Maken Melodye - 21-22 February 2011
Feb. 23rd, 2011 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHi, everyone. The sun's come out today, reminding me that despite where I live, the clouds do occasionally break. You can then enjoy optical illusions where the lines are straight, but appear quite bent. And then I read about how the government claism it can spy on people without court approval, and then redacts the law it cites for justification, and the clouds come back, faster than before. Compounded by requests from the Pentagon to be able to use rapid-fire rubber bullets to control crowds - one suspects that if the United States broke out again in major protest, the people called in would be able to put it down quite savagely and swiftly at this point.
If you ask American evangelicals where we can find money to balance the U.S. budget, they'll say the best place to cut money is in aid to the world's poor people, aid to the United States' poor people, and then money spent to protect the environment. If those evangelicals further believe that private charity could make up for whatever was taken away in government spending, that's the Gospel of Republican Jesus right there, and it flies rather in the face of what the actual Jesus said about taking care of the poor. Not to mention, it's the wrong way to reduce deficit spending - you can do a lot more by putting the unemployed back to work, so that they start contributing taxes and stop drawing unemployment insurance, adding to income and reducing expenses at one swing. It's not just evangelicals that believe this, though - elected Demcorats also swear by Republican Jesus, cutting heating assistance to the poor so they can feed the war machines for another week, Republicans that think cutting things like the White House decoration budget and a TelePrompTer for the President are necessary and will help, and both parties likely working toward a compromise that will gut the working class and their entitlements while leaving the rich and the Corporations undisturbed, or perhaps even richer. Because they always talk about spending cuts and never about raising revenues. Kind of like how the owner of the Yankees doesn't want to have to pay revenue-sharing costs or a luxury tax on his gigantic payroll, y'know.
Of course, that's just once facet. There's also the facet that says Americans brought the recession upon themselves because they wanted to have a living wage, instead of accepting serfdom for Our Corporate Overlords and being happy to be employed at all, and the work that they're doing dismantling organized labor and all the other pro-worker reforms of the last two centuries. This same facet believes union leaders are communists, because they support the Demcoratic Party, and that unionized government workers making more than their private-sector counterparts means redistibution of wealth and the successful infliction of massive taxes on the rest of the economy to pay for their exorbitant salaries. Except for one problem - unionized government workers pay taxes on their wages, too. And on their property. And sales taxes, too. Working for government is not a free pass on paying your taxes. And I'd bet the private sector could achieve similar wages if they were allowed to unionize and collectively bargain, instead of being subjected to intimidation and reprisals for attempting to do so. (Not that it would ever happen directly - that's illegal, of course.) They also believe the fight in Wisconsin is about whether or not unions get to automatically collect dues from their members, and because unions just use that money to advocate political issues, it should be stripped from them. It's true that union do spend lots of money on political issues, and they are big spenders in terms of absolute money spent on Demcoratic causes and elections, but if you look at their context, especially post-Citizens United, you find that unions are the only people leveraging big money on national issues - they're the sole center-left voice in the conversation amidst fanatically pro-business, right-wing, now corporate-backed groups. Getting rid of them allows the corporations to basically dominate the airwaves with only their perspective, achieving the kind of media lockout that Fox News could only drool over.
Those kinds of forces are stymied in Wisconsin by tesimony after testimony, people camped out in the Capitol, and the people wanting to have their voices heard, even though the people who need to hear them have long since left the building. (Some of whom are being asked to return to their classrooms to teach students. Which could be an entirely different opportunity...) At least for now. their opposition wants to do things like pose as union workers and then shout Tea Party slogans and wave Tea Party signs so that the cameras can capture an image friendly to their cause for Fox News to play ad nauseam. Or they'll instruct the opposition's website to be blocked on the free wi-fi the capitol building offers to all visitors.
But they're not just after unions. They're after all the ways you can better yourself and get up to the mythic middle class lifestyle. Texas librarians protested the significant axing of their funding in the new budget, for example.
