It’s Sunday morning, and I don’t have much for you fine folks. Links! Assemble!
I remember linking to an article about how the US got information from captured Nazis– our brave men sat down, had coffee with them, and… played chess. I know that playing boardgames doesn’t give one the same feeling of manliness as drowning someone. But it does seem to be more effective. Let’s call foregoing sadistic pleasure in favor of being effective “putting on our big boy pants”.
Speaking of putting on our big boy pants: If the new Joint Strike Fighter really is the hideous mess that Foreign Policy is describing, we need to cut the program. It seems we’re asking for a Swiss Army/Navy/Air Force/Marine jet- that can laser guide Santa’s toys from orbit- and not getting what we want. Instead, let’s cancel the program and design 2-3 different aircraft. That might be both cheaper and more effective.
Employers have the power to keep people hustling at work, constantly moving to prevent what managers call “time theft”. Employees have little to no power to prevent wage theft. Until 2010, in New York City, if your boss got caught stealing your money, they only had to pay you a quarter for every dollar they took. The extra 75 pennies? Pure profit. Most places still have penalties that weak.
One of the reasons I’m reading Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is to figure out why the Wiemar Republic fell. The answer is frustratingly vague: everyone seemed to want it to fall. When Reagan said “Government is not the solution to our problem government IS the problem”, he set the American political thought down a path that must eventually lead to a dictatorship and tyrannic. As government gets smaller and less capable, we begin to yearn for a strong man (or woman!) to fix the real problems left behind. It happened in Rome. It happened in Japan. It happened in France. Let’s alter course before it’s too late.
The Supreme Court A district court, in Eastern Virginia ruled recently that publicly declaring that you “like” a candidate or cause is not protected speech. Frighteningly, I’m not convinced that the court actually realized they did that.
I hate that the American Government has given up on space. And I’m sort of worried about the implications of space being conquered by private individuals. Yet I cannot help but be gleeful that someone, somewhere is still doing this. Humanity will leave the womb.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for paying rent a mere 29 days past due. Sundays are for going to work in hopes of paying rent in a more timely manner next month. Sundays are for enjoying your last day of vacation before starting a new job.
The Occupy [city] movement has become- in the popular conversation- about income inequality. I don’t think that’s wrong- not exactly. But I do think that it misses one of the fundamental frustrations of modern existence: the growing sense that corporate actors are more important than human actors. Worse than that, there seems to be very little that we humans can do about it.
When I was a kid growing up in the (very liberal Bay Area), talking about gay people was basically the same thing as talking about child molesters. Given the underlying (incorrect, demented, awful) axiom, the reactions of ordinary people was (terrifyingly) sane. This was the genius of Harvey Milk’s strategy of having gay people come out of the closet. Gay people became normal. Sunlight disinfected- not the people themselves, but the reputation of the group. The arc of history of long, but it bends towards justice.
Despite how often I hear the opposite, every statistic I run into says that we as people are doing more of the “good” things, and less of the bad. For instance: crime is at all time lows. You have to admit, it’s getting better. It’s getting better all the time.
Note to marketers: sex can’t sell your product. It seems that people can be distracted by sex, but it is very rarely advantageous to distract people from the product that you’re trying to sell them.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for visiting Japantown and seeing parades. Sundays are for making your your kitty is still mending. Fridays are for taking your laptop to the local bookstore and writing a blogpost. Sundays are for seeing what I did there.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped looking at aborting a pregnancy as something that human beings did, and started looking at it as a political act. When we removed humans from the equation, when we stopped focusing on the ladies and started focusing on the fetus, it became very easy to create horrible conditions for the humans involved.
A doctor’s take on being forced to perform invasive and unnecessary insertions into a woman’s body.
Again, the American conversation about women’s health is a political conversation, rather than a conversation about healthcare. Were it a conversation about healthcare, we’d know the sheer number of women who take birth control pills to keep themselves from dying.
It is true that boy nerds are treated harshly for imperfect knowledge of things they love. That’s not relevant to any conversation about how lady nerds are treated for the same imperfections of knowledge. The problem that women are trying to address isn’t the harsh treatment itself- though that’s a real problem- rather, the problem to be addressed is the gendered nature of the treatment. The problem is that womanhood- an intrinsic quality of the person in question- is being used against the woman. This devaluing of half the human species is not something which should be tolerated. And sure. Along the way we ought to stop treating men poorly also.
