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| Cheers, people who drink beverages ranging from water to concoctions of multiple ingredients. Have you hugged your public library today? If you’d like to evangelize or learn a few quick facts, the ALA Quotable Facts card for 2010 is available as a PDF, where you can learn there are more libraries than McDonalds locations in the USA, but Americans spend twice as much money on candy as they do on their libraries.
For those working on urgent deadlines and hoping to influence domestic policy, some options for those who believe the public option is the best option and want the Congresscritters to keep it robust and keep it going. Especially when insurance companies bought some opponents cheap with virtual currency for Facebook games.
To correct on an earlier story, apparently, Goldman Sachs bankers are not carrying guns for their own security. There are still much increased expenditures for security, however.
And for those that simply want a laugh... or a cry, Design Hell, where the client always thinks they’re right and they can do a better job than you, and Twelve breeds of clients, only one of which is actually the one that has no drawbacks.
Out in the world today, burger King in the United Kingdom acknowledges their male bias with the new ad campaign of a woman in a bikini taking a shower singing tunes, with both bikini and tune selected by users. Theuy justify this by saying their breakfast demographic is mostly male. So, smart advertising decision, but jury’s out on whether playing to the base like that will backfire.
Encouraging material from Uganda - a government-owned paper saying the Parliament should not pass the "death or imprisonment to homosexuals" bill. Perhaps they’ve realized just how they’ve been had? Or what kind of hell awaits them if they do?
The United States ambassador to a secretly-negotiated copyright treaty says that if the text of the treaty were made public before it is finished, negotiators would walk away from the table. So instead of wondering, “Gee, I wonder why they would do that? Perhaps because the provisions in here are flagrantly unfair, abusive, or otherwise unpalatable?”
Unfortunately, it currently lacks video or media coverage, but if the account of United States border guards beating, impounding, imprisoning, charging with assault of an officer, and then turning a Canadian citizen out into the Port Huron cold with just his jacket after making bond, all for questioning why his car was selected for an in-depth search is anywhere near true, then the continual grey zone of authority granted to border guards needs to be brought into sharp, dichromatic relief, and swiftly.
Xe, nee Blackwater, has had their contract to load missiles upon drones canceled by the CIA, after allegations surfaced that Blackwater personnel participated alongside CIA agents in raids in war zones. The government confirmed that personnel were in the area, but said they were not participating in any raids.
United States President Barack Obama traveled to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, although the shortness of his visit means many of the events traditionally planned have been canceled. Has a country to run, after all. In his speech, the President addressed the criticisms that his Nobel was awarded too early, defended the need for warmaking against evil people, and expressed his hope that we could get closer to a peaceful world. The speech drew praise from both consevatives that supported the previous administration’s actions and liberals who supported the idea of this administration being war free, which prompts Mr. Greenwald to ask precisely what the hell is going on in that speec that it got two wildly divergent and opposed camps to both shower the speaker with praise. My conclusion is that the conservatives like the substance, which is not very different from the last administrator, while the liberals like the language it’s been wrapped in, because it lets them think he’s saying the opposite of what he is, or that liberals think the lawless terrorist hunt is necessary, too.
Finally, FactCheck.org delivers their analysis on "Climategate" - a scandal made up where the evidence supposedly proving it doesn't. The e-mails are scientists at their worst, speaking frankly, sure, but they do not indicate some sort of massive conspiracy or provide proof that global warming is some sort of hoax. One bad data set does not bring down the entire conclusion, and the further context of the e-mails may indicate not deception, but use of language in older and less common ways. (English sure is funny, isn’t it?)
Domestically, first there was the mayor who claimed the Muslim President pre-empted A Charlie Brown Christmas because he was a Muslim and wanted to destroy our traditions. That was silly. He has since apparently threatened to skin persons who poked fun at him for his commentarry, after recommending that the fun-poker and his brother relocate northward, as they were “an embarassment to the South”, which is disturbing. Not silly nor easily dismissed at all is a complaint about how ABC eviscerated the special, cutting out important parts to add more commercials - providing an object example of the lesson the special is trying to communicate... or would, if there weren’t so many commercials interrupting it.
