslims? It's doctrine wars, and instead of schisming every time there's a disagreement, as Christians do, they choose to fight it out until one side is dead and thus can't espouse anything contrary. Kind of like how Christians went after Muslims earlier. I'm glad to say, for the most part, Christians learned their lesson. Islam is now learning it. It's going to take a while and a lot of dead people before it sinks in, though.
Slacktivist returns to talk about Twelfth Night, and how it and Job are linked - Jesus is the resolution of the impasse in Job where G-d insists that he should be trusted, even though he hasn't given Job a reason why, and Job insists that G-d needs to try living down here on his creation, and then see if he still wants to make the same claim. Jesus is both G-d, who has the plan, and man, who cries and cries out that he's been abandoned by G-d in the hour of his greatest need. In the comments, there's a good discussion about how the idea of a learning god makes Christianity more palatable, the world a bit more understandable, and helps to remove the problems that arise when you insist that God Knows All, Sees All, and is All Good, All The Time.
As for more boorish behavior, PZ Meyers has a laugh at the Conservapedia folk trying to connect atheism, lesbianism, and obesity, because apparently some people who are either atheist or lesbian are above the ideal body weight of Conservapedia, and such pictures and taunts are supposed to make them renounce their athiesm and convert just to make the taunting stop. I don't think it's working...
Journey into the mind of someone who wants a child desperately, but has IVF fail, is apparently excluded from adopting, and so turns to surrogacy and egg donation to get the child she's always wanted.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Carrol gives his top ten reasons why the 111th Congress will be forever reviled in conservative circles. Health care, stimulus, cap and trade, new START, Cash for Clunkers, earmarks in omnibus bills, mountains of debt, fake Wall Street reform, a "bailout" of unions, and a bill that would allow for judges to forcibly rewrite mortgage contracts so as to prevent people from losing their homes in foreclosure. There are some factual holes, though: cap and trade never got passed, Republicans are porkers just as much as Democrats, and if you look at where that mountain of debt comes from, it's mostly from financing two Land Wars in Asia and Tax Cuts For The Rich over the last decade, and a little from stimulus spending. Plus, if you thought it was fake reform of Wall Street, then you should have been agitating for stronger measures, instead of demanding that nothing happen at all, and we thought that you guys were on board with wanting people to keep their houses. After all, the homeless drive down property values and generally end up on government assistance. Oh, wait, you guys wanted that all axed, too. When everything pans out, they may be right - this Congress may be reviled in history, but I don't think the blame's going to be all on the Democrats, considering how much got stopped by opposition filibusters, watered-down in fear of those filibusters, and how much the opposition spent time and political capital making sure that nothing that helped the President pass, even if it was originally their idea.
Last for tonight, main characters that are upstaged entirely by their sidekicks, and easter eggs in video games that took awy too long to find, including one that was in a game but otherwise un-alluded to, so nobody found it because they didn't want to spend forever just randomly destroying stuff.
Oh, and one dumb criminal who thought cocaine was a good thing to try and bring into jail with him.
If you feel a bit of a chill behind all the warmth of the season, perhaps it's because you've noticed something - The Gift of the Magi, in glorious colors and illustrations, perhaps, or worse, you've noticed that a perennial winter flick is not as happy as it appears - "It's A Wonderful Life" is a tale of pleasant fictions being torn away, not one of the difference one person makes in life.
There are reasons to be happy, many of them directed toward places other than the First World, or to those who now suffer from things that would have killed them outright and painfully, and of course, the fact that we haven't blown ourselves up.
...not yet, anyway. North Korea claims that any war the South starts with them will end with nuclear weapons used against them.
Elsewhere in the world, more predictions about world events and politics within the next 25 years or so.
According to Nigerian law, bribing someone to get out of a bribery charge isn't legal, so the plea deal and fine that was paid wasn't supposed to be legal.
Coptic Christians in Egypt demanded better security after militants blew up a church and killed 21.
The governor of Pakistan's major Punjab province was shot and killed by his bodyguard.
And then there's the plight of the Afghan women arrested because they fled arranged and/or abusive marriages.
Ten years on from changing their laws to require counseling instead of jail for drugs, Portgual has seen its addiction rates drop, even as more incidences of drug use happen. The United States may be looking into this idea as the ultimate solution to the relatively unsuccessful War on (Some) Drugs.
Oh, and last out, gas prices are definitely going up. How far is yet to be determined.
Inside the country, Governor Christe of New Jersey takes federal money to clean snowed state roads, appropriates local resources to clean state roads, then complains about local mayors for not cleaning their local roads.. The bit about staying in Disneyland is actually not all that important.
The incoming chair of the House Transportation committee is pushing hard to privatize airport security...and it's entirely "coincidental" that a major contractor for such is in his district, and has given money to his campaign. Your Congresscritters, bought and sold on the open market. First they sold you machines that show off your anatomy, and then were unamused when people took the logical step of going through as nearly-naked as they could, and don't seem to care that much when employees steal stuff from travelers. What next?
Then again, considering how easy it is to do something criminal, and that it's ridiculously easy to be put on the no-fly terror watch list, there's really only one conclusion. You are a terrorist. As are we all.