Of course, all I’m really doing is begging the question. Once a side has committed itself to the idea that female personhood is a logical fallacy, we see how much trouble the whole species has gotten itself into.
I was taking a class on early 20th century European history, when I had the startling linguistic insight: “nation” was a synonymy for “race”. That was why the “nation state” wasn’t a redundant construction. Suddenly, the American Civil War made sense in a new context: would America be a “nation state”, or a “multi ethnic country”? Also: if “a language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy” (sorry Catalan), then this is a disturbing trend. If Americans are becoming more polarized politically and linguistically, how long until we stop seeing one another as belonging to the same multiethnic nation?
Best political ad of all time? It works as an effective “fuck you” to his opponent, while actually being incredibly upbeat about the candidate having achieved the American dream.
I don’t really care for the us-against-them tone of this article. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that my generation- and the generations after mine- are in a very different position than that faced by the Baby Boomers. There is simply less of everything than there used to be. The wealth of the nation has been spent on a single generation, and it will be the work of the next several to rebuild.
If we think about how civilization began, we realize that cooperation is key. Humans had to coordinate planting, gathering, and travel. During times of conflict or hunting, the winners were the ones who worked best with others, who laid traps and had devious strategies. It is therefore unsurprising that in making virtual warfare, we humans would be exercising the mental muscles of cooperation?.
This article overstates the extent to which our phone bills are the result of market failure. Comparisons to a European phone plan in which customers are expected to bring their own phone and pay only for data will skew heavily towards making American “pay for the phone as part of your monthly bill” plans seem even more unreasonable. That’s all throat clearing. It is unquestionably true that 2 year contracts lock Americans into deals which favor telecoms. The difficulty of switching plans makes it unattractive for new companies to enter the market. And without new entrants to the market, incumbent companies don’t see much reason to make things better.
Seems that Americans already have a flat tax. I wouldn’t mind tax simplification- where each dollar of income at a given tier is treated the same regardless of source. And eliminating deductions would make it incredibly easy for everyone to do their own taxes– or make it simple for the government to just send you a bill. But most Americans pay the same 1/5 of their incomes to the government. And that’s what conservatives seem to say they want…
The colony of Virginia was named after the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth the First. So it is an incredible linguistic and historical accident which pitted virginity against love and marriage in one of the most important supreme court cases in American history. This case really did change the definition of marriage. America is even stronger for it. I may be biased, though. In a large sense it made my own family possible.
Many of the links from this week’s post are from the Slactivist, so you should probably be reading him on a regular basis. For now, let him share with you a fantastic and true American ghost story.
I’ve been making my way through the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Here’s why.
? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?
For those humans who follow the Western Christian tradition, today is Easter Sunday. For people of that branch of that faith, today is the holiest day of the year. In that belief system, a deity (people of that belief system understand there to only be a single deity) caused a woman to conceive a child, and that child grew up to be offhandedly executed by the mightiest empire in the world. So far, all well and good. This next bit is where “faith” comes into it.
Today Western Christians (next week for the Eastern Christians) celebrate the resurrection of their deity. 3 days after his death, Jesus got up, stretched his legs, and announced that- having been a blood sacrifice for the sins of the human species- he was back.
Apparently God meant what he said to Abraham.
For those who have faith- as I do not- in the truth of this story the willingness to give one’s life to atone for the awfulness of the human species gives someone tremendous moral authority. What Jesus is believed to have said and done between resurrection and ascension basically amount to showing his face around town, and telling his followers to get to work.
What things did Jesus say he wanted people to do? What terrible sins required the blood of a god to atone for? Moral authority to do what? Even the moral teachings of a deity must be tested against an external reference, unless we want Cthulhu to have unfettered access to our uncritical brains.
And so it seems to be that we should examine a brief part of Jesus’ teachings. For extra fun, read that passage while replacing every use of “hypocrites”, with “douchebags”.
What I read is an extended meditation on the virtue of doing the right thing for it’s own sake, rather than for the sake of being seen to do the right thing. Someone who gives bread to the hungry in order to be seen doing so may make someone better off, but they have mentally recategorized another human being from “person” to “prop”. It is impossible to love a prop.
