Turning in the entry early - 12 June 2008
Jun. 12th, 2008 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptAll sorts of things to look over as you ponder the day's news. I'll be enjoying some well-deserved rest and relaxation before going back to work on the weekend.
Starting in interplanetary affairs, experiments ahoy on Martian soil as the ovens and analyzers get to work looking for interesting things.
International news starts with good news - Norway is putting forward a bill that will permit homosexuals to marry, with all the legal rights that entails. There already were domestic partnership laws in place, but this removes the distinction between civil union'd and married. Hooray!
United States congresspersons complain that their computers are being hacked by the Chinese government, and that every time there is an attempt at an investigation or publicizing the attacks, other government officials want to keep the matter silent. I suppose it would depend on whether or not the government intends on trying to backtrack the hacks and then take cyber-revenge or not, or whether the government even wants to admit that people whom that have normal trade relations with are committing acts of aggression against them.
A Mercy Ministries "mental illness program" in Queensland will close after several complaints were leveled that the staff forced the participants to turn over their benefit checks, subjected them to exorcisms, and cut them off from the outside world without actually treating them for their illnesses.
Justice is served as Marines are disciplined for their role in throwing a puppy off a cliff while on their tour in Iraq. Because of the wonders of YouTube and someone deciding to post the video, we can get justice for this. And besides, isn't one of the signs of potential bad behavior the abuse of animals?
Further in Iraq, a curious phenomenon. Once you bring out the details of a secret agreement into the light and start letting people see it, suddenly a lot of people start having objections to the measure. Amazing.
Justice may finally be served on several of the detainees being held without habeas rights. The SCOTUS has declared that the process by which "enemy combatants" are held and then subjected to military trial without their habeas corpus rights have sufficient flaws that detainees should have access to federal civilian courts for their trials. Read the opinion of the SCOTUS on this case, Boumediene v. Bush. It's a good thing that they have access, too, because the government now has photographic proof that those sent ot other countries to be held are tortured there.
Mrs. Bush provides us with an update of how well things are going in Afghanistan, which, if I were looking for feathers in my cap, I would choose over Iraq.
From there, not as good news - a UK government official was suspended after he left classified documents on a commuter train,
Getting into the domestic sphere - it looks like the impeachment articles have stirred some unrest, again, considering the Speaker's stated position that impeachment is not an option. So much so that some are calling for the Speaker's head because of her refusal, accusing her of being an accessory to the Bush crimes, or at the very least, behaving criminally by preemptively dismissing all impeachment claims. If one wishes to join that voice, there's the online petition route, or the route of calling one's congresscritters and asking for a declaration of the Speaker's seat vacant. When the Democrats took over in 2006, and weren't able to get enough support for an impeachment attempt then, I knew it wasn't going to happen for their two years. Which is unfortunate, because it provides a measure of legitimacy and acceptance of actions that, if not clearly against the Constitution, require an investigation into their Constitutionality, "unitary executive" be damned.
Even the intelligence communities are going Web 2.0 - the CIA and the Defense Department have an Intellipedia, written with the Wikipedia software and with versions for the various levels of classification. Hey, collaboration among intelligence analysts. Might mean that some interesting mysteries get solved because all the right people end up seeing it.
New Arizona state laws requiring voters to present certain forms of identification before they can vote have hit a bit of a snag - they turn away a 97 year-old woman who was born before birth certificates, no longer has a driver's license, and all of her witnesses and places that could confirm her identity are either dead or destroyed. How many other legitimate voters will they end up turning away?
Staying with election possibilities, A serious candidate for McCain's vice president speaks of his experience with an exorcism, complete with forced restraint of the "possessed", the inability to speak key religious phrases, the whole nine yards. As a quality in the Republican vp, I can see how this might galvanize the religious vote, but it also makes me worry about who might be President should a then-President McCain die in office.
New York is attempting to get more visas offered for those who want to work fashion runways, because their visa classification is the same as that of high-technology workers, and the tech people usually win out. Toronto is looking for ways to get more strippers into the country, after new regs were passed that tighten the screening processes for the visas.
