![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptOfficially, in the United States, today is supposed to have been a day where one salutes those who went into military service and are lucky enough to have survived war and combat, and remembers those who were not as fortunate. Except in Denver, where those who protest the Iraq war are not permitted to participate in a remembrance parade. You know, that whole “died for your freedoms” part rings kind of hollow when vets exclude vets because they choose to exercise their freedom of speech.
We make note of the case of First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who refused to deploy to Iraq nearly two years ago. His first trial ended in a mistrial, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Army from putting Lieutenant Watada back on trial. Looking through the tilt on the article, I think that if the Lieutenant must defend himself again, his Nuremberg defense has a chance of success - assuming that he can convince the tribunal or judges that the Iraq war has committed illegal and war crimes acts. That may be the bigger snowball to roll through the Inferno.
Anyway, almost everyone in this country knows someone in military service, even if through a couple hops of friendships. So far, of the people that I know by name, only one has perished in the operations. As this continues, the percentage of people who know someone who died in military service, is linked to the 3,860 that have already gone before us. Even if this ordeal manages to turn out well or at least non-disaster-like, the question is always “Was it worth it?” And the ghosts of all those who have gone before us in conflict ask us that question.
Getting off the soapbox for a bit, onward to other military matters: A Chinese submarine appeared, undetected and unnoticed, in the middle of a United States naval exercise. Slipped right through the physical defense and the technological defense and came close enough to say hello with armaments, if it had chosen to do so. Oops? Speaking of oops, the Untied States Air Force has released a heavily blacked-out account of an accident with the new heat ray. You know, I don’t know if I even heard that there had been an accident in the first place. Which makes me wonder whether there have been more, or the military isn’t telling us about what the beam can do when not used properly.
In international matters, Musharraf calls for elections in January, likely trying to mollify his opposition, and Spain's king tells Chavez to shut up, when Mr. Chavez attempted to interrupt one of his speeches. Diplomacy fraying the world around.
Broadway stagehands are into their second day of work stoppage, which is, as my comments tell me, unrelated to the Hollywood work stoppage. So live entertainment is also shutting down in addition to video entertainment. Are there any other entities and unions striking so far?
USA Today has an article about a split in musical theory for films. On one hand, grabbing the rights to already-made songs and putting them in the film can help to boost the film and the music’s popularity. On the other hand, writing one’s own music allows for the tailoring of feel, lyric, instrumentation, and the rest of the nuances of music and mood. Admittedly, the kind of music that I like in movies is almost always going to be composed, but in those movies where pieces were dropped in to provide the background, most of the choices were not things I liked, or would like when I heard them on the radio. I’m most definitely biased in musical choices, though, so your mileage may vary.
An opinion in the Christian Science Monitor asks Congresscritters and taxpayers to fund Amtrak to the point of turning it into a viable rail network, for passenger transport, including high-speed corridors. The United States can certainly use a high-speed nationwide rail network, with hubs, spokes, and patterns across the country. If they can then be energy-efficient high-speed trains, too, then we can do even better. For those people who are in the distance where flying is longer, but driving is gridlock, train systems really would be great to have for the commute and for weekend trips. Unfortunately, down here, it looks like a proposal to expand both roads and trains failed out, so we may have to try again later.
Get out and walk, and you could reduce global warming, your waistline, depression, osteoporosis, and deaths from vehicle crashes, while improving your air quality, according to public health experts, who are focusing on showing the multiple benefits that healthy lifestyles have, for the environment and for each person. Oh, and walking also might help keep your brain sharper into later years, too. Chemistry is helping us, toward health or better taste (and hopefully, both) by putting chemistry and chefdom together to create stuff that looks, and tastes good, and has some applied science to boot.
Certainly not healthy for the environment is a large oil spill that happened in the San Francisco Bay area. Potentially compounding the error, Kossack catfish reports that the government is urging would-be cleanup volunteers to stay home and do nothing, even threatening would be do-gooders with arrest. Is cleaning up after an oil spill really that dangerous and difficult that those who want to help have to be turned away?
Continuing the stupidity train, The Smoking Chimp tells us yet another reason to answer one's telephone "F**k Hoover!" - he kept files on the Marx Brothers. Most of it non-damaging, from the looks of things that are actually available and not blacked out, although there is an inquiry as to whether the Marx brothers might have had a brother by the name of Karl (yes, that joke will be repeated across the web) that they followed. Hoover apparently liked to keep an eye on all the kingdom’s fools.