So: people are supposed to pray in private, and not for specific goodies. What should people pray for? The first part of the prayer Jesus gives his followers is a reminder that they are not supposed to ask their deity for things- and “things” in this case counts for actions and outcomes as well. “Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.” So, you know. Christians technically can pray for a touchdown, or for a war to have a specific outcome. But if they do they’re contravening a direct command from their deity.
Interestingly, there is also an injunction against wanting forgiveness for infractions against that deity’s commands. “and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.” As a child, this was always the scariest, most terrifying part of the prayer– Christians are asking god to create a direct, 1:1 correspondence between what they have done wrong and wrongs which others have done. The only way to make good- the only way to attain heaven- is to forgive other people. It is not good enough to simply the the “keeper” of one’s siblings. Everyone is now, in an ultimate moral sense, yourself.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for cat sitting. Sundays are for lazy days in the rain. Sundays are for feeding the post-church crowd and hoping they leave enough money to help you pay your rent.
This week: Former American Vice President Dick Cheney finally received a heart. Pope Benedict the Sixteenth visited Mexico, causing many to wonder why the former Hitler Youth chose “the good” as his papal name. And also this week: NASA has found what may be liquid water on the Sol System’s hottest planet.
I’m having a hard time understanding why the Spiderman movies are being rebooted so soon after they launched. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the series– indeed, they were huge sellers. Overthinking it argues that Spiderman exists to teach children humility, among other lessons. It’s a bit breathtaking, if true. Society has demanded that we create a character who’s entire point is to suffer for our amusement, and- when he reaches personal happiness- is reincarnated to repeat the cycle. Ladies and Gentlemen: the Amazing, Webslinging Sisyphus!
It’s a typical story: single Dad raises daughter, daughter begins to like comic books, and… daddy doesn’t know anything about comic books. So he educates himself about his daughter’s interests, so that he can help guide her on her path to autonomy. No real moral here. Just a heartwarming story.
Even if you’ve never seen Casablanca, you’ve seen it. The movie is so good that every line and shot has been parodied and reproduced to death. And yet… and yet the movie is still fantastic. Apparently the Marseilles scene wasn’t really acting…
I find myself surprised that Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing its print operations. It’s not that I expect anyone to be getting more use out those set of books than from the average set of paperweights. Rather, in the very near future, printed books will be status markers of their own. I have a Kindle, I love my Kindle, but a visitor to my home does not see my thousand ebooks. Instead, they see my thousand real books and know something about me. In the future, the only physical books we buy will be the ones that we want to show off. An encyclopedia seems well suited for that.
Google is huge. They’re so important that they have to actively fight against their name turning into a generic verb. To not be linked to by Google, to not be included as one of their search results, is to basically not exist on the web– and therefore to be outside of human knowledge. Google is required by the laws of many nations to remove links to certain pages known to discuss certain topics. “For example, no hate speech,” Depending on how they define “hate speech”, this is probably ok. “no death threats”, I, for one, hope they get local authorities involved when death threats are uncovered. “no incitement to violence”, again: depends on the situation, but generally agreeable. The situation in the US is certainly different than that in Syria; I hope Google makes that distinction. “no copyright-infringing content”. Wait, what? In Google-world, hate speech, death threats, incitement to physical violence, and copyright infringement are equivalent problems?!
Each of the stories today has been about the ability of a cultural artifact to shape the lives of those who interact with it. Each of those artifacts has been inside the control of a corporate entity- an unperson which is legally barred from doing anything that does not lead to increased shareholder revenue. Google has said that they will remove any story from any source that might contain “copyright-infringing content”. Finding if your content has been delinked is difficult, and requires a site owner to be vigilant. certainly no corporate entity would abuse that.
Did Dr. Sues really say this? I don’t know. But I do love what it is saying.
Who a person’s enemies are says a lot about them. Perhaps more importantly is the lines along which they choose to attack their enemies. The brilliance here is that Tolkien is willing to tell Germany that The Great War was merely bygones, and that the contemporary unpleasantness is utterly transient. But racism? That’s unacceptable.
Republican economic nostrums are very bad for America. When the government spends money, it is possible to get positive return on investment. By removing that spending, we shrink the economy. And, of course, we return to the War of All Against All.