A biker was lifted from his bike, subdued and tasered after he apparently failed to stop for not having a front light. By the account of the police, he was resisting and combative and didn't stop when he was told to. By the account of the person involved and a witness, the police didn't really give him much of a chance to stop, did not identify themselves as police officers, and then proceeded to slam the biker against a wall and use the taser on him. Over not stopping for not having a front light. I think this one fits in "excessive use of force", regardless of justification.
That almost pales in comparison to Sheriff's deputies in Maricopa County denying a member of the public the right to inspect documents that they themselves were inspecting, in clear contravention of the law, and then threatening to arrest the curious reporter for exercising his right to freedom of the press, citing that it would be interference with an investigation that, in the opinion of the reporter, looked more like a fishing expedition trying to find some dirt on someone else.
Getting into the opinion columns, apparently wearing a brassiere increases one's risk for breast cancer, due to the tightness of the brassiere causing problems in the soft breast tissue. Aaaah, shouldn't that then be "Wearing an improperly-sized brassiere increases your risk for breast cancer", at the least, rather than taking the flying leap to saying that all brassieres are responsible? Plus, any time that there's a conspiracy by industry and medical professionals to squelch the truth about something, the eyebrows raise in a skeptical manner.
Walter E. Williams thinks Americans are stuck in a form of slavery, because most of their tax dollars that the government takes from them are then given out in subsidies and entitlements, making it so that honest Americans are forced to work many months of the year to serve someone else's purposes. John Stossel worries about the pace of entitlement spending, suggesting that at current rates, it will consume far too much of the budgetary spending very soon. A fair worry, but with possible solutions, like actually trying to fund it, rather than slashing taxes and raiding the fund for more spending, paying down the debts, instead of incurring more, and possibly doing a little tax-raising. With the way that credit counseling corporations insist that Americans pay down their highest-interest debt first, because that makes it easier to pay the lower-interest debts, why can't we get the government to do the same? Put a budget at 60-70% of expected revenue, and then spend the remaining amount knocking down as many high-interest debts as we can, rolling the money saved on interest payments into reducing further high-interest debt. Of course, this does mean that we can't go fighting expensive wars at the drop of a hat, and that we might have to make do with current military technology for a bit, and other such inconveniences. We could do a lot in four years with that, I'm sure.
Now that oil prices have spiked significantly, there's significantly more opinion on the matter. New guesses about the total amount of oil reserves in the planet, and yet more calls for domestic drilling.
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey try to justify the Iraq conflict by making it a necessary war of choice, like other wars that the country has fought in, by pointing out that the other wars could have ended differently, or even not gotten off the ground, had leaders made other decisions. This tack of reasoning is disingenuous - Iraq was not attacking a neighbor, was not directly threatening the United States, etc. If the case really were that Iraq was a threat to others, and could be demonstrated, with evidence that most people would accept, to be so, then I don't think there would have been nearly as much hue and cry about the matter.
In candidate opinions, Ton Blankley continues to harp on the "Obama is secretly a super-liberal" theme, a theme that I haven't quite figured out whether it hurts or helps Senator Obama. Running on the "change" platform, being seen as someone with ties to things further left than the establishment might be beneficial, in that even in being a moderate compared to those associations, he might be able to pull the country leftward and onto a new pathway.
Lawrence Kudlow thinks McCain will be a good president, based on his plan to lower taxes and spending, which apparently involves freezing discretionary spending outside of the military, one of the biggest spenders of the bunch. I'd like to see his budget plan on how he intends on making government ends meet when the country is already very much overspent and borrowing on what it is doing now. And which programs are going to get the axe because he wants to make sure the military machine is fed all the money it can take. And how he plans on doing it on reduced tax income.
Johnnie B. Byrd isn't worried about Senator Obama's appeal, and thinks Senator McCain shouldn't be, either, based on the assumption that the people whom Senator Obama is courting, the very young, tend to flake out at the ballot box, and that Senator McCain can aggressively court and capture the Hillary Clinton supporters. Considering that there are already several Clinton-supporting groups that are declaring their unwillingness to support Senator Obama, now that he has the nomination, there may be room for defection to another candidate from the Democratic base. All told, though, those who are defecting are probably closer to the center line than those who support Senator Obama's policies.
