Back to the news - 16-18 February 2011
Feb. 19th, 2011 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptUp top today, to start, A new prayer room in Hong Kong takes traditional practices and makes them higher-tech, making prayers to the gods with electronically-controlled smoke and lighting up which god has received the prayer. As with all of these things, the traditionalists are a bit more skeptical. One advantage the new place has is that it's not going to be full of incense smoke - the only place to do traditional burning is with low-smoke incense.
Also, Borders is filing for bankruptcy and closing several of its stores in the United States.
More material indicating that playing video games can be beneficial to your health, instead of being just a waste of time.
A reminder that social change is needed as well as political change, based on the way some women, foreign or not, are harassed and abused while they participated in protests, as well as praise for how well the protests went with gender equality and a lack of that threatening atmosphere for the most part. That's a whole lot better than the United States, where the Pence Amendment to the budget would effectively zero out any federal funding for Planned Parenthood, likely as an attempt to punish them for including abortion in their reproductive services offerings. The House of Representatives in their Republican majority passed the amendment. (And reminding me I need to brush up on what constitutes bills of attainder in this country) The Republicans who came in promising to focus on jobs are doing a whole lot to try and make reproductive services unavailable in the United States. As if they also want women to be taken out of the job force by pregnancy and to punish women who choose to have sex, so they can go back to a mythical time when only men worked and women were totally dependent on everything from the men in their family or the man who deigned to marry them. There are far too many reasons to stand with Planned Parenthood instead of with the socially and economically regressive.
And finally, more material on the major protest in Wisconsin - a protest getting far better coverage than those happening in the Middle East. The mention of using the National Guard as possible scabs against a strike conjures an ugly past with the Guard being used for much worse things. Furthermore, it appears solidarity from the various unions in the state, as well as students from school, and the Democratic legislators in the state has emerged, making it impossible for the bill to be voted on due to a lack of a quorum, scaring the daylights out of the conservatives in charge and trying to spin the story into something akin to thuggery, and letting the 25,000 already at the state Capitol let the Governor know what they think of his plan. They could be gone for weeks, giving us plenty of time to point out how the Governor's actions are a plan deliberately designed to break public-sector unions as opposed to the austerity measures that he claims are the real reason, as Wisconsin was doing quite well with a surplus until he implemented tax cut policies that he did not indicate a payment plan for. In that respect, he's just following the model of John Boehner, who callously dismissed public sector workers as not real jobs when he said that it would be okay to cut jobs out of the federal government. Worse, instead of seeing Wisconsin as the monster warning everyone away from emulation, nearby states are getting ready to fight their own strip-the-unions battle.
For comparative coverage, see the following article about the uptick in violence in the attempts to stop the protests in Bahrain, with government and military forces firing their guns at the protesters.
Or, even better, the use of excessive force against a veteran who peacefully protested the Secretary of State by turning his back to her while she spoke.
Out in the world today, Mexico attempts to rebuild their farming infrastructure, Japan suspends antarctic whaling practices, and the Iraqi government wants $1 billion USD in reparations paid to the city of Baghdad for all the damage United States troops have done to it after they invaded in 02003.
In light of the continuing practice of settlements outside the agreed-upon zones, The United States offered to endorse a UN resolution condemning Israel for the practice, hoping to avoid having to deal with a different resolution declaring them illegal. [RECORDSCRATCH] Err, rather, The United States already vetoed the resolution in question.
Inside the United States, a disturbing revelation in the HB Gary attempts to create a smear campaign against certain targets - they appear to have attempted, or possibly succeeded, at making sockpuppetry into a mostly-automated art, building credibility with profiles and personas and making it so that one person could potentially command an army without cross-contamination, assuming they paid attention to the reminder cues left for them. A flash mob on a flash drive, essentially.
TSA workers were arrested for stealing almost $40,000 USD from the checked baggage of airline passengers.
An accusation against Fox News that they substituted the footage of the CPAC 2010 results affirming Ron Paul was the winner for the CPAC 2011 poll with the same result, so as to make it seem like the CPAC attendees were not in favor of the results when they really were.
