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	<title>DragonFlyEye.Net</title>
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	<description>Rochester Entertainment and Progressive Politics</description>
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		<title>It Snowed Today, But So Far, No Glaciers.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I was stunned and panic-stricken this morning. I looked outside my window and there was an unmistakable one to two inches of accumulated snow on top of my car. I couldn&#8217;t believe my eyes, seeing as how scientists have been telling me for years that the globe is actually warming, yet here it was obviously colder than it was yesterday. These two things stood in clear and obvious contradiction to one another, as any good Conservative talking head could tell you. Or, even if you can&#8217;t find a good one, anybody on Fox News could have explained it.
But so far, I haven&#8217;t seen any glaciers forming. I&#8217;ve been watching all morning and nothing. Even more confusing, I think there&#8217;s a chance that it may have warmed up a degree or two since six thirty this morning. So, who is right? Fox News or the global warming scientists? With the weather changing so much, it&#8217;s really hard really pin it down. Fortunately, Rachel Maddow had Bill Nye the Science Guy on her show to explain it to me. Looking back, I almost feel as though all those Conservative yakkers were perhaps being a trifle disingenuous. Could that be right?
It all makes [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2010/02/14/it-snowed-today-but-so-far-no-glaciers/</link>
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		<title>Rep Paul Ryan&#8217;s Brave Call to Nationalize the Stock Market</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Republicans have been getting a lot of flack for not bringing ideas to the table at a time when our nation desperately needs them. But the recent budget proposal by Republican House Budget maven Paul Ryan is a sharp rebuke to the notion that Republicans bring nothing to the table and an outright rejection of the notion that Republicans are so ruled by ideology that they cannot propose ideas outside their narrow scope.
Among its many plans, the Ryan budget proposal calls for nationalizing the Stock Market.
It is true that, in discussing the topic of the Republican plan for Social Security, the phrase generally used is &#8220;privatizing Social Security.&#8221; But consider what the plan actually proposes. Just as the last proposal under George W. Bush did, the plan allows taxpayers to reroute a portion of their FICA taxes to &#8220;personal savings accounts.&#8221; So far, it almost seems private, except for the fact that the government isn&#8217;t giving your money back to you and they&#8217;re not ceasing to remove FICA taxes from your paycheck: you&#8217;re still paying taxes.
It is a &#8220;personal savings account,&#8221; which means according to the plan that it will allow you to pass on your balance to your children. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2010/02/11/rep-paul-ryans-brave-call-to-nationalize-the-stock-market/</link>
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		<title>Google Phasing Out Internet Explorer 6.0</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For those of you who are not computer geeks, this may all seem a bit esoteric. But in the power plays between Google and Microsoft, this is big news. I received an email today as an administrator of a Google Apps domain that Google has now officially begun the process of terminating support for Internet Explorer 6.0, an old version of that browser that goes back almost ten years now and whose frustrations have been the bain of many web developers.
This is good news for developers because major support for &#8220;Killing IE6&#8221; means cover for us to continue developing for modern browsers and a justification for ending our support for the dinosaurs. This website ended it&#8217;s support of IE6 not quite a year ago, when the new look of DFE was released. But this news is not all about making us developers feel better, nor is it all about moving the Internet forward. Though Google announces it&#8217;s requirement for &#8220;faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5,&#8221; this is a thin veil for entirely non-technical motives. Recall Google&#8217;s recent history with China and the fact that the key to China&#8217;s snooping was a security flaw in Internet Explorer that Microsoft [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2010/02/02/google-phasing-out-internet-explorer-6-0/</link>
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		<title>Google in China: Its Not About Censorship</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I should be less surprised to have to say this than I am: Google&#8217;s trials in China have nothing whatsoever to do with censorship. In spite of the often breathless accounts of Google&#8217;s fight against the Empire, this is not a David and Goliath hero story. When the issue was censorship or the Great Firewall of China, Google made their choice: sell, sell, sell.
I&#8217;m not as altogether opposed to that decision as I know many on both the Right and the Left are. I am of a persuasion that believes that the more money and the more power flows through a society, the more inevitably free that society becomes. At least, to a point. It is certainly self-evident in China&#8217;s case that controlling information is a cornerstone of a closed society.
But that is all water under the bridge. The issue before us now is not one of censorship, but of politico-industrial espionage. Threatening to lower the firewalls on Google.cn&#8217;s service is merely Google&#8217;s way of putting pressure on the Chinese government where it hurts. Google found evidence it claims as fairly indisputable that China launched attacks on the email accounts of Gmail users as well as 34 other companies. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2010/01/15/google-in-china-its-not-about-censorship/</link>
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		<title>Show Me The Strength of Your Singular Eye</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In the American Colonies, before the Revolution, taxation was done at the whim of a Parliament in which American tax payers had no representation whatsoever. But far worse for many Americans caught a-foul of the law, settling disputes and penalties with the British legal system often meant showing up in court in Merry Old England herself. Such a voyage in those days meant months and years away from the very properties these Americans we trying to maintain, to say nothing of the lost income and extra expense of the voyage, lodging in England and the like. It was precisely these types of extreme hardships &#8211; much more so than the taxation itself &#8211; that prompted a few well-educated and wealthy Americans to start plotting the Revolution.
The American Revolution can therefore be thought of in a certain context as a radical renegotiation of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Not simply a reinvention of government, but forging of a new principle of power sharing, supported by thousands of legal pleadings in British courts, up to and including the final and most famous Declaration of Independence.
