And the rain kept coming down - 19 August 2008

Dispatches From A Public Librarian - quite possibly a real story, because in this profession, 90% of the time when we say something, it’s because it happened, not because we’re exaggerating.

Internationally, as a move most likely aimed at consolidating the gains Russia has made from Georgia, Russia has placed mobile short-range missile launchers in South Ossetia, sparking cries that such a move is against the cease-fire agreement.

Domestically, an appeals court has ruled that members of the government, acting in their official capacities, cannot be sued in civil court individually. In dismissing a civil claim in the Valerie Plame case, the appeals court made it clear that “government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties”, according to the article. So either the government permits itself to be sued for actinos that it doesn’t consider to be wrong, or no relief is forthcoming. The Winter Patriot takes it a step further and says the appellate court has said that it's okay to commit any sort of crime while acting in a government capacity and the people cannot hold someone accountable. It at least used to require a presidential pardon after leaving office before the courts could not prosecute someone for their actions while in office. Some part of my brain is tickling me that says this is an extension of the immunity the government currently enjoys from prosecution or civil suit, when it wants to be immune. Is this new precedent, or more of the same?

An article about how even people with advanced degrees and semistable jobs can find themselves at the soup kitchen, thanks to divorce and having children from Heather Ryan at Salon. The piece is equal parts “the difficulty of admitting to oneself that the soup kitchen is a necessary decision, and getting over the sense of shame and failure that going to a soup kitchen or a food bank often is for people who are employed and degreed” and “the complexity of the system and how going to the food bank and soup kitchen reduces one’s want to believe in the political system, because it is obviously failing a lot of people”. What brought the article to our attention, from Jezebel, is the comment section, where pit vipers came out, accusing the writer of being stupid, lacking planning, and otherwise creating the situation she found herself in all by herself, because Heather got her MFA and was a writer, until the problematic situation put her in secretarial work to get a regular paycheck.

The conventions are just around the corner, where the presumptive nominees become the official nominees. Senator Obama is willing to let Senator Clinton's supporters have a roll-call vote at the convention, so they can register that support before confirming Senator Obama. The buzz is, of course, that such an opportunity will result in the Clinton supporters stirring up sparks and trouble for Senator Obama, making the convention less smooth and more fractious.

In the opinion columns, Rich Tucker thinks that the United States and Europe should rearm and return to utilizing the power of tanks and troops to control Russia, otherwise Russia won’t respect them and will do whatever it wants to do.

The WSJ thinks that nationalism during the Olympic Games is a good thing, based on the way Kobe Bryant has been waving the country’s flag at other sport events and speaking of the USA as the greatest country in the world. If there wasn’t some nationalism and national pride, then the competition wouldn’t be quite as fierce. What the WSJ is missing out on, though, is that the Games are conducted, theoretically, in a peaceful atmosphere, where competitors strive fairly, meet members of other countries, hopefully get some international expsure, and come home better for having the experience, medals or no medals. Having national pride is good - being able to shelve it off the court so as to learn and enjoy the international flavor of the Games is important, too.

The Slacktivist is happy to see the current administration thinking like criminals again who will break the law and try to lie about it, which is an improvement over an administration that casually dismisses the law as unimportant. It’s not an improvement to, say, a government that actually functions within the rule of law, but it is ”better“.

On candidate opinions, Jack Cafferty thinks that John McCain has as much intellectual depth as the current administrator, making him even more of McSame to many.

On the other side, the WSJ thinks Barack Obama's reasons why he wouldn't appoint Clarence Thomas aren't any good, comparing Justice Thomas’s career judicial record to Senator Obama's senatorial record. Apples-to-oranges, anyone? And the implication that Senator Obama is too young and too inexperienced to say anything about whether Justice Thomas is competent sounds a lot like the arrogance the Senator’s opponents accuse him of.

Floys and Mary Beth Brown think every African-American will vote for Senator Obama, and thus try to inject doubts about the Senator by quoting a conservative relative of Dr. Martin Luther King. The quotes center around how Senator Obama’s pro-choice stance is a betrayal of Dr. King’s dream, but include his other liberal positions as further evidence of the need to see how opposed to Dr. King the senator is. I can applaud the idea of ensuring a candidate actually is in line with your politics, rather than voting for him blindly on the basis of his party affiliation, race, or religious belief, but anyone claiming that Senator Obama’s heritage is Muslim, not African-American, takes a credibility hit for ridiculous and untrue statements.