Indiana has introduced a bill that would make the state refuse to contract with or award grants to anyone who provided abortions or maintains a medical facility that provides abortion services, as well as requiring doctors to report to the state if someone experiences an adverse effect from the use of RU-486, and then to keep those reports, anonymized, as public records, so that anyone can see all the bad things RU-486 does without the context of all the people who did just fine with it.
Former president Carter spoke on the revolution in Egypt, expressing his belief that the Egyptian military will turn over power to an elected democracy when the elections are complete, and that the fears of extremist Islam taking over the country are unlikely to become true.
In technology, Watson wins. Handily. A supercomputer can beat the best humans at Jeopardy!. So we can add that to the list of games the computers can be built to be best at.
The robustness of the Internet being able to deal with disconnections only works if the physical infrastructure isn't tightly contained in certain spots - those nodes can be cut off and have the network crumble. On the other side, if you happen to find a choke point, like the domain registry system, to control, you can kill access just as easily.
Monopoly is getting an electronic face lift - one that Hasbro hopes will enliven the normally stodgy game...but will also play the game by the rules.
The carbon-dating of the Voynich Manuscript, a book written and drawn in a language currently unintelligible, indicates that it was written about the early 15th Century.
Pollen and bees could potentially become the agents of law enforcement concerned with making sure crops are genetically proper.
A recent big freakin solar flare made radio communications difficult on Terra for a bit.
Last out, learning to communicate with dolphins, another intelligent species here on Terra, may prepare us to be able to communicate with off-Terra aliens so that we can establish a functioning vocabulary until our linguists can learn to speak each other's languages.
Into opinions, where the Slacktivist points out how a Groupon ad at the Super Bowl bombed because it was an excellent barbed joke...in the wrong context. The consumerist, narcissist strike at Americans succeeds, but then it tries to sell them something. Right joke, Wrong Room, as he says.
Mr. Aravosis suggests that if Republicans are all about cutting $100 billion USD from the budget this year, that they can do so in programs on their own districts and see who's happier and doing better in the economy.
Speaking of cutting from the budget, as is their regular stance, Mr. Carroll of Heritage says that the military should get everything it ever wants, because to make them be austere makes us vulnerable to others, but that everything else is definitely on the table for cutting, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (incorrectly assumed to be the recipient of Sesame Street's finances instead of Sesame Workshop), Head Start, community block grants, and of course, ObamaCare. Public radio and the CPB are also accused of being partisan mouthpieces for the government, a claim that could easily be refuted if the funding was cut. And they assume that CPB broadcasting could just easily be licensed (or sponsored with commercial breaks, I'm guessing) to make up for the difference in any funding drops. Because the material on NPR and the CPB are, of course, the kinds of things that media conglomerates want their news departments researching, and programs like This American Life would draw stellar ratings on commercial radio, where the flow of the story would have to be interrupted every two mintues for commercials. Mr. Hanson adds his perspective by claiming that agriculture subsidies should be stopped and profitable agribusiness can stand on its own feet, which will lower the price of food, stop it from being used for biofuels, and possibly also end up cutting the food stamp programs as well, which sounds like two-of-three for Mr. Hanson. (Intended: Cut food stamps and ethanol growing. Unintended: Also cuts agribusiness profits. At least, that's the case if he's a standard Market (A.P.T.I.N.) devotee)
Through all of this, Mr. Rove remains comfident that Republicans should be picking budget battles as the President is an easy target to paint as a big-spender whose debt is crushing us and results were abysmal failures. After all, he has the full weight of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department behind him, as evidenced by a context-devoid chart that claims that President Obama is clearly responsible for all of our woes...at least based on the numbers reported, context-free.