By breaking 300 million people into millions of 5,000 person pools, it’s impossible for Americans to get really good group deals on healthcare. And so we wildly overspend. Imagine how much healthier our economy would be if consumers had (say) 25% of their healthcare bills in their own banks, rather than in the insurance company’s banks.
Health Insurance is based on the idea that one person may or may not have a car accident, but that thousands of random people are unlikely to all at once. Once individuals are able to start stacking the odds in their favor, health insurance will start going away. Which, obviously, is why we need to have it be provided by the government.
The health insurance reform signed by Obama was only the first step. It was a needed step, because over half of all bankruptcies in America are because of medical issues. It is deeply immoral to force someone to choose between their cancer treatment or their children’s home. But that’s the system we have in America.
Kevin Drum is wrong. The best Star Wars movie is Attack of the Clones.
Remember: the war against healthcare-provided birth control is a front in the war against birth control. And the war against birth control is a front in the war against enjoyable sex. If you’ve ever had– or want to have– enjoyable sex, let your congressperson know that they need to stand with the President, and against the birth control opt out.
I’m guessing that most teachers- and parents- have engaged in sex- many of them have done it on camera. So I’m not at all clear to see why it should be a dismissable- or noteworthy– offense.
It sounds like crazy conspiracy mongering to suggest that the President has taken the power to kill Americans on no higher say-so than his own authority. The only checks on this authority are the ones that he himself decided to impose on himself. This is America. 2012.
When Americans were broke, we drove less. Now that we’re making more money, we’re driving more. This is causing gas prices to go back up. Gas prices may suck, but the alternative would be to… raise taxes to pay for a system of mass transit that would actually be useful. No right-thinking American would dare go along with such a plan.
StarCraft, actually, a large and growing esport, with a huge following. I like it. It’s like Football without the risk of concussion.
In 2012, America has a black president, and so therefore racism is over. Well. Kinda. Instead, we live in a society which doesn’t intentionally or formally create barriers between “races”, but rather has many informal and social ways of Otherizing non-white people. And when one of the leading StarCraft 2 teams discovered that one of their coaches was using the N-word… they had a choice. The reasons they made the choice they did are enlightening.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for getting up way too soon after you’ve invited many of your closest friends for a Saturday evening, and going to work. Sundays are for being with family. Sundays are for catching up.
This week: hell claimed one of its own as the man who lied ACORN out of existence dropped dead of natural causes. This week: After a hotly contested primary campaign, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum split the Michigan delegates evenly. This week Microsoft showed consumers a beta of its next operating system. And this week Maryland became merry by allowing gay people to marry.
Also this week: Obama is a bad ass. Seriously: does the theme from Shaft get piped into every room he walks into?
Archie Comics is… weird. Instead of superheros, or whatever sort of bizarre dada the Japanese are into, it is instead a comic version of a PG highschool RomCom. The fact that such an inoffensive and banal comic is featuring a wedding between a returning soldier and his (male) partner probably marks a significant turning point in the march towards legalizing gay marriage. Gay marriage is now considered PG. Inoffensive. Banal. And naturally that scares the hell out of people who wish it were controversial.
Back in my Catholic school days, I was taught that sex ought to have consequences. The older I’ve gotten, the more I tend to agree. I think that sex ought to (at least) have the consequence of a rousing orgasm for all parties involved. Preferably, it would have the consequence of reinforcing an emotional bond between the parties involved. Sadly, there are a lot of killjoys running around (like my old Catholic school teachers) who think that sex ought to carry with it more negative risks, like pregnancy and disease. To create these consequences, these assholes fuddy duddies are doing their best to remove access to the things that make sex safe, legal, and plentiful: condoms, birth control pills, and abortions.
In America, it is possible to “steal education”, from public schools, for your child. This means that it is possible to buy education, from public schools, for your child. This means that in America, we do not have equality of opportunity. This means that the American dream has been betrayed.
So: you know how people are trying desperately to refinance their houses at lower rates, but banks won’t let them? Of course you do, it’s been all over the news: we have a responsible media that reports on important stories. So banks don’t want to let homeowners refinance their homes because they’ve already claimed earnings from future (expected) interest as money now. If people refinanced their homes, banks would take huge losses. Anyway. a huge bank owner is complaining about the 5 homeowners who managed to beat the odds by refinancing, but still got foreclosed on.