Gregory D. Lee contradicts himself, giving credit for there being no terror attacks in seven years to increased vigilance and potential luck from law enforcement officials, yet giving the Bush administration credit for having stopped terror attacks. Stopping terror is measured in failures. Why are people insistent that someone get credit for having nothing happen, except the erosion of civil liberties in the name of "security"?
Last out of the opinions, using a little sleight of words, a creationist tries to prove that evolution followers are non compos mentis and shouldn't be allowed to vote [PDF]. Except that tiny little part where evolution gets conflated with atheism. All the arguments in the piece are really against atheism. Still, arguing that atheists are insane, have no basis to decide laws, and don't have the capacities to make moral judgments is really stupid.
Technology news: Cranking widgets says to master the iPhone's keyboard, trust the autocorrect. It will work most of the time. Of more interest to the "green cars" crowd, an electric vehicle that uses superconductors for generating the electricity. Liquid nitrogen cooling will make it expensive, most likely, but will also give some extra range because of less waste heat. There's also some new batteries in development, so hopefully those ranges will expand even more. On a more entertaining note, a method for viewing 3D images and movies that don't require putting on special glasses. If that technology takes off, I can see video games and movies changing quite a bit.
Receiving a well-deserved flaming quiche to the face is El Camino High School, who had highway patrol officers tell students that some of their classmates had died over the weekend in an attempt to scare them straight on drunk driving. The students had the expected traumatizing reaction to the news - and then had the other expected reaction when they found out that it was a hoax and a ploy to try and make them pay attention to the dangerous of drunk driving - white-hot fury. Don't blame them at all. That the school is even trying to defend this says a lot about how out of touch they are with their students. Deliberately inflicting a trauma on someone and then saying that it was all a lie is cruel, even if in the name of trying to educate. There should have been an avalanche of complaints, but according to the article, there haven't been all that many at all. Whether that's students not saying anything, or (shudder) parents agreeing with the school's tactics, I don't know.
Last for tonight, some art - The Seven Deadly Wine Glasses, with each sin interpreted in a different way. If that's not interesting, a live feed of a lion and her cubs in a Norway zoo might be sufficiently cute.
If that doesn't work, ponder this moment of Zen.
Starting in interplanetary affairs, experiments ahoy on Martian soil as the ovens and analyzers get to work looking for interesting things.
International news starts with good news - Norway is putting forward a bill that will permit homosexuals to marry, with all the legal rights that entails. There already were domestic partnership laws in place, but this removes the distinction between civil union'd and married. Hooray!
United States congresspersons complain that their computers are being hacked by the Chinese government, and that every time there is an attempt at an investigation or publicizing the attacks, other government officials want to keep the matter silent. I suppose it would depend on whether or not the government intends on trying to backtrack the hacks and then take cyber-revenge or not, or whether the government even wants to admit that people whom that have normal trade relations with are committing acts of aggression against them.
A Mercy Ministries "mental illness program" in Queensland will close after several complaints were leveled that the staff forced the participants to turn over their benefit checks, subjected them to exorcisms, and cut them off from the outside world without actually treating them for their illnesses.
Justice is served as Marines are disciplined for their role in throwing a puppy off a cliff while on their tour in Iraq. Because of the wonders of YouTube and someone deciding to post the video, we can get justice for this. And besides, isn't one of the signs of potential bad behavior the abuse of animals?
Further in Iraq, a curious phenomenon. Once you bring out the details of a secret agreement into the light and start letting people see it, suddenly a lot of people start having objections to the measure. Amazing.
Justice may finally be served on several of the detainees being held without habeas rights. The SCOTUS has declared that the process by which "enemy combatants" are held and then subjected to military trial without their habeas corpus rights have sufficient flaws that detainees should have access to federal civilian courts for their trials. Read the opinion of the SCOTUS on this case, Boumediene v. Bush. It's a good thing that they have access, too, because the government now has photographic proof that those sent ot other countries to be held are tortured there.
Mrs. Bush provides us with an update of how well things are going in Afghanistan, which, if I were looking for feathers in my cap, I would choose over Iraq.