Mr. Kessler pens a colunm about the Inexorable March of Technology, and highlights the places where he expects a lot of people to be rendered unemployed soon, complete with derogatory nicknames. All of them are in the services economy - people who move goods from one place to another inside the same building (called "sloppers", a reference I'm assuming refers to people who move pig food around to each animal or to the fact that they're excess people that sloppy organization and procedures permit to exist but that efficiency won't), persons who make their money through marking up goods and selling them as luxuries ("supersloppers", which suggests that the previous reference is to pig food and not bad organization), persons who require a governmental certification to practice their work (called "sponges", because the artificially low supply lets them charge more for their services and "sponge" off everyone else), persons working in finance to provide capital and to do services like stock and bond trading (called "slimers", ostensibly because they grease the wheels of finance, but I think he might be referring to a different kind of slime there), and regulators, local monopolies, and conglomerate media offerings ("thieves", because they apparently provide no value added to their services and the bulk of their ability to make money is based on the fact that they have the government ensuring they are profitable, allowing them to just steal our money and provide nothing for it). Apparently if you work for any of those types of people, your job is likely to be crushed by technology. I think Mr. Kessler is very much wrong - technology will improve productivity and make it so that fewer people can do more work when there's a lot of
information manipulation, but the increase in information means that the people who are there will settle nicely into new roles as experts in data flow. Google can produce 3,000,000 hits on a search, but a librarian can tell you which of those 3,000,000 is actually worth checking out, and can tell you how to change the query so as to have less quantity but more quality, as well as pass you on to resources that Google doesn't index at all. Cable companies are the arms of media conglomerates, who aren't going away any time soon, no matter how much he wants to paint them as thieves. Much of what Mr. Kessler thinks of as dead weight is not actually so.
Continuing in the theme of myopia among conservative columnists, Mr. Mauro paints the Yemeni protests as an opportunity for Iran and al-Qaeda to gain power in the country as the government stretches resources to try and appease the protests. All because of the presence of a pro-political Islam party in the opposition coalition. It's part of his bigger thesis that the current administration is not being solid in its alliances, and continues to weaken relationships that should be strong to chase phantasms that will never become new alliances. The same point is put more angrily, less coherently, and less charitably, by Ms. Coulter, who says that Democrats being interested now in dictators is some comfort considering how much they were silent on Iran. (She also claims that anything liberals like is automatically bad for the country. Like I said, less coherence.) At least the WSJ is a little bit better at looking for the big picture, pointing out even if everyone thinks this will put pressure on Iran, Iran has a much more entrenched system to ensure the people in power stay that way. You know, the reason why the United States might have been a bit quieter on Iran - because the system's structure was being preserved, for the most part?
Not that our own country escapes such myopia, either. Ms. Rabinowitz must come back to the single point that Major Hasan was a fundamentalist Muslim as the sole cause of his attack and that anyone who does not mention that as the sole cause of his attack is cloaking themselves in the delusion of multiculturalism that will allow more Major Hasans to keep attacking, a delusion she feels many of the European countries are now waking up to based on their own problems with militant Muslims.
Same problem, different issue, Tait Trussel considers renewable energy development to be disastrous economics, because it costs too much to do things like build wind farms in New England, and thus all green energy stuff should be abandoned, at least until it can become cheap. You know, after research and development and prototyping and all those things that cost money to do and that fossil fuels also went through when they were the new kid on the block. Perhaps the belief is that G-d created the planet with infinite amounts of resources to be mined and extracted and thus we can always use the cheapest and most polluting option?
Mr. Jacoby says the time has come to end counting people by their races, because everyone these days is multi-racial and has a diverse family tree, with the added convenience that special interests won't be able to pit races against each other for funding. Mr. Jacoby's first premise has the potential for validity, but the second is a bit more sketchy. If we were the kind of country that didn't develop race ghettoes where people of color are conveniently also low-income and represented highly in the crime statistics, then Mr. Jacoby might be able to sell us on the idea. But because we happen to notice trends, we still count things in statistics to see if those trends have reversed or not. Call it special interests if you like - we call it the promise of equal opportunity.
Last for opinions, Slacktivist returns by noting a student may be best served by avoiding their honors English class, because it uses Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as its major book. Decided so mostly because Ayn Rand is a poor writer in that book. On the other side of the coin, a spirited defense of speculation fiction writers against the assertion that they are somehow less talented authors than their other genre counterparts. Hopefully, this will help illustrate the differences between not wanting a writer because they are poor at their craft, a valid complaint, versus not wanting a writer because you believe their genre is Inherently Inferior, an invalid complaint.