But I don&#8217;t recall having reached any such deal with cameras or computers.1
More and more [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/12/15/show-me-the-strength-of-your-singular-eye/</link>
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		<title>What Am I Missing?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What the hell is going on in the 23rd? Here we have a district which hasn&#8217;t been a Democratic district since the Civil War &#8211; when the Democratic Party was the Conservative choice &#8211; and we&#8217;ve got the whole country up in arms over the results? Trust me: any way the primary turns out, it&#8217;ll be a Republican in the 23rd. I&#8217;m a big fan of game-day statistics.
So, that&#8217;s the big disappointment for Dems. What&#8217;s the deal with Republicans? Why is it important to Fred Thompson &#8211; whose own presidential aspirations seemed to be such a bore to him &#8211; or Sarah Palin &#8211; whose gubernatorial responsibilities proved equally tiresome? Is the Baby Jesus scheduled to be born in Watertown? Is Sam Waterson making a movie in Massena?
And the media. The 23rd is a staunch member of the &#8220;fly-over&#8221; community of which the media is rarely aware. But suddenly, the opinions of residents in sleepy little Speculator are of monumental import. They must be so proud.
Or is the business of reforming health care &#8211; and in the case of Republicans, losing that battle &#8211; what has become so tiresome?

	Tagged With: Elections, Fred Thompson, ny23, Republicans, Sarah Palin

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		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/10/27/what-am-i-missing/</link>
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		<title>Is Halloween an Early Benchmark?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m sure like most of you, I&#8217;m watching the movements of the economy &#8211; from the daily news to much more local things like Monster searches of jobs in my industry in Rochester. And like most of you, I&#8217;m hearing the same whispers, &#8220;we&#8217;ve gotta have a good Christmas.&#8221;
And it is certainly true that many retail companies rely on Christmas for nearly a third of their total yearly income. Not simply down years but every year relies on the Christmas season to keep it afloat; with the economy in as much jeopardy as it is currently, we need some good news from the holidays to keep us from sliding off our tenuous perch at the edge of financial precipice.
But what is strange is the silence in the economic community about what is surely an early-warning bell-weather of our holiday mood, Halloween. Not to put too much of a damper on what is, after all, a pure-entertainment &#8220;holiday,&#8221; of course. But Halloween&#8217;s share of the marketplace has grown exponentially over the last decade. According to this About.com article written in 2006, each of us is likely to spend as much as $60 dollars on Halloween stuff on average. That&#8217;s not Christmas [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/10/17/is-halloween-an-early-benchmark/</link>
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		<title>O&#8217;Keefe and Gilles: Two Nuts Infiltrating an ACORN</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It remains the top Google search for &#8220;ACORN video&#8220;: FOX News&#8217; credulous &#8220;reporting&#8221; of the two kids who posed as a pimp and prostitute and entered various ACORN headquarters to ferret out the wrongdoers among them. The scandal as FOX continues to see it &#8211; despite overwhelming law enforcement evidence to the contrary &#8211; is that an ACORN volunteer is seen on the video confessing to the murder of her ex-husband. But is that where the story actually is? Or is there some other illumination to be gleaned from this whole affair? We&#8217;ve seen lots of video taken from the front of the camera, but let&#8217;s take a moment to look at who was behind the camera, posing as a &#8220;pimp.&#8221;
Meet Hannah Giles and James O&#8217;Keefe, the two activists who journeyed into the Heart of Darkness, also known as &#8220;The Ghetto.&#8221; One can hardly imagine a more appropriate pair to pose as two drug-addicted, hard-bitten inner city thugs with a taste for the sex trade. The video they produced shows the realistic method acting and authentic attire they employed in their subterfuge. Who among the volunteers at ACORN, many of whom have spent their lives in the streets where prostitutes [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/09/25/okeefe-and-gilles-two-nuts-infiltrating-an-acorn/</link>
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		<title>Oblivious on the Bus: My 911 Story</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A bus in Rochester is never a silent thing; more than just the engines roar as those big, blue boxes make their way from point to point across Monroe County. It is not exactly a roadhouse on wheels, but its full of gossiping women, chatting men and bus regulars bellowing orders to the rookie bus driver. There are also those who, like myself, prefer to blend into their respective seats, absorbing themselves in their books or thoughts until they can make their way off the bus. We silent few always seem to be in the minority, or perhaps that is just my impression.
But not on this day. On this particular day, I was entirely sure that I was on some different kind of bus filled with some different kind of folk than those with whom I&#8217;d grown somewhat resentfully familiar in my travels around Rochester. On this day, walking up the stairs of the bus felt like walking down the stairs of a pool: into rising pressure and a remarkable lack of sound beyond the rushing of blood in my ears.
As the bus rolled along, the somehow-muted roar of the engine; the moment&#8217;s gear-shifting hesitation; the elephant sigh of air [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/09/11/oblivious-on-the-bus-my-911-story/</link>
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		<title>A View From the Outside</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When you&#8217;re employed as a web designer or tech support person or any other job that requires you to sit in front of a computer all day, you&#8217;ve got ample time to read the news. In fact, in intellectually-stressing jobs, escaping for five minutes here or there to stare at the news is not merely a luxury, it&#8217;s a job requirement. You have more than enough time to read blogs and you have perhaps just a bit too much time to formulate strong opinions on the issues of the day.
But while you would think that unemployment would offer you that much time and more, my experience so far has been the opposite: whereas I woke up each morning updating my news section of this site, reading news and blogs and beginning to think about articles I might write later in the day, these days I can barely muster the interest to watch morning news. My interests have become hyper-provincial: the economy I care about is my economy; the education I care about is my own education.
Thus I&#8217;ve withdrawn from the world of political commentary for the last six months or so. And like stepping suddenly back into winter after months [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://dragonflyeye.net/blog/2009/09/10/a-view-from-the-outside/</link>
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