Following up on a story where Chicago police used a Taser on an eighty-two year-old woman, because she was wielding a hammer when officers confronted her after she showed a Department of Aging case worker the door, 37 percent of a Sun-Times poll said the police were justified, despite no laws being broken, no warrant being executed, the police forcing their way into her residence, and, at least according to the source that gives us the statistics, the hammer was picked up because she wanted to protect herself in case it was a criminal element, rather than law enforcement. American Samidzat considers this response a symptom of a greater malaise, where government believes it has the authority to make you do what it wants, starting with functionaries and escalating as needed all the way through lethal force, if that’s what it takes to make you comply. Why did the caseworker call police? If it was just because she’d been put out, then there’s no cause. Then one bad decision gets compounded when the police utilize a taser. Even worse, I suspect that’s standard procedure by now. I guess if you don’t want to get zorched by a police officer, you should never be around them when you do anything at all. Or do anything in self-defense that might be interpreted as hostile or resisting, even if you don’t know that its the police.
Genetic knowledge can help target medicines, screen for specific conditions, and could very well be the justification for a new flare-up of gene-based discrimination. This is a place where those shades and gradations have to be there, and science has to be able to explain it in such a way that those gradations get pounded into people’s heads. There’s a lot of ugly potential violence, fear, and discrimination that could happen if people start thinking that there’s genetic proof of “blacks are stupid” or “homosexuality can be cured with gene therapy” and such.
Similar kind of stupidity, excepting actual rather than potential - The United States deputy director of national intelligence wants to redefine privacy, changing it from anonymity and not collecting unneeded information to ensuring that all data collected is properly protected and secured. Cap'n Marrrrk says, "I dont' trust the government not to screw me over with that data", and I agree completely with that. Data that is uncollected cannot be abused.
I’m flame-spitting, quiche-throwing mad if the following is accurate - Congresscritters have a bill on the floor that will require universities to implement both techonological deterrents and offer "alternatives" to file-sharing networks, or they'll have their aid funding nixed. Rather than following ideas like Lessig proposes at TED about how the structure of copyright needs to change to encourage creativity, the cabal is doing things the same way ASCAP was earlier, on a different music debate. It didn’t work out for ASCAP, it won’t for the *AAs. Additionally, I don’t recall the part where colleges and universities are required to act in loco parentis. My own, as I recall, used to, but does not longer, and discourages people thinking in that vein. Since the people arriving at university are generally of the age of adulthood, they’re responsible for themselves, for the most part. Just because university offers a good connection to expand one’s music collection with, there’s no reason to assume that that expansion will be done illegally.
Not to mention that tying federal student aid to this makes zero sense. Why should copyright infringement, real or imagined, performed by students study at the university be any cause at all for the university itself to suffer punishment or penalty in the funds that it has to get students that want to go to the university? Wouldn’t it make more sense to punish them with removing their e-rate status or something like that? Y’know, something even conceivably in the ballpark of what might be a reasonable place to do punishment? If that portion of the bill doesn’t die in the blazing fury of a thousand suns, there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do.
Next to last for tonight, behind the cut, one of those silly percentage-ranking things.
Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Moya (Farscape) - 88%
Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) - 81%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) - 75%
Serenity (Firefly) - 75%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) - 63%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) - 63%
Enterprise D (Star Trek) - 56%
SG-1 (Stargate) - 56%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) - 50%
FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files) - 44%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) - 38%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) - 38%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) - 38%
Well, out of those options, I can’t say that I’d complain about being on the Leviathan. Knowing me, I’d probably be Pilot, if anyone. Not maverick enough for Crichton, not buff enough for Dhargo, definitely not Rigel, not crazy enough for Stark, nor really inclined to be any of the Peacekeepers.
Last for tonight, probably getting filed in my bookmarks, and definitely a contributor to the Big Book of Ancient, Semi-Coherent Wisdom is The Weird Fortune Cookie Collection. There’s obviously a sense of humor that slips through the Confucian versus Taoist poles of wisdom in one’s fortune cookies. Sadly, the fortune cookie did not make 101 Gadgets that Changed The World, which is a very neat list and should be read through from Abacus to Zip, but I think more people have laughed at the fortune cookies than at some of the devices on that list, many of which people still curse today.