From there, not as good news - a UK government official was suspended after he left classified documents on a commuter train,
Getting into the domestic sphere - it looks like the impeachment articles have stirred some unrest, again, considering the Speaker's stated position that impeachment is not an option. So much so that some are calling for the Speaker's head because of her refusal, accusing her of being an accessory to the Bush crimes, or at the very least, behaving criminally by preemptively dismissing all impeachment claims. If one wishes to join that voice, there's the online petition route, or the route of calling one's congresscritters and asking for a declaration of the Speaker's seat vacant. When the Democrats took over in 2006, and weren't able to get enough support for an impeachment attempt then, I knew it wasn't going to happen for their two years. Which is unfortunate, because it provides a measure of legitimacy and acceptance of actions that, if not clearly against the Constitution, require an investigation into their Constitutionality, "unitary executive" be damned.
Even the intelligence communities are going Web 2.0 - the CIA and the Defense Department have an Intellipedia, written with the Wikipedia software and with versions for the various levels of classification. Hey, collaboration among intelligence analysts. Might mean that some interesting mysteries get solved because all the right people end up seeing it.
New Arizona state laws requiring voters to present certain forms of identification before they can vote have hit a bit of a snag - they turn away a 97 year-old woman who was born before birth certificates, no longer has a driver's license, and all of her witnesses and places that could confirm her identity are either dead or destroyed. How many other legitimate voters will they end up turning away?
Staying with election possibilities, A serious candidate for McCain's vice president speaks of his experience with an exorcism, complete with forced restraint of the "possessed", the inability to speak key religious phrases, the whole nine yards. As a quality in the Republican vp, I can see how this might galvanize the religious vote, but it also makes me worry about who might be President should a then-President McCain die in office.
New York is attempting to get more visas offered for those who want to work fashion runways, because their visa classification is the same as that of high-technology workers, and the tech people usually win out. Toronto is looking for ways to get more strippers into the country, after new regs were passed that tighten the screening processes for the visas.
A biker was lifted from his bike, subdued and tasered after he apparently failed to stop for not having a front light. By the account of the police, he was resisting and combative and didn't stop when he was told to. By the account of the person involved and a witness, the police didn't really give him much of a chance to stop, did not identify themselves as police officers, and then proceeded to slam the biker against a wall and use the taser on him. Over not stopping for not having a front light. I think this one fits in "excessive use of force", regardless of justification.
That almost pales in comparison to Sheriff's deputies in Maricopa County denying a member of the public the right to inspect documents that they themselves were inspecting, in clear contravention of the law, and then threatening to arrest the curious reporter for exercising his right to freedom of the press, citing that it would be interference with an investigation that, in the opinion of the reporter, looked more like a fishing expedition trying to find some dirt on someone else.
Getting into the opinion columns, apparently wearing a brassiere increases one's risk for breast cancer, due to the tightness of the brassiere causing problems in the soft breast tissue. Aaaah, shouldn't that then be "Wearing an improperly-sized brassiere increases your risk for breast cancer", at the least, rather than taking the flying leap to saying that all brassieres are responsible? Plus, any time that there's a conspiracy by industry and medical professionals to squelch the truth about something, the eyebrows raise in a skeptical manner.
Walter E. Williams thinks Americans are stuck in a form of slavery, because most of their tax dollars that the government takes from them are then given out in subsidies and entitlements, making it so that honest Americans are forced to work many months of the year to serve someone else's purposes. John Stossel worries about the pace of entitlement spending, suggesting that at current rates, it will consume far too much of the budgetary spending very soon. A fair worry, but with possible solutions, like actually trying to fund it, rather than slashing taxes and raiding the fund for more spending, paying down the debts, instead of incurring more, and possibly doing a little tax-raising. With the way that credit counseling corporations insist that Americans pay down their highest-interest debt first, because that makes it easier to pay the lower-interest debts, why can't we get the government to do the same? Put a budget at 60-70% of expected revenue, and then spend the remaining amount knocking down as many high-interest debts as we can, rolling the money saved on interest payments into reducing further high-interest debt. Of course, this does mean that we can't go fighting expensive wars at the drop of a hat, and that we might have to make do with current military technology for a bit, and other such inconveniences. We could do a lot in four years with that, I'm sure.
Now that oil prices have spiked significantly, there's significantly more opinion on the matter. New guesses about the total amount of oil reserves in the planet, and yet more calls for domestic drilling.