Drawing on his own research as support, Scott Thumma says that most megachurches aren't the political dynamos we see on TV. Like most churches aren’t super-political. Considering, however, that we’ve had the era of Robertson and Falwell, Hagee and Wright, and that we’re having presidential candidates speak in giant churches, even if it’s a small amount of megachurches that do all this, the influence they can wield was or is considerable. Nationally-televised evangelicals reach lots of people more than fill their church.

Paul Jacob wants to go meet Sal Grosso, a citizen who started with some discrepancies in the tracking of water and ended up with a full-scale municipal corruption audit, because he documented things well and kept taking it up the ladder until he found someone who would do the investigation.

The Cranking Widgets blog has a post from Dave Crenshaw about the myth of multitasking - what we're really doing is switchtasking, and every time we switch, there’s a cost associated with it.

Our science, techonology, and art departments has gotten around to algae pools being fed extra carbon dioxide to generate more biofuel while taking care of excess waste CO2, opinions about whether to use the bands in between television channels for broadband internet access, arsenic as a carrier of energy during photosynthesis, the skeletons of cartoon characters and more progress in generating lifelike CGI actors.

Next to last, our art department has quite a few useful things. The steampunk style of Jennifer Rodgers, a gallery of 50s and 60s homosexual fiction covers, and Disney Princesses as the women of Sin City.

Singled out for further study, though, it looks like the Burger King folks are either getting edgier or are lettign thigns that push the bounds of good taste through. Exhibit A is the Veg City Airport advert, where an onion is being strip-searched in the view of other vegetables at the airport, with his possessions spread out on the ground for all to see as well. Exhibits B-E, the Veg City Red Light District, a Veg City Sniper attack, Veg City New Year's, and Veg City Halloween. Definitely different advertisements, and lots of potentially disturbing stuff for those who look closely. At least it’s not being sued for giving someone a tapeworm.

Last for tonight, the Hapiness Project has a happy story - excellent service rewarded because with the CEO overheard the thanks.

Finding one's own way - 20 August 2008

Big headline for tonight. Candidate-wise, John McCain agrees that we'll need to re-enact the draft to catch bin Laden. Which, to someone right on the cusp of Selective Service eligibility, is (yet another) big freaking reason to reject the Republican candidate - no draft surprises, thanks, and especially not for unpopular land wars in Asia.

Internationally, it's official: Poland will host missiles, Russia will threaten to blow them up. And then they are apparently needed because Iran is testing long-range missiles intended to send up satellites. All the more reason for Alan Caruba to speculate that it's a matter of when, not if, Iran gets hit with someone else's missiles. According to Daniel Schwemmenthal, Russia's not going to do anything about it, which makes sense, considering Russia’s probably not going to be targeted first in any (utterly MAD) decision to launch nukes.

A 16 year-old awaits sentencing after being convicted as a terrorist, currently the youngest to be so convicted.

Proving that the presence of dishonesty and nuttery is (unfortunately) not contained to the United States, Christopher Bird reviews a complaint made about the participation of a justice in the awarding of the Order of Canada to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, pointing out inflation of groups objecting, reading “required” where it suggests, taking tradition as ironclad law, and defending the judge from a smear by the group implying that the non-voting chair had a predetermined conclusion to get to, and by extension, the Supreme Court of Canada is biased in its decision-making in favor of abortion. The justice also spoke publicly about the allegations, noting the chair's ole as facilitator, and not as advocate for one side or another. The complaint was dismissed after being reviewed like any other complaint.

Domestically, a doctor tried to get out of an indecent exposure case by claiming that his own unit was too small to see. The appeals court didn't buy it at all, and probably thought rather small of him for that defense.

More seriously, the state of Ohio has forbidden poll workers from taking the voting machines home with them the night before an election, as a way of showing that the process is going to be transparent, and there aren’t going to be opportunities for shenanigans by the poll workers themselves. With the beating Ohio’s credibility has taken over the last two elections, one would think they would have banned the practice before now.

