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Gearing up for convention - 06 May 2007
May. 7th, 2007 01:34 amToday was another good day - got out of the house once I realized the softball game was here in Ann Arbor. Got to see pink jerseys on the players, pink shirts on the coaches and alumni band, pink bases, pink press boxes, even pink foam K’s. The home-and-home series with the Michigan State softball team was a fundraising effort against breast cancer, so the preponderance of pink was normal. Michigan won the game in five innings, hitting several doubles to the various gaps in the outfield many times.
Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential race, and must now engage a country with many race and labor problems. Good luck, Mr. Sarkozy. If the unrest that resutled after Sarkozy's election is a sign of things to come, it could be a very long road ahead for him.
More pet food recalled, this time Blue Buffalo "Blue" dog foods and treats and "Blue Spa Select" cat foods. These are apparently all wet foods, and it hints at the problem being at American Nutrition, Inc, which could mean that all foods potentially made by them might have the same problems.
Depsite opposition, I haven’t heard anything that the REAL ID act is being sent back or defeated. The ACLU has put up a website, RealNightmare.org, expressing a large part of the opposition to the creation of a national identity card from the driver’s license system. Some states have opted out of the unfunded mandate that REAL ID is already. Perhaps as the deadline for conversion draws nearer, more will happen. (Of course, I’m someone who has difficulty with remembering all the things that are going to become problematic in the future. My attention span does not always remember things that don’t directly affect me now.) Or maybe this will just bull through like other legislation has, and people will grumble, but let it happen.
Doug Giles, at Townhall, professes himself a single-issue voter. He’s voting for the Bloodshed Party, whose candidate must be willing to wage war and destruction at any Muslim considered to be threatening to the country. (Although, I’m not wholly sure whether this is satire, because of the language. Someone else can probably tell better than I can if it is).
My brain reels at the headline of the following article, and then even more at the body of the work - an invesitgator for the Maine Human Rights Comission found it perfectly reasonable for a manager to fire one of his employees because the employee is an atheist. Officially, the person was fired for “poor job performance”, but the investigator found no evidence of that. Yet the investigator appeared to have no problem at all with finding that a person’s belief regarding religion is an acceptable reason for their firing. Dollars to doughnuts (who came up with that phrase, anyway?) says that if the fired employee were a Christian, there would be hell raised and suits brought for discrimination. (Which might happen anyway, but still, a civil employee finding that the official reason doesn’t hold, but being willing to accept the unofficial one? It’s like pharmacists can not do their jobs if they have... right.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nebris tells me, however, that it’s not that the investigator approves of the firing, but that s/he’s just confirmed that the reason the worker was fired was because he was an atheist.) It does get worse, however. The Guardian has a couple in Malaysia, happily married for twenty-one years, forcibly divorced because the husband didn't convert to Islam when he married his wife, as the law required. The custody dispute on the children has been settled, by the Muslim wife giving up her claim and letting the children be raised Hindu. The mother has visitation rights, as well.
We go further into the darkness with CBS shutting off comments on articles about Barack Obama because of the high prevalence of racist remarks. This isn’t currently being applied to other candidates, and CBS does hope to resurrect the comments in the future. This has drawn fire to CBS for protecting Obama, but also for not being willing to take the time to remove racist remarks through moderation or filtering (there are language filters already in place, it looks - adding a few words might help cut it down. Of course, it could easily take down legitimate material, too.). However, we’re not to the point that Egypt is getting to, where a blogger is signing off in fear of being put in jail by the government, according to the Telegraph. The blogger himself has a few more words on the subject of why he's disappearing, making it as much a want to get protection for bloggers and to engage the people in wanting political reforms as much as it is being worried about repressive crackdowns.
There is one for the karma’s revenge file, however - an openly gay Navy serviceman, discharged under "don't ask, don't tell", has been recalled to active duty. Hehe. This time around, they don’t have to ask, and he doesn’t have to tell - they already know!
Paul Krassner remembers his interaction with Kurt Vonnegut. From the sounds of the material Vonnegut wrote, and the names of Krassner’s work, the two of them probably got along quite well with each other.
As Barry Bonds closes in on the record of most home runs hit in a career, George Will dismisses Bonds as a successor to Henry Aaron and as a record-holder, preferring to bide his time until Alex Rodriguez beats what will probably be Bonds’s record further in his own career.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em - the 34th Mardi Grass festival is underway. It’s in Australia, though, and the police will still make arrests for cannabis possession, cultivation, and selling. So it’d be kind of like the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor.
Next to last is more art - this is following a certain “see one, get many” rule that seems to happen to me - abundance which I’m perfectly fine with. So, if you’re looking for more art to look at, make color balances with, or smile to and think about making it a background, Weng Ziyang has quite the gallery of beautiful people.
