Monday's got all the weekend - 25 March 2008

It’s pretty late tonight, but this is the stuff I collected over the weekend and today that’s worth mentioning. Would have posted more last night, but I needed magical regenerative sleep.

Coming this Friday, ldragoon, our Unabashed Feminism Bureau chief, those against torture speak out. classics_cat tells us why everyone who is anti-torture should speak out this Friday, and why speaking out against torture is a necessary thing.

On the 21st (meaning last Friday), there were quite a few major religious holidays, so just about the entire world was celebrating some form of ceremony that day. Now, if we could have less of the killing and war and more of the peaceful celebration, I think we’d all be better off. And because the press really can’t resist a story like this with Easter Sunday, a Muslim who converted to Christianity says that he fears for his life. And there were the mass crucifixions by Catholics in the Philippines.

Also over the weekend, five years, and four thousand dead. Plus all the money that’s been spent. It seems to be an increasingly irrational hope for those who think things will turn around any day now. I suspect that we’re operating under reasonably favorable conditions, too. While it would have been best to not go there in the first place, now I wonder whether the best, if most violent option, is to let things collapse and then help rebuild when the people there finally get tired of fighting each other. Iran is shelling portions of Iraq, and Turkey was running incursions as well. It looks like Iraq might become a flashpoint for a big conflict. If that’s the case, then getting out while the getting’s good may be a very attractive option.

To be fair, accounts like an embedded journalist out on patrol with various Marines paint a much rosier picture, even if they take care to note that things could possibly go pear-shaped in a hurry. And the Marine Corps is planning on creating units that deal strictly with humanitarian affairs, which will help their image, and do good work in reconstruction and helping people back up after they were flattened by the invasion.

Explosions of fuel trucks in Pakistan have hurt 100. The trucks were delivering fuel to NATO forces in Afghanistan and exploded at a customs checkpoint. Of that gas that actually arrives, well, it's pretty freaking expensive.

An author was denied entry to the United States on a book tour because of a drug conviction from twenty-five years ago. Sounds like the same account that an American had when trying to get into Canada, where his arrest was from thirty years ago. The funny thing? The author’s been in the country six or seven times beforehand without incident. And he’s been sober for a while now.

On the other end, a gay man was denied a passport because he legally changed his name to reflect his marriage to his partner in Massachusetts. Legal marriage in the state runs into the DOMA of the feds, and passport denied. But his Social Security card changed just fine. Apparently, the government is so afraid of the gays that they’ll do anything to keep them here at home.

Users of Phorm, an ISP in the United Kingdom, got a nasty shock when it was revealed Phorm would be monitoring their traffic to serve them targeted ads. And it appears that this adware intrusion is being justified as also providing a little bit of warning against phishing sites. Phorm claims to anonymize and discard personal data collected after the advertising cookies are tweaked, but anyone who could capture that data in transit would have quite the rich set of material to work with. Plus, most people don't like being opted-in to schemes like this. (And the second part of that article, about how having images deemed “offensive” or “obscene” would be illegal, even if all participants were consensual, isn’t a real happy thing, either.)

The Olympic Games are coming to Beijing this year. Perhaps because of that, the unrest with Tibet is getting lots of press. (and some image manipulations, as well.) I wonder whether there is still a declaration of an Olympic truce that people and nations try to hold to while the Games are on. If not, could we get something like that... and then just have it extend indefinitely? Considering there is a history of pre-Olympic crackdowns, I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but it’s nice to dream. If one wants to boycott the Games’ corporate sponsors and partners over this, then here’s the list. If going for a boycott on the while thing, then try the Beijing Boycott, which the IOC probably doesn’t like, because they’re using the Olympic rings in an unauthorized manner. Despite all the security, protesters unveiled a banner using the Olympic rings as handcuffs at the torch-lighting ceremony in Greece. And through all of this, China has been waging multimedia war against the protesters, showing pictures of Chinese being attacked, screening out the Chinese attacking, and calling for the Tibetan independence movement to be crushed.