In more serious matters, a thirteen year-old hanged herself because of the fallout that happened from her showing a picture of her breasts to a boyfriend, or so the article would have you believe. When you look deeper, you find out that It's all the parents, adults, and administrators who prefered to blame her, punish her, take away her support group, let her be bullied, and and cover their asses instead of understanding, explaining, and helping her that drove her to hanging herself. The act itself was supposed to be from one person to another, as a way of getting his attention. That it was intercepted and then spread is a failure of ethics and intelligence on on intercepter’s part, but he’s in high school. It’s not like American schooling does a whole lot about human maturation, sexuality, and attempts any sort of guidance about what are good and poor expressions of sexuality. We prefer to stick our fingers in our ears and shot how muh we’re not hearing anyone who does something like that. Still, it could have been curbed there with a “this is unintended consequences. It’s embarrassing, but we’ll live.” That it then progressed to bullying, suspension, revocation of privileges, the noticing of self-harm tendencies that were not immediately given real help (and no, a “no-harm” contract is not real help. I’m frankly ambivalent about whether notifying the parents would have made things better or worse, but it was a necessary thing to do.), and a complete freak-out about a child showing sexual tendencies is the real crime. The adults in her life had every opportunity to be supportive and they chose to pile on, and now they’re choosing to blame her for the action, instead of working to fix the climate that made her into feeling like a whore everywhere she went over one picture.
Elsewhere, a teenage girl seeking an abortion past the point of legal procedure was charged with attempted murder when she paid a friend to strike her and cause a miscarraige. As it turns out, the judge dismissed the case against her because Utah law states persons seeking an abortion cannot be held criminally liable for their actions regarding the induction of the abortion. the friend, however, was charged, pled guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison for attemtped murder. I don’t know if he’s covered under the statute and should be released as well, or whether he will have to serve out his prison term. At least one Utah lawmaker is furious and promised to rewrite the law to close off the “loophole” that the judge used to dismiss the case. The General admires him for his stalwart commitments to the unborn, and pokes at prominent Catholics to egg their representatives toward making laws like these.
The United States government is set to raise the debt celing to allow them to run more defecits to pay for wars and domestic spending programs - and the Democrats are worried that Republicans will exploit this to paint them as wildly spendthrift liberals, regardless of what debts were incurred by previous presidents in their war exercises and other excursions.
In technology, facebook defaults tend to share not to keep, and they hope that the users won't care, as there's some good, soem bad, and some really ugly in the changes, noninvasive ways of removing the fear ressponse, which could make us unafraid of things we really should be scared of (as well as relieving anxiety and panic attacks), evidence indicating that children do, in fact, rewire their brains to fit their situations, and a game for XBox360 to help shy male gamers learn coversation with women...and I’m sure all the dating sim gamers are popping their eyebrows and saying, “So?” I think it’s just that we’re starting to get them to appear here in the States without needing translation and localization. Erogames are next, I’m sure.
Working into the opinions, Mr. Medved offers his solution to bring Republicans back to power - run a centrist with conservative leanings, like the country is, instead of an ideological purist, like the party seems to want to put into power. Eisenhower as the example, not Reagan, so as to be a sober centrist to play against the image of Obama as a wild-spending flagrant liberal. Cue Mr. McGurn's opinion that the President and his party believe firmly in the idea that Big Government is Better and that they know what's best for everyone - sounds an awful like saying “socialist” without saying socialist, as opposed to the completely freedom-loving, individual-promoting Republicans Mr. McGurn flutters his eyelashes at. The Editors take their own stab at it by ridiculing the plan to take recovered TARP money and spend it on more jobs and infrastructure programs, saying that if there was to be any benefit from these spending programs, it should have been evident in the first two stimului programs, even as they ridicule those for not actually spending money on the things they say would have created jobs. So, by their own words, there hasn’t actually been a stimulus plan that could be judged on whether it worked, so why stop this one when it looks to actually try and settle the question?
Perhaps the people above would like to follow the true Chicago Way, privatization of public assets into long-term leases that are priced and sold without public input and at prices that are not anywhere close to what should have been charged as the equivalent of what the city would have made had they kept those assets.
On the Copenhagen climate-change conference, the editors of the WSJ start swinging by claiming that reality trumps climate change, and the money and time spent on this is better spent on fixing real problems, like HIV/AIDS. Actually, if the governments of the world did do that, I think we’d be praising them pretty heavily. Climate change, if it is a possible Earth-dooming situation, does need to be addressed, as we are not a space-faring race yet. I guess what we really need to do is learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Anyway, then the editors claim the EPS's ruling on CO2 is a bully tactic intended to go around the will of the people and force the people and businesses to be greener at great expense. And thus, we land on Mr. Stephens declaring that the ideologies and methods of the Stalinist regime and climate change advocates are far too similar for comfort. And then we can go beyond that to Mr. Williams' dismissal of climate change based on the East Anglia e-mails, where he expects the government to plow ahead even if permafrost reached New Jersey and Mr. Jeffrey's insistence that climate change is really an overt plot to redistribute the wealth of hardworking Americans to other countries, making us poor and them rich, instead of clingling to every dollar that we have and angrily dismissing any idea that Humes might be affecting their climate.
