New week's beginning - 17 March 2008

[silveradept]

The crew got their first swings at Smash Brothers Brawl today. Which was interesting. The Rotate mode is a godsend, but I worry that the match counts being racked up there aren’t counting toward unlockables. If they’re not, then we’ll have to do some manual rotation until everybody’s been unlocked and is ready to join the Brawl. In a little while, perhaps we’ll just see mental gaming, where eyebrows twitch and smash attacks are performed.

If you’re up for that sort of thing, beckyzoole is all about a whole entries-and-comments strike form midnight-GMT 21 March to midnight-GMT 22 March.

Anyway, enough about that, and onward to news we go. Surprising absolutely no one, oil profits are funding the Iraqi insurgency as well as the government. Also surprising no one, the Bush administration is accused of systematic meddling in science, the most recent incident with regard to an EPA regulation on ozone levels.

Elsewhere in the world, the Dalai Lama is asking for a probe into the Chinese government's actions against protesters in Lhasa and the surrounding area , saying that those in the area were in danger of a “cultural genocide”.

The health system in Scotland is suffering a shortage of dentists, leading to queues of thousands and a worry that teeth will fall out before the dentists can see the people they’re supposed to. More dentists for Scotland, please.

Terry Pratchett pledges $1 million USD to help fight Alzheimer's. After telling his fans that he was going to get the disease, now he’s putting up some money to hopefully stop it before it claims him too much. The gesture has inspired Match It for Pratchett, an attempt to get fans of Terry’s work to raise a collective $1 million USD for research as well.

Young women went for help with their problems, and instead got exorcisms and Bible study. Faith healing is a nice idea, but should never substitute for qualified medical personnel. For the claims it has, the exorcisms it performs, and the insistence on demonic activity being a root cause, no real evidence supporting their success rate has yet to appear. Sounds like a cult and a scam. But don’t take my word for it. Read the account of one of the women who went through the ordeal, and see just how really cultish and secretive it is.

The most senior police forensics expert at Scotland Yard has suggested that primary school children be put in a DNA database if they exhibit what could become criminal behavior later on in life. The suggestion drew immediate fire from teachers and parents, who find the idea dangerous, distasteful, and as moving toward a police state. Plus, the young children are being condemned for something they may not even do. And, is it really possible to pick out the criminal in the lot of preschoolers?

Speaking of collecting data on people, MI5 is looking to search the records of the mass transit system's RFID-enabled smart cards, ostensibly to help in unmasking potential terrorists by combining the data with other data and seeing if a pattern emerges. Having free access to that kind of data in little chunks makes it possible to know a lot about someone without actually having to prove to a court of law that there’s a need to know that much data. *sigh* What happened to the idea that a warrant was the first necessary step before prying into someone’s private life?

Going into the science annals, NASA announced that the Hubble Telescope has detected the presence of an organic molecule on an extrasolar planet. Said planet is too hot to support human life, but apparently organic compounds can be detected by spectroscopy. Interesting.

Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, is the "weirdest place to live". I don’t know if that’s just in the UK, or in the entirety of the world, but it as apparently a nexus for odd things. Although not exclusively so, as Lancaster County, PA got a drunk and naked man causing damage to a store. Perhaps Torchwood should relocate.

In sport news, with a birdie put on the last hole, Tiger Woods kept his victory streak alive and extended it to five events on the PGA Tour. With as much as he’s done already, there will be a voluminous entry written about Mr. Woods in the annals of golf. There’s still a lot more to see from him, most certainly.

Out in the opinion columns, Kenneth Levin believes Islamic fundamentalism is a gigantic threat, and that those who downplay, seek civilized compromises, blame American policy for begetting the situation, or otherwise disagree with him about the severity of the problem are deluding themselves and permitting the fundamentalists to gain more strength to strike at the West and/or Israel. Considering that Mr. Levin uses the nonsense term “Islamo-fascism”, and thinks that the only way that the West will wake to the real dangers of fundamentalism is if more attacks happen, I invite him to pick up a weapon and go serve in the military, where he can have all the Islamo-fascists he wants, real or perceived, and live in a nice black-and-white world. (Besides, some of the Christians are taking the comics too seriously themselves.

The Slacktivist has one phrase each for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton that he would like them to hear about how they don't want their supporters voting for them because their opponent is black/female, and that those who do vote on those grounds shouldn’t be voting for the Democratic candidate. It would be a ballsy move to say that. But it would probably show how many members of the Democratic party actually are voting based on issues and platforms.

In celebration of an Irish saint’s feast day, bradhicks talks about Ireland's contribution to speeding the end of the Dark Ages, while maanging to drag a bloody conflict on for way past the due date.

And one last opinion, this one of the American populace - nearly three-quarters of them think it's a recession. So why not call a spade a spade and get to work fixing the problem, rather than dancing around whether or not to call it a recession?

Making lists, Five floating Utopia/Ocean City projects. Last for tonight, a different sort of utopia - Thich Nhan Hanh presents the fourteen precepts of engaged Buddhism. As with a lot of Buddhist writings, I find the core message could be applied to just about any religious belief and not lose potency. Sleep doesn’t lose potency, either, and so that’s my pursuit.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I'll gladly take Owen if Torchwood is relocating to Lancaster ;)

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

The thing about "criminal tendencies in young children" has a little more complexity to it.
As I understand it, it is quite possible to earmark the children with the highest probability of getting involved in persistent criminal activity at a relatively early age - they tend to be from lower income socioeconomic groups, with family problems, they may have one or more conditions which make them less academically gifted (attention deficit disorders, impulse control issues) and so on. Of course, many of these children don't go on to a "life of crime", but the set of all "career criminals" contains an overwhelmingly higher number of people with these background than any other.
(So: pick someone who has serially committed crimes (usually with drugs and petty crime offenses) and you're likely to be looking at one of these children grown up. Pick one of these children, and you're unlikely to be looking at a someone who persistently breaks the law.)

The Police, in their "Wisdom" would like to tag all the DNA from these children so that those who perform criminal acts in the future can be easily identified and rounded up; thus saving them time and money.
The more intelligent members of society have argued that this is silly, because it's tantamount to giving those children a self-fulfilling prophecy - "your background/DNA/whatever means you're going to end up a bad'un". They'd rather that the same information was used to provide social services and counselling for kids in the worst brackets, to prevent them from being in situations where they commit crimes in the future. Because, of course, most of these children are high-risk for committing crimes because they're also high-risk for being poor, psychologically disturbed and or drug-addicted, not because they're somehow "Evil"...

The Government, so far, has declined to comment on the matter in any detail as far as I know.

[silveradept]

Yeah, that sounds about right. I fall on the side of the debate that wants to see them pulled up out of bad situations rather than tagging them and then using that to make quick arrests later on in life. I wonder if the Government has had a look at how many from that "future criminal" class actually do go on and become criminals. It might not be worth the expense, comparatively.