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey try to justify the Iraq conflict by making it a necessary war of choice, like other wars that the country has fought in, by pointing out that the other wars could have ended differently, or even not gotten off the ground, had leaders made other decisions. This tack of reasoning is disingenuous - Iraq was not attacking a neighbor, was not directly threatening the United States, etc. If the case really were that Iraq was a threat to others, and could be demonstrated, with evidence that most people would accept, to be so, then I don't think there would have been nearly as much hue and cry about the matter.
In candidate opinions, Ton Blankley continues to harp on the "Obama is secretly a super-liberal" theme, a theme that I haven't quite figured out whether it hurts or helps Senator Obama. Running on the "change" platform, being seen as someone with ties to things further left than the establishment might be beneficial, in that even in being a moderate compared to those associations, he might be able to pull the country leftward and onto a new pathway.
Lawrence Kudlow thinks McCain will be a good president, based on his plan to lower taxes and spending, which apparently involves freezing discretionary spending outside of the military, one of the biggest spenders of the bunch. I'd like to see his budget plan on how he intends on making government ends meet when the country is already very much overspent and borrowing on what it is doing now. And which programs are going to get the axe because he wants to make sure the military machine is fed all the money it can take. And how he plans on doing it on reduced tax income.
Johnnie B. Byrd isn't worried about Senator Obama's appeal, and thinks Senator McCain shouldn't be, either, based on the assumption that the people whom Senator Obama is courting, the very young, tend to flake out at the ballot box, and that Senator McCain can aggressively court and capture the Hillary Clinton supporters. Considering that there are already several Clinton-supporting groups that are declaring their unwillingness to support Senator Obama, now that he has the nomination, there may be room for defection to another candidate from the Democratic base. All told, though, those who are defecting are probably closer to the center line than those who support Senator Obama's policies.
Gregory D. Lee contradicts himself, giving credit for there being no terror attacks in seven years to increased vigilance and potential luck from law enforcement officials, yet giving the Bush administration credit for having stopped terror attacks. Stopping terror is measured in failures. Why are people insistent that someone get credit for having nothing happen, except the erosion of civil liberties in the name of "security"?
Last out of the opinions, using a little sleight of words, a creationist tries to prove that evolution followers are non compos mentis and shouldn't be allowed to vote [PDF]. Except that tiny little part where evolution gets conflated with atheism. All the arguments in the piece are really against atheism. Still, arguing that atheists are insane, have no basis to decide laws, and don't have the capacities to make moral judgments is really stupid.
Technology news: Cranking widgets says to master the iPhone's keyboard, trust the autocorrect. It will work most of the time. Of more interest to the "green cars" crowd, an electric vehicle that uses superconductors for generating the electricity. Liquid nitrogen cooling will make it expensive, most likely, but will also give some extra range because of less waste heat. There's also some new batteries in development, so hopefully those ranges will expand even more. On a more entertaining note, a method for viewing 3D images and movies that don't require putting on special glasses. If that technology takes off, I can see video games and movies changing quite a bit.
Receiving a well-deserved flaming quiche to the face is El Camino High School, who had highway patrol officers tell students that some of their classmates had died over the weekend in an attempt to scare them straight on drunk driving. The students had the expected traumatizing reaction to the news - and then had the other expected reaction when they found out that it was a hoax and a ploy to try and make them pay attention to the dangerous of drunk driving - white-hot fury. Don't blame them at all. That the school is even trying to defend this says a lot about how out of touch they are with their students. Deliberately inflicting a trauma on someone and then saying that it was all a lie is cruel, even if in the name of trying to educate. There should have been an avalanche of complaints, but according to the article, there haven't been all that many at all. Whether that's students not saying anything, or (shudder) parents agreeing with the school's tactics, I don't know.
Last for tonight, some art - The Seven Deadly Wine Glasses, with each sin interpreted in a different way. If that's not interesting, a live feed of a lion and her cubs in a Norway zoo might be sufficiently cute.
If that doesn't work, ponder this moment of Zen.
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Date: 2008-06-13 01:22 am (UTC)unemployment is not a disease that needs curing, unemployment is the cure!
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Date: 2008-06-14 06:46 pm (UTC)