Last, but certainly not least, the Goodbye! I hate you all! Generator, for those times when the rage takes over and coherence at the keys is impossible. I think I’m goign to be sane about it, though, and just go to bed.
Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential race, and must now engage a country with many race and labor problems. Good luck, Mr. Sarkozy. If the unrest that resutled after Sarkozy's election is a sign of things to come, it could be a very long road ahead for him.
More pet food recalled, this time Blue Buffalo "Blue" dog foods and treats and "Blue Spa Select" cat foods. These are apparently all wet foods, and it hints at the problem being at American Nutrition, Inc, which could mean that all foods potentially made by them might have the same problems.
Depsite opposition, I haven’t heard anything that the REAL ID act is being sent back or defeated. The ACLU has put up a website, RealNightmare.org, expressing a large part of the opposition to the creation of a national identity card from the driver’s license system. Some states have opted out of the unfunded mandate that REAL ID is already. Perhaps as the deadline for conversion draws nearer, more will happen. (Of course, I’m someone who has difficulty with remembering all the things that are going to become problematic in the future. My attention span does not always remember things that don’t directly affect me now.) Or maybe this will just bull through like other legislation has, and people will grumble, but let it happen.
Doug Giles, at Townhall, professes himself a single-issue voter. He’s voting for the Bloodshed Party, whose candidate must be willing to wage war and destruction at any Muslim considered to be threatening to the country. (Although, I’m not wholly sure whether this is satire, because of the language. Someone else can probably tell better than I can if it is).
My brain reels at the headline of the following article, and then even more at the body of the work - an invesitgator for the Maine Human Rights Comission found it perfectly reasonable for a manager to fire one of his employees because the employee is an atheist. Officially, the person was fired for “poor job performance”, but the investigator found no evidence of that. Yet the investigator appeared to have no problem at all with finding that a person’s belief regarding religion is an acceptable reason for their firing. Dollars to doughnuts (who came up with that phrase, anyway?) says that if the fired employee were a Christian, there would be hell raised and suits brought for discrimination. (Which might happen anyway, but still, a civil employee finding that the official reason doesn’t hold, but being willing to accept the unofficial one? It’s like pharmacists can not do their jobs if they have... right.
nebris tells me, however, that it’s not that the investigator approves of the firing, but that s/he’s just confirmed that the reason the worker was fired was because he was an atheist.) It does get worse, however. The Guardian has a couple in Malaysia, happily married for twenty-one years, forcibly divorced because the husband didn't convert to Islam when he married his wife, as the law required. The custody dispute on the children has been settled, by the Muslim wife giving up her claim and letting the children be raised Hindu. The mother has visitation rights, as well.We go further into the darkness with CBS shutting off comments on articles about Barack Obama because of the high prevalence of racist remarks. This isn’t currently being applied to other candidates, and CBS does hope to resurrect the comments in the future. This has drawn fire to CBS for protecting Obama, but also for not being willing to take the time to remove racist remarks through moderation or filtering (there are language filters already in place, it looks - adding a few words might help cut it down. Of course, it could easily take down legitimate material, too.). However, we’re not to the point that Egypt is getting to, where a blogger is signing off in fear of being put in jail by the government, according to the Telegraph. The blogger himself has a few more words on the subject of why he's disappearing, making it as much a want to get protection for bloggers and to engage the people in wanting political reforms as much as it is being worried about repressive crackdowns.
There is one for the karma’s revenge file, however - an openly gay Navy serviceman, discharged under "don't ask, don't tell", has been recalled to active duty. Hehe. This time around, they don’t have to ask, and he doesn’t have to tell - they already know!
Paul Krassner remembers his interaction with Kurt Vonnegut. From the sounds of the material Vonnegut wrote, and the names of Krassner’s work, the two of them probably got along quite well with each other.
As Barry Bonds closes in on the record of most home runs hit in a career, George Will dismisses Bonds as a successor to Henry Aaron and as a record-holder, preferring to bide his time until Alex Rodriguez beats what will probably be Bonds’s record further in his own career.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em - the 34th Mardi Grass festival is underway. It’s in Australia, though, and the police will still make arrests for cannabis possession, cultivation, and selling. So it’d be kind of like the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor.
Next to last is more art - this is following a certain “see one, get many” rule that seems to happen to me - abundance which I’m perfectly fine with. So, if you’re looking for more art to look at, make color balances with, or smile to and think about making it a background, Weng Ziyang has quite the gallery of beautiful people.
Last, but certainly not least, the Goodbye! I hate you all! Generator, for those times when the rage takes over and coherence at the keys is impossible. I think I’m goign to be sane about it, though, and just go to bed.