Out in the world today, student protesters in Puerto Rico forced the withdrawal of police from their campus, where the students have been raising their voices against a tuition increase that would prevent many of them from finishing their studies. Yet we hear very little about this uprising. Probably because it's been cemented in the American consciousness that student protests, excepting for Iran 1979, are just whiny kids bitching about useless things, so they don't need to be listened to.
Elsewhere, citizens demonstrated in north Iraq over the killing of protesters and the continued lack of response from the government on important issues like aid and electricity.
Iran continues to fight its own group of protesters, violently and without hesitation or mercy, using paramilitary forces as well as conventional ones. The trip of Iranian naval vessels inending to use the Suez canal to dock in Syria has many eyes fastened on them to see whether they make any stops, or shoot anything, along the way.
Libya explodes in violence, with gunfire and reports of bombs being dropped on the civilian population. Additionally, the navy may have been ordered to fire on the people as well. Gaddafi clearly wants this uprising killed. However, he'll have to do it without his pilots or his diplomats. With these events, we find that the willingness of Western nations to fund military sales to repressive governments often comes back to haunt them.
Many other places across Africa continue their own revolutinos as well - the fire from Tunisia and Egypt inspires extra effort in democracy revolutions across the area. Even though there isn't as much for media coverage.
As Egypt changes into a more long-term gear, The New Yorker does a long-form piece looking long-term, from the beginning, through the end of this first chapter in Egypt's Tahrir Revolution.
An American being held in Pakistan on suspicion of shooting two citizens is a CIA operative, according to the United States governmemnt, which I guess they think will grant him clemency? Frankly, if that turned up, I think that Pakistan would be more inclined to prosecute hard just so as to prove that they don't ely foreign operativees run roughshod in their country.
The Afghanistan government's plan to administer women's shelters and determine who can get in to them has human rights groups worried that this will make those spaces unsafe. Activists are concerned that the government is not committing to help women, but is using them as a bargaining chip while talking with the Taliban.
Last out, a major earthquake in New Zealand - 6.3 Richter, at least 65 killed. Despite NZ's strict quake regulations, the shallow depth of the quake gave it more energy to shake the city just above.
Domestically, Mr. DeMint does more than dog-whistle, he flat-out says Barack Obama does not deserve to be President, nor is he the leader of the country. I'm sure that'll be red meat for Tea types and the Birther conspiracists who insist that Barack Obama is not the legitimate president of the United States. Now, if Mr. DeMint truly believes this, then we'll expect to see him introducing articles of impeachment soon, on whatever charge he can find.
A mother of three was arrested for taking pictures on a public street of a monument meant to be shown to the public. She happened to be near an airport, and was legally carrying an unloaded weapon in her trunk, which probably switched on the awful treatment she then received at the hands of the Suffolk County Sherrif's Department, includign being placed on suicide watch, treated as if she were a terrorist, and having some of her personal property stolen from her by the police. The charge against her was dropped, but the damage had already been done.
A veteran of the Iraq war found his intended audience less than receptive in trying to convince the university to let the ROTC back on campus and to get the students to join up. His appeal to "bad men trying to kill you", likely an Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion reference, probably fell flat because university students are not very inclined to believe it. Or at least not that they exist in such quantities that joining the military s necessary and invading foreign lands is the right way of getting rid of them. Neither will those students (or most of us, we hope) believe that the assaults in Egypt on journalists were because Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion composed entirely of barbarians and saw them all as infidels that had to be punished or sexually assaulted. Especially considering the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, and the fact that those assaults took place either by pro-government forces or after the pro-government forces had been deployed to turn the peaceful protest violent through their actions. None of that matters to the framing, however, which still insits that fundamentalist Muslims orchestrated the whole thing to turn the country of the dictator into the country of the caliphate so they can repress everyone even more. So much so that they'll reprint old articles and claim falsely that liberals were silent about the sexual assaults on Lara Logan and other females, as if that proves that liberals also know Islam is the Bloodthirsty, Anti-Women religion, and just refuse to see reality and admit it. (Plus, there's always the teachings of the Catholic Church about sexuality, restricting it solely to genital intercourse inside of marriage with the explicit intent of getting a woman pregnant if you want to talk about an anti-women religion...)