The WSJ editors proclaim once again their undying love for charter schools, saying they're succeeding despite all the union and government interference that is deliberately trying to make them fail. So what’s stopping us from making our public schools more like charter schools? The fear of being arbitrarily dismissed makes teachers be on their best all the time, so unions should be removed and schools should have to be reauthorized every few years? That’s the tack the editors take, which I’m sure they believe doesn’t accelerate any sort of burnout or stress on the teachers and administrators. Maybe funding? Well, the WSJ says they get far less public money per student, so one would think they’re underfunded, too...that is, until you realize most charter schools charge tuition to their students. Maybe that’s what they think will work - if you force parents to pay money to go to the school, instead of passively paying taxes, they’ll make sure that their kids succeed at school, because they won’t want that money to go to waste. Whatever it is, it’s not in this opinion. I’d like to see them be more constructive and show us all how we could eaily import all the success of the charter school into the public school and thus make all our schools just as good.
Mr. Merola takes Mr. Reid to task for implying that the Republican Party has been on the wrong side of several historic decisions, which, if that is what Mr. Reid intended, he is correct to do - the Democratic Party is only recently the party that claims to be all about the civil liberties and rights. If the quotation he puts in is correct, and Mr. Reid was intending just to speak generally about how some Senators always were on the wrong side, and we ridicule them now for being so, then mountain out of molehill. Tough to tell without knowing intent.
Last out, Rupert Murdoch lays out his reasons why he thinks people will pay for news content, attacks aggregators and bloggers as thieves of that content, and wants the government to have less regulation of media markets and keep themselves out of funding them.
Last for tonight, because a new Twilight movie means new life to old mockery, twenty unfortunate lessons that Twilight teaches about love, the appropriate wear for the Red Shirt in your life, and something far more serious - Detainee 063, the account of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, seven years afterward, but otherwise in real-time.
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| Cheers to you, great people of power and skill! There are charities for everyone, we find, including one that will take your old and new games and game systems and provide them for children with long hospital stays to use.
As we are concerned with certain professions over other, we update you on an earlier story. After firing two library employees who manipulated a hold record and breached patron privacy because of their belief that the requesting user should not see the item requested, the Jessamine County Library system elected to recatalog and reshelve the graphic novel collection in Dewey Decimal 741.5, instead of as a separate collection, citing concerns expressed by citizens that the graphic novel collection was too close to the young adult area. The library will still loan materials to anyone who requests them, regardless of age, but the gesture will probably placate the "THINK OF THE CHILDRENS!" people who believe that children should never ever be exposed to anything adult in nature. So, when will we hear of the complaints about the book that's just been mixed in with more family friendly material like Garfield? That's also in the 741.5 area, and I'm betting that just as many people who discovered the LXG in the graphic novel section will do so in the 741.5 section.
For a more classic example of someone advocating for censorship while loudly proclaiming they are not a censor, A woman wants the Pataskala library to stop carrying a book that is billed as a lovemaking guide and offers instructions with illustrations and pictures because she is concerned that children will find it and read it. Yet, in her own words, "This is not about censorship, because I believe in America we have the right to read and see whatever." You cannot have it both ways - you must either be okay with the possibility of young children and adolescents viewing a sexual instruction book or you must admit you believe that in some situations, censorship of materials is appropriate. What we're not saying is that your belief is wrong - it just happens to not be shared by the library in this situation. And if you keep our book out because you don't want us to check it out, we'll bill you the cost of the book and go buy another. It is still up to the parent(s) or guardian(s) of children to decide what they are and aren't willing to let their children read. (And besides, with the proliferation of materials available on other networks, it's not like you'd be closing off the only avenue by which a youngster could obtain that explicit data. With linked video of it in action.)
A teacher in Oregon took flak for using sexual profanity, devoid of its surrounding literary context, as part of a lesson on censorship and how words taken out of context can result in bannings or challenges. The teacher also received some support from parents about the lesson and the choice of words. From the sounds of the context provided by the article, the teach is within his educational boundaries to use that kind of language, especially in pointing out how easy it is to take things out of context. One hopes his students grasped the lesson in viewing all the fallout from the teacher's choice of words.