At the end, thank you all very much for your well-wishes, sympathy, and empathy with Gandalf. The hole's still there, and it will be for a while, but we're healing.
Also, Borders is filing for bankruptcy and closing several of its stores in the United States.
More material indicating that playing video games can be beneficial to your health, instead of being just a waste of time.
A reminder that social change is needed as well as political change, based on the way some women, foreign or not, are harassed and abused while they participated in protests, as well as praise for how well the protests went with gender equality and a lack of that threatening atmosphere for the most part. That's a whole lot better than the United States, where the Pence Amendment to the budget would effectively zero out any federal funding for Planned Parenthood, likely as an attempt to punish them for including abortion in their reproductive services offerings. The House of Representatives in their Republican majority passed the amendment. (And reminding me I need to brush up on what constitutes bills of attainder in this country) The Republicans who came in promising to focus on jobs are doing a whole lot to try and make reproductive services unavailable in the United States. As if they also want women to be taken out of the job force by pregnancy and to punish women who choose to have sex, so they can go back to a mythical time when only men worked and women were totally dependent on everything from the men in their family or the man who deigned to marry them. There are far too many reasons to stand with Planned Parenthood instead of with the socially and economically regressive.
And finally, more material on the major protest in Wisconsin - a protest getting far better coverage than those happening in the Middle East. The mention of using the National Guard as possible scabs against a strike conjures an ugly past with the Guard being used for much worse things. Furthermore, it appears solidarity from the various unions in the state, as well as students from school, and the Democratic legislators in the state has emerged, making it impossible for the bill to be voted on due to a lack of a quorum, scaring the daylights out of the conservatives in charge and trying to spin the story into something akin to thuggery, and letting the 25,000 already at the state Capitol let the Governor know what they think of his plan. They could be gone for weeks, giving us plenty of time to point out how the Governor's actions are a plan deliberately designed to break public-sector unions as opposed to the austerity measures that he claims are the real reason, as Wisconsin was doing quite well with a surplus until he implemented tax cut policies that he did not indicate a payment plan for. In that respect, he's just following the model of John Boehner, who callously dismissed public sector workers as not real jobs when he said that it would be okay to cut jobs out of the federal government. Worse, instead of seeing Wisconsin as the monster warning everyone away from emulation, nearby states are getting ready to fight their own strip-the-unions battle.
For comparative coverage, see the following article about the uptick in violence in the attempts to stop the protests in Bahrain, with government and military forces firing their guns at the protesters.
Or, even better, the use of excessive force against a veteran who peacefully protested the Secretary of State by turning his back to her while she spoke.
Out in the world today, Mexico attempts to rebuild their farming infrastructure, Japan suspends antarctic whaling practices, and the Iraqi government wants $1 billion USD in reparations paid to the city of Baghdad for all the damage United States troops have done to it after they invaded in 02003.
In light of the continuing practice of settlements outside the agreed-upon zones, The United States offered to endorse a UN resolution condemning Israel for the practice, hoping to avoid having to deal with a different resolution declaring them illegal. [RECORDSCRATCH] Err, rather, The United States already vetoed the resolution in question.
Inside the United States, a disturbing revelation in the HB Gary attempts to create a smear campaign against certain targets - they appear to have attempted, or possibly succeeded, at making sockpuppetry into a mostly-automated art, building credibility with profiles and personas and making it so that one person could potentially command an army without cross-contamination, assuming they paid attention to the reminder cues left for them. A flash mob on a flash drive, essentially.
TSA workers were arrested for stealing almost $40,000 USD from the checked baggage of airline passengers.
An accusation against Fox News that they substituted the footage of the CPAC 2010 results affirming Ron Paul was the winner for the CPAC 2011 poll with the same result, so as to make it seem like the CPAC attendees were not in favor of the results when they really were.
Indiana has introduced a bill that would make the state refuse to contract with or award grants to anyone who provided abortions or maintains a medical facility that provides abortion services, as well as requiring doctors to report to the state if someone experiences an adverse effect from the use of RU-486, and then to keep those reports, anonymized, as public records, so that anyone can see all the bad things RU-486 does without the context of all the people who did just fine with it.
