Pope Francis and Patti Smith. pic.twitter.com/BwfbIAh1kA
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) November 14, 2013
Francis sure gets around. Open thread.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 63 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Pope Francis and Patti Smith. pic.twitter.com/BwfbIAh1kA
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) November 14, 2013
Francis sure gets around. Open thread.
This post is in: Military, Open Threads
From the AP through the Military Times (subscription or viewing an ad required):
North Carolina Guard to recognize Same-sex marriages
Spokesman Lt. Col. Maury A. Williams said the Guard will abide by U.S. Department of Defense orders extending benefits to the same-sex spouses of uniformed service members. Williams said couples who wed in states where same-sex marriage is legal can begin applying for benefits immediately.
“In accordance with all applicable DOD directives, rules and regulations, we will do our best to facilitate effective and efficient assistance for these service members and their partners,” Williams said.
With the announcement, North Carolina sidesteps a potentially thorny legal issue.
Gay Va. Guard couples get benefits
Gov. Bob McDonnell says legally married same-sex partners of Virginia Guard members will be eligible for the same federal benefits as opposite-sex married couples.
McDonnell said that 90 percent of the state Guard’s funding comes from the federal government, so Virginia intends to follow the Defense Department’s rules, regulations and policies.
From a Military Times Staff Writer:
Texas: Same-sex spouses can’t enroll for benefits at State Guard facilities
In an Aug. 30 memo, Texas Adjutant General John Nichols said until legal clarification is provided, officials are unable to enroll same-sex families for benefits at state-supported facilities.
“It is important to note, this is not a denial of benefits, but rather a processing issue that is currently awaiting legal clarification from the Texas State Attorney General’s Office,” said Laura Lopez, a spokeswoman for Texas Military Forces. She said Texas Military Forces officials have been working closely with the governor’s office and attorney general’s office for the past few weeks on the issue.
There are five state-supported Guard facilities and 20 federal installations in Texas, Lopez said.
So that’s two states doing the right thing, and another state following Oklahoma’s lead of adhering to the legal fiction that state constitutions trump the US Constitution.
In other military news, a civilian jury acquitted USAF Lt. Col Jeffrey Krusinski of assault charges related to the former head of the USAF’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office’s alleged groping of a woman in Virgina last year (Military Times staff writers):
A jury of five men and two women found the former chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response office not guilty of assault and battery related to allegations he groped a woman’s buttocks in Arlington, Va., in May.
Jurors deliberated for about one hour and 15 minutes Wednesday before clearing Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, 42, of the misdemeanor charge. Krusinski was at first expressionless when the verdict was read, but within seconds he was smiling and talking with his attorney. He exited the Arlington County courthouse without commenting on the two-day trial’s verdict.
The USAF may also try him by court-martial for the alleged assault because the state of Virginia and the US Government are different Sovereigns, and are therefore immune to the Double Jeopardy clause in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. That decision is up to the General Court Martial Convening Authority, who presumably is the first General Officer in a command billet in Lt. Col. Krusinki’s chain of command.
The military suicide rate is down 22%, but we aren’t sure why (AP through Military Times):
Suicides across the U.S. military have dropped by more than 22 percent this year, defense officials said, amid an array of new programs targeting what the Defense Department calls an epidemic that took more service members’ lives last year than the war in Afghanistan did during that same period.
Military officials, however, were reluctant to pin the decline on the broad swath of detection and prevention efforts, acknowledging that they still don’t fully understand why troops take their own lives. And since many of those who have committed suicide in recent years had never served on the warfront, officials also do not attribute the decrease to the end of the Iraq war and the drawdown in Afghanistan.
Still, they offered some hope that after several years of studies, the escalating emphasis on prevention across all the services may finally be taking hold.
A proposal has been put forth to merge the VA and all DoD medical commands into one structure in the Military Retirement and Compensation Modernization Commission :
The idea surfaced after veterans service organizations discussed the failure of VA and the Pentagon to create a single electronic health record system. The $1 billion program, launched in 2008, largely was abandoned in February in favor of a less expensive system built on existing technology.
I don’t see how that can work with VA merged so intimately, given their different missions (caring for Veterans out of the service vice maintaining combat strength) but I also don’t see why DoD doesn’t start using VistA/CPRS, our very robust and stable patient care management system that we send all over the country to subclinics and contract clinics, including places in the middle of nowhere, but I don’t work at that level, either. Also note that this program spent $1 billion over ten years to merge two stable existing systems and failed miserably. And yet people act surprised when a program that came into existence three years ago, had $300 million available, and had thirty-odd unwilling stakeholders trying to sabotage it doesn’t work like Amazon.com.