Out in our world today, the unique situation and challenges of three creatures found as cub together and raised as brothers - a lion, a tiger, and a bear. We'll refrain from what you have probably already said as a reflex action, if you're in the part of the country that has had too much of that phrase drilled into you.
An Australian coroner's report indicated that participation in a self-help course is what helped drive a woman to suicide, most likely because the course uncovered some hidden mental problems that then were uncontrolled. Caveat Emptor and then some, and always know what's going on before you let someone else try to help your head get screwed on straight.
Iraq suffered a large co-ordinated bombing attack, killing more than 120 and raising calls for resignations of security heads. The Prime Minister did some movement of officials, but there are bigger and angrier calls in the wings.
Iranian government forces and student protesters clashed heavily in a resurgence of the unrest around the alleged results that put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power several months ago. while the students are getting bolder, we'll see whether they go forward to the point of advocating the complete overthrow of the system or whether they are still just agitating for a change at the head, according to their election results.
In Nigeria, being stopped by the police could result in your death, if you don't have the money to pay bribes to the underpaid police force. Blargh. Corruption everywhere. Seems like the best option there is for the people to decide to scrap it and start again. Of course, there's no guarantees there that what results will be any better than what was. You might, instead, end up executing rogue traders, as China has, instead.
Last out, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency for the United States said the current administration is attempting to make up for lost time on climate change and promised there would be Congressional action to complement the actions of the Executive, instead of using the executive's power to regulate through agencies as an end-around lawmakers unwilling to take up the legislation. Mr. Lomborg suggests that the climate change attendees focus less on climate change (implied to be at least exaggerated, if not hoax-tastic) and more on helping the people of the world around their favorite climate change examples.
Domestically, yesterday we talked about how our drinking water sometimes fails tests for cleanliness standards. Today, we have the knowledge that fast food restaurants test more and have more stringent standards for contamination than the government uses for meats going into school lunches. So the next big bacterial breakout will be tainted food at a school, maybe? Wonder how well that's going to play.
More information about the connections between the Ugandans now pushing to kill their HIV-positive homosexuals and The Family, a secretive organization here in America that has lots of ties to lots of influential people. As the bill makes it way through, The General urges us to contact members of The Family and show our support for their work by sending them a stone and encouraging them to sponsor similar legislation here in America.
Several members of the Democratic Party are campaigning for election or re-election to office based on their opposition to the President's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. As is their right to do so. Anyone trying to make more of it, into some sort of "The Democrats are fracturing and will lose to Republicans" is making mountains out of anthills.
On health care, the public option is dead, long live the public option as Senators have apparently abandoned the idea of a government-run insurance option in favor of pushing to reduce the minimum age of entry into Medicare to 55 years and allowing those 55-64 to buy into the program at subsidized rates. Although, in the print of the article, it looks like the authorization to put in place a low-cost option is still retained by the Office of Personnel Management, but they have to use private-sector people first, and then can do it themselves if nobody signs up.
Additionally, although used as a throwaway line, the Senate version of the Stupak Amendment was permanently tabled, and thus the Senate bill has no punitive abortion restrictions. Not that the female Senators didn't get their chance to lay into the amendment, making apt comparisons of the availability of reproductive enhancement drugs for men without corresponding availability of reproductive control for women.
Last out, the homeowners's association threatening legal action against a veteran who flew his flag on a flagpole have relented on their threat, according to the spokesman for one of the Senators from that state. I wonder what sort of counterthreat was made against them if they persisted with their folly.
In the sciences and technologies of our lives, pets can be infected with H1N1 virus, but these are very rare cases, and we might have already synthesized the right drug to help with H1N1 infections anyway, an article about parts of the Internet that prize and thrive on their anonymity, including Freenet, whose creator penned a response about the dark aspects mentioned and his general happiness with the article, ways of getting robots to avoid collisions, requests for published authors to sign on to a letter supporting new legal frameworks that would permit adaptations of their work for he blind and visually impaired, Twoddler, a device that takes the play and input of toddlers and converts it to pre-defined Twitter updates, AT&T introducing incentives to make smartphone users use less of their data network, and the growing potential of smartphones to become musical instruments that we have everywhere, which means democratization of music composition, production and performance, along with all the neat possibilities that having a portable electronic instrument provides.