Former president Carter spoke on the revolution in Egypt, expressing his belief that the Egyptian military will turn over power to an elected democracy when the elections are complete, and that the fears of extremist Islam taking over the country are unlikely to become true.
In technology, Watson wins. Handily. A supercomputer can beat the best humans at Jeopardy!. So we can add that to the list of games the computers can be built to be best at.
The robustness of the Internet being able to deal with disconnections only works if the physical infrastructure isn't tightly contained in certain spots - those nodes can be cut off and have the network crumble. On the other side, if you happen to find a choke point, like the domain registry system, to control, you can kill access just as easily.
Monopoly is getting an electronic face lift - one that Hasbro hopes will enliven the normally stodgy game...but will also play the game by the rules.
The carbon-dating of the Voynich Manuscript, a book written and drawn in a language currently unintelligible, indicates that it was written about the early 15th Century.
Pollen and bees could potentially become the agents of law enforcement concerned with making sure crops are genetically proper.
A recent big freakin solar flare made radio communications difficult on Terra for a bit.
Last out, learning to communicate with dolphins, another intelligent species here on Terra, may prepare us to be able to communicate with off-Terra aliens so that we can establish a functioning vocabulary until our linguists can learn to speak each other's languages.
Into opinions, where the Slacktivist points out how a Groupon ad at the Super Bowl bombed because it was an excellent barbed joke...in the wrong context. The consumerist, narcissist strike at Americans succeeds, but then it tries to sell them something. Right joke, Wrong Room, as he says.
Mr. Aravosis suggests that if Republicans are all about cutting $100 billion USD from the budget this year, that they can do so in programs on their own districts and see who's happier and doing better in the economy.
Speaking of cutting from the budget, as is their regular stance, Mr. Carroll of Heritage says that the military should get everything it ever wants, because to make them be austere makes us vulnerable to others, but that everything else is definitely on the table for cutting, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (incorrectly assumed to be the recipient of Sesame Street's finances instead of Sesame Workshop), Head Start, community block grants, and of course, ObamaCare. Public radio and the CPB are also accused of being partisan mouthpieces for the government, a claim that could easily be refuted if the funding was cut. And they assume that CPB broadcasting could just easily be licensed (or sponsored with commercial breaks, I'm guessing) to make up for the difference in any funding drops. Because the material on NPR and the CPB are, of course, the kinds of things that media conglomerates want their news departments researching, and programs like This American Life would draw stellar ratings on commercial radio, where the flow of the story would have to be interrupted every two mintues for commercials. Mr. Hanson adds his perspective by claiming that agriculture subsidies should be stopped and profitable agribusiness can stand on its own feet, which will lower the price of food, stop it from being used for biofuels, and possibly also end up cutting the food stamp programs as well, which sounds like two-of-three for Mr. Hanson. (Intended: Cut food stamps and ethanol growing. Unintended: Also cuts agribusiness profits. At least, that's the case if he's a standard Market (A.P.T.I.N.) devotee)
Through all of this, Mr. Rove remains comfident that Republicans should be picking budget battles as the President is an easy target to paint as a big-spender whose debt is crushing us and results were abysmal failures. After all, he has the full weight of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department behind him, as evidenced by a context-devoid chart that claims that President Obama is clearly responsible for all of our woes...at least based on the numbers reported, context-free.