Spacial voting theory is pretty straightforward. In a system such as ours, only 2 parties will ever exist for very long. When there are more than one conservative parties, they tend to split the vote and accidentally allow a liberal to get elected. Obviously liberals do the same thing: that’s how 2000 saw the election of President Bush. I think the reason we see this repeated non-strategic candidate-picking behavior is twofold. First: people get into an echo chamber and stop thinking about how far left/right they really are (compared to their politically apathetic neighbors). Second: people have a very hard time believing in spacial voting theory.
I do love cloud products. My Kindle, my Steam account, hell, even this blog. The cloud is compact. It removes a lot of clutter from my life. Unfortunately, you don’t own any of the content on the cloud. Possession is 9/10ths the law. This is another major reason why piracy continues to exist. Developers and consumers are often at odds about continuing services, and piracy is a method for retaining control of a product after a developer had abandoned it. I do wish Congress understood things from a consumer point of view. Perhaps these fights could be headed off.
It is distressing that Americans look at Obama and see a black man, and then ask him for guarantees that he won’t serve the interests of just black men. And it is distressing that Americans looked at JFK and made him promise that he wouldn’t actually turn America over to the Catholic Pope. What’s terrifying, though, is that there’s a Republican candidate for president who listened to JFK’s speech about America not being a theocracy, and it “made me want to throw up”. So there you have it. 2012. American theocracy. The issue is distinctly drawn.
The older I get, the more I realize that “Politically Correct” means not being an asshole. The fact that the term (PC) is almostalways used as a slur should tell us a lot. The fact that our culture has a set of norms for (eventually) shouting down assholes tells us that we’re growing as a society.
Identity is weird. One of my sisters shares the same pair of biological parents as I do– but she considers herself “Italian” in a way that I just don’t. She will root for ITL over the USA during soccer matches– I think this is a bit crazy. I’m not a basketball fan. In fact, the Golden State Warriors are such a bad team that I’m actively repelled by the sport. Even so, I’ve heard of this Jeremy Lin dude. What’s awesome about him is the way he’s become a cipher, letting project from him whatever sort of stereotypes they wish to see. He isn’t those things, of course, he’s a human being. The fact that he’s an Asian-American human excelling in a sport which demands qualities that American society tells Asian-Americans they don’t possess is making Asian-Americans feel all kinds of good. Reading this article, I learned that Lin is from the Bay Area. This makes me feel all kinds of good. Because Bay Arean is how I ethnically identify.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for loving the one you’re with. Sundays are for nerding out and watching video games on TV. Sundays are for working your Monday-Friday job. Sundays are for waiting patiently for the IRS to give you some money for a change.
This week, a judge ruled that former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi hid his corruption long enough that he wouldn’t have to face punishment for it. This week, Playstation released a new piece of hardware. This week the IMF told the world that the global economy is really not in the best of shape right now. And this week Iran begged the world to stop attacking them.
The internet is fantastic. It has allowed more people access to more data than ever before seen in human history. A device that fits in my pocket can answer and factual question that humankind has discovered. Not everyone has access to the internet. Access requires a skill set that must be learned. And in this age of austerity, American society is removing the tools which can help people learn those skills. This is how austerity creates poverty.
Because it needs saying, saying again, and repeating: Obama (and the Democratic party) saved the US economy. Had Republicans not enacted austerity measures, the economy would probably be doing even better by now.
It has now been long enough since Loving Vs. Virginia that those first (legal) interracial couples can have great grand children. So naturally in Austin Texas, the police get called out when a white man is talking a walk with his black granddaughter. And naturally, in 2012, the police respond to every situation with overwhelming force. These two things together point out how American racism is upheld and reinforced by the society which would like very much to destroy it. It’s ugly, pernicious, and needs to change.
The other day my dad was asking me how many readers I’d need in order to make money from this blog. Some quick math tells me that if I had a readership of 100,000 people, and could get $1 a year from about a third of them, I’d be doing ok. I don’t have nearly that level of readership, though I know some people do. One way to monetize readership is to sell ads. Another way is to sell Tshirts. A third is though pledge drives. I’m not sure how future-media will pay for itself. I’m fairly sure that this blog won’t ever get big enough to worry about it.