Speaking of framing Islam as the Bloodthirsty Religion, watch the word choices as you read about a cleric planning a protest and call for Islamic law to take hold in the United States. After having a row with Fox News talking head Sean Hannity, the Daily Mail paints him as a hate preacher - if you actually look at his words, he's probably scoring on the fanatical scale somewhere, but no more so than anyone else calling for religious law to take over.
In technology and the sciences, the increasing population of humans on Terra may transform the planet into something we would currently not recognize within the century. Which could be that we all slide into something less developed, or we redevelop ourselves to maximize space to the point that we wouldn't recognize our own planet. And assuming large corporate special interests aren't able to redefine reality in such a way that benefits them.
Your THINK OF THE CHILDRENS moment comes from the police officer in New Jersey who says parents should install keyloggers on their childrens' computer, steal their passwords, and then use them to spy on their on-line interactions. Once again, people, Little Brother is not meant as an instruction guide on the society to create. And, as anyone who's read that book knows, kids are very good at hacking things back to their preferred settings, or they'll abandon the laptop entirely and browse on a portable device for which keylogging software isn't available or that the manufacturer will reject as an unauthorized firmware.
A car that is largely autonomous but over-ridable by human thought debuts. The question then is whether the car can be trained to ignore most of what comes out of our brains so that we aren't thinking about leftist (or rightist) politics and veer into the oncoming traffic lane.
In opinions, Yoram Ettinger wants you to believe that Israel is the only reliable United States ally in the Middle East, so they should be the recipients of U.S. largesse and funding to turn them into an even stronger force.
Mr. Morris points at figures regarding climate emissions dropping and attributes them to The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), and says any cap and trade (or cap and tax) plan is just about increased governmental control.
Last for tonight, some facet of Anonymous delivers an ultimatum to the Westboro Baptist Church, and rather than leaving well enough alone, WBC rises to the bait and tells them to bring it on. However, wiser heads prevail. And thus, one must remember than Anonymous doesn't always agree with itself.
Oh, and a Facebook campaign to raise sufficient funds to buy the rights to Firefly so as to have Nathan Filion make good on speculation that he'd do more with it if he owned it.
If you ask American evangelicals where we can find money to balance the U.S. budget, they'll say the best place to cut money is in aid to the world's poor people, aid to the United States' poor people, and then money spent to protect the environment. If those evangelicals further believe that private charity could make up for whatever was taken away in government spending, that's the Gospel of Republican Jesus right there, and it flies rather in the face of what the actual Jesus said about taking care of the poor. Not to mention, it's the wrong way to reduce deficit spending - you can do a lot more by putting the unemployed back to work, so that they start contributing taxes and stop drawing unemployment insurance, adding to income and reducing expenses at one swing. It's not just evangelicals that believe this, though - elected Demcorats also swear by Republican Jesus, cutting heating assistance to the poor so they can feed the war machines for another week, Republicans that think cutting things like the White House decoration budget and a TelePrompTer for the President are necessary and will help, and both parties likely working toward a compromise that will gut the working class and their entitlements while leaving the rich and the Corporations undisturbed, or perhaps even richer. Because they always talk about spending cuts and never about raising revenues. Kind of like how the owner of the Yankees doesn't want to have to pay revenue-sharing costs or a luxury tax on his gigantic payroll, y'know.