And, PETA's at it again, this time with a proposal to put advertisements on the border fence telling incoming illegal Mexican immigrants that they're leaving a healthier lifestyle for burgers and fried chicken, which will kill them if the Border Patrol doesn't. Percent sign ampersand dollar sigh.... if you’ve got the cash to propose something like this, why not put it forward toward goals like making it possible for people to live healthier lifestyles on lower incomes, or ethically treating animals that happen to come into their care. Couldn’t hurt their image any more than it already is.

Of the few states where corporal punishment by teachers is still permitted, more than 200,000 students were reported to have been spanked, swatted, or otherwise disciplined through corporal means. To greyweirdo, however, corporal punishment amounts basically to adults bullying children up to the point where the children start being able to fight back.

In a country of darker-skinned people, products claiming to make them paler are in high demand. This comes from a tradition where someone with pale skin is a good match, because it means they haven’t had to do hard labor in the fields, and thus, they must have wealth? As opposed to us pale-skins, who are looking for someone who has had time and wealth to bronze themselves into a more Mediterranean style all over, rather than getting burnt in a couple places by our sun labor.

In our opinion section, candidate opinions come first, because of the big Rick Warren hosting Senator Obama and Senator McCain thing (link goes to computerized transcript) that will no doubt, buzz around until it is swatted by someone. Kevin McCullough puts his opinion out on the table and calls Senator Obama a manipulative liar in the pocket of the abortion lobby, by not giving as unambiguous a response to the “Human Rights (and thus, Life) Begins at Conception, Right?” question as Seantor McCain did, instead saying that decisions about where life begins is something “above his pay grade”, implying that the people with the best qualifications to say so on the matter are the people that should be saying so (McCullough implies that as a father, the Senator “knows” the answer really is “at conception”, and that he’s lying every time he doesn’t say that), by saying that abortion rates had gone up... although the statistical summary linked to as counter-evidence notes that while total abortions have been going down, there was a trend of increasing medical abortions over some years. Not to mention the fundamental trickiness of statistics in general - depending on who you include and exclude, numbers will say whatever you want them to, and apparently by defending himself against accusations that he voted to deny life-saving care to those who are born live even after an abortion, pointing out the bill proposed was not the bill presented, not that a distinction like that matters to someone convinced he’s a liar and immoral.

Much more reasonably, The WSJ asks what Senator Obama considers to be fair for the rich and the corporations to pay so that everyone is putting in "their fair share", making Senator Obama into an incompetent Robin Hood, who has the “rob from the rich” part down, but has very little on “give to the poor”, which, as a Democrat, and supposedly the liberal of liberals/socialist, would be very strange, indeed. This line of reasoning has been asking for the Senator to start giving numbers for what he considers rich and fair taxation rates for those that are rich, probbaly so they can say that it’s too high and continue saying that the rich (when they do pay taxes) pay most of the taxes anyway.

advice on what to do is the taxpayers end up bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the WSJ, including firing everybody who let this mess happen. Brian Wesbury thinks we should fear the spectre of inflation and work to kill it now, rather than staying in denial about it.

Leslie Hook peers behind the Potemkin villages of the Olymic Games to talk about landowners being forcibly evicted by the government because developers want the land their houses are on. And because of the Olympics, the normal channels of redress are apparently shut down, resulting in rejection of claims and detention of those that make them.

And people wonder why the villains of our movies seem lame in comparison.

Science and technology has generated a lot of biology today, including a chameleon with a lifespan of barely a full year, a msising turtle with two heads, a found fish with two mouths, a cat with four ears, and markers of biological age in humans.

There’s other stuff, though, too, like a site that generates headlines and ranks news stories based on a credibility algorithm.

Winding down, nine tips for sticking with your exercise plan. Or, for an injection of happiness in a quicker release, toy robots from the 1950s. For those looking for a challenge, try guessing forty-six movies from a single letter or punctuation mark in their posters/logos. And then grab some famous fonts afterward.

At the end, a few things that deserve attention. And derision. First, the vibrator that contains a razor. For the shower, I guess? Still, anything that can cut is probably not going to go near anywhere where the vibrating function should be used. For similar doses of WTF, if two female athletes kiss, it's because they're lesbians, apparently. Shakespeare’s Sister takes up the relevant educational post about what, exactly, entails a lesbian kiss. Like, say, the presence of actual lesbians.