Going to bed, then. Hoping that tomorrow proves to be an enlightening day.
We make note of the case of First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who refused to deploy to Iraq nearly two years ago. His first trial ended in a mistrial, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Army from putting Lieutenant Watada back on trial. Looking through the tilt on the article, I think that if the Lieutenant must defend himself again, his Nuremberg defense has a chance of success - assuming that he can convince the tribunal or judges that the Iraq war has committed illegal and war crimes acts. That may be the bigger snowball to roll through the Inferno.
Anyway, almost everyone in this country knows someone in military service, even if through a couple hops of friendships. So far, of the people that I know by name, only one has perished in the operations. As this continues, the percentage of people who know someone who died in military service, is linked to the 3,860 that have already gone before us. Even if this ordeal manages to turn out well or at least non-disaster-like, the question is always “Was it worth it?” And the ghosts of all those who have gone before us in conflict ask us that question.
Getting off the soapbox for a bit, onward to other military matters: A Chinese submarine appeared, undetected and unnoticed, in the middle of a United States naval exercise. Slipped right through the physical defense and the technological defense and came close enough to say hello with armaments, if it had chosen to do so. Oops? Speaking of oops, the Untied States Air Force has released a heavily blacked-out account of an accident with the new heat ray. You know, I don’t know if I even heard that there had been an accident in the first place. Which makes me wonder whether there have been more, or the military isn’t telling us about what the beam can do when not used properly.
In international matters, Musharraf calls for elections in January, likely trying to mollify his opposition, and Spain's king tells Chavez to shut up, when Mr. Chavez attempted to interrupt one of his speeches. Diplomacy fraying the world around.
Broadway stagehands are into their second day of work stoppage, which is, as my comments tell me, unrelated to the Hollywood work stoppage. So live entertainment is also shutting down in addition to video entertainment. Are there any other entities and unions striking so far?
USA Today has an article about a split in musical theory for films. On one hand, grabbing the rights to already-made songs and putting them in the film can help to boost the film and the music’s popularity. On the other hand, writing one’s own music allows for the tailoring of feel, lyric, instrumentation, and the rest of the nuances of music and mood. Admittedly, the kind of music that I like in movies is almost always going to be composed, but in those movies where pieces were dropped in to provide the background, most of the choices were not things I liked, or would like when I heard them on the radio. I’m most definitely biased in musical choices, though, so your mileage may vary.
An opinion in the Christian Science Monitor asks Congresscritters and taxpayers to fund Amtrak to the point of turning it into a viable rail network, for passenger transport, including high-speed corridors. The United States can certainly use a high-speed nationwide rail network, with hubs, spokes, and patterns across the country. If they can then be energy-efficient high-speed trains, too, then we can do even better. For those people who are in the distance where flying is longer, but driving is gridlock, train systems really would be great to have for the commute and for weekend trips. Unfortunately, down here, it looks like a proposal to expand both roads and trains failed out, so we may have to try again later.
Get out and walk, and you could reduce global warming, your waistline, depression, osteoporosis, and deaths from vehicle crashes, while improving your air quality, according to public health experts, who are focusing on showing the multiple benefits that healthy lifestyles have, for the environment and for each person. Oh, and walking also might help keep your brain sharper into later years, too. Chemistry is helping us, toward health or better taste (and hopefully, both) by putting chemistry and chefdom together to create stuff that looks, and tastes good, and has some applied science to boot.
Certainly not healthy for the environment is a large oil spill that happened in the San Francisco Bay area. Potentially compounding the error, Kossack catfish reports that the government is urging would-be cleanup volunteers to stay home and do nothing, even threatening would be do-gooders with arrest. Is cleaning up after an oil spill really that dangerous and difficult that those who want to help have to be turned away?
Continuing the stupidity train, The Smoking Chimp tells us yet another reason to answer one's telephone "F**k Hoover!" - he kept files on the Marx Brothers. Most of it non-damaging, from the looks of things that are actually available and not blacked out, although there is an inquiry as to whether the Marx brothers might have had a brother by the name of Karl (yes, that joke will be repeated across the web) that they followed. Hoover apparently liked to keep an eye on all the kingdom’s fools.