Of course, that's just once facet. There's also the facet that says Americans brought the recession upon themselves because they wanted to have a living wage, instead of accepting serfdom for Our Corporate Overlords and being happy to be employed at all, and the work that they're doing dismantling organized labor and all the other pro-worker reforms of the last two centuries. This same facet believes union leaders are communists, because they support the Demcoratic Party, and that unionized government workers making more than their private-sector counterparts means redistibution of wealth and the successful infliction of massive taxes on the rest of the economy to pay for their exorbitant salaries. Except for one problem - unionized government workers pay taxes on their wages, too. And on their property. And sales taxes, too. Working for government is not a free pass on paying your taxes. And I'd bet the private sector could achieve similar wages if they were allowed to unionize and collectively bargain, instead of being subjected to intimidation and reprisals for attempting to do so. (Not that it would ever happen directly - that's illegal, of course.) They also believe the fight in Wisconsin is about whether or not unions get to automatically collect dues from their members, and because unions just use that money to advocate political issues, it should be stripped from them. It's true that union do spend lots of money on political issues, and they are big spenders in terms of absolute money spent on Demcoratic causes and elections, but if you look at their context, especially post-Citizens United, you find that unions are the only people leveraging big money on national issues - they're the sole center-left voice in the conversation amidst fanatically pro-business, right-wing, now corporate-backed groups. Getting rid of them allows the corporations to basically dominate the airwaves with only their perspective, achieving the kind of media lockout that Fox News could only drool over.
Those kinds of forces are stymied in Wisconsin by tesimony after testimony, people camped out in the Capitol, and the people wanting to have their voices heard, even though the people who need to hear them have long since left the building. (Some of whom are being asked to return to their classrooms to teach students. Which could be an entirely different opportunity...) At least for now. their opposition wants to do things like pose as union workers and then shout Tea Party slogans and wave Tea Party signs so that the cameras can capture an image friendly to their cause for Fox News to play ad nauseam. Or they'll instruct the opposition's website to be blocked on the free wi-fi the capitol building offers to all visitors.
But they're not just after unions. They're after all the ways you can better yourself and get up to the mythic middle class lifestyle. Texas librarians protested the significant axing of their funding in the new budget, for example.
Out in the world today, student protesters in Puerto Rico forced the withdrawal of police from their campus, where the students have been raising their voices against a tuition increase that would prevent many of them from finishing their studies. Yet we hear very little about this uprising. Probably because it's been cemented in the American consciousness that student protests, excepting for Iran 1979, are just whiny kids bitching about useless things, so they don't need to be listened to.
Elsewhere, citizens demonstrated in north Iraq over the killing of protesters and the continued lack of response from the government on important issues like aid and electricity.
Iran continues to fight its own group of protesters, violently and without hesitation or mercy, using paramilitary forces as well as conventional ones. The trip of Iranian naval vessels inending to use the Suez canal to dock in Syria has many eyes fastened on them to see whether they make any stops, or shoot anything, along the way.
Libya explodes in violence, with gunfire and reports of bombs being dropped on the civilian population. Additionally, the navy may have been ordered to fire on the people as well. Gaddafi clearly wants this uprising killed. However, he'll have to do it without his pilots or his diplomats. With these events, we find that the willingness of Western nations to fund military sales to repressive governments often comes back to haunt them.
Many other places across Africa continue their own revolutinos as well - the fire from Tunisia and Egypt inspires extra effort in democracy revolutions across the area. Even though there isn't as much for media coverage.
As Egypt changes into a more long-term gear, The New Yorker does a long-form piece looking long-term, from the beginning, through the end of this first chapter in Egypt's Tahrir Revolution.
An American being held in Pakistan on suspicion of shooting two citizens is a CIA operative, according to the United States governmemnt, which I guess they think will grant him clemency? Frankly, if that turned up, I think that Pakistan would be more inclined to prosecute hard just so as to prove that they don't ely foreign operativees run roughshod in their country.
The Afghanistan government's plan to administer women's shelters and determine who can get in to them has human rights groups worried that this will make those spaces unsafe. Activists are concerned that the government is not committing to help women, but is using them as a bargaining chip while talking with the Taliban.
Last out, a major earthquake in New Zealand - 6.3 Richter, at least 65 killed. Despite NZ's strict quake regulations, the shallow depth of the quake gave it more energy to shake the city just above.
Domestically, Mr. DeMint does more than dog-whistle, he flat-out says Barack Obama does not deserve to be President, nor is he the leader of the country. I'm sure that'll be red meat for Tea types and the Birther conspiracists who insist that Barack Obama is not the legitimate president of the United States. Now, if Mr. DeMint truly believes this, then we'll expect to see him introducing articles of impeachment soon, on whatever charge he can find.