It is certainly true that a bad attitude doesn’t help solve major problems. It is much more true that being able to buy a new pair of legs requires money. And since disabilities tend to be concentrated among the least-well off, society creates a circular problem– and then tells the disabled that it’s their own fault. Helen Keller recognized this. That’s why she spent her life working for the communist party.
How the fuck do fashion designers have enough clout to tell Hollywood women they’re too fat?! Relatedly: how can fashion designers believe that Hollywood women are too fat, yet not be institutionalized as being too crazy to function in the real world?
This winter, California weather has been frighteningly perfect. I mean that literally: I have been frightened at our lack of rain, lack of cold weather, lack of everything that our ecosystem depends on to reset itself. This summer will probably not be very pleasant at all. Global Climate Change. If Earth truly is becoming more like Venus, might it be worth the collapse of civilization in order to save our species? Or maybe we ought to let Iran build nukes- if they promise to stop exporting oil. Or maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe.
My goal for 2012 is to become self sufficient once more. I’ve said before that January 2011 saw me at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, looking up at everything. It’s a terrifying place to be. I think this terror helps answer C.S. Lewis’ question about debt: Debt undermines every part of the hierarchy. A person in debt literally cannot use their own resources to take care of all their needs, and thus must begin to decide which of the fundamental things they must give up on, or which of several needs they must cut back on.
Sleep is weird. If we humans don’t get enough of it, we will literally go mad. Too much will leave us feeling sluggish and stupid. Is it possible that we modern people sleep wrong? It would make some evolutionary sense for us to have a two hour nighttime wake-period– the better to keep an eye out for predators. And perhaps that’s why hot-weather cultures are able to have siesta– they’re shifting their sleep from night to day. And perhaps it’s all BS.
At the very least, read the first few paragraphs of this review of the game Oil Rush. I’m not really sure how game designers can create a game around 4th generation warfare, but it’s useful to have a conversation around it’s existence.
I’ve never been sure why Reagan was neither tried for treason nor impeached. It would be awesome for Republicans to realize they’ve been making a huge mistake about him.
The business model of Intellectual Property rental depends on artificial scarcity. IP owners are terrified about piracy because it creates extra product outside their control. The obvious solution would seem to be allowing consumers easy and free access to IP within a framework controlled by the IP owners. instead they’re making it difficult for consumers to become a customers.
Side note to the previous: when you buy an Mp3, the music industry likes to pretend that you’re merely licensing it from them. When they pay royalties to the people who made that music, they pretend that they sold it to you. The music industry is full of lying scumbags. This is what happens when the side the has the money also controls the information.
Setting aside special parking spaces for people who have physical difficulty walking is one of those nice things that society does. Which is exactly why we must shame, condemn, and punish people who abuse that system. The sense of entitlement people have about “perfect” parking is sort of outrageous. This is just one of many social ills that would be solved with better mass transit.
There is something awesome about watching a competition between people who have mastered their craft. Whether that’s football, cooking, or Street Fighter. Watch the one minute video, read the description, then watch it again.
Price might be the single biggest barrier to entry for entertainment. I think this sort of thing will come to define the future of games, movies, and books. There are enough entry points to- and price points within- the ecosystem they’ve set up that it becomes up to the consumer if they’re willing to spend more. Since the product is well designed, the consumer never feels like they’ve been ripped off.
It’s Sunday… sometime. Sundays are for crockpots. Sundays are for road trips to Grandma’s. Sundays are for Sleeping. Sundays are for working, and visiting one’s partner’s family. And of course, Sundays are for dressing you up like a little gnome and have you, like, live in my garden.
This week: Iran moved a pair of Warships into the mediterranian, a show of force intended to push Israel into ceasing their attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. This week the US Presidential primary showed a massive swing towards the candidate who’s name is so vile that googling it cannot be done from most work places. Also this week: scientists discovered that goats can form accents.
I’m almost positive that the Virginia State legislature didn’t intend to write a law that would demand doctors rape roughly 1/3 of Virginian women. But they did. Perhaps the most awful part of the bill is suspicion that it was written in the most-inflammatory way possible– specifically to overturn one of the most important legal decisions in American history.
