Sunday, July 29, 2007

The Other Lindsay



There's really not much to say about Lindsay Lohan's arrest. She's been displaying erratic and clearly impaired behavior for quite some time, with little consequence. She needs a LONG drying-out period, with no "compassionate" breaks - those will only be used for more chemical/alcohol binges. Remember the Robert Downey releases? Every time, he went right back to the gutter. Only his final stay in jail gave him the time he needed to finally sober up.

I hope. Because, you can never tell with an addict - they can spend long stretches sober, then go on a bender that takes them back to square one.

The interesting thing about the SCRAM bracelets is that, once again, using technology to replace a watchdog JUST DOESN'T WORK. Guys, the tech can be fooled. There's no replacement for intelligence.

Which brings me to the TSA's reliance on sophisticated hardware - bomb-sniffers, X-rays, wands, etc. - the weak link is the people. And, although I've run across fabulous people in the TSA, and some who qualify as both professional and more than competent, sadly, some are placeholders. If you want good security, GET RID OF THE USELESS!

The recent uncovering of the JFK plot also brings up another issue - take the recent "probe" activity seriously. Stop squabbling about profiling, and "get 'er done".




Friday, July 27, 2007

I Hope They're Scheduled for Intensive Searches

On Captain's Quarters, he posts about the alarming number of "probing incidents" lately:
The Transportation Security Administration has issued a bulletin that confirms that an uptick in suspicious incidents indicate that a terrorist attack on airliners may be close at hand. The items seized by TSA include clay-like substances, potential IED components such as wires and switches, and cell-phone components that could be used as remote triggers (via Michelle Malkin)
Frankly, if I had to fly in the near future, I'd be more than a little nervous.

The Captain isn't the only one concerned.



RIGHTS for Non-citizens



It's unclear why they chose to stay.Unclear? It's painfully obvious why they chose to stay - the opportunities for their family were far superior to those they faced in their home country.

But, that's not good enough. They had no RIGHT to stay. They deliberately broke the law. That fact that the law is laxly enforced isn't an excuse, but it does explain why their crime didn't surface until their son tried to enroll in college.

The ICE spokesman was correct
It's unfortunate that the parents place their children in these situations by breaking the law, but they did break the law.
Kids, learn your American law. No matter how badly you feel about a situation, you have to realize that RIGHTS are for the citizens. Not the interlopers.

Why I've Been Gone

I've been out of town, at back-to-back workshops. Next week should be easier; this first week is what my husband refers to as "Physics Boot Camp". And, truly, he has a point. Most evenings, we're doing well to make it until 8:30. At that point, bed looks irresistible.

Next week should be an easier schedule. Lots of meetings and presentations, but less interactive.

We've also been buying a new house. We're frantically looking for the paperwork the mortgage people need - not easy when you've packed up the old house. We should know in a week or so whether we'll get it. Until then, we'll be in a motel.

Fun. Well, I can't complain, at least we have a roof over our heads.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Winnie Is Rolling in His Grave

Michelle Malkin has the second reference to the new Britain curriculum standards. Winston Churchill is out
From “Never surrender” to “The sky is falling,” a once-great nation now winces in wartime. I feel tremors from England’s great leaders rolling over in their graves.
I concur - this is a HUGE mistake.



Tramp Stamps, Continued

I've been updating my awareness of the cultural phenomenon (well, it's a phenom for women, at least), and found this poll for tats. You might as well join the discussion.

If You MUST Get a Tattoo

Here's one that would serve:



It's Photoshopped.

I'm not the only one who finds tats - well, not exactly a good idea. Here's a link to something unbelievable - a Beginner Tattoo Parlor - for kids. I'm not kidding.

The Flood of Visits is Over

The temporary uptick in visits is past. Guess the tattoo fetishists found out that I'm not the best source for pictures like that below.



Although the above tattoo is at least something you could show your grandmother without blushing.

Or stories like the following:



Why am I against tattoos? For the following reason, and many more.