Striking into the opinion section, Mr. Crovitz on what may be peer-review for peer-review, where data disclosed or obtained is then checked by the wisdom of the crowds to determine whether the claims made are backed up by the data, using the disclosure of the East Anglia e-mails as an example of how the process could work better if instead of covering up and restricting data, it was released at the outset for the crowd to draw its own conclusions from. In other words, science at work (sort of - the ability to replicate experiments, especially on climate issues, is a bit difficult, as temporal displacement devices are not widely available.) Mr. Connor goes the opposite route, hailing the criminal hackers as intrepid skeptics, being all for transparency in data, and commenting on the foolishness of proceeding as if nothing had happened, criticizing the Administration's stance that climate gases still need regulation. Well, of course you like transparency if it helps to prove your point. That said, one corruption does not a complete undoing make - how many other studies have been conducted according to appropriate protocol, without manipulation, that conclude as the discredited study does? Why not investigate that, instead of jumping straight to the conclusion that there's a conspiracy to keep the doubters out?
In our juxtapositions department, criticism of stimulus spending from Senators, claiming that up to 15 percent of the spending is wasteful, a claim the administration denies, and Mr. Hill's complaints that the President's policies and actions have been completely against the spirit that generates jobs and profits, now mixed with Mr. Obama proposing to use some of the money that is left over from the TARP program to fund jobs and tax credits to get people hiring, resulting in... Republican opposition to the plan to use the money to fund jobs and tax credits, now apparently claiming that the money is better spent reducing the deficit. There's certainly an aspect of Party of No there, in that Republicans, who were so very much about spending on jobs and tax cuts, are suddenly opposing them. The truthout article also contains more about what has been done and what the plan still currently lacks to make it a truly effective use of funds.
Finally, Mr. Barone tells a shaggy dog story about the burdens of being commander in chief while having grown up in an environment usually hostile to the military resulting in a speech that seemed to have both of those men speaking from the podium all to say that he feels that the President should have used the word "victory" in his speech if he truly were committed to the war effort he just ordered.
Last for tonight, some retro-style graphics for some... very interesting creations, dictators, and more.
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| Happy Holidays upcoming and arriving to all. Be well, and know that your relationships do not require contractual restriction of the use of kung fu. For most of you, anyway. Some of you may need it now or later. Perhaps after reading some books off the weird book shelf.
For those in the United States, sixty-eight years ago yesterday, December 7, the United States was overtly drawn into the second World War through Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. These days, however, we're less about attacking warplanes and more about unveiling the next commercial spacecraft, christened Enterprise by Virgin Galactic foudner Richard Branson. One can see the Roddenberry influence. I think a lot of our spacecraft will take the name Enterprise.
To begin our efforts in the international sphere, CNS points out how much involvement Iran has in the United Nations, coloring it as a "These people are flouting U.N. rules, why are they still allowed to participate at the U.N.?" story, and possibly also getting in a note of "The U.N. is so useless, it will let countries like Iran continue to participate and hold leadership positions." Now, adding the context of Iran's repression of Internet access and warning of foreign journalists to stay inside on the eve of protests and the idea of making Iran suffer some UN standing for its actions makes more sense.
a paper arriving that attempts to correlate unemployment and insurgency and finds that poverty, unemployment, and insurgency are not positively correlated - the insurgents find other ways of making ends meet that make them more resilient even with higher unemployment.
On the Copenhagen climate change conference, an obligatory article about how much carbon pollution all the heads of state and dignitaries create at the summit, providing for the "Shouldn't they be trying to be greener than green at this event?" response from the hopeful, and the "Bunch'a hypocrites" response from the cynical.
Last out, Iraq will have parliamentary elections on time next year, as lawmakers managed to pass rules, guidelines, and all the other important things they needed to get elections set up.
In the domestic sphere, one man's mental disorder is another man's perfect employee, or, another article about how employers are continually waking up to the idea of putting autism spectrum disorder sufferers in jobs and tasks that are extremely well-suited to them.
The United States is offering to pay more than $3 billion USD to the Native American tribes as a settlement to a lawsuit brought over royalties from native lands. It is significantly less than the plantiffs were seeking, but it is a payment.
Elsewhere, taking the belief that God will provide to its logcial, albeit absurd, conclusion - starvation and neglect of Mom and her children, while waiting for God to provide. Instead, the State stepped in. ![[identity profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png) hybridelephant.myopenid.com mentions a case where a man expected God to heal him, and so he sat in a recliner for eight months and then died, waiting for that healing. In other religious and legal combinings, a person sued the Church of Scientology, claiming it kept him as a virtual slave for many years, giving him tasks to do for little or no pay.