A mother of three was arrested for taking pictures on a public street of a monument meant to be shown to the public. She happened to be near an airport, and was legally carrying an unloaded weapon in her trunk, which probably switched on the awful treatment she then received at the hands of the Suffolk County Sherrif's Department, includign being placed on suicide watch, treated as if she were a terrorist, and having some of her personal property stolen from her by the police. The charge against her was dropped, but the damage had already been done.
A veteran of the Iraq war found his intended audience less than receptive in trying to convince the university to let the ROTC back on campus and to get the students to join up. His appeal to "bad men trying to kill you", likely an Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion reference, probably fell flat because university students are not very inclined to believe it. Or at least not that they exist in such quantities that joining the military s necessary and invading foreign lands is the right way of getting rid of them. Neither will those students (or most of us, we hope) believe that the assaults in Egypt on journalists were because Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion composed entirely of barbarians and saw them all as infidels that had to be punished or sexually assaulted. Especially considering the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, and the fact that those assaults took place either by pro-government forces or after the pro-government forces had been deployed to turn the peaceful protest violent through their actions. None of that matters to the framing, however, which still insits that fundamentalist Muslims orchestrated the whole thing to turn the country of the dictator into the country of the caliphate so they can repress everyone even more. So much so that they'll reprint old articles and claim falsely that liberals were silent about the sexual assaults on Lara Logan and other females, as if that proves that liberals also know Islam is the Bloodthirsty, Anti-Women religion, and just refuse to see reality and admit it. (Plus, there's always the teachings of the Catholic Church about sexuality, restricting it solely to genital intercourse inside of marriage with the explicit intent of getting a woman pregnant if you want to talk about an anti-women religion...)
Speaking of framing Islam as the Bloodthirsty Religion, watch the word choices as you read about a cleric planning a protest and call for Islamic law to take hold in the United States. After having a row with Fox News talking head Sean Hannity, the Daily Mail paints him as a hate preacher - if you actually look at his words, he's probably scoring on the fanatical scale somewhere, but no more so than anyone else calling for religious law to take over.
In technology and the sciences, the increasing population of humans on Terra may transform the planet into something we would currently not recognize within the century. Which could be that we all slide into something less developed, or we redevelop ourselves to maximize space to the point that we wouldn't recognize our own planet. And assuming large corporate special interests aren't able to redefine reality in such a way that benefits them.
Your THINK OF THE CHILDRENS moment comes from the police officer in New Jersey who says parents should install keyloggers on their childrens' computer, steal their passwords, and then use them to spy on their on-line interactions. Once again, people, Little Brother is not meant as an instruction guide on the society to create. And, as anyone who's read that book knows, kids are very good at hacking things back to their preferred settings, or they'll abandon the laptop entirely and browse on a portable device for which keylogging software isn't available or that the manufacturer will reject as an unauthorized firmware.
A car that is largely autonomous but over-ridable by human thought debuts. The question then is whether the car can be trained to ignore most of what comes out of our brains so that we aren't thinking about leftist (or rightist) politics and veer into the oncoming traffic lane.
In opinions, Yoram Ettinger wants you to believe that Israel is the only reliable United States ally in the Middle East, so they should be the recipients of U.S. largesse and funding to turn them into an even stronger force.
Mr. Morris points at figures regarding climate emissions dropping and attributes them to The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), and says any cap and trade (or cap and tax) plan is just about increased governmental control.
Last for tonight, some facet of Anonymous delivers an ultimatum to the Westboro Baptist Church, and rather than leaving well enough alone, WBC rises to the bait and tells them to bring it on. However, wiser heads prevail. And thus, one must remember than Anonymous doesn't always agree with itself.
Oh, and a Facebook campaign to raise sufficient funds to buy the rights to Firefly so as to have Nathan Filion make good on speculation that he'd do more with it if he owned it.
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Date: 2011-02-23 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 07:31 pm (UTC)