Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- U.S. Troops Will Fight Without Pay If The Government Shuts Down – In for a penny, GOP. If you patch all the “problems” with a government shutdown by selective bills, then there’s no impetus to avoid a shutdown of the stuff you want to shut down.
- An Interactive Map With Every War Ever Waged [Maps] – Oooooh, this is cool.
- Hitler’s Christianity is Not Completely Irrelevant – Hitler certainly started Christian — and the early-middle days of the Nazi movement he did a lot to appeal to the Christian population of Germany (and Europe). As time went on, that appeal became much more clearly manipulative and the religious element changed more obviously into nationalism and racism — with, eventually, some large chunks of paganism thrown into the mix. Of course, Hitler was also a nut. Slapping a simple label on him (Christian, atheist, whatever) is a gross over-simplification — and ignoring his use of religion to manipulate public opinion and the populace is even more dangerous than that.
- Lessons in how NOT to negotiate, courtesy of your President. Lesson 1: Don’t accept the other guy’s opening offer. – “No wonder the Hill GOPers have no fear of the White House. When you start negotiating by agreeing to the Republicans’ opening offer, you aren’t negotiating, you’re caving.” Yes.
- Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase is at it again – Stay out of our way, except when we need you because we’re too big to fail!
- With Liberty And Electroshock Treatment for All – There are, indeed, times when it seems like our politics have gone stark, raving mad.
- Florida Republicans Bring Back Legal Graft With Disgraced “Leadership Funds” – “Nothing good comes out of corruption, even when it’s in broad daylight.” The best government money can buy!
- Google loses autocomplete defamation case in Italy | Regulation | ZDNet UK – Gee — if autocomplete was coming up with bad associations with my name, I would WANT to know about it, so I could look up those sites (and file anti-defamation suits against THEM).
- A Depressing Statistic – Well, if you had to make a choice, I suppose Trump is better than most of the folks on that list (I’d probably vote for Romney, if pressed). I think that’s why Trump has made such a splash — if you’ve already decided you don’t like or trust Romney, Trump is the best of a bad lot. Which is, itself, really depressing.
- Oregon Geology Bonus Features: Geologic Core – That’s very cool.
- Dish Network acquiring Blockbuster for $228M – The Denver Post – I read the story and I still don’t understand what they hope to get out of it.
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The shutdown article on TP appears to be wrong
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12571718
As I recall from the last time this happened, the particulars of what does/doesn’t get funded will be open to some interpretation. So it may be that funding for military operations (ammo, fuel) might be funded, while troops are not.
Thinking and reading a bit more it looks like the dichotomy that the Right (especially – the thinking is creeping leftward in a populist move) keeps banging on about – Front Line vs Back Room.
“We will save money by reducing back room jobs, leaving the front line untouched”
The trouble is, even if you can identify ‘back room’ jobs, there is usually a reason for them existing.
“Do you shoot people?”
“No, I’m a civilian in DC.”
“HA! WASTE! You are redundant.”
“General, why are your men not shooting people?”
“They have no ammo. The clerks who process the requests were made redundant.”
I expect it is the same with pay. “Soldier, you are getting paid. You just won’t receive that pay”
It’s like the NHS. Penpushers are always a target. After 30 years of war on penpushers we still have pen pushers. The latest idea is give the GPs the budget – who knows better what to spend than the doctors ‘at the front line’.
Of course, if the doctors are spending all their time on accounts they are no longer treating patients. So what will they do? No doubt hire ‘penpushers’ to do the spreadsheets, while the docs treat patients. You know that there is a problem with the proposals when Cameron has to spend a lot of his time on the reforms (15th time in 30 years) dening that he wants a US style privatised system. Lots of people don’t believe him.