And then there are the folktale spinners making tall tales about single-handedly helping to dispatch 11 "Muslims" from a plane that were apparently making a dry run for a terror attack. Most curiously, these men enjoyed drawing attention to themselves, including, supposedly, watching pr0n right before takeoff. Um, I think I'm with TPM here - if you're going to hijack a plane, and you're supposedly already dressed in a manner that will make people suspicious, I don't think you want to be drawing attention to yourself by fighting with the crew and disrupting the passengers. Oh, and the best part is the hero was not anywhere near where the incident supposedly was.
Last out of our "bad people come in all stripes" section, a McDonalds manager said he would not hire a 17 year-old based on her transgendered status, stating, "We don't hire faggots" in the voicemail he left for her.
Oh, okay, one more - Record labels are being sued for committing piracy and will likely have to pay out damages. So the next time a media cabal member talks about the dangers and the problems of pirates, be sure to remind them they're talking about themselves, too.
An internal investigation of ACORN personnel, in the wake of the scandal involving selectively chosen incidents where persons posed as a pimp and prostitute and asked for advice on how to set up business, has found that while there was unprofessional conduct in those who assisted, there was no illegal behavior, and reminds us of all the ACORN offices that did not help them. Plus, there's allegations that the video and audio have been selectively edited and/or dubbed over so as to receive the maximum effect of what the trappers were trying to do. Thus, from start to finish, it looks like honesty was not part of the gameplan.
The United States Defense Secretary and other military officials refute criticism of named dates regarding Afghanistan and the end of military presence there by saying the withdrawal will take a significant amount of time, ensuring that American military presence stays in the country for years to come. But they're not criticizing how long it takes, Mr. Gates, they're criticizing that it's happening at all, and that someone had the audacity to name a date when it would start.
The opposition party accused the President of engaging in back room dealing to marshal support for the health care bill currently working its way through the Senate, complaining of a bill being crafted to the exclusion of the Republicans in a non-transparent manner. While the complaint that this administration is not doing nearly enough on transparency in all walks is probably valid, the opposition party still seems to have a ready set of amendments to provide, even though I think we've seen maybe one or two official plans come through while all the Democratic work was being done, and even then, they seemed to be half-assing it. So to complain about being shut out when it seems like you haven't had any interest in coming in seems disingenuous.
The New Yorker Magazine has an in-depth article on how Americans have never been particularly in favor of abortions, the antiabortion movement has been both savvy and smart in their exploitation of people's feelings and in measuring the pulse of the people to know how much they can get away with, and how complex and conflicted the women who seek abortions are on whether to go through the procedure or not.
In the opinions and interviews, Ms. Strassel interviews Mr. Lieberman, frequent breaker with the caucus and irritator of liberal and Democratic elements who would rather see him join with the Republicans he seems to favor. Makes you wonder what the Gore-Lieberman ticket would have been like in practice.
Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Klukowski clamor for cutting off funding for the trials of Kalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, claiming that the decision to do those trials instead of military trials allows KSM to exploit his status, inflict more pain on the victims, and be a shining example to fellow terrorists, instead of tucking him away in the military trial, sentencing him to death, and killing him without fanfare. The "nation of laws, not of men" argument still applies, but furthermore, with a swift closed trial and execution, what kind of closure does that give to the victims. A guilty verdict delivered along with a death sentence would probably be a big boost for the victims, knowing that the court system renders justice unto those who deserve it.
Mr. Fund rightly observes that the liberal base expects the Democrats to deliver on health care, and that the liberal voters will punish the Dems if there is no bill. They may also smack them around if the bill sucks, but most likely, the independents will swing back toward the Democrats once they give them reason to believe the liberal agenda might get passed.
Tony Judt delivers a talk about how much we've let economics color even our moral debates, when it comes to government policy, to our detriment in how we treat the poor and unemployed and in the privatization mania that makes our public coffers and institutions much poorer. To improve these things, we have to start considering all the costs of actions, not just the economic ones - the ones that are profitable often keep people miserable, while the expensive ones keep the populace happier. What we need, then, is to convince the populace to be afraid of what happens when the private sector takes over completely and there are no social services - Dickens is always a good place to start, and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, and the world before labor laws. Y'know, places where the drinking water is rated unsafe at some point during the year - or that, in that world, there's no way of knowing whether the water is unsafe or not, and you're still going to pay $5 USD per small bottle because you need water to survive.