So, more pedestrian politics - the Republicans plan on implementing stricter rules for House business, including requiring Constitutional justification for all bills and resolutions that pass their house, and will kick off their new session with a reading of the Constitution in its entirety. I suspect this is their way of making it look like they're the Tea Party party before they find ways of doing things for Their Corporate Masters as they always have, and based on the statements of the Congresscritters involved, the "make it look like we're the Tea Party party" part is right. It remains to be seen whether the other half of the prediction is so. We assume they will read the entire thing, amendments and all, since so many of them are focused on exercising or repealing one or more of them.
Here are two things that are not related to each other at all, but are convenient to put together for the sake of a narrative - a study recently conducted shows that the brains of persons who identify as conservative have a more developed amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate - bigger fear/lizard brain sections, smaller courage/optimism sections. Keeping that in mind, the decision to have a speaker at a counter-terror official's conference who advocates for the wholesale destruction of Muslims, including women and children makes more sense. In defense of his extreme choice, the founder of the eventy appealed to the fear centers of the reader's brain, trying to make them construct and be afraid of the imaginary Muslim army just waiting to destroy the United States. Although, if we're getting smaller brains, and that means increased tolerance, then that would make those bigger and smaller portions more pronounced, I think, and more effective. So our extremists might get more extreme.
The United States Navy is investigating a 2006-2007 video for its content, which could be classed as anything from juvenile humor to lewd and homophobic content, depending on your viewpoint, and how much of "boys will be boys" you want to tolerate. That was then, this is now, Operation Yellow Elephant reminds us, and wonders whether the people have changed as the times have. According to a study done by the Universtiy College of London, love is love, regardless of whether the person loved is XX, XY, or something else entirely - scientific validation of what people have known for a while.
Finally, Book retailer chain Borders is in negotiations with publishers about making their payments - it looks like we might be losing another bookseller to the pressures of the market. Not good...
In technology, just because the humans think the cameras are hidden doesn't mean the polar bears do. And like many other animals, when they see something moving across the terrain, their first instincts are "food!" and "plaything!". Suffice to say, the humans got some neat footage of bears mauling their cameras.
3D fabricators making food to order may be part of The Future, depending on whether someone can get the raw materials right.
Speaking of raw materials, a process has been developed to artificially create a compound that looks and behaves like a rare-earth metal, palladium, which, if it can be done across the board, will lessen the impact of China's proposed reductions in rare-earth mining.
Now that we're talking about net neutrality and acknowledging that corporations run the show, maybe it's time to put together a truly peer-to-peer network and use that instead of our centralized Internet. It's most likely that the software required to run a node on such a network will be easily hacked together. Then it's just a matter of figuring out how the antennas and the nodes connect to each other.
Last for tonight, weather wizards are bringing rain to the desert through generating artificial clouds of ionized particles that attract moisture.
Into opinions, where the changing of the Congress inspires Mr. Pendry to talk about "Obamastan", the world where liberals crush the middle class into serfdom and force them to go back to places like Detroit that Freedom had let them escape, while the wealthy eat cake and otherwise aren't affected. As someone who's been around Detroit and actually knows the place, it sure as hell wasn't Freedom that made all those white people run away from the black people as fast as they could, and then do their best to stop the black people from getting out to their supposedly-safe white enclaves. And as for killing the middle class and enslaving them, that sounds suspiciously like the goal of Our Corporate Masters and Republicans, too, so it's not just "Obamastan". If there's going to be a civil disobedience, and states going for the nullification route, the alternative has to be markedly different than the status quo. At least in "Obamastan" we make an effort to preserve the planet and keep it habitable and provide care for the serfs. The alternative does no such thing. So, Mr. Pendry, you should be widening your gaze and attacking the very core of the system that allows corporations to buy and sell politicians, get their own way through the power of the purse, offshore and outsource jobs, drop wages, and keep the profits without anyone so much as thinking it strange. You need to spend some time as a committed communist ideologue, Mr. Pendry. Your copy of Marx is at the library. Check it out.
Mr. Milbank warns President Obama of hubris based on the sudden flurry of accomplishment achieved in the lame duck session, instead of letting the President take his victory lap before he has to return to dealing with obstructionism as the way of the Congress. It's almost more a critique that he got softballs instead of hard questions from the press corps than it is an accusation of the "Obama ego" reasserting itself. Truthfully, his critics still think he's disconnected from reality by his ego - they just haven't used that line, thinking there are better ones to pursue.
Like the following - Using unfounded speculation about sanitation workers deliberately fouling the snow cleanup in New York, a case against allowing government workers to stay unionized is made - apparently, those darn unionized workers are causing all those state budget shortfalls because they can demand outrageous things and they have no competition from anyone. And besides, the state will just borrow money to pay them, so it's a totally win-win situation for the unions, and thus they must be busted, because it's all their fault. It apparently has nothing at all to do with the housing bubble bursting, causing property values to plummet and tax revenues with it. It apparently has nothing to do with Wall Street bankers trading in complex financial instruments that basically made gold-plated shit bricks and then laughed as the government bought them to avoid having the entire financial system go belly-up. No, it must be those public-sector employees and their unions, with their pension benefits and health care plans and on average 4% less pay than their private sector counterparts that are blowing the giant holes in the budget.