Speaking of treating women very badly: the congressional panel about contraceptives and insurance that didn’t include a single woman. That’s not what Darrell Issa wanted the panel to be about, of course. He wanted a congressional inquiry about how Religion would no longer be as free to discriminate against women. So he invited a bunch of religious people to talk about it would curtail their freedom. Naturally he didn’t want to learn about how curtailing religious freedom enhanced the freedom of women. Also, for the record: when women get free contraceptives, men are much happier.
The practice of buying and selling sex is, of course, unsavory. I honestly can’t imagine what would cause someone to, say, get a lap dance. The idea of paying for penetration is utterly foreign to me. Maybe it’s just that desire is my own personal kink. Who knows. But just because I don’t like something, and just because I don’t understand why someone would buy something, doesn’t mean that it ought to be illegal. Nor does it mean that the police should incentivize unsafe workplaces. By doing so, they’re not only directly harming workers and clients, they’re also causing a danger to the public at large.
Also this week? The world was OUTRAGED by the case of the government forcing a child to take free milk she didn’t know she had access to. I understand how parental embarrassment/fear at being unable to provide for their child can masquerade as outrage that someone else would do so. The fact that she was encouraged to feel that outrage is sickening. What sorts of moral monsters object to the richest country on Earth collectively offering to feed 4 year olds?
I do love me some West Wing. It’s got great dialog, fun characters, and a real sense of the pacing that government officials operate under. The problem is that the fictional president they portray isn’t very good. The problem is that not only did the writers on that show not know what liberalism should be, they didn’t understand why liberals believe what we do. As a result, Barlet was a sort of feckless weather vane: constantly reacting to crises, never setting the agenda. That was before the last half of the series. At that point, the writers started making a Democratic president make all the same decisions that the real Republican president was making.
There was a great line in Pump up the Volume: “all the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks“. I won’t actually throw a party the day the last Baby Boomer dies- my father is part of that generation. It is, however, certainly the case that the Baby Boomers cashed out the promise and equity of America, and left behind only a burned husk of what might have been. As a generation they are loathsome.
Fun fact: we had ever increasing wages until the Boomers began voting in large numbers. Labor rights were rolled back, and we find ourselves in the mess we are today.
I’m sorry if my anti-Boomer musings have brought you down alot.
I earned just over $13,000 in 2011. As a result, I owed the US government roughly $300. Facebook earned roughly $1 billion. As a result, they will owe no taxes at all. This seems fair to me. Wait. Wait. No.
I hadn’t realized that Portugal decriminalized drugs a decade ago. One never hears about drug tourists flocking to the country hoping for a high. This may say some very negative things about the rest of what Portugal has to offer. Interesting thing about drug use after that decade: It’s gone down.
Despite the headline, this is first paining ever made by humans. Rather, it is the oldest one we have record of. Either way: fucking cool.
When content owners won’t let their audience get product, it increases the likelihood that people will turn to other means to get their goods. I think if IP owners understood their problem with piracy, they’d have a better handle on fighting it. Instead, they flail like children, reacting against change.
The point of copyright law is to provide a (monetary) incentive for people to produce art and science. It’s hard to see how Whitney Huston could be induced to create more music by a posthumous price hike. Instead, the profit goes to the immortal corporation. Make your own vampire joke.
It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for waking up in a NyQuil-hangover daze and wondering if your face is still attached. Sundays are for furiously making Valentines day plans. Sundays are for sleeping in. Sundays are for doing Tea for Two. Sundays are for kitties.
This week US Bishops got into a huff about being asked to treat their employees the way every other employer is mandated to treat theirs. This week the Republican Presidential Primary got interesting as Rick Santorum won three states. And this week a major video game producer was able to raise over a million dollars just by asking their fans.
The super power I most want is flight. I know that telekinesis, teleportation, or tele-rude-people-off would be more valuable, but I am utterly fascinating by the ability to defy gravity. It is fascinating to me that nature came up with a method for creating flight that was easy enough to have been independently evolved dozens of times– but that humanity came up with an entirely different method for our own mechanical attempts. Yet here we are, with over a century of flight experience, and decades of space travel, without a firm grasp of what birds and insects do by pure instinct.
I showed this article to my boss. He confirmed that it was his experience in reading a menu. One obvious point he mentioned: no matter how people read the menu, they’re much more likely to actually order something if it has a picture of the food item.