Last out, Ms. West skirts Gowin's fringe, trying to make the case as to why we should be less concerned about nation-building and go straight to the razing people to the ground option, comparing this long campaign to when the military was unleashed in World War II to kill and destroy whatever it came across, and finding the earlier scorched earth idea to be more palatable.
In technology, Google goes Augmented Reality with Google Goggles, a service that will analyze a picture and give you more contextual information, Google also offers their customizability options to non-logged in users, using cookies to track and make suggestions, what may be the first confirmed case of biometric fraud, where an immigrant changed their fingerprints to fool immigration controls, protocols for wireless high definition streaming, cannabinoids might help regrow brain cells that deal better with stress and anxiety, and something very interesting - casual sex among young adults does not appear to psychologically negatively impact them. The claims that casual sex has negative impacts on the well-being of young adults aren't backed up by this study. So long as they engage in safe sexual practice, then, go for it.
Last for tonight, a barefoot bandit in the islands around Seattle is becoming more of a folk hero the more he evades capture. And forty things that were fads in the early parts of this decade that have since tanked in popularity.
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| Good day, you who are wonderful and take time out to read our roundup. Do suggest if there are better signposts we can use to make it easier for you to find the information you seek. And possibly whether we need to use disclosure signs such as these to meet our new FTC overlords’ requirements. Don’t bee too frightened if you find yourself in a culture shock, however - all will return to normal.
Today’s world is focused on both the important, such as a marriage ceremony between a person and his two-dimensional girlfriend, complete with ceremony and wedding addresses, and the unimportant, such as charting the evolution of the Hipster look over time.
We have both the internationally significant, including a bill in Uganda that would make homosexuality a crime, not reporting a known homosexual a crime, and death as a possible penalty for engaging in homosexual sex, and it supposedly claims that Ugandans elsewhere in the world should be extradited back to Uganda to be tried, a bill fostered from the attitudes of many American evangelicals, and the pretty insignificant, such as the Lingerie Football League. (Incidentally, Scientists at the University of Montreal attempted to find a male in his 20s who had not viewed pornography up to that point in his life and failed. Thus, Rule 34 wins again, and as it turns out, The Internet Is For Porn.)
Leading off tonight’s International section, a sensation of deja vu should be smacking the Obama administration in the face by now, regarding a decision to use a lot more unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan suffered a bomber attack at a mosque in a zone supposedly very secure. Perhaps this will induce the authorities there to be a bit more aggressive toward removing terrorists. On a more positive note for the United States President, NATO allies have offered up some amount of troops to helkp, although short of the 10,000 soldiers supposedly needed to make up the difference between the American commitment and what the General request was. What may be worse is... this could all be a fool’s errand, as there hsan't been new information on Osama bin Laden in years.
On top of the domestic issues of the day, some of the thirty Republican Senators who voted against preventing companies that don't let their employees sue them for sexual harrassment and/or rape from getting federal contracts are complaining that Al Franken, amendment creator, hasn't stopped the media characterization of those Senators as pro-rape. Despite having voted in a pro-rape direction. Furthermore, in what bizarro world is Mr. Franken responsible for telling anyone that they didn’t really mean it when they voted pro-rape?
Additionally, Alaska half-governor and almost-Vice President Sarah Palin is apparently sympathetic to birtherism, now, in her contual quest to try and catch as much of the shifting political wind as she can. No doubt next week she will be explaining why she is now against war with Eurasia, when this week she was clearly for it on the record.
In the opinions, Mr. Fund recognizes teh pro-military stance of sending more troops to Afghanistan will hurt the President's approval rating with the liberal base, as Mr. Cohen says the President has to focus on Afghanistan if he wants to win it, despiate all the apparent signals going on that the administration is not at all interested in wnining, using his definition of win in both cases. Mr. Rove says the President can win, assuming he doesn't lose his nerve and move away from the path that will alienate him from his base and thus trap him between two hostile forces, although Mr. Rove and others do not say as much explicitly, I suspect that is their hope - the Dems will hate him for his war stuff, the Republicans will hate him on principle, and thus, one-term President. Ms. Noonan laments the opportunity the President had to make his part take a bold step on winning and to get the public behind him and victory-hungry. Mr. Krauthammer complains about the perceived ambivalence of the President, wanting him to be more “open-ended commitment” and less “here's an exit strategy”. Mr. Cline goes the other way, indicating how much Mr. Obama is still a tool of the ruling classes and not a change agent, and thus those wanting real change should seize it.