Nancy Pelosi visited the Dalai Lama, on a visit arranged before the unrest in Tibet, and spoke glowingly of freedom-loving peoples needing to speak out against human right abuses in other countries. Madame Speaker, I applaud you speech. Will we be seeing articles of impeachment and troop withdrawal for Iraq as well, just so that you can be consistent between rhetoric and action? You could certainly lean on John Conyers and tell him that thinking an impeachment will lead to the election of a Republican is an insufficient reason not to send them up to the House.

An Australian gentlemen built and successfully used a robot armed with a weapon to commit suicide. A genius method for a grisly result. I wonder what inspired this particular device. Going from very old to very young, an infant died from a treatable pneumonia because the parents attempted faith-healing without the allopathic kind.

In the United Kingdom, Catholic bishops are calling for an end to hybrid embryo research, among other provisions of a proposed law, despite the “hybrid” being approximate 0.1 percent animal DNA. It is not the intent to breed chimeras, and last I checked, the embryos so created weren’t going to be viable enough to develop into said chimera. As things are right now, a prominent scientist has accused the opposition of lying about the bill and its effects, while Mr. Brown’s Cabinet may have a suite of resignations if forced to support the bill. The Daily Mail finds it problematic that the MPs are not allowed a free vote on this particular bill, considering it a matter of conscience.

In Saudi Arabia, a measure in the United Nations against discrimination against religions ran into a roadblock when the Saudi Arabian Shoura Council rightly concluded that all religions meant all religions. While the measure may have been brought up as a reaction against the re-run of cartoons depicting Mohammed in unflattering ways, and intended to stop what was seen as discrimination against Muslims, the Council recognized that Muslims might be expected to show tolerance to others. This should be an interesting snarl to resolve. Will they vote against it, wanting to retain the primacy of Islam in their country, or risk having to tolerate pagans so that they can then complain about others? We’ll have to see what kind of solution appears. Hopefully it’s not something that condones lawyers destroying evidence of child porn when a megachurch is involved.

In domestic news, J.P. Morgan raised the bid for Bear Sterns to $10/share, trying to pacify angry stockholders. The Federal Reserve was hesitant to raise the price, but is going along with the new purchase. Several shareholders of Bear Sterns are looking to block the deal because of the low price they’re getting for the shares. So rather than being a quick sale, this could drag on, and drag others down with it. James Surowiecki, in the New Yorker, says that it's both good and bad the Fed stopped Bear Sterns from freefalling, hoping that it will jolt Wall Street into scrutinizing who they lend money to and take the risk for in the future, so that assistance in this nature only happens rarely.

Borders going belly-up? Apparently, the credit crunch has crushed a big bookseller. Barnes & Noble, another big bookseller, is apparently considering buying up Borders for the right offer. I wonder if that will mean more people flock to Amazon.

Meat plant explosion sends ammonia gas into the air. Remarkably, no one hurt. Although some people were displaced so that they wouldn’t get hurt by the gas leak.

bradhicks is reminded of a good example of how American medicine is much more "rationed" than social or single-payer insurance, a story of a man who tragically died at his work desk because the company insisted that he come back to work for one day six months after recovering from a gigantic heart attack. He didn’t do any work that day, he was going to have a short day, but the strain of being moved from the hospital to work killed him when his stitches blew out. All because the corporation wouldn’t budge on the maximum amount of time that people could recover.

With regard to the candidates in the general election to arrive in November, bradhicks tells us why Hillary Clinton's membership in an Dominionist group over the last 30 years explains her often strongly-conservative positions, including positions that are pretty female-unfriendly, despite her supposed membership in the progressive party.

Valley Wag has the Republican party playbook, err, how to utilize the anonymous nature of the web and social networking sites to disseminate the party message, thanks to lots and lots of sockpuppets.