More on Same-sex marriages and the National Guard and other military newsPost + Comments (23)
This post is in: KULCHA!, Open Threads, Popular Culture
(Bill Watterson via GoComics.com)
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The documentary “Dear Mr. Watterson” finally opens this weekend — the website has a list of showings, video-on-demand details, and purchase offers. (I’mma buy the DVD, because I’m old & staid.) You pretty much know whether you’ll be watching this already, but Andrew O’Hehir reviews it for Salon:
… Any “Calvin and Hobbes” fan will enjoy watching Schroeder’s film, which is more a love letter to the strip and its publicity-shy creator than anything else. “Dear Mr. Watterson” is a work of charming reportorial energy, in which Schroeder (who wrote, directed and edited the movie) interviews many prominent fans and friends of Watterson – including “Bloom County” cartoonist Berkeley Breathed and actor Seth Green – and handles original “Calvin and Hobbes” artwork now in a comics archive at Ohio State. Schroeder’s passion for the material comes through clearly, and he correctly identifies a note of ruefulness – a sort of American-Zen reflection on the ephemeral and transient nature of all experience – that runs through Calvin and Hobbes’ adventures even at their most joyful…
But Schroeder isn’t much of a comic-strip expert or historian, by his own admission, so “Dear Mr. Watterson” bounces off many of the most interesting issues in and around “Calvin and Hobbes,” noticing them but not exploring them deeply. As various of Watterson’s fellow cartoonists point out, “Calvin and Hobbes” was the last in a historical line of fanciful or allegorical newspaper comics that attracted a large popular audience while pushing at the artistic and conceptual limits of the form. This tradition goes back at least as far as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” (which debuted in 1905) – a major formal and structural influence on Watterson — and then continues through George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” still viewed by comics devotees as the two greatest newspaper strips of all time. Like each of those three pioneers, Watterson treated the full-color, large-format Sunday comic as a zone of free-form experimentation, insisting on full editorial control.
I think that context is crucial to understanding Bill Watterson, and what he did and didn’t do. He was a struggling editorial cartoonist, nearly unknown outside northeastern Ohio (his hometown is called Chagrin Falls, which has to be one of the greatest American small-town names), when he suddenly leapt to fame with “Calvin and Hobbes,” which became an international hit within a year or two. He had the opportunity to become immensely rich off his strip and its characters – one industry expert in Schroeder’s film suggests that licensing and merchandising could have brought in $300 million or more – and refused to license anything, ever…
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Apart from what the Japanese call “visual culture”, what’s on the agenda today?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: There’s Treasure Everywhere!Post + Comments (68)
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement
… And killing irony dead. I’m kinda hoping someone with better tech skills can explain why this is impossible (it is Sky News, after all):
The Conservatives have attempted to hide 10 years of speeches from the internet, it has emerged.
The speeches, news stories, press releases and blogs, which date back to 2000 until the party came to power in May 2010, have been hidden from public view on the Conservative Party website.
They have also removed the record of their past speeches from internet search engines, including Google, according to Computer Weekly…
The removal of such a large collection of speeches will fuel speculation the Tories are attempting to make it difficult for people to hold them to account to pledges made ahead of the 2010 election with the 2015 vote looming.
In addition the archive of information has been erased from the Internet Archive, which is the public record of the internet.…
Some of the speeches involved are those made by David Cameron and George Osborne in which they campaign to use the internet to make politics more transparent…
Open Thread: Using ‘1984’ As An Instruction Manual…Post + Comments (54)
by Tim F| 187 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Excellent Links
Speaking of, Kevin Drum has some valid reasons for concern about the website.
So how is the website? Have you tried to sign up for coverage in the past week and if so, how did it go?
Keep in mind that the signup numbers only count people who have signed up for a plan and actually paid for it, something that you do not have to do for a while yet. How many of you have signed up for a plan and paid for it, and how many have signed up but plan to pay closer to the deadline? Any feedback from real users would help a lot.
This post is in: Gamer Dork, Music, Open Threads
Went through the entire Tampa Bay roster and I recognized two names, which may explain their 0-8 start and my lack of interest in the game. Think I might cop a couple of episodes of Chuck on Netflix to fill my dork urges, although I am so close to pulling the trigger on BF4 or Call of Duty: Ghosts (but I want to play on PC, and everyone has xbox or a playstation). This really sums up my mood tonight:
Listen assholes, you've had almost three decades. The name of the damned song is Sister Christian, not "MOTORING." Fer fucks sake.
— John Cole (@Johngcole) November 12, 2013
As such, that means it is trash 80’s night. My first offering:
Your offerings?
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Vagina Outrage, Warren for Senate 2012
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That’s what irked me, personally, most about Noam Schieber’s breathless TNR long-read, “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren”. You can’t blame political journalists for premature forecasting, because elections are like housecleaning — no matter how much effort and energy you’ve just expended on getting the place spotless, give it a few hours and it’ll all have to be done again. But you can blame the lazy journamalists who fall for the easy tokenism; now that the ever-reliable ‘Black dude or white lady?’ debate has been wrung of all its cheap drama, it will be discovered that “we” want a female president, so a promising female candidate will be fronted. One female candidate. Because the variety of white-dude candidacy is limitless in its potential, but once there’s a single Vagina-American certified by Our Media Betters, what more can “we” possibly ask?
But to address the meagre TVP-mockmeat core of Schieber’s cover piece, why the bloody hell would Elizabeth Warren want to run for president in 2016? She worked really, really hard — as did her progressive supporters, me among them — to win a seat in the Senate, where she can make a difference in her target financial-abuse issues, issues she’s spent her entire career fighting. Now a handful of Media Village Idiots want Senator Warren to stop working against the banksters and their paid shills, in order to start a campaign she’s said she’s not interested in, against a woman who’s been her supporter and who’s got one hell of a head start in the race, because… the Village Idiots are boorrrred with Hillary Clinton.
It’s like we’ve got a world-class marathon runner finally starting the race of a lifetime, and “some people” want to pull her out so she can compete in the figure-skating trials instead. Sure, it’s an insult to both marathoners and skaters, and it’s unlikely she could win, but it would be so much more entertaining for the spectators!…
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Apart from Village idiots being idiots, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Monday Evening Open Thread: There Can Only Be OnePost + Comments (152)