One of my pet peeves with certain stories I see in mainstream news outlets are those which say "scientists say ..." or "scientists discover ..." in the headline or in the story itself.
Every year is the coldest
It's been really cold this week in the US northeast, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's only cold relative to recent years, and that this chilliness was normal for winter around here decades ago. Despite that, it still feels like it was the coldest week in my life, undoubtedly because I don't really remember how cold it was on colder days!
Blog revamp
It's been over two years since I wrote a post on the blog. I've been keeping the software up to date, but did little else during that time. With the new year, though, I've decided to revamp the blog with a new theme.
Debt ceiling prediction
The presumably upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling is the big news story of the US today. Personally, I think they should just go with an up and down vote, but there is all these messy fights about wanting to attach conditions to the debt ceiling. Despite the ugly political fights, however, I have a feeling that things will go like this:
- The August 2 deadline will continue to approach, with no end in sight to the debt ceiling fight. In fact, Republicans will make increasingly outrageous demands, making it seem even more likely that the United States might default on part of its debt.
- With the huge amount of uncertainty and fears of a default by the United States government, the stock market will plummet drastically near the August 2 deadline.
- Goldman Sachs will make a killing with all the shorts it would have made. Right before the deadline, they will also buy up a whole lot of stock at rock bottom prices.
- In a dramatic vote immediately before the deadline, Congress will agree to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans may or may not be trying to deliberately cripple the American economy for working class people for their own political benefit, but they would never be allowed to actually block the raising of the debt ceiling. Goldman Sachs might like destroying parts of the economy to gather wealth from shorts, but even they might balk from a default which could threaten the wealth of even the incredibly rich.
But what do I know? I'm just a poor, cynical guy with no first-hand experience with the inner workings of any political or financial system, who probably has no idea what he is talking about.
Where are the moderate Muslims? There was one ...
A common criticism against Islam is that there isn't enough condemnation from moderate Muslims when a fundamentalist Muslim does something terrible. (The same sort of criticism can also be made against other religions, notably Christianity.) In my opinion, it's raised a bit too often even when not justified, although sometimes it is, but there's at least one case where the criticism would definitely not apply: a Pakistani governor was murdered by an extremist Muslim for opposing draconian blasphemy laws.
It won't matter if no moderate Muslim ever speaks up condemning this vile act, this is one case where the "moderate Muslims stay quiet" criticism would just earn a bop on the head from me, since it was precisely because he was a moderate Muslim speaking out that got Salman Taseer killed by an intolerant extremist. I may not have agreed with his beliefs, but I respect him enormously for standing up against intolerance. He should not have had to pay the ultimate price for it.