2013 archive
Droning On 3
Daniel Ruth makes a point about raining robotic death from the sky; follow the link for the rest.
It’s difficult, though. In my selective way, I concede that blasting some American al-Qaida member deep in Yemen seems reasonable. You can’t have the drone read him his constitutional rights through a loudspeaker. My attitude is: Occupy any area that is clearly a battlefield in a war against America, die. But too often there is collateral damage, the modern term for innocent people dead. We are on a slippery slope in a toboggan of our own manufacture.
My two or three regular readers know that I am not a fan of drone warfare.
Note that I am no more against drones in general than I am against M16s, Tanks, and aircraft carriers.
I’m not for any of them, but sometimes they seem necessary.
What troubles me is the packaging–drones are presented as somehow surgical weapons that always get the right target. Their PR makes gamers’ raining robotic death from the sky seem somehow, well, nice, antiseptic, almost harmless.
Too many wedding parties, too many children gathering food, too many innocents surgically struck have been destroyed.
Yet, the “surgical strike” PR helps the citizenry turn away from the dealing of death.
As Bob Cesca points out, there is a possible corrective, and it’s not yelling “Obama=Bush”; anyone who is capable of grasping more than one thought at a time can see that he doesn’t.
News, Ripped from the Ticker(less) 0
Warning: Some language.
Stay Classy, Republicans 0
They aren’t even trying to hide the racism any more.
“The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party,” Crawford said.
Via ABL at Balloon Juice, who notes
If only the president would stop being black, poor people in South Carolina might be able to get some healthcare.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
A little better.
(snip)
Those people collecting emergency and extended payments increased by about 136,500 to 1.92 million in the week ended Feb. 23.
Gamed 0
Click through the warning and enter a birthday.
Despite what it says, there’s no language, fake violence, and little maturity.
The League of Bush Leaguers 0
Mike, a Florida resident with a ringside seat at Florida’s Bush league, wonders whether Jeb Bush can outdo George the Worst.
Denial Is Not Just a River in Egypt 0
“He Must Be High on Something, Someone Said”* 0
The Streak is baaaaaccccck, spotted at a wedding this weekend.
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*With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel.
“Public-Private Partnerships” 0
They work out so well. Like the one to fix potholes in my area’s roads rather than having the highway department employees do it themselves and do it right, as they used to when I spent a summer working for the highway department back in the days of bench seats and no seatbelts:
“It’s more about filling holes than trying to fill them properly,” Siddiqi said about what he witnessed while working for TME from early 2009 to June 2011.
Two other former employees and one still with the company gave similar accounts of the time they spent maintaining the interstates in South Hampton Roads for TME. They described an operation that often cut corners to save money and relied on aging equipment that frequently broke down.
Much more privatization wonderfulness at the link.
Cheap! 0
PoliticalProf explains:
- We want out teachers to be the best in the world, but we pay them so little that teaching as a profession can’t compete for talent with higher-paying jobs.
- We demand that our food supply be safe, but always buy the cheapest we can find.
- We want good roads and good schools … but don’t want to pay property or fuel taxes to support them.
- We want to buy our stuff on Amazon (which is largely exempt from sales taxes) while wondering why local businesses die and local governments (which depend on sales taxes) don’t seem able to get our streets cleaned in the snow.
- We insist that our universities ought to charge low tuition while refusing to pay taxes to support universities.
I could live with all of this (and much more) if we weren’t so damned hypocritical about it.
Read the rest.
The Galt and the Lamers 0
Jay Bookman considers Rand Paul’s recent filibuster (by the way, kudos to Paul for having the integrity to actually, like, you know, talk through a filibuster, rather than talk of one) and rumors that Paul might be the 2016* Republican presidential nominee:
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*2016 is a long time away. This type of speculation now is nothing more than the political press pleasuring itself, something most persons do in private.
Drinking Liberally Norfolk Tomorrow 0
Drinking Liberally is a gathering place for liberals. Socialize and laugh in a friendly atmosphere.
When: 6 p., Thursday, March 14.
Where:
Lola’s Caribbean Restaurant
328 W 20th St (map)
Details here. Meetup page here.
The Burden of Wealth 2
Zoe Williams pities the rich, suffering gazallionaires. A nugget (emphasis in the original):
8. Some people, especially people who aren’t rich, have no idea how small a £2m house can be.
Mansion? YOU CALL THIS A MANSION? I wouldn’t make my enemy’s dog live in it, it’s not even near a park.
More at the link.
Stray Thought, Juice Dept. 0
It occurs to me that one of the principle drivers of economic inequality over the past 40 years has been the shift to financing education with student loans, which harness students to a life of debt and debt to finance debt, sucking their earnings into the coffers of the masters of the universe for most of the rest of their economic lives.
Facebook Frolics 0
You are what you like.
The researchers developed an algorithm which uses Facebook likes — which are publicly available unless a user chooses stronger privacy settings — to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s intimate details.
These mathematical models proved 88 percent accurate for differentiating males from females and 95 percent accurate distinguishing African-Americans from whites.
Via Raw Story.