On the matter of the East Anglia e-mails, Mr. Henninger makes a bold assertion that science itself is now standing on a credibility bubble, with the threat of the hard sciences being dismissed as politicized or agenda-driven because of how much politics and attempted dissent-silencing is shown in the leaked e-mails. The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department congratulates Mr. Henninger on his insight and points him in the direction of catching up on several decades worth of various opinions and papers published claiming the hard numbers have been fudged to fit one conclusion or another. Comedian David Limbaugh, already well-schooled in this, does his best to declare that the anthropogenic side are dishonest frauds who fix numbers, intimidate people, claim there's no dispute, and never have accountability for their wild doomsday predictions, while also advocating for policies that will ruin the country. With a treatment like this, who would you trust?
The WSJ defends itself from the suggestion that they were looking at the numbers the wrong way on stimulus success, claiming they’re right and their measures are superior, and that the stimulus has actually been worse overall because it sucked money that the private sector (All Hail The Market!) could have put to better use than all the “transfer payments” the WSJ claims the stimulus is primarily composed of. The WSJ also hopes that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is replaced instead of reconfirmed, because they feel he won't do what's necessary when it comes to tightening up the money supply.
Mr. Lester lays out the ambitious plans that would be needed if America were to achieve what the likely Copenhagen-promised carbon emission reduction goals on schedule, reading as a litany of new renewable and nuclear power, enforced efficiencies in construction and the like, and a country that is mostly independent of fossil fuels. He’s not dismissing that it could happen, but it will take the machinery of infrastructure to do so - so here’s an opportunity for all the unemployed people, yes? Mr. Inhofe says the trip should be scrapped in the first place because it would be dishonest of the President to say America will do something when the bill to do so will never see the light of day in the Senate.
Mr. Scully warns of a domino effect on the elimination of tax deductability in employer retiree drug coverages, usually culminating in lots of people being unceremoniously dumped onto Medicare Part D as their former employers decide the cost of coverage is too much for them to handle. The worst part of it is he could be right, because he may be properly forecasting the ruthless behavior of many companies to ensure their bottom line and bonuses remain as fat as possible. Elsewhere on health care, The WSJ returns to a very classical argument - that Europe can't provide military forces anywhere because their economies are comprised mostly of welfare-state expenditures, and because of that welfare-state, their economies have also been slow or stagnant in real growth. Only in America are we prosperous, because we make sure the weak, the unlucky, and the poor die, either through lack of a saftey net or by making military service, where they have a high chance of being killed, the most attractive, if not the only, option for them. Thus, corporations and bankers can get wealthy off of everyone because they don’t have to worry about taking care of anyone but themselves, and the people who could change this are too busy dying or being killed.
Landing in the fringe before technology, making the case that homosexuals should be allowed, in fact, forced, to marry each other, so that they die out from lack of reproduction. Too bad for the sperm banks and the IVF and the like, ya? Beyond this, A Tennesean mayor claimed the President timed his Afghanistan speech specifically to pre-empt the Charlie Brown Christmas special, while also calling him and his supporters Muslims and expressing a desire for the original rules regarding voting in the United States. Suffice to say, this one holds himself up nicely as a Worst Person In the World.
In technology, a study indicates those who text, blog, and use other forms of technology feel more confident about their writing. The study author suggests that we now need to teach when to use particular writing style to our already-literate and wordy children.
Elsewhere, SPACE BEER!, an amputee, with the help of electrodes, maniuplates and receives feedback from an artificial hand, and growing a nanoscale carpet on a surface so as to repel dust and water, creating potentially self-cleaning windows and solar panels as well as better batteries and charged surfaces.
Also, a winner announced for the DARPA Red Baloon challenge. To no persons’s surprise, the winning team is from MIT.
From there, vegetarian diets retaining links to longevity, getting around the law to provide synthetic cannabinoids to people, with the same high, but not coming from a banned or restricted substance, and science fiction becoming science fact more than two decades ago, with the case of a person becoming addicted to their pleasure implant - I don’t know who the oldest example it, but we’ve got lots of them scattered about the novelsphere.
Last for tonight, From Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the men living in a cave who have inherited millions, with which they hope to return to a normal life, the list of the most popular questions asked of Ask, and your VEWPRF moment, riding the coattails of a person with too much time to put up lights.
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