Planned Parenthood. The very name has been demonized by religious zealots. I remember in Catholic school (oh yes, I was a Catholic school boy), I was taught that there ought to be “consequences” for our actions. This, I was told, is why abortion was a moral wrong. The older I get, the more I realize that consequence free fucking is something that we humans really ought to strive for. Rather than a moral wrong, this would be an incredible moral victory. The focus on one medical procedure also serves to obscure all the other good work that Planned Parenthood engages in. The short version: any medical care that a woman needs can be obtained at low- or no- cost at one of their clinics. Perhaps that’s the part that actually scares the patriarchy.
Speaking of my education: Target. When I was at Davis, I used to drive all over hell and gone to get the basic home furnishings: Toilet paper, kitty litter, sponges, etc. For about a year of my stay there, the city debated allowing the opening of a new Target a short walk from my apartment. This would have saved me more gas money than I care to think about. And brought the city always-needed sales tax revenue. I’m glad to see the NIMBYs finally relented.
In a very real sense, the Civil Rights struggle was a second American Revolution. It transformed the way the government and society treated citizens. I think the Occupy movement would like to be a third revolution, and in some sense fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights movement. If they are truly refusing to engage with the legal aspects of society, if they really do not wish to effect a change in the laws of America, then they have no chance at all of accomplishing anything lasting. If that’s the case, then they really are what the media has painted them as: a bunch of privileged kids whining about mom and dad.
Barack Obama rose from nothing to become the most powerful man in the world. And he is still human enough to take delight in the small things. Love it.
In America, in the year 2012, it seems bizarre(!), strange(!), impossible,(!) that a human being could own(!) another human being in the same sense that a human can own a house or horse. In America, up until the year 1864, it was not only possible, but in many areas socially and economically mandatory. In some places, it wasn’t mandatory. In some places, it was social death, and a legal impossibility. A lot of that owes to one man convincing his coreligionists to give up that evil practice , at great economic harm to themselves. I know I’ve linked to that article before, but it does seem worth mentioning again that one person can make a difference. Also: remember that in 2012, in America, there are about 1 million enslaved human beings.
I don’t trust Facebook. It isn’t that I don’t trust the amount of information they collect. It isn’t even the way they advertise or roll out new features. It’s the ethos of the company. Facebook was started by a man represents the very worst parts of American capitalism. Before day 1, he had a plan to sabotage his competition. Since then, his company has consistently broken privacy promises and violated user expectations. As a result, I’m not using facebook. Also: feel free to put up a link to this post on facebook. I’m not picky about where traffic comes from.
A new book on the FBI is set to be released on Valentines Day. I don’t think it’s more than an amusing coincidence. The book itself seems like a great, but terrifying, read. Our intelligence agencies (both internal and external) really do think that they are the only people who see the ever-looming threat to the American way of life. As a result, they’re more paranoid than they ought to be. This paranoia makes them willing to lie to elected officials, and grants them an unhealthy contempt for the democratic process. So the security state stumbles ever onward, turning America into something unrecognizable fearful, mean, and small.
In the US, the years between 2001 and 2010 were not very good. They were characterized by wars, economic stagnation, and- eventually- the Lesser Depression. They were, however, some of the best years so far to be a human being. It may not be as dramatic or flashy as warfare, but it is awesome.
An interesting Slate article about the rise of Chipotle. It’s the last three sentences that I find the most interesting. Certain things just take a certain amount of time to do. If we continue to have long commutes, and continue to need 6-8hrs of sleep every day, and we continue to want to spend time with friends and family, then something will have to give. Our society had decided that we’d prefer to have someone else cook for us than to spend the time cooking for ourselves. This actually makes a lot of sense. Cooking can be a leisure activity, or a hobby, but having to do it every day quickly turns it into a chore. I wonder if there’s a commensurate rise in high-end cookware: as people cook less often, they’d want to use better tools when they do.
Valentines day is Tuesday. I’m not sure what I’m doing yet, but I do know who I’m spending the evening with. Modern romance, though, can be so confusing. Text messages, instant messages, jumbotrons, etc. What we really need is to get back to basics. We need to flirt like the Victorians. I’ll be wearing my best cravat…
This does set a pretty high bar for proposals. And makes me ache for the long-promised Android port of that card game.
This week’s theme has been revolution and love. In the comments section, leave a note about your over-the-top ultimate bad-ass Valentines day plans are.