Guys, it's expensive to get, even more expensive to remove, and is a major barrier to professional advancement.

Plus, it looks gross as you age.

Boosting your Blog

Electric Venom has a special linkfest going on:
Here’s how to do it: Simply edit one of your posts (or write a new one) to include a link to this entry, then send a TrackBack.
I like that - go visit, link, and reap the benefits!

This Explains a Lot About San Fransisco

In the course of reading an online article, I found an incredible fact: San Fransisco banned cemeteries in the early 1900s. That's right, you can't be buried in San Francisco.

The stated reasons were hygenic - cemeteries were thought to be a source of disease:
Everybody knows that behind these shams are the mortal remains of a human being—killed, it may be, by some loathsome and contagious disease—and, at the best, a mass of decomposing matter, which, if not already offensive, must surely become so in a few short hours. The objection to living near a cemetery is no mere sentiment. Five thousand such bodies are interred there every year, and sometimes more. Half a million pounds of putridity are annually boxed up and covered with a few feet of earth. The scientist knows that all the evils of this decomposition are but disguised by stone vaults and costly cerements. The germs of disease grow and are diffused in spite of them. They rise to the surface from the deepest grave to poison both the earth and air. They descend to contaminate the springs of water; years do not destroy them. Putrefaction is actually prolonged indefinitely, and there is continued danger to the living whilst the process lasts.
Could this refusal to provide a place to acknowledge the fact of death be part of the reason that San Francisco became a city of mourning when the AIDS epidemic hit? By existing in a subculture of the young and healthy, gays of that time excluded themselves from confronting death. When the epidemic hit, they were thrust into an unaccustomed role - that of mourner. We need cemeteries, we need the rituals - but, by law, they weren't available in the city.

Talk about a denial of death.

Imagine a city without reminders of death. Do its inhabitants presume that they will live forever?

Death and Social Order

I've been reading an article that is more philosophical than my usual taste. It deals with the position of death in social order:
A culture that closes down its public forms for the expression of mourning—a society that eliminates rituals and ceremonies with at least a claimed origin in the most emotionally meaningful portions of its history—has forgotten the hazards that those rituals and ceremonies once channeled and controlled. When grief can find no public outlet, it will make its own in the infection of social hysteria and the return of the blood feud. The inexplicability of mortality can, under the pressure of grief, issue in astonishingly destructive hunts for someone to blame. Grieving people are dangerous people.

People incapable of grief are also dangerous, however. Ritual and ceremony exist in part to siphon off the dangers of grief, but they also exist to allow use of the remainder of grief for public purposes. Just as the private dead can bind us to something greater than ourselves in the family, so the public dead can bind us to something even larger: The story of their suffering becomes part of our story—with the same demands as though a brother or a sister had died.

The political use of grief is thus an expansion into the public realm of the private relation to the dead. Even here, however, culture matters: Without well-formed, solemn, and generally accepted funeral rites, a society’s sporadic attempts at unifying itself around the public display of the newly dead will appear to be what those attempts typically are—arbitrary, artificial, and ineffectual.
One of the facets of Middle Eastern culture that is least understood is that of death and grieving in the political arena. The, to us, exaggerated posturing and public display of grieving by Arabic cultures, may, according to this article, have a pollitical purpose. We need to understand its meaning.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Shush! Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Amnesty International has come in for some bad press recently. Can a human-rights organization be taken seriously when its annual report dwells more on abuses in America and England than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia? When it rebukes Israel far more often than Iran, Libya, Syria, and Egypt? Or when it asks who has the worst human-rights record among Darth Vader, Hobgoblin, and Dick Cheney?

As disconcerting as these problems are, Amnesty International's most egregious recent offense almost went unreported--and the organization wanted to keep it that way. Hidden on the members-only section of its website was the announcement of a new policy that condemns as a human-rights violator any country that does not allow broad access to abortion or punishes abortion providers.