Which reminds me. When did politics change to the point where what supporters of a candidate say are just as important as what the candidate says themselves? Should I particularly care that an Obama supporter compared Bill Clinton to Joe McCarthy, if the candidate did not do so himself? Is it an affiliation thing? Because I’d pay more attention to what’s being said by the people the candidate is with regularly as opposed to people who support the candidate speaking their minds independently. Like John McCain campaigning on the premise that more of the same is what the country wants. Which doesn’t stop John Boehner from praising McCain's promises to cut out earmark spending. Which may be true, but I think McCain is still going to leave in Iraq War spending, which is most likely a much bigger expenditure than all the “pork” he’s combatting.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to get cheesed off at Pat Buchanan saying blacks should be grateful for all the help they&aposve received so far, and describing the idea that America still has a lot of work to do on making the promise that all men are created equal true, “the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running...” for some time now. Pat just seems so curious as to why African Americans commit crimes against white people more than their fellows, and where the scholarships for the deserving white kids are, and why black men are rapists and murderers of white people, and why black men are always in prison, dropping out of school, and fathering bastards. He’d probably smugly point to Kwame Kilpatrick's 12-count indictment as proof that even black people in power still just have to commit crimes. Pat thinks, that black people should they be appreciative of all the opportunities they have, like welfare, affirmative action (which Pat charmingly calls discrimination against whites), and all that charity white people do to help the black people. I can’t remember who said it or where, but I remember reading somewhere that the way charity and opportunity is presented from either whites of Christians to others, they expect the person receiving the charity to grovel sufficiently and inflate the ego of the giver, which is a really backwards way of doing things. It’s the difference between the person who gives the money out of the excesses of their profits and the person who gives because they know what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes. It just seems odd for Pat to say such things, when as he notices, there’s more incarcerations and crime and such - almost like whatever’s being offered right now doesn’t work. Or that on one hand, here’s this charitable giving, and on the other hand, there’s no civic development, no opportunities for work, or for good schooling, or paying teachers an appropriate wage so that they’re motivated. If the stuff being done was bettering the people as a whole, black, white, poor, Hispanic, or otherwise, they would be grateful, and they wouldn’t need any prompting, Pat. Sure, things are better here than in a lot of places, but that still doesn’t mean there’s a lot more to be done. That’s what Senator Obama was getting at, and that’s what you missed out on, Pat. Instead, you sound like someone for whom white supremacists would be proud.

Getting into technology, imagine this future, and tell me that it wouldn’t be a nice one to live in. Certainly much better than the one that ddjango paints, where human greed and narcissism will create the means of our own destruction.

The Automotive X-Prize race to get a car with 100mpg fuel efficiency (or energy equivalent) that can handle several stages of races, and be a viable car for mass manufacture, has begun. More details about the rules can be found at The Auto X Prize's website. $10 million is up for grabs to the winner with the shortest time that meets all the requirements.

In medical science, I can haz repair of severed fingertips? It’s regeneration on a small scale. We’ll see how it turns out on the large scale... and how painful it might be for someone to regrow all of that lost tissue.

The New York Times tells us about Billy, a boy who suffers from a near-constant stream of bullying that started when he was twelve. He’s now 16. So for four years, he’s been the target of everybody. Jezebel takes the writer to task for being clueless and suggesting that maybe Billy invited the problems on himself. For one incident, maybe. For a constant string of assaults, many of which have knocked him out and/or left bruises, and others which the bullies are cavalier enough to record on their own cell phones, I can’t think of anything that one person could do that would invite that kind of wrath. What I’m even more shocked at is that in four years of these events, it appears that whatever punishments are being meted out, if they are being meted out, are not sufficient deterrent to this behavior. By this time, with that kind of documentation, long-term suspensions, expulsions, and other heavy-weapons options are in order. I won’t be surprised if in a few years, or a few months, or a few days, we hear about some child named Billy who got a hold of a weapon and mercilessly slaughtered his classmates.

Last for tonight something light-hearted after all the doomy stuff, (another?) dog that has learned Zen postures. Dogs pick up the behaviors of the humans around them. If the human is a Zen priest, the dog probably learns a few tricks for poses. The lotus position, though, is anatomically problematic, so just sitting still will work. And as a postscript, why the challenge by a rationalist to have a "magician" had only one outcome before it even began.

And there were peep dioramas. And itchy tentacle relief commercials. Plus, another iPod Band performance.

And that’s all of it, really. Bedtime now.