Mr. Kessler pens a colunm about the Inexorable March of Technology, and highlights the places where he expects a lot of people to be rendered unemployed soon, complete with derogatory nicknames. All of them are in the services economy - people who move goods from one place to another inside the same building (called "sloppers", a reference I'm assuming refers to people who move pig food around to each animal or to the fact that they're excess people that sloppy organization and procedures permit to exist but that efficiency won't), persons who make their money through marking up goods and selling them as luxuries ("supersloppers", which suggests that the previous reference is to pig food and not bad organization), persons who require a governmental certification to practice their work (called "sponges", because the artificially low supply lets them charge more for their services and "sponge" off everyone else), persons working in finance to provide capital and to do services like stock and bond trading (called "slimers", ostensibly because they grease the wheels of finance, but I think he might be referring to a different kind of slime there), and regulators, local monopolies, and conglomerate media offerings ("thieves", because they apparently provide no value added to their services and the bulk of their ability to make money is based on the fact that they have the government ensuring they are profitable, allowing them to just steal our money and provide nothing for it). Apparently if you work for any of those types of people, your job is likely to be crushed by technology. I think Mr. Kessler is very much wrong - technology will improve productivity and make it so that fewer people can do more work when there's a lot of
information manipulation, but the increase in information means that the people who are there will settle nicely into new roles as experts in data flow. Google can produce 3,000,000 hits on a search, but a librarian can tell you which of those 3,000,000 is actually worth checking out, and can tell you how to change the query so as to have less quantity but more quality, as well as pass you on to resources that Google doesn't index at all. Cable companies are the arms of media conglomerates, who aren't going away any time soon, no matter how much he wants to paint them as thieves. Much of what Mr. Kessler thinks of as dead weight is not actually so.
Continuing in the theme of myopia among conservative columnists, Mr. Mauro paints the Yemeni protests as an opportunity for Iran and al-Qaeda to gain power in the country as the government stretches resources to try and appease the protests. All because of the presence of a pro-political Islam party in the opposition coalition. It's part of his bigger thesis that the current administration is not being solid in its alliances, and continues to weaken relationships that should be strong to chase phantasms that will never become new alliances. The same point is put more angrily, less coherently, and less charitably, by Ms. Coulter, who says that Democrats being interested now in dictators is some comfort considering how much they were silent on Iran. (She also claims that anything liberals like is automatically bad for the country. Like I said, less coherence.) At least the WSJ is a little bit better at looking for the big picture, pointing out even if everyone thinks this will put pressure on Iran, Iran has a much more entrenched system to ensure the people in power stay that way. You know, the reason why the United States might have been a bit quieter on Iran - because the system's structure was being preserved, for the most part?
Not that our own country escapes such myopia, either. Ms. Rabinowitz must come back to the single point that Major Hasan was a fundamentalist Muslim as the sole cause of his attack and that anyone who does not mention that as the sole cause of his attack is cloaking themselves in the delusion of multiculturalism that will allow more Major Hasans to keep attacking, a delusion she feels many of the European countries are now waking up to based on their own problems with militant Muslims.
Same problem, different issue, Tait Trussel considers renewable energy development to be disastrous economics, because it costs too much to do things like build wind farms in New England, and thus all green energy stuff should be abandoned, at least until it can become cheap. You know, after research and development and prototyping and all those things that cost money to do and that fossil fuels also went through when they were the new kid on the block. Perhaps the belief is that G-d created the planet with infinite amounts of resources to be mined and extracted and thus we can always use the cheapest and most polluting option?
Mr. Jacoby says the time has come to end counting people by their races, because everyone these days is multi-racial and has a diverse family tree, with the added convenience that special interests won't be able to pit races against each other for funding. Mr. Jacoby's first premise has the potential for validity, but the second is a bit more sketchy. If we were the kind of country that didn't develop race ghettoes where people of color are conveniently also low-income and represented highly in the crime statistics, then Mr. Jacoby might be able to sell us on the idea. But because we happen to notice trends, we still count things in statistics to see if those trends have reversed or not. Call it special interests if you like - we call it the promise of equal opportunity.
Last for opinions, Slacktivist returns by noting a student may be best served by avoiding their honors English class, because it uses Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as its major book. Decided so mostly because Ayn Rand is a poor writer in that book. On the other side of the coin, a spirited defense of speculation fiction writers against the assertion that they are somehow less talented authors than their other genre counterparts. Hopefully, this will help illustrate the differences between not wanting a writer because they are poor at their craft, a valid complaint, versus not wanting a writer because you believe their genre is Inherently Inferior, an invalid complaint.
At the end, thank you all very much for your well-wishes, sympathy, and empathy with Gandalf. The hole's still there, and it will be for a while, but we're healing.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-19 08:23 pm (UTC)You might wanna update with the fact that The US vetoed the UN Resolution already.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-19 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-19 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-19 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 01:40 am (UTC)