Why attack Obama's ego when you can instead make progress for your Corporate Masters toward removing all the power from the people and placing it in the hands of the executives?
The Slacktivist takes the "reading the Constitution" stunt and hopes that it will result in a significant lesson - that the Constitution is remarkably Godless - and that all the people agitating for religious tests and "The Judeo-Christian heritage" that basically says "all the members of government must be my religious belief or anarchy and amorality will reign supreme" will realize that their arguments have been made, found wanting, disproven, and been wrong for as long as the country continues to exist. all the things that people are saying now about how we need a particualr religion to lead us, or that we have to pick the "right" religion and adopt it, less we pick the "wrong" religion and adopt it, or how atheists and non-Christians are amoral people, all of these things were argued while they were drafting the Constitution. They made apocalyptic comments about it, claimed the new country would be destroyed if it stayed religion-free, and said that things would never work. They were wrong, and continue to be so. We do not need a State Religion, nor should we insist that all our leaders follow our own belief system.
Ms. Saunders finds it reprehensible that people making fun of Muslims suffer assassination attempts and death threats, yet people can be as offensive as possible to Christians without receiving similar threats and attacks. The charitable interpretation is that she hopes that all the extremists will learn to be able to take a religious joke in stride and not go all bonkers over the matter. The uncharitable one, the one that's actually in the column, is that it means Muslims get Special Kid Gloves that they don't deserve from governments and elsewhere, while Christians simply get shit upon regularly and are told to grin and eat it. Well, if you wanted that same kind of treatment, you could adopt similar tactics and start killing and threatening people who poke fun at you. It's in Christian history - nothing really stopping you but the law. And whatever Thing it is that makes you want to retain the moral high ground so you can complain. Because that's what it really is - you want to be the ones getting the special treatment because you don't go around killing the people that disagree with you or making fun of your major figures any more. Which is nice, and we appreciate it, really. Did we mention that most Muslim extremist violence is against other Muslims? It's doctrine wars, and instead of schisming every time there's a disagreement, as Christians do, they choose to fight it out until one side is dead and thus can't espouse anything contrary. Kind of like how Christians went after Muslims earlier. I'm glad to say, for the most part, Christians learned their lesson. Islam is now learning it. It's going to take a while and a lot of dead people before it sinks in, though.
Slacktivist returns to talk about Twelfth Night, and how it and Job are linked - Jesus is the resolution of the impasse in Job where G-d insists that he should be trusted, even though he hasn't given Job a reason why, and Job insists that G-d needs to try living down here on his creation, and then see if he still wants to make the same claim. Jesus is both G-d, who has the plan, and man, who cries and cries out that he's been abandoned by G-d in the hour of his greatest need. In the comments, there's a good discussion about how the idea of a learning god makes Christianity more palatable, the world a bit more understandable, and helps to remove the problems that arise when you insist that God Knows All, Sees All, and is All Good, All The Time.
As for more boorish behavior, PZ Meyers has a laugh at the Conservapedia folk trying to connect atheism, lesbianism, and obesity, because apparently some people who are either atheist or lesbian are above the ideal body weight of Conservapedia, and such pictures and taunts are supposed to make them renounce their athiesm and convert just to make the taunting stop. I don't think it's working...
Journey into the mind of someone who wants a child desperately, but has IVF fail, is apparently excluded from adopting, and so turns to surrogacy and egg donation to get the child she's always wanted.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Carrol gives his top ten reasons why the 111th Congress will be forever reviled in conservative circles. Health care, stimulus, cap and trade, new START, Cash for Clunkers, earmarks in omnibus bills, mountains of debt, fake Wall Street reform, a "bailout" of unions, and a bill that would allow for judges to forcibly rewrite mortgage contracts so as to prevent people from losing their homes in foreclosure. There are some factual holes, though: cap and trade never got passed, Republicans are porkers just as much as Democrats, and if you look at where that mountain of debt comes from, it's mostly from financing two Land Wars in Asia and Tax Cuts For The Rich over the last decade, and a little from stimulus spending. Plus, if you thought it was fake reform of Wall Street, then you should have been agitating for stronger measures, instead of demanding that nothing happen at all, and we thought that you guys were on board with wanting people to keep their houses. After all, the homeless drive down property values and generally end up on government assistance. Oh, wait, you guys wanted that all axed, too. When everything pans out, they may be right - this Congress may be reviled in history, but I don't think the blame's going to be all on the Democrats, considering how much got stopped by opposition filibusters, watered-down in fear of those filibusters, and how much the opposition spent time and political capital making sure that nothing that helped the President pass, even if it was originally their idea.
Last for tonight, main characters that are upstaged entirely by their sidekicks, and easter eggs in video games that took awy too long to find, including one that was in a game but otherwise un-alluded to, so nobody found it because they didn't want to spend forever just randomly destroying stuff.
Oh, and one dumb criminal who thought cocaine was a good thing to try and bring into jail with him.