Following up on a story where Chicago police used a Taser on an eighty-two year-old woman, because she was wielding a hammer when officers confronted her after she showed a Department of Aging case worker the door, 37 percent of a Sun-Times poll said the police were justified, despite no laws being broken, no warrant being executed, the police forcing their way into her residence, and, at least according to the source that gives us the statistics, the hammer was picked up because she wanted to protect herself in case it was a criminal element, rather than law enforcement. American Samidzat considers this response a symptom of a greater malaise, where government believes it has the authority to make you do what it wants, starting with functionaries and escalating as needed all the way through lethal force, if that’s what it takes to make you comply. Why did the caseworker call police? If it was just because she’d been put out, then there’s no cause. Then one bad decision gets compounded when the police utilize a taser. Even worse, I suspect that’s standard procedure by now. I guess if you don’t want to get zorched by a police officer, you should never be around them when you do anything at all. Or do anything in self-defense that might be interpreted as hostile or resisting, even if you don’t know that its the police.
Genetic knowledge can help target medicines, screen for specific conditions, and could very well be the justification for a new flare-up of gene-based discrimination. This is a place where those shades and gradations have to be there, and science has to be able to explain it in such a way that those gradations get pounded into people’s heads. There’s a lot of ugly potential violence, fear, and discrimination that could happen if people start thinking that there’s genetic proof of “blacks are stupid” or “homosexuality can be cured with gene therapy” and such.
Similar kind of stupidity, excepting actual rather than potential - The United States deputy director of national intelligence wants to redefine privacy, changing it from anonymity and not collecting unneeded information to ensuring that all data collected is properly protected and secured. Cap'n Marrrrk says, "I dont' trust the government not to screw me over with that data", and I agree completely with that. Data that is uncollected cannot be abused.
I’m flame-spitting, quiche-throwing mad if the following is accurate - Congresscritters have a bill on the floor that will require universities to implement both techonological deterrents and offer "alternatives" to file-sharing networks, or they'll have their aid funding nixed. Rather than following ideas like Lessig proposes at TED about how the structure of copyright needs to change to encourage creativity, the cabal is doing things the same way ASCAP was earlier, on a different music debate. It didn’t work out for ASCAP, it won’t for the *AAs. Additionally, I don’t recall the part where colleges and universities are required to act in loco parentis. My own, as I recall, used to, but does not longer, and discourages people thinking in that vein. Since the people arriving at university are generally of the age of adulthood, they’re responsible for themselves, for the most part. Just because university offers a good connection to expand one’s music collection with, there’s no reason to assume that that expansion will be done illegally.
Not to mention that tying federal student aid to this makes zero sense. Why should copyright infringement, real or imagined, performed by students study at the university be any cause at all for the university itself to suffer punishment or penalty in the funds that it has to get students that want to go to the university? Wouldn’t it make more sense to punish them with removing their e-rate status or something like that? Y’know, something even conceivably in the ballpark of what might be a reasonable place to do punishment? If that portion of the bill doesn’t die in the blazing fury of a thousand suns, there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do.
Next to last for tonight, behind the cut, one of those silly percentage-ranking things.
Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Moya (Farscape) - 88%
Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) - 81%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) - 75%
Serenity (Firefly) - 75%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) - 63%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) - 63%
Enterprise D (Star Trek) - 56%
SG-1 (Stargate) - 56%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) - 50%
FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files) - 44%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) - 38%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) - 38%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) - 38%
Well, out of those options, I can’t say that I’d complain about being on the Leviathan. Knowing me, I’d probably be Pilot, if anyone. Not maverick enough for Crichton, not buff enough for Dhargo, definitely not Rigel, not crazy enough for Stark, nor really inclined to be any of the Peacekeepers.
Last for tonight, probably getting filed in my bookmarks, and definitely a contributor to the Big Book of Ancient, Semi-Coherent Wisdom is The Weird Fortune Cookie Collection. There’s obviously a sense of humor that slips through the Confucian versus Taoist poles of wisdom in one’s fortune cookies. Sadly, the fortune cookie did not make 101 Gadgets that Changed The World, which is a very neat list and should be read through from Abacus to Zip, but I think more people have laughed at the fortune cookies than at some of the devices on that list, many of which people still curse today.
Going to bed, then. Hoping that tomorrow proves to be an enlightening day.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-11-13 01:53 am (UTC)