"This policy will not be made public at this time," the website instructed its visitors. "There is to be no proactive external publication of the policy position or of the fact of its adoption issued."
Yeah, because we know that women are so well treated in all those countries with unlimited abortion - for example, China and Japan.

The Weekly Standard article continues:
To add insult to injury, Amnesty International thinks the public is stupid enough to buy its spin. Consider its repeated claim to take "no position as to when life begins." Of course, to demand that every country in the world allow abortion is to take a position: A human being's life does not begin--at least not in a way in which Amnesty International will permit any government on the planet to protect it--until after birth.

And while Amnesty International argues that abortion advocacy follows from its long-standing work to stop violence against women, I saw no signs that it considered whether abortion itself is simply one more attack on women. Though Amnesty International is against "forced abortions," the unspoken reality is that wherever these policy initiatives are adopted, boyfriends, husbands, and employers will be able to pressure women into getting abortions.
The reality is that abortion is seldom a CHOICE - women are under intense pressure from all sides. Just think about most colleges - they offer no housing for families, at all. So can most coeds' decision to abort be considered "pressure-free"?

Blackmail Pays Off

Let me see if I understand this:
North Korea told the United States it shut down its nuclear reactor, the State Department said Saturday, hours after a ship cruised into port loaded with oil promised in return for the country's pledge to disarm.
I'd like a job like that. Make a threat, and even before I carry it out (or even prove that it was a credible threat), my victim pays off.

Sweet.

Friday, July 13, 2007

This is a test

I'm trying to see if I can get an element added to each post.



OK, that works. Next, I'm going to try to add the Digg button.



Not sure what I'm doing wrong - the bottom of the button gets cut off. I sent a message to Digg, but if anyone knows what could be wrong, I'm open for suggestions.


OK, I went out for a while, and now when I load the page, it works. Don't know why it went wonky, don't care - it works.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

I May Soon Be Homeless

We'll still working on selling the SC home (although we took a detour today; I was helping my husband finish a project for a class at Clemson). The inspection of the new home (OK, it's not really new, it's over 100 years old) won't take place until Monday. Until we see the inspection, we don't want to move forward on everything else. But the realtor and mortgage people are pushing for us to hire an attorney, do a title search, etc. All of which will cost us $$$$.

We'll be at the district office on Tuesday, filling out benefit forms, so we'll be in position to assess our situation. Until then, we're in limbo.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Gee, I Thought I Was More Spicy Than That!

Online Dating

Mingle2 - Online Dating



I tested this rating system out on this site, but - Golly, Gee, I can't understand why I can't get a more Mature rating.

No More Paris?

It seems that the frenzy of reporting about Paris Hilton is continuing.



But not everyone is still Paris-mad.



We can but hope.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Update

Nothing too earth-shattering to relate - we've been traveling, and have come to rest (temporarily) in OH. We're soaking up family time, until early next week. Then it's back to SC, to prepare to move once again.

The holiday is making it more difficult to get the paperwork together for our new house. I'm hoping that everything will work out, but, if it doesn't, we'll find a rental for the short-term, and look around again. It's too much of a buyer's market to jump through hoops for any home, however nice.


What the immigration bill defeat teaches us is - don't count your chickens. Also, it serves as a reminder that politicians can be sneaky - they really thought they could pull a fast one, bringing the bill back with fancy procedural tricks.

Gotcha!

I used that experience as a lead-in to my point in an educational conference last week. I pointed out that the power of the blogs has not been tapped, and that the organization needed to begin working with them. I'm not sure that my message was received. They were far more focused on using traditional MSM, along with pre-blog advocacy measures.

They are trying to lobby Congress to fund improved science education. I was at an NSELA conference, where we discussed the current state of science education. You can find more about legislation and hearings at the preceding link.

Lies of the Left

This COULD be a lengthy post. But, I'll try to winnow it down to a reasonable length. The CA Parent Bribery 'Scandal' - the 1...